As you may know, I’m a member of the Greater New York Area Episcopal Trans Task Force. For the past three years, we have organized a Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine around the time of the Trans Day of Visibility each year. (I say “around the time” because TDOV typically falls during Lent, often during Holy Week, and it is therefore usually impossible to do it on the day itself for religious reasons.)
This year, I was honored to be invited to preach the sermon. I’m grateful to the cathedral for permitting it, and I’m grateful that the Episcopal Diocese of New York arranged for both videography and photography (the featured photo on this post is by Angela James.)
It’s tough out there right now. It’s extraordinarily difficult to be a trans person in this moment. I don’t know about you, but it feels to me like I spend a lot of time justifying my own existence. Starting from first principles. Teaching about the realities of life as a trans person. I spend a lot of time arguing against proof-texts, those little bits of the Bible that people use to claim that God agrees with their transphobia. I spend a lot of time introducing people to the basics of trans theology, helping them understand why the Hebrew Bible is not as anti-trans as they might think.
And you know, that time isn’t wasted. It’s important to explain to people that contrary to what they may have learned, Genesis doesn’t describe the creation of only men and women; God first created the ha’adam, the Earth Creature, who was non-binary. It’s important for people to actually read their Bible and discover that contrary to what they may have believed, in Isaiah—Isaiah, the book of the Hebrew Bible perhaps most beloved by Christians—God instructed his people to accept and welcome gender-non-conforming folks, saying that they would receive special blessings: “I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”
All these things are true and there are many people who don’t know them, so it is good to repeat them. But Lord, I am so tired of justifying myself. I am so tired of begging for scraps and fearing that I will be cast out. There is a passage in the New Testament where a woman tells Jesus that “even the dogs eat the crumbs that the children drop beneath the table.” She is a model of humility and I honor her for it, but I have been in that place, begging for those crumbs, for so long. Lord, for so long. We go begging outside the church, and it feels like we are rejected and misunderstood at every turn; we go begging inside the church, and there too we count ourselves lucky if we are given a piece of bread, an ounce of understanding and respect, we don’t have to fight for.
But my friends: this is not what God wants for us.
My God, our God, is a God who promises to care for the humble, the hurt, the broken-hearted. My God, our God, is a God who knows the pain of being rejected and cast out. Trans people are twice as likely as cis people to live in poverty but my friends, my God—our God—is the God of the poor. Our God scorns the wealthy and the powerful and chooses in favor of the downtrodden and the hopeless. Our God will walk with us and defend us in our trials, even to the end.
And that is not all. That is not all because it is not enough that our God promises to be with us to the end, however difficult things might get. God promises us life, joy, beauty, dignity. God made us joyful and beautiful and authentic and wise.
It is easy to see how much God values our lives because our God is trans. I mean that. God is trans. It is not even a particularly convoluted theological statement to make.
First of all, it isn’t controversial at all to say that God is non-binary. Theologians have always agreed that God is beyond human categorizations like gender. And, of course, when God made human beings, either God made just one creature that had both male and female elements, or God made two beings because they were both necessary to fully reflect God’s image. God is non-binary.
God is non-binary—but I’m going to go further than that and say that God is trans. Let’s get on the same page here. When we trans people are born, people assign us a gender based on what they see. Then when we’re old enough, we realize that society was wrong, and we’re not—in our deepest selves—the gender that everyone thought. Right? That’s a reasonable working definition of a trans person, yes?
OK. Here is why God is trans. When God, who is non-binary, was born in human form as our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary said “Oh, look! A baby boy!” But God isn’t a boy. God is beyond boy and girl. God was assigned a gender at birth, and later on, it became clear that that gender wasn’t quite right.
When I say that “later on, it became clear that that gender was not quite right,” I mean it. Jesus didn’t live life the way your average first-century Judean man did. To the best of our knowledge he didn’t get married, and he chose to teach and engage with women in ways that were very unusual. Then Jesus died and was resurrected, and when Jesus was resurrected Jesus was changed. Jesus was different. Jesus did not look like himself. There was something different about Jesus.
Now the Bible doesn’t tell us what that was. The Bible doesn’t tell us why it is that Jesus’s best friends, his disciples, the people who had walked with him to the end of his life, the people who buried him in the tomb, still didn’t recognize Jesus for a good long time. I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t there. But I have an idea. I think Jesus was resurrected as Jesus’s true self, which is beyond male or female. I think that Jesus was not only transfigured. I think that Jesus transitioned. And I think that when the disciples met Jesus they were astonished because they were seeing who Jesus truly was.
That’s gospel, that’s good news, for trans people. Just saying “God made us who we are”—that doesn’t mean anything if God doesn’t really understand where we’re coming from, if God doesn’t really understand our struggles. But God does. And God didn’t make us for the purpose of torturing us with dysphoria, with societal scorn, with struggle. God made us with the goal that we would reflect God’s own self, God’s own glory, through our lives, indeed through our transitions. God made us and gave us memory, reason, and skill in order that we might work towards our own sanctification, that we might work towards becoming the people that God intended us to be. And God promises, God promises us that all our tears will be wiped away, that God will make all things new, that we will work with God to become our truest selves!
That’s good news!
And so I refuse to cede the holy spaces of our world, the cathedrals and churches, to people who do not recognize that in God’s complete eternity and immensity, that in God’s omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience, God is beyond our human gender We refuse to cede sacredness to people who think that God is so small that God cannot understand us trans folks. We refuse to cede sacredness to people who cannot see that in that holy city we are promised, in the New Jerusalem, each person will live their life honestly, truthfully, without fear or shame or constraint. We will fight for our rights in the political sphere, we will fight for our dignity in the social sphere, but we will do it with joy and with complete security because we know, we know that in doing so we are following Jesus Christ, our Lord and our Redeemer. We know that we are marching in the light of God.
My friends, today is a tough day. Yesterday was too and tomorrow is probably going to be again. The world is against us. But God is for us. God sees us and loves us and will justify us as we work to live our lives honestly, to not hide our true selves in the shadows. Today is a tough day, but it is the day the Lord has made, and we will rejoice and be glad in it, because we are truly made in the image of God.
Amen.
Last modified on 2026-03-21