It’s really amazing that there has been such fury over the question of transgender care. We’re only talking about less than 1% of the population, and about a small group of people who seek medical care. People who would otherwise want less governmental interference in our lives do a 180 when it comes to this issue. Why?
Challenges to traditional understandings of gender roles is certainly one of the reasons people fear, even hate, trans people. The religious right uses the Genesis quote, “male and female, God created them,” as a reason for strict lines between people. But, the reason really goes deeper than that.
Based on the underlying tribal need to have an “us” versus “them” understanding of the world, it allows people to bond together against what is perceived as outside forces that would dismantle the way they frame the world. The other is to be feared because the other is not us, making this fear easily exploitable by politicians seeking power.
Prayer for the Day
Needing rivers in the deserts of our hearts,
God of all blessings, we come thirsty for you;
Searching for your grace to well up in us as water from a spring
We ask for tenderness of heart and strength of soul.
Choose us this day, gentle God, and we shall be chosen.
So our hearts are filled with your Spirit and grace.
In the name of the One we follow,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
We are all assigned a gender at birth. Sometimes that assignment doesn’t match our inner truth, and there needs to be a new place–a place for self-identification.
Geena Rocero, actress, advocate
Breaking apart the forced unity of sex and gender, while increasing the scope of liveable lives, needs to be a central goal of feminism and other forms of social justice activism. This is important for everybody, especially, but not exclusively, for trans people.
Susan Stryker, historian
For a long time I have held my peace, I have struggled and restrained myself;
Now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant.
I will lay waste mountains and hills, and dry up their herbage;
I will turn the rivers into islands, and dry up the poos.
I will lead the blind by a road they do not know, by paths they have not known.
Isaiah 42: 14-16a