A Quaker Looks at Transgender People

Dear Friends,

More than any other message I have ever delivered, I've received the most requests for this one. I've updated it since I first delivered it at Fairfield Meeting. If you have struggled with this issue, or know someone who has, please feel free to pass it along. It seems especially fitting when so many trans people are being targeted by national leaders.

- Philip Gulley

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I was giving a speech several years ago that ended with a question-and-answer session, in which a woman asked me what I thought of transgender people. Reflecting on her question, I realized I had given little thought about what it meant to be transgender and how people got that way. I just knew it was the T in the acronym LGBTQ. I remember feeling embarrassed that something to important to so many had not yet received my attention. Apologizing, I told the woman I was too uninformed to answer her question but promised her I would educate myself about the topic.

I soon discovered, in talking with others, that many of us know little about something so central to our lives, and that’s our gender and how we got that way, how we became male and female. Try for a moment to imagine yourself apart from your gender. Try thinking of yourself as genderless. I suspect for most of us it’s impossible.

Let’s consider how deeply our gender is connected to our identity. Whether you are reading this message or listening to it, I invite you to participate in the following exercise. I’m going to name several relationship categories, and when I name a relationship category you fit in, please make a note of that. Here we go. Are you a father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, niece, nephew, grandson, granddaughter, son, daughter, husband, wife, sister, brother, father-in-law, mother-in-law, step-mother, step-father, step-sister, step-brother, boyfriend, or girlfriend.

Did you notice all those words that define us denote gender? All those relationships are the primary ways we understand and define ourselves and they all have to do with gender. Each of us fit in one, if not several, of those categories. In fact, our gender and identity are so intricately linked, I suspect it would be impossible to imagine and understand ourselves apart from our gender. Our gender is central to who we are. From what we know, most of us feel quite comfortable with our gender. It would be difficult for us to imagine being another gender. Most men can’t imagine what it would be like to be a woman. And while I probably shouldn’t speak for the women, I suspect most women can’t imagine what it’s like to be a man. Most of us are quite comfortable with, even happy with, our gender and can’t imagine being otherwise. It suits us well. We have grown into our gender.

But there have always been people for whom that isn’t true, and we have never understood why until recently. For most of our lives, it was believed transgender people, people whose inward gender was inconsistent with their outward gender, suffered psychological trauma as children, causing them to reject their outward gender. This has been our default explanation whenever we meet someone we don’t understand. We just assume they’ve experienced psychological trauma, often in childhood. Of course, sometimes that’s true. But scientists believe that is no longer an adequate explanation for why some people are transgender.

We now know that female brains and male brains are physically and functionally different. Of course, any woman married to a man, any man married to a woman, knows that already. We process language differently, our impulse controls are different, parts of our brains vary in size, function, and development depending on gender. We know this. We also know nothing happens in the body without first happening in the brain. Gender identity? Brain. Sexual orientation? Brain. Body type? Brain. Personality? Brain. Pain sensitivity? Brain. The brain drives everything. We talk about the heart being the seat of emotion, but it isn’t. The heart is a muscular organ. It is the brain that generates and facilitates our emotions. When we fall in love and feel our heart race, it’s only because our brain told it to. Nothing happens in our bodies without first happening in our brains. I’m going to repeat that because it is of vital importance. Nothing happens in our bodies without first happening in our brains.

As I said, the brains of men and women differ. Scientists have studied the brains of transgender people and have learned that people who’ve moved from male to female have brain characteristics more common to females. When we’ve been able to scan their brains, or study them after death, the brains of male to female persons have female brain characteristics. Conversely, transgender persons moving from female to male have male-characteristic brains. From the day they were born, transgender people have been moving toward their brain types. Because of their brain’s exposure, or lack of exposure, to certain hormones during fetal development, their outward gender is inconsistent with their inward gender.

Remember when our children were born and we said, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!”? What we’re really saying is that at a certain stage in their development, the presence or lack of presence of testosterone programmed the fetus to grow a certain type of sexual organ. 99.5% of the time the external organ accurately reveals one’s genetic gender, but sometimes it doesn’t, which is why some people are transgender. Trans is Latin for “across.” So transgender people are those people who’ve moved across genders, from one to the other, because their inward gender didn’t match their outward gender, so they are moving toward the gender of their brain type. We know this now. It isn’t a theory. The scientific community has demonstrable evidence indicating this. It isn’t a religious theory. It isn’t a political theory. It is a physiological trait occurring during our fetal development and is therefore beyond our control.

While the Bible talks a great deal about gender, sexual codes, and relationships, let’s not forget the Bible was informed by a limited understanding of human development. Thousands of years later we know so much more about sexual and gender formation. We must stop treating those formed differently as sinners. Or moral failures. They are, in the case of transgender people, simply persons whose inward gender and outward gender were out of harmony at birth, who are now moving toward harmony, toward gender integration, which the rest of us had happen to us before we were born. As you can imagine, having to do that after you are born is incredibly frightening and difficult.

I once overheard someone say it would be easier to support transgender people if they didn’t make such a fuss of it in public. And I agreed with that, until I remembered that when you are a persecuted minority, you use whatever tools you have at your disposal to bring attention to the injustice you and others have suffered. I also remembered that when Quakers were a persecuted minority in the 1600’s, they did something similar. Let me quote from the introduction of an article written by Heather Barry and recently published in The Historical Journal of Massachusetts. The article is entitled Naked Quakers Who Were Not So Naked: Seventeenth-Century Quaker Women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

“This article examines forty-five Quaker women who preached and protested against orthodox Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1656 to the 1670s. These women protested by…holding Quaker meetings, disseminating Quaker literature, disturbing Puritan church services, "walking naked" in public, and not attending required Church services. Some historians consider these early women to be irrational, single, social deviants who were on the margins of society. On the contrary, evidence indicates that seventeenth-century Quaker women who lived or visited the Massachusetts Bay Colony were usually literate, married mothers of middling socioeconomic status in their twenties or thirties who believed it was necessary to protest against Puritan authorities.”

The same things that are said against transgender people today were said against Quaker women 350 years ago. Both were accused of being irrational social deviants, on the margins of society. This should make us more sympathetic to persons who have so little political power they must make dramatic gestures to bring attention to the injustice they and others suffer.

What does this have to do with our faith today? As friends of Jesus, our calling is to love and understand. To love and understand. That means our love must be informed by facts and knowledge, not fears and prejudices and ignorance. Our Christian faith must be an informed faith, which helps us always to love, for when we know and understand one another, the more we are able to empathize, the more we are able to love. What we should not do is pass laws making the lives of struggling people more painful, more humiliating, more difficult. Instead, it falls to us to take our lead from the gospel of Matthew, which reminds us that “in everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you.”

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Philip Gulley is the author of and the popular Harmony series and Unlearning God: How Unbelieving Helped Me Believe.

Discover my books, stories, and more by visiting Books by Philip Gulley

Contact Philip directly at philiphgulley@gmail.com

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