Earlier today Aaron Scott, Episcopal Church Staff Officer for Gender Justice, preached a powerful, inspiring word at the Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. His text is below the video. Thank you, Aaron!
I come before you today in the name of the One who creates, redeems and sanctifies all of us—no exceptions. Amen.
Good afternoon. Thank you so much for having me with you today. My name is Aaron Scott, my pronouns are he/him, and I’m The Episcopal Church’s first-ever Staff Officer for Gender Justice.
I want to thank the Greater NY Episcopal Church Trans Taskforce, not just for inviting me to be here, but also for your leadership in these times. Along with that I want to thank every trans and nonbinary person who showed up today, in person and online. We are, in the end, a small community, very much under the boot of repression. And yet we continue to lead.
We speak for ourselves.
We set forth our own vision for what justice means for our people—trans and nonbinary people.
We determine what justice means for us in our bodies, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in our workplaces, in our country. And while we need everyone here to join with us in that struggle, we are the ones responsible for setting the vision. We are the experts on when we are free. Only we get to say when we are truly safe, truly honored, truly afforded our God-given dignity and rights. So thank you to every trans and nonbinary person here for the visions you put forward into the world. Thank you for standing in your power and your leadership.
I also want to thank the leadership of this diocese and this house of worship for supporting and following the trans and nonbinary leaders who have made this celebration possible. Let’s make that the norm everywhere.
It’s a beautiful day to be alive.
It’s a beautiful day to exist, in flagrant defiance of executive orders. January 20th came and went and I still haven’t been whisked away to Oz—like the rapture, but for trans people only. I briefly wondered, “Am I not transgendering hard enough, if two whole months have gone by and I’m still stuck here in America?!”
And then I remembered myself, and I remembered: this is a sham. Because we have always been here and we are not going anywhere, ever.
You heard it in the Gospel reading just now, out of the mouth of Jesus himself. He’s recognizing third gender people who live as themselves “for the sake of the kingdom of Heaven. And the one who can accept this SHOULD accept it.” Jesus’ teaching on gender diversity in this passage is echoed in the Talmud, which legally recognizes somewhere between six and eight genders. Isaiah chapter 56 says that third-gender people who keep God’s commandments will have “an everlasting name, a name better than sons and daughters.” The book of Esther includes no less than ten gender nonconforming people and they all have names. One of our first conversion stories, in Acts 8, is about a Black third-gender person—who is not proselytized into conformity but rather rejoices at hearing Philip teach that God wants justice for those who have been deprived of it in this world.
Trans people are part of a long and sacred lineage. The Bible is ours. It does not belong to those who seek to erase us because by erasing us, they erase the Word itself. And we have a name for that kind of theological malpractice: it’s heresy.
The erasure of trans people is heresy.
And the violence of setting up systems and policies that exclude trans people? This is idolatry. It is idolatry because it makes false claims about where God does and does not reside. It claims that the image of God resides in cisgender people only, and therefore only cisgender people deserve belonging and thriving. It is idolatry of self to say to your transgender neighbor, “I contain more of the image of God in me than you do.” And it is an idolatrous society that takes that falsehood and enshrines it in policy.
Heresy and idolatry are two grave sins that every Christian—trans or not—should be concerned about. They are insidious, and dangerous, and when we do nothing to counter these sins in our teaching and preaching and public witness, we allow more and more people to be misled about the world God wants for us all, and how we get there together. We are seeing the results of that mass-misleading now, with trans people caught squarely in the cross hairs—offered up as a false scapegoat for the real problems in this country. But as Laverne Cox said, “Trans people are not the reason the price of eggs is so high. Folks are mad at the wrong 1%."
Well. We will only get what we are organized to take. No powers and principalities are going to hand trans people our joy and our thriving down to us out of their benevolence. That’s not how change happens. Change comes because we demand it, and we labor for it. So today we celebrate our joy—and tomorrow we get back to work organizing to defend our joy. Organizing to defend our young people. Organizing to defend our dignity. Organizing to draw in more and more people to stand with us, move with us. And we can’t do all that on an empty tank, so today: We sing. We shout. We strut. We swagger. We rejoice in our trans-ness so that the memory of this joy can continue to carry us forward even in the hard times.
Miss Major speaks to this so clearly. A survivor of the Stonewall uprising who still today, at 78 years old, continues to organize and teach and write, has more reasons than most of us to be tired. And so, as she says, she takes breaks. She lives fully and has the stories and rap sheet to prove it.
I think one of our favorite mini heresies, even in an affirming church, is to expect that Christ the Liberator will appear in the form of someone flawlessly marketable. Someone with a shiny backstory and no mistakes. Someone who hasn’t constantly had to navigate murky moral terrain because their survival depends upon it.
We should read the Bible more.
We should read history more.
Christ the Liberator is a PR nightmare.
Ms. Major is not marketable—she is fully alive, fully agitated, and fully activated.
The abolitionist Harriet Tubman was not marketable—she was a destroyer of markets, just like Jesus himself amid the money changers in the temple.
Our text from Galatians has been sorely distorted on this point. We read “in Christ there is neither slave nor free” as if that pointed to individual friendship between the enslaved and those who hold them in captivity, which is a heretical interpretation. In Christ there is neither slave nor free because Jesus Christ destroys the institution of slavery. Jesus Christ destroys all hierarchies of human worth. And wherever systems of oppression are being toppled, Jesus Christ rises again.
But we forget this because those of us with some access to comfort want to stay comfortable. So we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves things like: when the right kind of oppressed person appears, they’ll lead the way.
When we tell ourselves this lie, the unspoken coercion behind it is that we do not want oppressed people to be real human beings. This is just as great an enemy to our liberation as words that more directly dehumanize us.
Trans joy is not about marketing a false, palatable version of ourselves. It is about enjoying being alive and not dead.
What do you do when you are so thoroughly in touch with your mortality and choose to get up and live anyway?
You eat and drink and smoke with your friends.
You make love.
You make art
You go dancing
You hustle to survive, and you refused to be lied about.
I refuse to be lied about.
We refuse to be lied about.
We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected.
We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected.
We do not exist to be afraid. We exist to be powerful. And we must understand that when people fear us, it is because they fear our power. But if we are to be feared, then we should be feared only in the way that a true Christian fears God—feared because the breadth, and depth, and complexity of our lives force everyone to admit that breadth, and depth, and complexity have always been here, have always been part of God’s creation.
The more that trans people stand in our joy and our full messy humanity without apology, the more powerful we become. That is why this day is important. The less afraid we are to live—even when there is so much to fear—the stronger we get.
There is always backlash to this. That is why the work of the church could not be clearer in this moment. The good shepherd protects the sheep from the wolves. And I don’t love being compared to a sheep, but I know that wolves are real. Trans people know what happens when there is nobody to stand between us and danger. Resilience does not come from easy living.
Maybe that is the gift and the teaching that we as trans people can offer to this church in this particular moment.
We know what it is like to not be able to imagine a future version of ourselves, even as we understand we must move toward that future unknown self or die.
We know what it is like to be despised and lied on, and still refuse to allow any of that to sway us from our deepest knowing.
We know what it is like to move in the public eye with a target on our backs every single day. And to still get up and get out there anyway, dressed to kill.
We know what it is like to choose one another again and again and again—in love and in faithfulness—when we have been abandoned by parties, and institutions, and fair weather friends. And there is no greater joy than that continual choice. We are worth it, every single time.
Amen.
Good afternoon. Thank you so much for having me with you today. My name is Aaron Scott, my pronouns are he/him, and I’m The Episcopal Church’s first-ever Staff Officer for Gender Justice.
I want to thank the Greater NY Episcopal Church Trans Taskforce, not just for inviting me to be here, but also for your leadership in these times. Along with that I want to thank every trans and nonbinary person who showed up today, in person and online. We are, in the end, a small community, very much under the boot of repression. And yet we continue to lead.
We speak for ourselves.
We set forth our own vision for what justice means for our people—trans and nonbinary people.
We determine what justice means for us in our bodies, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in our workplaces, in our country. And while we need everyone here to join with us in that struggle, we are the ones responsible for setting the vision. We are the experts on when we are free. Only we get to say when we are truly safe, truly honored, truly afforded our God-given dignity and rights. So thank you to every trans and nonbinary person here for the visions you put forward into the world. Thank you for standing in your power and your leadership.
I also want to thank the leadership of this diocese and this house of worship for supporting and following the trans and nonbinary leaders who have made this celebration possible. Let’s make that the norm everywhere.
It’s a beautiful day to be alive.
It’s a beautiful day to exist, in flagrant defiance of executive orders. January 20th came and went and I still haven’t been whisked away to Oz—like the rapture, but for trans people only. I briefly wondered, “Am I not transgendering hard enough, if two whole months have gone by and I’m still stuck here in America?!”
And then I remembered myself, and I remembered: this is a sham. Because we have always been here and we are not going anywhere, ever.
You heard it in the Gospel reading just now, out of the mouth of Jesus himself. He’s recognizing third gender people who live as themselves “for the sake of the kingdom of Heaven. And the one who can accept this SHOULD accept it.” Jesus’ teaching on gender diversity in this passage is echoed in the Talmud, which legally recognizes somewhere between six and eight genders. Isaiah chapter 56 says that third-gender people who keep God’s commandments will have “an everlasting name, a name better than sons and daughters.” The book of Esther includes no less than ten gender nonconforming people and they all have names. One of our first conversion stories, in Acts 8, is about a Black third-gender person—who is not proselytized into conformity but rather rejoices at hearing Philip teach that God wants justice for those who have been deprived of it in this world.
Trans people are part of a long and sacred lineage. The Bible is ours. It does not belong to those who seek to erase us because by erasing us, they erase the Word itself. And we have a name for that kind of theological malpractice: it’s heresy.
The erasure of trans people is heresy.
And the violence of setting up systems and policies that exclude trans people? This is idolatry. It is idolatry because it makes false claims about where God does and does not reside. It claims that the image of God resides in cisgender people only, and therefore only cisgender people deserve belonging and thriving. It is idolatry of self to say to your transgender neighbor, “I contain more of the image of God in me than you do.” And it is an idolatrous society that takes that falsehood and enshrines it in policy.
Heresy and idolatry are two grave sins that every Christian—trans or not—should be concerned about. They are insidious, and dangerous, and when we do nothing to counter these sins in our teaching and preaching and public witness, we allow more and more people to be misled about the world God wants for us all, and how we get there together. We are seeing the results of that mass-misleading now, with trans people caught squarely in the cross hairs—offered up as a false scapegoat for the real problems in this country. But as Laverne Cox said, “Trans people are not the reason the price of eggs is so high. Folks are mad at the wrong 1%."
Well. We will only get what we are organized to take. No powers and principalities are going to hand trans people our joy and our thriving down to us out of their benevolence. That’s not how change happens. Change comes because we demand it, and we labor for it. So today we celebrate our joy—and tomorrow we get back to work organizing to defend our joy. Organizing to defend our young people. Organizing to defend our dignity. Organizing to draw in more and more people to stand with us, move with us. And we can’t do all that on an empty tank, so today: We sing. We shout. We strut. We swagger. We rejoice in our trans-ness so that the memory of this joy can continue to carry us forward even in the hard times.
Miss Major speaks to this so clearly. A survivor of the Stonewall uprising who still today, at 78 years old, continues to organize and teach and write, has more reasons than most of us to be tired. And so, as she says, she takes breaks. She lives fully and has the stories and rap sheet to prove it.
I think one of our favorite mini heresies, even in an affirming church, is to expect that Christ the Liberator will appear in the form of someone flawlessly marketable. Someone with a shiny backstory and no mistakes. Someone who hasn’t constantly had to navigate murky moral terrain because their survival depends upon it.
We should read the Bible more.
We should read history more.
Christ the Liberator is a PR nightmare.
Ms. Major is not marketable—she is fully alive, fully agitated, and fully activated.
The abolitionist Harriet Tubman was not marketable—she was a destroyer of markets, just like Jesus himself amid the money changers in the temple.
Our text from Galatians has been sorely distorted on this point. We read “in Christ there is neither slave nor free” as if that pointed to individual friendship between the enslaved and those who hold them in captivity, which is a heretical interpretation. In Christ there is neither slave nor free because Jesus Christ destroys the institution of slavery. Jesus Christ destroys all hierarchies of human worth. And wherever systems of oppression are being toppled, Jesus Christ rises again.
But we forget this because those of us with some access to comfort want to stay comfortable. So we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves things like: when the right kind of oppressed person appears, they’ll lead the way.
When we tell ourselves this lie, the unspoken coercion behind it is that we do not want oppressed people to be real human beings. This is just as great an enemy to our liberation as words that more directly dehumanize us.
Trans joy is not about marketing a false, palatable version of ourselves. It is about enjoying being alive and not dead.
What do you do when you are so thoroughly in touch with your mortality and choose to get up and live anyway?
You eat and drink and smoke with your friends.
You make love.
You make art
You go dancing
You hustle to survive, and you refused to be lied about.
I refuse to be lied about.
We refuse to be lied about.
We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected.
We do not exist to be respectable. We exist to be respected.
We do not exist to be afraid. We exist to be powerful. And we must understand that when people fear us, it is because they fear our power. But if we are to be feared, then we should be feared only in the way that a true Christian fears God—feared because the breadth, and depth, and complexity of our lives force everyone to admit that breadth, and depth, and complexity have always been here, have always been part of God’s creation.
The more that trans people stand in our joy and our full messy humanity without apology, the more powerful we become. That is why this day is important. The less afraid we are to live—even when there is so much to fear—the stronger we get.
There is always backlash to this. That is why the work of the church could not be clearer in this moment. The good shepherd protects the sheep from the wolves. And I don’t love being compared to a sheep, but I know that wolves are real. Trans people know what happens when there is nobody to stand between us and danger. Resilience does not come from easy living.
Maybe that is the gift and the teaching that we as trans people can offer to this church in this particular moment.
We know what it is like to not be able to imagine a future version of ourselves, even as we understand we must move toward that future unknown self or die.
We know what it is like to be despised and lied on, and still refuse to allow any of that to sway us from our deepest knowing.
We know what it is like to move in the public eye with a target on our backs every single day. And to still get up and get out there anyway, dressed to kill.
We know what it is like to choose one another again and again and again—in love and in faithfulness—when we have been abandoned by parties, and institutions, and fair weather friends. And there is no greater joy than that continual choice. We are worth it, every single time.
Amen.
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