This is a guest post by an intersex person in their mid-50s who was raised and lives as a man, only to discover lately that the wrong surgery had been performed in infancy. F.H. graciously shared this to enlighten cisgender others and to offer encouragement to other intersex people. F.H. is unsure of the road […]
Pastor Susan, God, and the Evangelical Church’s Growing Pains
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 […]