By Anderson C.

Tuesday morning in the shower, it hit me – the full weight of what had happened over the previous two days at General Convention.  My emotions rose up, mixing tears with the warm water streaming down my face.

I was thinking about how the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies  had both passed resolutions D019 and D002 that incorporate “gender identity and expression” into the non-discrimination canons for access to the ordination process and lay participation in The Episcopal Church.  The positive comments and arguments given by supporting and allied deputies were on my mind, as well as the final vote tallies.  An entire Christian denomination had just recognized and accepted trans people as valued members of the Church and removed barriers for their participation at all levels.  The enormity and impact of the outcome of these events were best summed up by my friend Vivian who, when I asked her for the reason behind her own emotional response, said, “Oh, just this business of changing the direction of American Christianity.” 

I was also remembering the previous evening, when trans people played a significant role in the Integrity Eucharist.  When I and other trans folks walked into the large room where the service was being held, we were directed to the first two rows of the center section of seating, where we found on each chair a printed piece of paper that said, “Reserved for VIPs and Transgender service participants.”  We also lead the procession to the stage, two columns of trans people leading TransEpiscopal members Reverend Cameron Partridge, Invocator of the service, and Reverend Carolyn Woodall, Deacon of the Eucharist, as well as Bishop Mary Glasspool, the Bishop Presiding and Bishop Gene Robinson, Preacher.

For his sermon, Bishop Robinson preached about the day, the passing of the two trans-inclusive resolutions and, in the House of Bishops, the passing of the trial liturgy for same gender blessings.  For me, the remarkable aspect of the Integrity Eucharist was the high level of trans inclusion, including in Bishop Robinson’s sermon.  

Clearly, these events could not have been realized without the support of friends and allies, including and perhaps especially members of IntegrityUSA and gay men, bisexual people and lesbians in the Church.  I considered that as I stood there in the service, surrounded by hundreds of supportive people, listening to Bishop Robinson telling us in the trans community that our work is not finished, with the promise, "We'll have your back."

This last sentiment was a new concept for me, not so much in intent because I have heard similar sentiments often enough before, but in action.  Since entering the GLBT community at the peak of the contentiousness around Rep. Barney Frank’s and the HRC’s 2007 actions to remove trans people from the protections of the Federal Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), I am afraid to say that I have been repeatedly disappointed by the “support” of our GL colleagues.  My painful experiences in this regard have not been with the majority of the GL people with whom I have interacted, but there have been enough of them to render me jaded and cautious about overtures of support.  I have spent too much of my energy in GLBT activism engaged in educating people in the GL community whom I always expect will know better but who too often do not.  At times the behavior of well meaning allies has felt patronizing, and at times, attitudes have seemed dismissive or even downright hostile. 

Fortunately, that has all been turned around at this General Convention and during the Integrity Eucharist the other night.  I believe that Bishop Robinson is aware of the need for education of the “GL’s” about the “T’s” – he gave me hope during his sermon when he spoke twice to the non-trans people at the service, "Don't underestimate what there is to learn on this."  In addition, the overwhelming support that was extended toward us trans folks was palpable.  We were included, we were part of the collective spirit, and we were loved.  I believe the Holy Spirit moved through everyone in that room that night, and I felt in communion with the hundreds of people there.  When Bishop Robinson said, “We'll have your back,” I believed him. 

What rose up in me in the shower and since then has been an overwhelming pride in The Episcopal Church for remembering, supporting and being inclusive of some of her most vulnerable members.  Even though we trans people are few in number in the Church, we have been rendered significant by our non-trans Episcopal gay, lesbian, bisexual and straight brothers and sisters.  For this, I am grateful, I have begun to heal, and I am proud to be a member of The Episcopal Church.

** Photos by Anderson C. 

From Historic Trans ENDA Testimony to the "Stalling" of a 2006 Antibullying Guide in MA  

Today has been a historic day for transgender people in the U.S. Kylar Broadus, founder of the Trans People of Color Coalition, became the first openly transgender person to testify before the U.S. Senate. The subject of his testimony was the Federal Employment Nondiscrimination Act – ENDA — that has been stalled in Congress for several years now. At our last General Convention in 2009, The Episcopal Church passed resolutions D012 and C048, putting us on record in support of an ENDA inclusive of gender identity and expression as well as of sexual orientation. 

In his testimony, video of which can be viewed here, and a transcript of which can be found here, Broadus spoke of his transition (from female to male) as well as his work history. Transition was for him “a matter of living the truth, and sharing the truth with the world, rather than living a lie and pretending to be somebody every day that I was not…. [I decided to] bring my full self to the table and to the world.” 

He explained that as he came into a fuller sense of himself in the late 1980s-early 1990s, his work attire gradually shifted from women’s to men’s business attire, and his haircut significantly shortened. His colleagues treated him well, but within six months of telling management of his decision to transition, he “was ‘constructively discharged’…. While my supervisors could tolerate a somewhat masculine-appearing black woman, they were not prepared to deal with my transition to being a black man.” He concluded stating, “it’s devastating, demoralizing, and dehumanizing to be put in th[e] position” of being denied work because of being trans.

As it also emerged today, the same thing can be said for an anti-bullying guide produced under the Romney administration here in Massachusetts in 2006. The Boston Globe reported this morning: “Former governor Mitt Romney’s administration in 2006 blocked publication of a state antibullying guide for Massachusetts public schools because officials objected to use of the terms ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgender’ in passages about protecting certain students from harassment, according to state records and interviews with current and former state officials.” While at the time aides to the governor publicly attributed the delay to a standard review process, in fact an email from May, 2006 revealed otherwise: “Because this is using the terms ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgendered,’ DPH’s name may not be used in this publication,’’ wrote an official in the Department of Public Health.

In other words, the governor did not want to be associated with a guide for protecting youth who might grow up to be like Kylar Broadus, or any of the participants in Integrity’s new video Voices of Witness: Out of the Box. Gay and lesbian youth might be one thing, but bisexual and transgender youth were something else entirely. 

A year and a half removed from the devastating landslide of LGBT suicides last fall, that covert distancing and delay looks even more unconscionable. This afternoon Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley commented, “For the Romney administration to block a discussion on the impact of bullying on LGBT students was to fail to protect some of our most vulnerable children.’’

As General Convention draws near, one of the major priorities of both TransEpiscopal and IntegrityUSA is for The Episcopal Church to pass a resolution on the problem of LGBT bullying. As Harry Knox recently reported, Integrity will be showing the film "Bullied" on July 8th. Today's Senate testimony and Globe stories underscore the urgency of this work, particularly for bi and trans people, that, as Broadus put it,  all of us might be empowered to "liv[e] the truth and share [that] truth with the world."

​- The Rev'd Dr. Cameron Partridge

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 
-Rom 8:38-39

A lobby day for transgender equality yesterday capped off what has been, to put it mildly, an extraordinarily intense week here in Massachusetts.  

I attended the lobby day in support the H1728/S1687 “An Act Relative To Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes” bill with my partner and our three-month-old son, and delivered a brief invocation at the end of the speeches in my capacity as Co-Chair of the locally based Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality.  

The mood in the historic Nurses Hall at the State House was tense, energetic, and laced with anger in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s Tuesday defeat of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Martha Coakley. Brown’s win removes Senate Democrats’ sixty-vote supermajority and imperils the passage of national health care reform legislation.  

Coakley had been widely backed by the state’s transgender community, as Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition Executive Director Gunner Scott forcefully expressed in a Bay Windows opinion letter* last September: “as State Attorney General, Martha Coakley came out early for transgender civil rights as the first statewide elected official to publicly support ‘An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes.’” Coakley also “sought civil rights injunctions in numerous cases involving hate crimes against LGBT victims” including one “against two men who attacked a transgender teenager in a Dorchester pizza shop.”

Meanwhile, as Chuck Colbert reported in Bay Windows* yesterday, the Massachusetts LGBT community was angered this election by “anti gay-baiting robo calls” that began plaguing Massachusetts phone lines three days before voters hit the polls. Originating “in a 202 area code from the Washington, D.C. [area], a recorded male voice asks residents if they view marriage defined as ‘only between one man and one woman.’ If they indicated ‘Yes’ they were urged to vote for Brown, ‘the only candidate with a proven track record’ of supporting traditional marriage. The call also labeled Coakley as a ‘radical’ same-sex marriage supporter who opposed letting the people vote on the issue and who used taxpayer dollars to support a same-sex marriage ‘agenda.’”

With the Supreme Court just yesterday approving by a 5-4 margin that corporations and labor unions can spend unlimited amounts on federal elections, the floodgates of such robo-calls and other methods of bombardment would appear to be opening at the national level. The majority opinion, penned by Justice Anthony Kennedy, argued that to prevent such spending is to censure free speech. “When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,’’ he wrote. 

Add to this mix the continuing cloud of grief and anxiety hovering over the many intersecting communities devastated by last week’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. Numerous people in New England had connections to the events in Haiti, including members of the large Boston Area Haitian community, the Sisters of Saint Margaret, and medical teams from Boston based Partners in Health.  

And add to that list the trans community which learned last weekend of the death of Flo McGarell, a visual artist and trans man from Newbury, Vermont, who lived in the city of Jacmal for the past six years, serving as director of the FOSAJ, a non-profit art center. The New England Cable News** did what struck me as a very respectful interview with McGarrell’s grieving parents and, perhaps without meaning to, gestured toward the complexity of McGarrell’s gender identity and expression. In an in-depth interview with the art 21 blog about his wildly creative art, Flo described himself as “a total gender mash up” which was “a constant and humorous topic of discussion” in Jacmal. When asked about what guided his artistic vision, Flo answered:

“Don’t hide, don’t lie.
Do that which scares me.
Resist the urge to settle.
Be as many things as possible in this lifetime.”

His loved ones are organizing memorials and tributes at this site.  

With such losses along with the sour economy on the minds of lobby day attendees yesterday, a fundamental question emerged: how can we help return a sense of confidence to lawmakers who may be afraid to fight for any legislation considered “controversial” right now? How can we break through this late-January crust of fear?

Fear may be eroding Massachusetts’s transgender nondiscrimination legislation, just as it is at work in the stalled Employment Nondiscrimination Act in Washington. D.C. How is it that over 105 state lawmakers (out of a total of 200) have signed on as co-sponsors of the MA bill, that a poll conducted last November by Lake Research Partners showed that 76% of Massachusetts residents and 80% of Massachusetts women support it, that Governor Deval Patrick has signaled his enthusiastic support, and still this bill has not gotten out of committee? We cannot let the events of this week, devastating as they are, deter us from this crucial task.  

As I think and pray about all of these swirling currents, as I watch the dynamics of fear playing out all around me, I can’t help but think of McGarrell’s conscious ethic of fearlessness. And that sentiment, in this week’s context, draws my mind to the Apostle Paul writing to communities in Rome about the eager longing with which creation waits to be set free from its bondage. We may groan inwardly now, he says, and we may feel alone in our labor, but the Spirit indeed intercedes for us, and urges us onward, never, ever separate from the love of God, as we collaborate in building God’s glorious dream. 

As the three of us emerged from the State House, we were dazzled by a brilliant, cold blue sky and streams of sunlight. 


****************************************************************************

Here is the invocation, which uses language tailored for a group of numerous religious (and nonreligious) traditions:

Nurses’s Hall, State House 
Boston, Massachusetts 
January 21, 2010

An Invocation for Transgender Lobby Day

May the Holy One of all our traditions bless, protect and empower us, illumining us with insight, calm and unfathomable fortitude.

May we be reminded of the remarkable strength that lies within us, urging us onward even in face of the steepest odds. 

May our hearts be filled with gratitude and awe for the sacred community gathered here today: trans people, partners, allies, families of all configurations, people of all races and ethnicities, sexual orientations, national origins, religious and spiritual traditions, professions and vocations.  

May the Divine Spirit flowing among us stir up our prophetic anger at the evils of apathy and expediency as much as of bigotry and ignorance.  

And may we go forth with boldness, empowered to bear witness to the truth of our lives and the birthright of our human dignity. 

All this we ask in the name of the All-Holy One who urges us into life and love, and sets us free. Amen.

​-The Rev'd Dr. Cameron Partridge

* The publication Bay Windows no longer exists, but Gunner Scott's letter has been archived on a Transgender News public google group and Church Colbert's article, "Dems lose critical 60th Senate seat in Mass" is archived at Keen News Service.  

** The New England Cable News has removed this post from its website  

November in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachsusetts has been quite the month on the LGBT front with big ticket items during our Diocesan Convention, to Transweek and Transgender Day of Remembrance, to this weekend’s announcement about the role of clergy in same sex marriage.

At our Diocesan Convention during the first weekend of November, a resolution was overwhelmingly passed expressing our hope that Bishop M. Thomas Shaw III would give clergy permission to legally solemnize same sex marriages. +Tom has long been a supporter of LGBT people in general – and speaking as a trans priest whom he ordained, I mean it when I include the T – and equal marriage in particular, stepping out in support of equal civil marriage during this state’s protracted battle over it.  

But once gay couples were legally allowed to wed, Episcopal clergy were still limited to blessing said couples. And while I realize just being allowed to do blessings would be a coup in some dioceses, here being limited to blessings felt like a pastoral nightmare. I can’t tell you how many clergy have had repeated conversations with couples about how they could solemnize some marriages but not others. Some clergy have refused to solemnize any marriages in the in-between time of the past five years. And so, while the conversation about whether we should even “be in the marriage business” as legal representatives of the state goes on, that is a conversation that I suspect will take this Church a long time to sort out. It’s a lot more difficult to disentangle than I think people on all sides of the debate realize. In the meantime, to me it has made no sense to refuse to let same sex couples in the solemnization door while we figure out whether we want to restrict our involvement in all marriages to blessings.

Another way I have personally faced this issue is in doing trans marriages. We who are trans also face limitations in our ability to wed. Much depends not only on whether our partnerships are gay, bi, or heterosexual – just like everyone else -- but also on whether our legal documentation (e.g. drivers licenses) accurately reflects our gender. And when I say accurate, I mean whether it reflects our identities, not the meanings that others might write on our bodies. In some states changing appropriate identification is easier than in others (for instance, Ohio is notoriously difficult). So when a couple with a trans member has approached me to do their wedding (and I have now done several), one of the things I have had to ask at some point is what the gender markers on their drivers licenses say. In some cases I have been able to bless only and in others I have been able to bless and solemnize. Each time I have been aware that I am part of the ongoing transformation of marriage in this time and place. Because, as I see it, marriage is not now and has never been static. Its meaning and form has long been changing. What was the miracle that Jesus undertook at Cana? The transformation of water into wine. Our relationships are to be sacred vessels in which we walk together through the changes and chances of this life.

But I have to say—and I say this as someone who obviously cares a lot about the marriage debates -- all the energy we pour into marriage can get pretty irritating to the trans community. Because even though we are impacted by the rules regarding marriage as well, marriage is not the most important thing to the trans community (insofar as we can say there is a single trans community—there are indeed numerous communities). Protecting our most basic human rights are. Keeping members of our community safe from violence – as our sisters of color most often experience – and free from often blatant discrimination on the job, in schools, housing, credit, and medical care, is what we are most concerned about. And so we are pleased that the Matthew Shephard Hate Crimes Act is finally now law, but we wait eagerly for the passage of a fully inclusive Employment Nondiscrimination Act and the passage of local and state laws that safeguard us in our various communities.

November is a month that the trans community around the globe is increasingly claiming as its own. The main impetus for this is Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) which takes place every year on November 20th. Fourteen years ago, an African American Bostonian named Chanelle Pickett was murdered here in Boston on that date. I remember it well because I was a first year MDiv student interning at the Victim Recovery Program at the Fenway Community Health Center at the time, and it was also my birthday. Three years later, on November 28th, 1998 another African American woman named Rita Hester died in Brighton, MA, three blocks from the congregation I now serve, St. Luke’s and St. Margaret’s. This murder sparked a vigil on Brighton Avenue across from the place she was last seen. One year later, the trans community in San Francisco marked that anniversary with the first ever Transgender Day of Remembrance. And so the TDOR tradition, which is now international, was born.  

Last year for the first time, Boston’s TDOR was held at St. Luke’s and St. Margaret’s in a secular event that packed the small church. This year, once again, we were asked to host this event (read about it here in the Allston/Brighton TAB; photos by Marilyn Humphries are here). It was a particular honor to be able to share with the gathered community that at its General Convention this past summer The Episcopal Church went on record in support of our full civil rights. And in another important demonstration of support and encouragement, the Crossing, the emergent church style congregation at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston, held a special service in honor of TDOR on Thursday evening, November 19th, also hosting Transcriptions, the local trans/queer themed open mic. More and more Episcopal congregations are opening their arms to trans people.

And then yesterday lay and ordained leaders in Diomass received a beautifully clear letter from our bishop declaring that as of Advent I clergy in this diocese are indeed authorized to solemnize the marriages of same sex couples (read about it in the Boston Globe or Bay Windows). No more do gender markers on licenses matter. As I talked about it on the phone with a friend and fellow trans priest, I said, “what a relief!” He replied, “I know—now I wanna run out and find a gay couple to marry!” 

And so life here in Massachusetts continues to move forward with blessings amid all our complexities. But to me the greatest gift of all this November is my son who was born in mid-October. Today, literally as I wrote this piece, he smiled at me for the first time. God is so good.

- The Rev'd Dr. Cameron Partridge

This piece was originally written for the Walking with Integrity blog.

This past Saturday, June 7, Northampton, Massachusetts hosted the first New England Transgender Pride March and Rally. North Hampton’s LGBT Pride event had taken place in May, and Boston’s LGBT Pride parade is happening this coming weekend, but trans folks wanted to take a moment to lift up people across the spectrum of gender identities and expressions, and more specifically to take, as the event’s website put it, “a visible and positive stand for transgender rights.” Dedicated “to diverse representation among organizers and participants,” the event sought “to educate and build awareness of the movement against gender-based discrimination.”  

As we celebrate the milestones increasingly achieved for equal marriage across this country, it’s important to remember that in thirty-seven states — as well as at the federal level -- trans folks don’t have the assurance of basic civil rights. And in one state, Maryland, recently gained protections are under threat. We still have a long way to go.

That ongoing and upcoming journey reminds me of the first reading we heard this past Sunday, June 8th, which was from Genesis 12:1-9. In it God tells Abram — the forbearer whose name and identity God would change —“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” Abram and Sarai made their way to the land that God promised to them, and when God pointed out that land to them, they stopped and built an altar to God. As they made their way through this land, in fact, they stopped at several points, marking the stages of their progress with altars.  

In a way, that’s what this New England Transgender Pride was doing — it was a day to stop, assess where we have been, to take pride in who we are, in how far we have come, and to strengthen ourselves for the various stages of the journey ahead. And it was a day to claim the promise — the promise that our unique human dignity will be honored and that this very humanity will take its place — is even now taking its place — amid all the interweaving strands of creation’s tapestry, as a blessing.

That I can sit here and type these words today, as someone who wasn’t even able to make it to this event, is because of the blessing of others’ witness. There are numerous descriptions of New England Trans Pride out there, but I came across one today that stopped me in my tracks. It turns out that Jendi Reiter, author (especially of poetry) and self-described straight ally, made her way to Trans Pride last weekend and ended up marching in the parade. As she describes, “The first-ever New England Transgender Pride March took place this weekend in Northampton, and I was there with my ‘Episcopal Church Welcomes You’ rainbow tank top and a digital camera to capture the pageantry. I was hoping to blend into the MassEquality contingent, but they were scattered around other groups this time, so I just milled around looking like I knew what I was doing, and took lots of pictures. Next thing I knew, someone had handed me a bunch of purple and white balloons, and I was marching behind the lead banner, shouting ‘Trans Pride Now.’”

Now how many of you fabulous allies out there might have hopped into a trans pride parade wearing an Episcopal Church Welcomes You rainbow tank?!  

Reiter observes, “Whereas the main Northampton Pride March in May had a family-oriented, carnival atmosphere, Trans Pride was more bohemian and political. From their placards and speeches, it sounded like many trans folks felt they'd been sold out by the mainstream gay and lesbian activist groups, particularly the Human Rights Campaign's decision to support the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act even though protections for gender identity and expression had been eliminated. Some speakers seemed concerned that groups like HRC were selling a more sanitized, bourgeois image of gay and lesbian life that ignored the poor, prisoners, people of color, and those whose sexuality and gender identity defied easy labeling. Maybe I was in the right place after all.”

It seems to me that Reiter was in just the right place, with observations right on target, and not only for the ‘secular’ struggle for trans rights. Indeed, these questions struck me as particularly timely for Anglicans as July’s Lambeth Conference draws near:

“Is being queer a state of mind? Is queerness, like Protestantism, inherently self-fragmenting, as the need for a perfectly authentic personal identity clashes with the equally real need for affinity groups? The more precisely you draw your doctrinal statement (or define your gender), the closer you get to becoming an army of one.”  

These questions challenge those who view gender as infinitely refracted as much as those who would define it in strictly dualistic terms. In a sense, we have on our hands a twenty-first century version of the one and the many. To float an answer to the question about self-fragmentation (with its fascinating link between queerness and Protestantism), I believe that as we name and embody our differences with ever-greater precision we will fragment to the extent that we base our alliances mainly on the degree of our similarity. But what happens when our bonds are based not only upon similarity of experience or embodiment – “who we are” -- but also upon principle, which, for Christians, would be the good news? Upon the radicality of God’s dream in which all -- all for real, not all ‘whose manner of life’ doesn’t ‘pose a challenge’ to me – are not only welcomed but expected, listened-to, even delighted-in, and ultimately drawn into God’s ongoing project of creation? As we already know, the stages of our passage will be marked with struggle, and sometimes by fragmentation. At points we, like Abram and Sarai, will need to pause and mark with gratitude how far we’ve come, and then continue on. If ours is a mission bent on love, the journey will bring us – all of us – home. And in this process, somehow, we will all become a blessing to one another.

- The Rev'd Cameron Partridge