Ten years ago today, BNG published an article by Mark that opened the door to a friendship between us that spans a decade of tremendous change in American culture and politics.
On May 13, 2016, BNG published Mark’s opinion piece titled “Seven Things I’m Learning About Transgender Persons,” which immediately went viral and remains today the most-read article ever on BNG’s website. The article was republished multiple places and remains a top read on the BNG website to this day.
The piece was sparked as Mark sat in a task force meeting at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, listening to a pediatrician explain the biology of transgender identity.
Mark Wingfield
Mark wrote: “The truth is that I don’t know any transgender persons — at least I don’t think I do. But with the help of a pediatrician friend and a geneticist friend, I’m listening and trying to learn. This is hard, though, because understanding the transgender experience seems so far outside what I have ever contemplated before. And the more I learn, the more theological questions I face as well. This is hard, even for a pastor.”
At the time, Texas was embroiled in a political battle over so-called “bathroom bills” that sought to regulate where transgender men and women may access public restrooms. Those battles seem quaint now compared to the more devastating legislation being considered and adopted in statehouses across the nation.
Liam read that article, couldn’t believe it was written by a Baptist pastor, and immediately reached out to Mark. Here’s our recollection of all that happened next:
Mark: Liam was probably the second trans person to reach out to me immediately and say, “I read that you don’t know any transgender people; I’ll be your friend.” I was so moved by the outpouring from Liam and others who genuinely sought to make themselves available to me. We met for lunch and became immediate friends.
Liam Gent
Liam: I had read that article with shaking hands and tears, wondering if it was real. Are there Baptists out there who are accepting and ready to stand for my community?
I had been doing queer advocacy work for 10 years, and I had learned that sharing my story could change hearts when no argument could. So I emailed Mark and asked to meet. My partner at the time was terrified for me — she was not sure it was safe for a trans man to meet a Baptist pastor on the subject of who we are.
I drove to Dallas anyway. Whatever happened at lunch, I owed him the courtesy of meeting honesty with honesty.
Mark: One of the first things I learned from Liam was that he had found more acceptance at work than at church. In fact, he had been shunned at his previous church in College Station, Texas. Hearing about how painful and unnecessary that experience was opened my eyes to realities I never had imagined before.
Looking at Liam — very masculine — I couldn’t imagine anyone seeing him as a visual threat or wanting him to use a women’s restroom. To me, he just looked like a normal person, the kind of person you would meet on the street and think nothing about it.
That’s when I first realized the issue was not appearance but identity and existence. Religious and political leaders fear the very existence of transgender people,
Liam: One of the first things we talked about was using the men’s restroom at work. My company had been fully behind me on that, even early in my transition. I had spent years bringing my whole self to work — and building the programs that let other queer people do the same.
“Work had become the place that did what the church was supposed to do.”
I led an employee resource group. I spoke in corporate rooms about what affirming spaces look like. I taught companies how to make trans employees safer. Then I went home and could not bring the same self into a church. That was upside down. Work had become the place that did what the church was supposed to do. So I asked Mark: “Why can I bring my whole self to work, but I cannot bring my whole self to church?”
Mark: This became a really important phrase to me, to think of bringing your “whole self” to church or to work. Again, I never had faced such exclusion. I had no experience to compare this to because of the vast amount of privilege I had known my whole life.
The reason it was essential for me to sit down and listen to the stories of new friends like Liam was that I had a lot to learn. More than anything at this juncture — as the initial article portrayed — I realized how little I actually knew. It was time for me to shut up and listen carefully.
Liam: He was already at the table when I walked in. He stood up. I had learned to tell pastors who wanted to understand from pastors who wanted to win. I did not yet know which Mark was. He shook my hand like I was just a person, which sounds like a small thing to say until you have spent a decade in rooms where the handshake came with conditions.
He told me he had read my email twice. He had questions, but they were not the ones I had prepared answers for. He asked about my partner. He asked about my work. He asked what I wanted Christians to understand about trans people. I have been asked that question many times. I never had been asked it first.
So I told him the truth. I told him about the church in College Station that had asked me not to come back. I told him about being raised in a tradition with no vocabulary for me. I told him about the daily cost of being a trans man in Texas. I did not edit. He did not flinch. He kept listening.
Mark never reached for the question other pastors usually came to ask. He kept asking about my life. He kept making room for the answer. He had answered my earlier question without using the words. He had asked for my whole self by listening.
We met as strangers. We did not leave as strangers. He has been telling the rest ever since.
Mark: Just a few days before meeting Liam, I had sat in the same restaurant meeting Laura Beth Buchleiter, who also would become a dear friend. Laura Beth started attending our church and became our first publicly identified trans member. She stayed with us through the weeks of public meetings and discussions about inclusion and gently testified to realities a lot of folks did not want to hear.
The thing I am most thankful to Liam and Laura Beth for is their willingness to sit with me and others and just tell their stories. Boldly. Plainly. Out of these and other conversations, I wrote a follow-up piece for BNG, “Painful Lessons from A Pastor’s Viral Transgender Post.”
There, I wrote these words: “In all these conversations of the past two weeks, I have found myself weeping and shaken. I have learned more than I ever imagined — not only about the details of transgender life but also about what it means to be human. As my commentary went viral, I discovered the transgender community was immediately kinder to me than the church has been to them.”
“I discovered the transgender community was immediately kinder to me than the church has been to them.”
From this awareness, I vowed I never would be the same. And that commitment led to unexpected places, including a TEDx Talk titled “The Baptist Pastor and His Transgender Friends,” writing a book, speaking at conferences, being interviewed on radio and TV, and maintaining close relationships with new friends. It also led me to become an outspoken ally of the trans community and to make a theological case for their full inclusion in the church.
Suddenly, I found myself in an Uber ride with a transgender person, and it was a divine appointment. Wherever I traveled, I met people who were shocked to meet a Baptist pastor who knew transfolk and loved them. And I had the joy of officiating Liam and Sarah’s wedding in a hospital room — one of the highlights of my entire career.
Liam: Mark named Laura Beth. I want to name her too. We were not the only ones — trans people sat with Mark in those first weeks one after another, telling stories the church had not wanted to hear.
Laura Beth did the harder thing. She sat through the months of public meetings at Wilshire and let her presence change a congregation. Wilshire was more than an hour and a half away. I only made it there once, and I found a church of my own to attend online instead. But Mark has been my pastor for 10 years, in a way that does not require a ZIP Code or a denomination.
The stranger across a lunch table became the man I called when my marriage was about to time out in a hospital room.
We had a wedding planned the day before Donald Trump’s second inauguration — we were trying to beat a clock. Our Texas marriage license was running out, and we did not know if marriages between people like me and Sarah would still be legal once the new administration took office. I was supposed to stand and say my vows that Sunday. I could not stand. The chronic illness I live with had picked the worst possible weekend to flare.
Trump was sworn in on Monday. By Tuesday, I was well enough to call Mark from a hospital bed. He did not ask if. He asked when. When I said I could not believe he would do it, he said: “Yep. Just say when.”
The next morning, he stopped for yellow roses on his way across town. He walked into the hospital with the flowers in one hand and his Bible in the other and married us in a room with monitors and IV poles and Sarah’s hand in mine.
That is not a metaphor. That is a Baptist pastor in a Texas hospital marrying a trans man to his wife days into an administration that has spent every month since trying to prove the marriage never should have happened.
Mark is a white, Southern Baptist-trained pastor. That sentence carries weight in America right now. The political and religious movement currently writing trans people out of public life is led, in large part, by white, Southern Baptist-trained pastors. He has been fighting alongside us anyway for 10 years — from his pulpit, in his columns, in green rooms, in Uber rides and in a Texas hospital room with yellow roses and a Bible.
“That means there is an adult who looks like the people who hurt them, in the tradition that hurt them, saying out loud that they belong.”
For me, that means I have a friend inside the country I am supposed to be afraid of. For young queer and trans people, it means there is an adult who looks like the people who hurt them, in the tradition that hurt them, saying out loud that they belong. I have sat with people for whom that single fact has kept them alive. They tell me they did not know it was possible to be loved by someone like Mark until they saw him love someone like me.
Mark: Today, the thing that distresses me most is that the United States and Texas have gone backward, not forward. Those bathroom bills of a decade ago — awful as they were — pale in comparison to the Trump administration and the Texas governor’s efforts to eradicate transgender people from existence, to treat them as criminals and traitors to the nation.
I have spent the last decade begging other Christians to understand and care. And it feels like the progress has been modest at best. Polling today shows there is more misunderstanding and more distrust of transgender people than there was a decade ago. This has been stirred up for political gain by Focus on the Family and their allies, along with the MAGA movement.
Huge swaths of America are no longer safe for transgender people to live. Literally not safe.
Liam: Mark’s first article was written in the middle of Texas’ first bathroom bill fight. That is not a coincidence. The bathroom bill is what brought him to write. The bathroom bill is what brought me to him. We met inside a country where lawmakers had decided the question of where a trans person can pee was urgent enough to legislate.
Mark called those early bills “awful.” They were. They were also the prototype. Ten years later, Texas passed SB-8 — the most financially punitive bathroom bill in the country. We did not lose. We are being obliterated.
In September 2025, Mark wrote a column for BNG titled “Stand Up for Trans Folk Who Have No Place to Pee.” He wrote it about a trans friend with a rare autoimmune disease who could no longer safely go to the only hospital in Dallas that could treat him — because the hospital is part of the UT system, because it is state-controlled, and because SB-8 turns a trip to the emergency room into a $25,000 risk.
He did not name the friend but it was me. It is the same hospital where Mark married Sarah and me a few days into Trump’s second term. The room where a Baptist pastor made my marriage legal is in a building where SB-8 is trying to make my body illegal. I have a full beard. I have a wife and a marriage this administration is trying to invalidate. I have an autoimmune disease that flares without warning. I have a medical chart Texas law now requires to record me as female regardless of who I have been for the last decade. I have a driver’s license the state will not let me update anymore.
Our state officials are keeping a quiet list of the trans Texans who asked too many questions. I have been discriminated against by doctors and nurses at least 20 times in the last five years, and according to this administration I have no legal recourse the next time. I have a hospital I cannot safely enter for treatment of the disease that is trying to kill me. That is what huge swaths of America being unsafe looks like from inside it. Not a slogan. A bathroom door.
Here is what I am asking. It is not complicated but it is costly. Most of the people who could pay will not. Be the exception. Pick up the phone when a trans person calls. Show up at the hospital. Say from your pulpit what Mark has said for 10 years. Say it when your friends start to flinch. You do not have to look like the people writing the laws. You only have to refuse to look away while they pass them.
Mark: In my adult Bible study class at church, I’ve been teaching through the book of James. This past Sunday, I drilled down on James 4:17, which is a lynchpin verse in the small epistle: “Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.”
I’m not claiming to be a saint, but I do believe this one thing more strongly today than ever before: When you know transgender people, when they become your friends, you are responsible for what you know and how you act. You must become an ally. You must speak up.
Ten years ago, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Today, I know enough to realize to whom much has been given much will be required. I cannot be silent about the persecution of transgender people in America, and as long as I have a voice and platform I will continue to tell their stories. So help me, God.
Why? Because Liam and Laura Beth are my friends. And in first grade Sunday school at First Baptist Church of Cushing, Okla., I learned this Scripture memory verse: “A friend loveth at all times.”
Liam Gent lives in North Texas with his spouse, Sarah, and is an advocate and educator for the transgender community.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality and Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves.