In the wake of the executive orders being released this week and last targeting our community, including yesterday’s order seeking to restrict access to gender affirming care for anyone under the age of nineteen, we want to highlight the January 13th webinar "Building a Fighting Church, Part 1: Defending the Dignity of Trans, Non-binary, and Two-Spirit People." This webinar was organized by the Episcopal Church’s Gender Justice Officer Aaron Scott, and co-sponsored by TransEpiscopal. Over 400 people attended via Zoom, with another three hundred registered to attend.
Video of the webinar can be viewed here, and we highly recommend watching all of it.
In one section of the webinar, one of our steering committee members, the Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge, spoke on anchoring our commitment to trans justice in our Episcopal identity. His remarks, shared below, underscore the commitments the Episcopal Church has made over the past fifteen plus years at its highest level – the General Convention – to support and stand with trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people, a stance that directly opposes what has been unfolding this week.
We share the webinar link and these remarks as an urgent call to stand with our community. Please watch this space for opportunities to connect and get involved with TransEpiscopal and other supportive groups around the church as we respond to all that is unfolding. Please particularly stay tuned for the Building a Fighting Church Part 2 webinar, focused on reproductive justice, with huge thanks to Aaron Scott for his leadership!
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This is a time of urgency and precarity for all of us who are trans, non-binary, and/or Two Spirit; and for all of us who are connected to this community: spouses and partners, parents, siblings, friends, community members. We’ve heard about our call to be a Fighting Church from Canon Carla Robinson. I want to underline that call for us as Christians and as Episcopalians. Many of us reaffirmed our Baptismal Covenant yesterday, as we celebrated the First Sunday after the Epiphany, traditionally centered on the baptism of Jesus. Among the promises we reaffirmed was our call to persevere in resisting evil, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, and to strive for justice and peace, respecting the dignity of every human being.
This is a moment in which the basic dignity of trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people is being widely disrespected, undermined, and demeaned for political gain. Such action is happening at local levels in the form of schoolboard actions to ban particular books or flags, or to prevent trans people in general and trans girls in particular from accessing sports teams or other gender specific activities and spaces. This disrespect is happening at state levels with bans or attempts to ban access to gender affirming care, as well as sports bans.And it is happening at the federal level, as we just saw in the massive money spent on transphobic, transmisogynistic commercials aired particularly during sporting events this election season. This is part of a widespread pattern of anti-trans violence intersecting with racism, classism and sexism. This pattern is unfolding in so-called blue states as well as red states. It is happening in my own state of California. This avalanche of demeaning anti-trans activity has an impact that is serious and widespread. Not only on our laws, our spaces, the activities we may be barred from participating in, our basic safety and well-being. But there is also a spiritual danger of this pattern seeping into our hearts, of lowering the horizon of our expectations; squelching what we imagine is possible for our living and thriving. I think this is especially the case for the youngest trans, non-binary and two-spirit people among us, who hear of the violent rhetoric second hand if they haven’t already experienced it firsthand, and may feel the horizons of their own lives being foreclosed, even if they are in supportive families and friend groups. As we persevere in resisting this life-limiting evil, trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people are counting on the Episcopal Church to honor its commitment to our community to respect not only our basic dignity but our presence, our creativity, our lay and ordained leadership, and our full flourishing as members of Christ’s body in this church we love.
The Episcopal Church has been on an intentional path to fully embrace, uplift, and honor the gifts of trans, non-binary and Two Spirit people for well over fifteen years now. At the churchwide level we began specifically affirming trans people in 2009 when the General Convention passed legislation encouraging churches to create flexible and expansive language church forms, allowing people to share their pronouns and their names. We went on record supporting a fully trans inclusive version of what came to be called the Equality Act – then the Employment Non-Discrimination Act – as well as state and local nondiscrimination legislation efforts. We went on in 2012 to add gender identity and expression to our own non-discrimination canons for lay and ordained leadership (first access to the ordination process, and then in 2018 expanded to employment and deployment opportunities) and underlined in 2022 that these canons include non-binary people. We named the epidemic of the bullying of young people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and called upon one another to support the LGBTQIA youth among us. In 2022 we – the General Convention – specifically called upon the Episcopal Church to “advocate for access to gender affirming care in all forms (social, medical, or any other) and at all ages as part of our Baptismal call to ‘respect the dignity of every human being.’” We came out in official opposition to so-called “conversion therapy” in 2015. We called for and later incorporated into the Book of Occasional Services a Rite for changing one’s name. And to support the journey of this call to fully embrace our community, we have called for and are increasingly taking up formation programs so that congregations, dioceses, and wider groupings of the church, can learn more about how to be supportive and actively affirming. (A comprehensive list of the Episcopal Church policy positions I have been describing is on TransEpiscopal’s website.)
Looking through the work our church has been engaging over these last fifteen plus years, the Episcopal church at the highest levels of its collective authority has a very clear, unambiguous stance of support for trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people. That stance is founded upon a theology of the human person that is comprehensive, not complementarian or rigidly binary in its conception of gender; that honors the complexity of the human within the wide-ranging beauty of God’s creation; that makes space for the discernment of gender identity and the unfolding of its expression in various cultures and contexts. We have committed as a Church to the ongoing work of equipping ourselves to answer our call to respect the dignity of this community in our congregational life, and in the public square. Now more than ever, it is vital that we step forward and into this work.
Closing Prayer
Holy One, we give you thanks for this community, for its commitment, its questions, its energy and urgency. Fire our hearts as we leave this space, that we may take our learnings and connections out into our communities, into the world, strengthened by God’s transforming love. Amen.
Video of the webinar can be viewed here, and we highly recommend watching all of it.
In one section of the webinar, one of our steering committee members, the Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge, spoke on anchoring our commitment to trans justice in our Episcopal identity. His remarks, shared below, underscore the commitments the Episcopal Church has made over the past fifteen plus years at its highest level – the General Convention – to support and stand with trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people, a stance that directly opposes what has been unfolding this week.
We share the webinar link and these remarks as an urgent call to stand with our community. Please watch this space for opportunities to connect and get involved with TransEpiscopal and other supportive groups around the church as we respond to all that is unfolding. Please particularly stay tuned for the Building a Fighting Church Part 2 webinar, focused on reproductive justice, with huge thanks to Aaron Scott for his leadership!
***********
This is a time of urgency and precarity for all of us who are trans, non-binary, and/or Two Spirit; and for all of us who are connected to this community: spouses and partners, parents, siblings, friends, community members. We’ve heard about our call to be a Fighting Church from Canon Carla Robinson. I want to underline that call for us as Christians and as Episcopalians. Many of us reaffirmed our Baptismal Covenant yesterday, as we celebrated the First Sunday after the Epiphany, traditionally centered on the baptism of Jesus. Among the promises we reaffirmed was our call to persevere in resisting evil, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, and to strive for justice and peace, respecting the dignity of every human being.
This is a moment in which the basic dignity of trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people is being widely disrespected, undermined, and demeaned for political gain. Such action is happening at local levels in the form of schoolboard actions to ban particular books or flags, or to prevent trans people in general and trans girls in particular from accessing sports teams or other gender specific activities and spaces. This disrespect is happening at state levels with bans or attempts to ban access to gender affirming care, as well as sports bans.And it is happening at the federal level, as we just saw in the massive money spent on transphobic, transmisogynistic commercials aired particularly during sporting events this election season. This is part of a widespread pattern of anti-trans violence intersecting with racism, classism and sexism. This pattern is unfolding in so-called blue states as well as red states. It is happening in my own state of California. This avalanche of demeaning anti-trans activity has an impact that is serious and widespread. Not only on our laws, our spaces, the activities we may be barred from participating in, our basic safety and well-being. But there is also a spiritual danger of this pattern seeping into our hearts, of lowering the horizon of our expectations; squelching what we imagine is possible for our living and thriving. I think this is especially the case for the youngest trans, non-binary and two-spirit people among us, who hear of the violent rhetoric second hand if they haven’t already experienced it firsthand, and may feel the horizons of their own lives being foreclosed, even if they are in supportive families and friend groups. As we persevere in resisting this life-limiting evil, trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people are counting on the Episcopal Church to honor its commitment to our community to respect not only our basic dignity but our presence, our creativity, our lay and ordained leadership, and our full flourishing as members of Christ’s body in this church we love.
The Episcopal Church has been on an intentional path to fully embrace, uplift, and honor the gifts of trans, non-binary and Two Spirit people for well over fifteen years now. At the churchwide level we began specifically affirming trans people in 2009 when the General Convention passed legislation encouraging churches to create flexible and expansive language church forms, allowing people to share their pronouns and their names. We went on record supporting a fully trans inclusive version of what came to be called the Equality Act – then the Employment Non-Discrimination Act – as well as state and local nondiscrimination legislation efforts. We went on in 2012 to add gender identity and expression to our own non-discrimination canons for lay and ordained leadership (first access to the ordination process, and then in 2018 expanded to employment and deployment opportunities) and underlined in 2022 that these canons include non-binary people. We named the epidemic of the bullying of young people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and called upon one another to support the LGBTQIA youth among us. In 2022 we – the General Convention – specifically called upon the Episcopal Church to “advocate for access to gender affirming care in all forms (social, medical, or any other) and at all ages as part of our Baptismal call to ‘respect the dignity of every human being.’” We came out in official opposition to so-called “conversion therapy” in 2015. We called for and later incorporated into the Book of Occasional Services a Rite for changing one’s name. And to support the journey of this call to fully embrace our community, we have called for and are increasingly taking up formation programs so that congregations, dioceses, and wider groupings of the church, can learn more about how to be supportive and actively affirming. (A comprehensive list of the Episcopal Church policy positions I have been describing is on TransEpiscopal’s website.)
Looking through the work our church has been engaging over these last fifteen plus years, the Episcopal church at the highest levels of its collective authority has a very clear, unambiguous stance of support for trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit people. That stance is founded upon a theology of the human person that is comprehensive, not complementarian or rigidly binary in its conception of gender; that honors the complexity of the human within the wide-ranging beauty of God’s creation; that makes space for the discernment of gender identity and the unfolding of its expression in various cultures and contexts. We have committed as a Church to the ongoing work of equipping ourselves to answer our call to respect the dignity of this community in our congregational life, and in the public square. Now more than ever, it is vital that we step forward and into this work.
Closing Prayer
Holy One, we give you thanks for this community, for its commitment, its questions, its energy and urgency. Fire our hearts as we leave this space, that we may take our learnings and connections out into our communities, into the world, strengthened by God’s transforming love. Amen.
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