BERKELEY, Calif. (ABP) — In an event organizers billed as the first of its kind, about 40 transgender Christian leaders and their allies joined counterparts from other faiths for a “Transgender Religious Summit” Jan. 19-21 in California.
Sponsors said the meeting, hosted by the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, was the second conference for the transgender religious community — and the first to be held at a Christian seminary. The interdenominational school has students from multiple Christian traditions and formal relationships with the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
While many moderate and progressive Christian denominations and other religious groups have been engaged for decades in the debate over homosexuality, transgender issues still remain on the edge of Christian discourse. Most evangelical and conservative Christians consider acceptance of transgender people to be outside orthodox and traditional beliefs.
“Transgender” is a broad identity term, encompassing people who dress and live as a different gender than the one assigned to them at birth, those who have undergone partial or complete transformations to adopt the physical attributes of a gender different than their genetic gender, or people born with multiple or ambiguous sex organs.
Conference organizers said they aim to educate their faith communities about special issues facing the transgender faithful.
“Transgender people of faith have a valuable perspective on our national obsession with gender. They have struggled with the unreasonable demands for conformity inherent in our collective life yet have been able to discover a place of personal integrity,” said Erin Swenson, a transgender Presbyterian minister who spoke at the conference, according to a press release from organizers. “They have come to understand the balance between divine creation and the ongoing responsibility that each of us has for our own self-creation.”
The seminary's Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies in Religion and the National Center for Transgender Equality co-sponsored the conference. The press release noted that, even in liberal congregations and denominations, issues related to transgender people can be quite foreign to the church and ministers.
Attendees discussed ways to educate fellow believers about transgender issues as well as the need for more worship and theological resources inclusive of transgender believers.
Richard Lindsay, a spokesman for the conference, said the event was a starting point. “The transgender religious community is a community that's really in formation and that's really growing in its understanding of itself,” he said Jan. 23. “This is a movement that's really coalescing at this point, so there will be more of these.”
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