My client “Susan” was a gifted pastor in a large Evangelical church where only her co-pastor knew her secret. She realized in late middle-age that she is neither deluded nor broken, only born with a female mental and spiritual identity in a male body. She feels blessed to live in a time when modern medicine […]
To Leelah’s Parents and All Religious Parents of Transgender Teens
To Leelah’s Parents and All Religious Parents of Transgender Teens: Trust God, not fundamentalism I treat many transgender teens, from ages 14 up, and I meet many scared parents (although I meet many trusting, open parents too). The most scared are those who, paradoxically, could have the most trust: religious parents. Religion is supposed to […]
Christmas, Alone
By happenstance, I’m alone today and tomorrow, Christmas Eve and Day. Last time this happened was half my lifetime ago, when I was just 24 and enduring a rough patch. That holiday was spent in unwelcome solitude, in a Minnesota winter with its usual awful cold. But it was not, in the end, an awful […]
Interfaith Transgender Spiritual Retreat A Success!
Neither snow nor cold kept transgender adults of several faiths–Jewish, Catholic, Methodist, Nazarene, Evangelical–from gathering in a warm cabin with good food, rich conversation and deep reflection over this past weekend on our Transgender Spiritual Retreat. Our goals were to simple: to take time away from busy lives to reconnect with the God of our individual […]
Pope Says Theology Must Listen to Science
Many of my transgender clients, whether Catholic, other Christian or Jewish, are people of faith, and they want to be “good.” We want to follow the teachings of our various religious traditions, but we need these doctrines to make spiritual sense. I, as a pastoral therapist and lay theologian, am vitally interested in how religious […]