Trans Issues: Abstraction or Testimonial

Which model should the church follow?

[A Note before I get started: I’m still unsure about the future of Twitter but I remain for as long as I can. I have created both a Post account and a Mastodon account. Find me on Post @johnwhawthorne and on Mastodon at sciences.social@jwhawthorne.]

Two things came to my attention this week that illumined the challenges faced by trans people. One was a story from the Washington Post that appeared right before Christmas that I didn’t see until the 26th. The piece, written by Casey Parks, is a careful look at a trans teen in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Sid High grew up in the church and even though his local church is non-affirming he has maintained his Christian commitments.

The other appeared on Twitter yesterday. A number of people shared that Chaya Raichik, creator of Libs of Tic Toc, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show streaming on Fox Nation. She said that the “LGBTQ community has become a poisonous cult” full of “evil people” who “just want to groom kids”.

I have known a number of trans individuals over the years. Several were my former students at Christian Universities (some of whom declared their intention to transition prior to leaving college). Some I got to know as we served together in community service roles. Some were members of the church I attended. Those who shared their story in some depth made clear what gender dysphoria feels like and the accompanying depression and suicidal ideation that often accompanies that. Their post-transitions selves, while still facing normal life issues, pale in comparison.

Photo courtesy of the Washington Post

That’s what struck me about Sid’s story. There is an incident in the local Methodist church the family actively attended after the 2019 UMC vote on the “Traditional Plan”.

In early 2019, when Sid was 15, the national United Methodist General Conference voted to adopt what was known as the Traditional Plan, a doctrine that reaffirmed the Methodist Church’s ban on same-sex marriage. Some Methodist churches rejected the plan, but the Highs’ pastor endorsed it.

A few weeks later, Sid says, the pastor, a woman, pulled Sid aside and told him homosexuality was a sin, and if he acted on it, he would go to hell.

Sid believed hell was a place where people were tortured forever, and as the pastor walked away, Sid’s throat tightened. Surely, he thought, the pastor knew the Bible better than anyone. Was he unworthy of God’s love?

Raichik would certainly agree with Sid’s pastor and go even further. As painful as it is, it’s worth seeing exactly what she told Tucker Carlson. I’ve repeated it here exactly as she says it, nonsequiturs and all.

I think there’s something so unique about -- the LGBTQ community has become this cult and it’s so captivating and it pulls people in so strongly unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And they brainwash people to join and they convince them of all of these things and it’s really hard to get out of it. It’s really difficult. And there are studies on this. There’s been a lot of reporting on this, about people, parents who are like, my child is starting to say that they’re non-binary, or transgender, or whatever, and what do I do? How do I stop this? And it’s really really difficult. It's unlike anything we’ve ever seen, I think. It’s extremely poisonous. {Tucker asks about spiritual component} It doesn’t make any sense. And I think they’re evil. And sometimes we try to break it down a lot, and we discuss why this is happening, what’s happening and whatever. And I think sometimes the best answer is there just evil. They’re bad people. They’re just evil people and they want to groom kids. They’re recruiting.

There’s so much to unpack here. And doing so would require that we treat Raichik and Carlson as legitimate interlocutors and that’s a bridge too far. Talk of cults and brainwashing doesn’t align with any LGBTQ person I’ve ever met. If anything, they struggle for years before un-closeting. She says there are studies, but quickly changes that to “reporting” (without citing any sources for either). She ends her comments with her starting frame — these are evil people who want to groom kids.

Now I don’t think most church people would go as far as Chaya Raicik does (even Sid’s Methodist pastor). But the Post story references a Pew Research Center Study showing that 70% of White evangelicals believed we’d gone too far to accommodate trans people — up 9% from just five years ago.

Sid, on the other hand, is trying to connect with his faith — not as a special version for trans teens — but in deep theological terms. The Post story describes how the family had spent time studying scripture and theology. Sid now manages a Google forum for other trans youth trying to stay connected to their Christian faith.

He laughed, but the truth was that he also longed to bring light to people the world had forgotten or pushed away. In June, he’d become an ambassador for Beloved Arise, the LGBTQ Christian group he found on TikTok. He planned to start a book club for young queer Christians, and he’d recently started offering advice to young trans people who wanted it. He set up a Google form, then posted the link in a bunch of forums, and the response had overwhelmed him. Every week, dozens of kids asked for advice.

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Some of the messages made him feel sad. Queer teenagers across the country felt as if God and their communities had turned against them, and several told Sid they felt no one cared about them.

As his sisters jumped around the hallway, singing and playing with the dogs, Sid opened one last letter. A young woman’s parents had told her she was going to hell for wanting to marry her girlfriend someday.

Sid tapped his fingers on the keyboard. He thought of his former pastor, of the fear he’d once felt, then he remembered a verse from the book of Romans.

“I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow — not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.”

Sid cut and pasted the verse into an email, then he typed a few of his own words.

“God has your back every step of your journey,” he told the young woman. “He still loves you. He’s still sustaining you.”

As you read this, you may still feel that there’s something discomforting about transgender teens. Maybe you want to have conversations about appropriate supports or parental consent or proper age for surgical transition. That’s all fine if that’s where you are (for now).

But there is no way on God’s green earth that Sid High is evil, brainwashed, cultish, or predatory. He’s a kid trying to understand what it means that God created him and how to faithfully follow Jesus.

While writing this, I recalled the work of Fr. James Martin and the excellent work he has done on Catholic-LGBTQ reconciliation. I used his book Building A Bridge in a general education class the last couple of years I taught (most students enjoyed it greatly). Toward the end of the introduction, Fr. Martin writes this:

[Though the book invites both groups — the institutional church and the LGBT Catholics — to approach each other with respect, compassion, and sensitivity, the onus for this process lies on the institutional church. The main burden for this bridge building falls on bishops, priests, and other church officials, who are invited to take the first steps and work harder at reconciliation. Why? Because, as I’ve mentioned, even though a few LGBT groups have publicly targeted the church, it is the institutional church that has made LGBT Catholics feel marginalized, not the other way around (21-22).

Taking Fr. Martin’s challenge seriously will require the church to listen to stories like Sid High’s, to engage with his theological questions, and maybe even to find his place again in the local congregation. There are lots of these stories out there from LGBTQ folks. We need to make it clear that we need to hear from them.

To follow the opposite path, the one advocated by Raichik and Carlson and far too many on Twitter, is to push people like Sid not only further from participating in their local church but further from the faith altogether.

My subtitle implies that the church has a choice in models to follow: those based on abstractions and imagined dangers or those based on the lived experiences of people who have made difficult yet important choices. That’s not true. The only path for the church over the next generation is to listen — as Fr. Martin suggests — with respect, compassion, and sensitivity.