Transgender Love Quotes

I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.

If you are a woman, if you're a person of colour, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are a person od intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world. And it's going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. Especially women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way or else you're worthless. You know when you look in the mirror and you think 'oh, I'm so fat, I'm so old, I'm so ugly', don't you know, that's not your authentic self? But that is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising, magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself so that you will take your hard earned money and spend it at the mall on some turn-around creme that doesn't turn around shit. When you don't have self-esteem you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you really wanna go for, you will hesitate to ask for a raise, you will hesitate to call yourself an American, you will hesitate to report a rape, you will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote, you will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution and our revolution is long overdue.

A single change can sometimes change your entire life

...nobody really wants to be a trans woman, i.e. nobody wakes up and goes whoa, maybe my life would be better if I transitioned, alienating most of my friends and my family, I wonder what'll happen at work, I'd love to spend all my money on hormones and surgeries, buying a new wardrobe that I don't even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then ending my short life in a bloody murder.

There are few things more dangerous to a transgender woman than the risk of a straight man not totally comfortable in his sexuality or masculinity realizing he is attracted to her.

It could've been easy to say I was hurt because I'm trans, because someone singled me out for my identity, but there's something weird about that - something off, about suggesting that my identity is the thing that brought me any sort of pain. It's the opposite. Being trans brings me love. It brings me happiness. It gives me power.

Compromise is often necessary [in politics], but entire marginalized identities are not expendable chess pieces.

Can you be gay or transgender and Christian? The answer is yes.

People think that LGBTs adopting children will hurt them, but it's not being in loving homes that hurts children most.

God’s palette of shifting hues is vast, subtle, and beyond our comprehension. We humans are like those colors. Subtle, shifting, unique. Non-binary. Unable to be labeled or singled out. Beautiful and one-of-a-kind, and seen by God’s eyes alone.

Who you are goes far beyond what you look like. My hope is that Ray’s story will inspire all of you—white or Black, Asian or Native American, straight or gay, transgender or cisgender, blond or dark haired, tall or short, big feet or small—to do what you love. Inspire those around you to do what they love, too. It might just pay off. Alone, we are a solitary violin, a lonely flute, a trumpet singing in the dark. Together, we are a symphony.

When Dawn looked at Vic, she saw Vic exactly as he wanted to be seen. Whereas Vic's parents couldn't help seeing who he used to be, and so many friends and strangers couldn't help seeing who he didn't want to be anymore, Dawn only saw him. Call it a blur if you want, but Dawn didn't see a blur. She saw a very distinct, very clear person.

My opened shirt blew in the wind—The sun tanning my stomach—Feeling lean and alive and beautiful—Saying I am a man—Saying I love men.

I've had more than one person tell me how courageous and strong I am, how brave and cutting-edge. I'm not any of those things. I'm just another person living my life and trying to make my way in the world, a person who has found out that love is complicated and life is difficult, but that companionship is worth all the king's ransom.

I'm a woman. And I'm a man. That's how it is for me. I am in a body that I prefer. But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery. I didn't do it to distance myself from myself. I did it to get nearer to myself.

Most people who are would each not be in love with their partner, if they did not have the kind of genitals they have.

Jesus is like us in every respect. Don’t brush this sentence off casually. Let it sink in, deep to the core of who you are. God is like us in every respect. He is like the transgender woman who is worried she’ll be murdered while walking to her car after work. He is like the broken-hearted gay man who can’t attend the church of his childhood. He is like the bisexual intersex person who doesn’t conform to gender norms and endures the snide looks and sniggers of strangers. He is like these people just as much as the heterosexual man who is comfortable performing his gender in a way this society finds acceptable.

None of us know how long we have, but we do have a choice in whether we love or hate. And every day that we rob people of the ability to live their lives to the fullest, we are undermining the most precious gift we are given as humans. [... E]ach time we ask anyone—whether they are transgender, Black, an immigrant, Muslim, Native American, gay, or a woman—to sit by and let an extended conversation take place about whether they deserve to be respected and affirmed in who they are, we are asking people to watch their one life pass by without dignity or fairness. That is too much to ask of anyone.

The best way I can describe [being transgender] for myself [...] is a constant feeling of homesickness. An unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that only goes away when I can be seen and affirmed in the gender I've always felt myself to be. And unlike homesickness with location, which eventually diminishes as you get used to the new home, this homesickness only grows with time and separation.

Venus to Tig: "I'm afraid, Alexander, that I may have fallen in love with you." Tig doesn't know what to say, so Venus says it for him: "I'm a man. I am a man who knows she's a woman. And that's exactly where I'm supposed to be. It's the criss-cross that I've come to love. I don't want the surgery. I don't want to undo what God has given me. I know how beautiful I am.

Those were some of the best times of my life...traveling to another dimension where I was...me. And not just a boy but a man, a man who could fall in love and be loved back. Why do we lose that ability? To create a whole world? A bunk bed was a kingdom, I was a boy.

Still, as a straight person, you might say, "This just isn't my fight." No, it isn't. Unless you care about the kind of society we have. Unless you want the society of which you are a part to be a just one. Unless you believe that a free society, not to mention a godly religion, should fight injustice wherever it is found. Unless your religion tells you -- as our entire Judeo-Christian heritage does -- that any society will be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable. Unless you care about our children. Unless fairness matters to you. Unless violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people concerns you. Unless "liberty and justice for all" is something you believe applies to all our citizens.

Imagine learning at such a young age that your very appearance—your very identity—is enough to trigger such confusion and animosity. Imagine knowing that people will hate you for no reason other than you are who you are

Our identities matter. They help make us who we are and shape our outlook. Existing in them is a radical act, one that requires, in many instances, courage, hard work, and determination. I am a better person because of the experiences and insights that I've had because I'm transgender. I'm a more compassionate person than I was before I accepted that part of my identity.

This is the thing I learned from loving a transgender boy who took years to say his own name: that waiting with someone, existing in that quiet, wondering space with them when they need it, is worth all the words we have in us.

I know what I am. I know that I've chosen to identify as a transgender woman, and that I am - by and large - happy with where I am in this world. I'm far from perfect, and I could give you a list as long as my arms of the things I'd love to change. Nevertheless, I am still here, and I am still me, and no one can change that without my permission. -Gwendolyn Ann Smith, "We're All Someone's Freak

My story testifies to the truth that we must never give up on people, no matter how many times they fail or how long recovery takes. We must never underestimate the healing power of prayer and love in the hands of the Lord. We must never give up hope.

Transgender people are not Mal-functional humans.

If there's one thing I know about women, it's that they have vaginas.

To be transgender all you need is to have an inkling that the gender on your birth certificate is not quite right. That’s it.

Jesus was consistently on the side of those who were outcast by society and bore the unfair burden of disdain, discrimination, and prejudice. It is likely that he would look at modern-day lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and hold real sympathy for them and their plight. He would have understood the implications of a system set up to benefit the heterosexual majority over the homosexual minority. It is hard to imagine Jesus joining in the wholesale discrimination against LGBT people. Isn't it logical that he would be sympathetic to young gay teens who take their own lives rather than live with the stigma attached to their sexual orientation? Would he not be found speaking a word of support, encouragement, and hope to them? Would he not be seeking a change in the hearts of those who treat them as outcasts?

As I said to that state representative in Delaware who had admonished us for moving the trans equality bill too quickly, each time we ask anyone - whether they are transgender, Black, an immigrant, Muslim, Native American, gay, or a woman - to sit by and let an extended conversation take place about whether they deserve to be respected and affirmed in who they are, we are asking people to watch their own life pass by without dignity or fairness. That is too much to ask of anyone.

One of the first significant, substantial purchases I made after starting testosterone, was a Compact Colt .45 1991 A1 automatic pistol. It's just about the best penis substitute I've ever waved at a sex partner. I love my gun. Can I get an a-a-ay-men? You better fucking believe I lo-o-ove my gun. I love to take it apart and put it back together and admire...oh,you sexy little death-machine...I suppose I oughta feel guilty or something, loving and fetishizing to the point of anthropomorphizing it it. But I don't. I won't either-don't matter to me whether or not I'm supposed to keep this a dirty little secret. I got a dick and I can kill you with it. Yeah, baby, trip my trigger, why dontcha. Heh.

That was it. The bracket of her bent leg against the stones. The way her mouth angled around the cigar in a grimace that was almost a smile. The sight of a woman in a well-tailored jacket and trousers. Unexpected, unimagined. A prickling sensation. A stomach-dropping, blood-fizzing, breath-stopping, knotted lurch-and-swoop that I recognized, by then, as the first faltering step towards falling in love.

Out & Equal is about work. It's about authenticity. It's also about justice. Essentially it's about love, because when you get right down to it, the civil rights movement for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community is really about having the freedom to be who we are, and to love who we love.

I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels.

But in fanfiction anything was fair game. If we could turn protagonists into vampires, bounty hunters, or elves, we could sure as heck turn them homosexual, bisexual, asexual or any ot he wonderful, beautiful in-betweens. Characters slid all over the rainbow. And through fanfiction I learned about identities like transgendered, genderfluid, and demisexual.

LGB people, a once-tiny group of women and men trying to love those of the same sex openly and be treated equally within society, has likely already been subsumed by capitalism and is now infiltrated by the medical industrial complex via transgenderism.

The work begins by each of us recognizing that cis people are not more valuable or legitimate and that trans people who blend as cis are not more valuable or legitimate. We must recognize, discuss, and dismantle this hierarchy that polices bodies and values certain ones over others.

Dysphoria is that bitch who visits the family and wreaks havoc. Sometimes she plucks away, needling and poking, whispering doubts and lies and pulling at the threads of resolve. Sometimes she is in full-on assault mode, attacking the very core of belief, ego and confidence. Sometimes she lingers. Sometimes she disappears as rapidly as she appears, but not before she has darkened things, unsettled all and left a tumultuous mess.

If you are an LGBT+ person and you come out, you have to go through your knight’s quest to create ground for yourself, to create a space for yourself, to stand there and say, “I exist. I have no reason to feel guilt or shame. I am proud to exist, and while I’m not perfect, I deserve to exist in society just like anyone else.” This became my first big fight. While I consider myself to be fantastically boring, I realized that if I took on my own sexual identity and came out and just told people about it and tried to have a chat with them—tried to be offhand and casual about it—and tried to build our place in society and humanity, then that would be a good mission. This is where I exist in society. I am just this guy. I am transgender, and I exist. But that is just my sexuality. More important than that is that I perform comedy, I perform drama, I run marathons, and I’m an activist in politics. These are the things I do. How you self-identify with your sexuality matters not one wit. What you do in life—what you do to add to the human existence—that is what matters. That is the beautiful thing.

Sami’s chest rises and falls, and I realize that, with nothing in the way, he can hug his loved ones closer to his heart.

To listen is to love. You can’t love without listening.

As trans activist Faye Seidler quipped, more Americans said they had seen a ghost than knew a transgender person, according to some polls.

It’s not easy for a young gay fabulous boy in Japan, I should know, that’s why I became a woman.” Momma Nakama

There is no doubt that society places unfair and unjust barriers in front of transgender people, but that is a flaw in society, not a problem with being transgender.

Love can be good and beautiful, like me and Davina. But sometimes it can be a fever dream running hot and cold, leaving you with art that looks like someone took a poop on a canvas.

Every social practice is the expression of fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human. When a society accepts, endorses, and approves the practice, it implicitly commits itself to the accompanying worldview. And all the more so if those practices are enshrined in law. The law functions as a teacher, educating people on what society considers to be morally acceptable. If America accepts abortion, euthanasia, gender-free marriage, and transgender policies, in the process it will absorb the worldview that justifies those practices—a two-story fragmentation of the human being that denigrates the body and biological bonds such as the family. And the dehumanizing consequences will reach into every aspect of our communal life.

Fathers and doctors of the church like Origen and Augustine recognized that language is too limited to adequately describe God. There are no words which can capture the being which loved so much that it exploded into energy and matter. But humans are designed to seek understanding, and language creates form for incomprehensible concepts, and so we apply human ideas to a God who is not human.

Transgender people shouldn't be treated with dignity because of how some of us look; we should be treated with dignity because we are human beings. The trans community is as diverse as any community.

Gender nonconformity is seen as something immature, something we need to grow out of to become adults. Overnight so many of the things I loved not only became associated with femininity but… with shame.

Our body-minds tumble, shift, ease their way through space and time, never static. Gender transition in its many forms is simply another kind of motion. I lived in a body-mind assigned female at birth and made peace with it as a girl, a tomboy, a dyke, a queer woman, a butch. But uncovering my desire to transition—to live as a genderqueer, a female-to-male transgender person, a white guy—challenged everything I thought I knew about self-acceptance and love.

It was like I had grown up with a limiter on my emotions, blocking me from feeling anything too deeply-positive or negative-but finally it had been taken off. I was feeling things profoundly and meaningfully for the first time in my life, and I loved it.

And if a trans* person comes to your church, they should be welcomed with open arms and accepted. Not just accepted, but embraced, delighted in, listened to, learned from, honored, loved, cared for, and shown the heavenly kindness saturated with compassion.

Jesus is building an upside-down kingdom where outcasts have their feet washed, the marginalized are welcomed, and dehumanized people feel humanized once again. Where truth is upheld, celebrated, and proclaimed. Where those who fall short of that truth are loved.

Ryan le pregunta a Avery acerca del pelo rosa. ㅡSí, es un color raro, ¿verdad? Para un chico que nació con aspecto de mujer y que quiere que lo vean como a un varón. Pero piénsalo un momento, solo muestra lo arbitrario que es el género. El rosa es femenino... pero ¿por qué? ¿Acaso las chicas son más rosas que los chicos? ¿Los chicos son más azules que las chicas? Es algo que nos enseñaron, principalmente para poder enseñarnos también otras cosas. Mi pelo puede ser rosa porque soy un chico. El tuyo puede ser azul porque eres una chica. Si te desprendes de toda esa mierda arbitraria con que nos controla la sociedad, te sientes más libre y, si te sientes más libre, puedes ser más feliz. ㅡMi pelo es azul porque me gusta el azul ㅡseñala Ryan. ㅡY el mío es rosa porque me gusta el rosa.

But correct science and correct theology are pointless if we’re not willing to love and honor, listen to and learn from, care for and be cared for by the trans* people God has gifted us with. Jesus cherishes them and values them. Would they say the same about you?

I do theology as a matter of survival,” explained Rev. Broderick Greer, who is black and gay, “because if people can do theology that produces brutality against black, transgender, queer, and other minority bodies, then we can do theology that leads to our common liberation.

It’s okay to feel sad that the memories you make in the future won’t match those from the past, and to miss aspects of the way things were. It’s okay to mourn. But try not to make your loved one feel like they’ve died. They’re still here." Suzanne DeWitt Hall, Reaching For Hope

This need not be the case. When Christians read the Bible through the lens of Jesus’ gracious life and ministry, they will be able to see lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as their sisters and brothers, faced with all the usual human problems, and loved equally by God.

When disclosure occurs for a trans woman, whether by choice or by another person, she is often accused of deception because, as the widely accepted misconception goes, trans women are not 'real' women (meaning cis women); therefore, the behavior (whether rejection, verbal abuse, or sever violence) is warranted. The violence that trans women face at the hands of heterosexual cis men can go unchecked and uncharted because society blames trans women for the brutality they face. Similar to arguments around rape, the argument goes that 'she brought it upon herself.

We are supposed to listen to the voice within us that says, “Gosh, this just doesn’t sound loving, even though it sounds correct!” Of course, there’s much sorting to be done: what does love really call for in a given situation? Nevertheless, the warning in Scripture is there for a reason.

We have so politicized literature today, pigeonholing people into gay male fiction, lesbian fiction, transgender fiction and then other sub-genres within those. There seems to be a feeling like authors should stay in their own box and not write about anybody else, but the thing is, as a writer, you're constantly writing about things that you yourself haven't personally experienced. We should all be free to write about each other as human beings. Some gay men love reading lesbian novels, some straight women love gay male romance, and that richness of reaching across the boundaries helps us further our understanding of each other.

She showed me a statistic. Forty-three percent of transgender kids try to kill themselves.” Dad sniffs again, hard. “Then she said, ‘Would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?’ ” “Oh, Dad.” I put a hand over my mouth. “She explained that kids who get a lot of love and support have a much lower suicide risk.

The best way to avoid being confused about Bruce Jenner is get your head out of his bedroom and closet, and then think about all of the things you've been hiding and been miserable about. So what he made his announcement via media. Books, music, movies, business launches are announced in the same manner. Just focus on the feeling of finally disclosing something that enables you to be free and to live as authentically as possible. And then imagine what it's like to own your truth, tell it your way, thus taking away anyone else's ability to spin it their way or use it against you. If you can do any of the above, you will no longer be confused.

I live my life knowing that God loves me. I know this because I completely put my fate in His hands, and for doing that I have seen the ultimate result of His unconditional love. In the end, it only matters what He thinks of me, because I know if He loves me then others will, too. This is God’s redemption for me. Rachel Clark

Thus is the defining characteristic of gay millennials: we straddle the pre-Glee and post-Glee worlds. We went to high school when faggot wasn’t even considered an F-word, when being a lesbian meant boys just didn’t want you, when being nonbinary wasn’t even a remote option. We grew up without queer characters in our cartoons or Nickelodeon or Disney or TGIF sitcoms. We were raised in homophobia, came of age as the world changed around us, and are raising children in an age where it’s never been easier to be same-sex parents. We’re both lucky and jealous. As the state of gay evolved culturally and politically, we were old enough to see it and process it and not take it for granted–old enough to know what the world was like without it. Despite the success of Drag Race, the existence of lesbian Christmas rom-coms, and openly transgender Oscar nominees, we haven’t moved on from the trauma of growing up in a culture that hates us. We don’t move on from trauma, really. We can’t really leave it in the past. It becomes a part of us, and we move forward with it. For LGBTQ+ millennials, our pride is couched in painful memories of a culture repulsed and frightened by queerness. That makes us skittish. It makes us loud. It makes us fear that all this progress, all this tolerance , all of Billy Porter's red carpet looks can vanish as quickly as it all appeared.

Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means— this way or that—but for the way facets set off prisms and prisms spin up everywhere and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows—made every shining true color. Now try to tell me—man or woman—your heart was ever once that brave.

Transgender people are not caterpillars who transform into butterflies, as lovely as that tired analogy may be. We are more like pet snakes who slough off our skin to keep growing, in full view of anyone peeking through the glass. When we finish shedding, our old selves lay there for a while, decomposing. It’s not very glamorous, but it’s closer to the truth.

In no way should we minimize the psychological difficulties that a person with one of these conditions might experience. These are ripe pastoral opportunities to embody the love and life of Jesus toward people who, for whatever reason, might feel “othered” by society (intentionally or unintentionally) or by their own self-perception of what it means to be a “real” man or woman.

That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work...I kept encountering a striking factoid...: she’s often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she’s openly trans. This is not the world I was taught I would grow into when I was a young trans child -- the one where transgender people are heard, are brilliant, are influential, are even the best. At anything. Being trans, I’d learned subliminally, was supposed to keep you from being that -- even if you loved your trans self, and even if some other trans people and a few allies did too, the world at large would keep your potential tamped down." - from "Surface Difficulty: An Adventure in Reading Trans Poetry," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014

But sometimes the quest for the right answer keeps us from testing a variety of good ones. In search of the right answer, we assume every answer other than the one we've settled on must be wrong. Forgetting that some things have more than one good answer. I'd like to think for example, that the question, "How can I love Ken?" might have many good answers, rather than one right one.

Let us not make a procrustean bed of trans issues and force deities of the past onto it, let us instead awaken trans and other gender-variant deities from their own beds! There is no possibility of blasphemy against existing powers and their human followers if the deities in question are our own, and we never have to "take them back," because they have always been ours to begin with!

I can't help but marvel at the resiliency of trans people who sacrifice so much to be seen and accepted as they are. Despite those sacrifices, trans people are still wrongly viewed as being confused. It takes determination and clear, thought-out conviction, not confusion, to give up many of the privileges that Genie did to be visibly herself, though her experiences varied from my own.

Transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an ‘essence’ of gender, a psychology and pattern of behaviour, which is suited to persons with particular bodies and identities.This is the opposite of the feminist view, which is that the idea of gender is the foundation of the political system of male domination. ‘Gender’, in traditional patriarchal thinking, ascribes skirts, high heels and a love of unpaid domestic labour to those with female biology, and comfortable clothing, enterprise and initiative to those with male biology. In the practice of transgenderism, traditional gender is seen to lose its sense of direction and end up in the minds and bodies of persons with inappropriate body parts that need to be corrected. But without ‘gender’, transgenderism could not exist. From a critical, feminist point of view, when transgender rights are inscribed into law and adopted by institutions, they instantiate ideas that are harmful to women’s equality and give authority to outdated notions of essential differences between the sexes. Transgenderism is indeed transgressive, but of women’s rights rather than an oppressive social system.

We are, all of us, doomed to hurt those we love. Most of us disappoint our parents in some respect; or at least, we're not exactly who our parents would have designed, had they been granted just a little more say. Worse yet, we disappoint ourselves. But then, each day, we awaken to a miracle: another chance to try again. To ask forgiveness. To call our moms. To go just a little easier on ourselves.

However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture’s wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self. You are to offer the stranger food and clothing, to guarantee the stranger justice, to treat the stranger like one of your own citizens, to welcome the stranger as Christ in disguise. This is God’s express will in both testaments of the Bible.

I am back in London in a couple of days and looking forward to Sunday. Here is what we are doing. 1. Going to see my favourite mad transgender folk singer at the Roundhouse. 2. Then I am going to feed you tapas in a little place by Mornington Crescent. 3. Then we will go home in opposite directions and I will stare at my silent phone for weeks, wondering what happened. Or we will go for a dirty hump on Primrose Hill. Or maybe we will just have an awkward kiss/hug loaded with the promise of more next time.  

For all of you out there, visible & invisible. Closeted or out & proud. Femme & Masc & every glorious stripe on the rainbow in between. You incandescent queens, deliciously undefinable androgynous souls, chivalrous butches, tomboy dykes, drop-dead yet still invisible femmes. You with your flare, your flamboyance, your rugged individuality, your glorious diversity, your insistence on being seen, your quiet but steady presence in the places that matter. You, the cliche and every unexpected exception. The world’s stereotypes brought to blazing life & you who smashes the boxes & changes the paradigms & refuses to be painted into place. You, who knows that queer looks, speaks, sounds & moves through this world in a million different ways. You, the grieving. You the dancing. You, the proud & the humble & the defiant & the free. Whatever label you choose & define for yourself. Whatever identity feels like home to you. However you have come to know & name yourself & your good, good, love. You are my family. I see you.

You can have your king-god. You can have your warrior-god. You can have your father-god. Today, I’m opting for the Mother-Hen-God. The God who welcomes all her children under her wings, no matter how they behave, or how they look, or what annoying and inappropriate things they do. The God who opens her heart of healing. The God who feels what I feel, who validates me as a mother, who assures me that when I have made mistakes, when I have wandered from the right path, and when I have been overwhelmed by the foxes, those holy wings are still spread over me, protecting me, sheltering me, keeping me safe, loving me. Leah D. Shade

The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace. As he stood there, silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity, and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell short by several inches. Orlando looked at himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discompose, and went presumably, to his bath. We many take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change in sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory - but in the future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for ‘he’ - her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark spots had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change in sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando has always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

What God was giving the eunuchs, through Isaiah's proclamation, was not just a place in society, and not just hope for a future. By giving the eunuchs the same kinds of gifts given to Abraham and Sarah--a name, legacy, family, acceptance, and blessing--God was consciously associating the two stories in the minds of the people. God was giving the eunuchs a story to connect to--a story that set a president, grounded in divine grace. That was the story I needed to hear. I needed to know that my problems were like the eunuch's problems, which were like Abraham and Sarah's problems, and that all of these complications were overcome by God's great love.

The sexual liberation revolution of the 1960's set in motion a cascade effect: the reversal of the long-standing moral consensus around promiscuity (which separated sex from marriage) worked in tandem with the advent of birth control and the legalization of abortion (which separated sex from pro-creation), which moved to the legalization of no-fault divorce (which turned a covenant into a contract and separated sex from intimacy and fidelity), then to tinder and hookup culture (which separated sex from romance and turned it into a way to "get your needs met"), From there it's moved on to the LGBTQI+ revolution (which separated sex from the male-female binary), the current transgender wave (which is an attempt to separate gender from biological sex), and the nascent polyamory movement (an attempt to move beyond two-person relationships). Amid the revolution, the questions nobody seems to even be asking are, is this making us better people? More loving people? Or even happier people? Are we thriving in a way we weren't prior to "liberation"?

I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask. I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people. And I told them that, contrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans. We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, so we can smell b.s. from a mile away. The church is the last place we want to be sold another product, the last place we want to be entertained.

Before I watched the videos and interviewed some of their makers, I didn’t expect to like trans influencers. Many of the parents I’ve interviewed regard them as cult leaders or drug dealers. But I didn’t dislike them. Riven with piercings and stamped with tattoos, battling the bouts of depression that strike like a summer storm, furiously and without warning, obsessing endlessly over their changing bodies: If these influencers are relentless evangelists for a dangerous cause, they also need all the love and care they can get.

What if, when the Bornding time comes, they saw their mother – or their father – I’m sorry, I don't quite know—' I will be their Icker,' said the Ickabog. 'And they'll be my Ickaboggles.

A year might not feel like a long time, but years add up. Every single one has bought me closer to the person I am now.

The gender thing wasn't what surprised me. A huge percentage of the homeless teens I'd met had been assigned one gender at birth but identified as another, or they felt like the whole boy/girl binary didn't apply to them. They ended up on the streets because - shocker - their families didn't accept them. Nothing says "tough love" like kicking your non-heteronormative kid to the curb so they can experience abuse, drugs, high suicide rates, and constant physical danger. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Better to sit down to listen and love a person before waxing eloquent on the nature of their experience.

Had these wise storytellers lived in modern America, they might point to a poor, black transgender woman or an asylum-seeking toddler alone in a detainment center and say: God is in this one. This one—the one on the outermost ring of the rankings we’ve made up about who matters. This one—the one farthest from whom we have centered. This one is made of our same flesh, blood, and spirit. When we hurt her, we hurt our own kin. This one is One of us. This one is Us. So let us protect her. Let us bring her gifts and kneel in front of her. Let us fight for her and her family to have every good thing we want for ourselves and our families. Let us love this one as we love ourselves. The point of this story was never that This One is more God than the rest. The point is that if we can find good in those we’ve been trained to see as bad, if we can find worth in those we’ve been conditioned to see as worthless, if we can find ourselves in those we’ve been indoctrinated to see as other, then we become unable to hurt them. When we stop hurting them, we stop hurting ourselves. When we stop hurting ourselves, we begin to heal.

it can be easy to adopt a depersonalized posture, one that forgets about the lives of real people. A posture of argumentation instead of listening. A posture of being right instead of being love.

We have closed our ears to the cry of the parents who have lost their children because of toxic theology; we have turned away from the tears of the youth who ask if Jesus can love them just as they are. Too many of those questioning their gender identity have been made to feel that they must choose between God and an authentic and healthy life. Not all of the people forced into that decision make it out alive.

The thing that brought me to an acceptance of Biblical masculinity was not a poignantly laid-out exegetical argument against transsexuality nor a fire and brimstone diatribe against homosexuality but a man who gave me the space to speak about my desires openly and let me know he and God loved me nevertheless.

It could've been easy to say I was hurt because I’m trans, because someone singled me out for my identity, but there’s something weird about that—something off, about suggesting that my identity is the thing that brought me any sort of pain. It’s the opposite. Being trans brings me love. It brings me happiness. It gives me power

I didn't imagine myself saying to a real gay, lesbian, or transgender person, a person I knew and loved as I would want to be known and loved, "You can't be baptized, or receive communion, or become a member, or serve in this or that capacity here." For a pastor to answer a question like this without deep reflection, without a brutally honest appreciation for its impact on real people, is, I think, and I say this advisedly, cowardly. For the people most affected by a pastor's answer, all this is very serious business, very personal business, something much different than a policy rendered in the abstraction sometimes referred to as "the gay controversy.

A third way departs from the "open and affirming" and the "love the sinner, hate the sin" approach by regarding the question of whether and how the biblical prohibitions apply in the case of monogamous gay relationships as a "disputable matter" in the Romans 14-15 sense.

He was accepting who he was. And he knew, as much as it hurt, that he would have to leave many people in his life to make that happen. They were his friends and family, they cared, but they didn’t love him. They loved her. And he was tired of being her.

Even when raised by a loving parent, a young adult may be influenced to the point of hopping on the fast-moving trans train and leaving the loving family behind.

I join thousands of parents globally in advocating for our daughters to accept their natural bodies and for the cessation of the harmful notion that only a “new one” will bring happiness.

Given the world we live in, it’s unrealistic to expect that you, as a transgender/non-binary person, are going to feel love for your body all day, every day. However, there is always an opportunity to show kindness to our bodies. And one of the greatest ways to show kindness to ourselves is to pursue pleasure.