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It took me a long time to accept myself as a gay man, loved by God and accepted as I am. To my shame, it took me even longer to accept my transgender siblings. For a long time, I just didn’t understand. It all seemed to foreign to me. Because my own experience of gender had always been so constant, and because my own understanding of sex had always been so binary, I projected my experience and understanding onto everyone else. It didn’t help that my conservative Christian upbringing had always insisted that God’s creation of “male” and “female” in Genesis by definition excluded everything in between and most definitely forbade moving from one to the other.
Of course as long as transness remained merely a concept or an idea to me, it was easy to think of it as foreign. It was easy to think of “those” people as weird or different or maybe even mentally ill. Did they really need to alter their bodies? Couldn’t they just get some therapy to help with that? I look back and shake my head with wonder. Did I not hear myself? How was I any different from the people who thought therapy would cure my “same sex attraction”?
I’ll never forget the first time I realized that I personally knew a trans man. I had been following a trans activist/writer/playwright/priest named Shannon Kearns on Twitter. I was impressed by his knowledge, his ability to articulate his experiences and his grasp of the Bible. Even though I was still not quite sure what I thought of trans people, I was beginning to warm to him. I was interacting with him one day on Twitter, when I received a DM from him: “Matt, don’t you remember me?” Remember him? No! How would I remember him? But then I began to search the recesses of my memory and it slowly began to come to me. Shannon Kearns. The awkward girl from Grace College who had once auditioned for a place in the singing group I led. The girl who didn’t seem comfortable in her skin. The girl who… wasn’t actually a girl at all. This confident man who I had been following and learning from, this activist, this writer, this playwright, this priest… He had always been a man. In those moments, everything started to fall into place for me. It would still take time for me to really understand, but I was well on my way. (See my interview with Fr. Shannon here.)
More personal relationships with trans people would follow: Lisa, the sweet, shy singer/guitarist who played in the Sunday evening band at MCC San Francisco; Laura Beth, the singer-songwriter, pastor and spiritual director who I got to know at the Q Christian Fellowship Conference in Florida in 2020; Brie, who comes to my Monday night contemplative spirituality group and flew to California last year for our first in-person retreat…
More recently, I have gotten to know the luminous Billie Hoard and Celeste Irwin, whose friendship and writing have been incredibly influential in my life. And of course, my friend and colleague at the church I co-pastor, The Quest, Kit Chan. She had only transitioned a few years prior to her tragic and untimely death from a heart attack last summer. But she made a huge impression on me and on all of us at our church. She so graciously allowed us to walk with her as she made this massive transition in her life. I’ll always be grateful for her generosity and openness.
I had a moment at the QCF Conference in 2024 that felt really significant. I was sitting in a big group of people in the conference hotel lobby for several hours. We were having a great time, laughing and talking about all kinds of things. At some point, it dawned on me that out of a group of maybe a dozen of us, there were only two cisgender people in the group, Simon Fung (host of the amazing Dear Alana podcast) and me. Everyone else was trans. And it simply… didn’t matter. We were just people having a great conversation.
The me of five years ago would have been keenly aware of all the transgender people in that room. Although I would have been accepting and affirming of them, I still might have felt some awkwardness. I probably would have been thinking about their sex/gender/body parts. Even if I had been too polite to ask them out loud, I might have had some intrusive questions about genitals or hormones or surgeries. But because I have had the privilege of knowing and loving many precious trans people, I have learned that these are not appropriate things to ask. And more than that, because of my many experiences being in the company of trans people, thank God, those kinds of questions don’t even cross my mind these days.
I got home from that QCF Conference and actually reached out to Celeste to see if we could Zoom to talk further about my experience. I just needed to process with a safe trans friend. Something had shifted in me, and I needed to be able to find the words to describe it. I was no longer having to force myself to accept trans people, no longer having to think to myself “this person used to be a man and is now a woman, and that’s okay.” No. Now somehow I was able to be with trans people and just see them as the women or men that they are. It’s like I have been granted new eyes through which to see the world. And I’m so grateful. It’s the most wondrous gift.
And it’s not that I’m some “model” liberal or member of the LGBTQ+ community. It’s just that I’ve had experiences with actual trans people. I’ve gotten to know trans men and women. And over a significant amount of time, my prejudices have faded away. This is how it works, friend. The unknown does tend to be scary. Any unknown group is strange and foreign until you get to know them. Lesbians. Democrats. Trans people. Muslims. Haitians.
And this is why we have days like today. As long as transgender people are hidden away, out of sight, closeted, illegal… They can seem mysterious, maybe even transgressive or dangerous. But when we see transgender people, when we begin to know trans people, when we get to like, enjoy, and maybe even love trans people… well, then they’re no longer scary or weird or foreign. They’re just these wonderful people we know and care about.
Visibility matters. Representation matters. On this International Transgender Day of Visibility, we celebrate the joy and resilience of trans and nonbinary people everywhere by elevating voices and experiences from these communities. We do our best to remember that there is so much more to the story than “male” and “female.” And even if you don’t know any openly trans people personally, you can read or watch something that will help you understand the transgender experience! Here are a few that I heartily recommend:
Disclosure – This Netflix documentary about 100 years of trans representation in TV and film was so eye-opening to me back in 2020. Please do yourself a favor and make time to watch it in the near future.
For They Know Not What They Do – This documentary from filmmaker Daniel Karslake is not only about the trans experience, but it is particularly relevant to Christians. And one of its subjects is Sarah McBride, before she was elected to the US House of Representatives!
Gender Revolution – This documentary series with Katie Couric is incredibly helpful to get a good overview of gender issues with tons of personal stories.
Pose – This beautiful series opened my eyes and my heart to the trans experience like nothing else before or since. Set in the NYC ballroom scene in the late 80s and early 90s, this groundbreaking TV series had the largest cast of transgender actors ever assembled.
It’s 2025, and we have an administration that wants to basically erase transgender people from public life. Trans people are under attack like never before. We have powerful figures in entertainment and the media saying that they are mentally ill. All mention of trans and nonbinary people are being scrubbed from government websites. There’s even a growing movement of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals who are trying to divorce themselves from trans and nonbinary people… perhaps you’ve heard of the “LGB without the TQ+” movement? They think that somehow they can be “respectable” enough that the conservatives will leave them alone. But respectability politics never saved anyone. Have these people not learned their history? When the right-wing media, politicians and religious leaders tell you that transgender people are dangerous, that they are harmful to children and that they need to stay hidden away from the rest of the world, that’s what they were saying about lesbians, gay men and bisexuals not too long ago! It’s the exact same playbook.
We rise and fall together, friends. As of this writing, lawmakers in nine states have proposed measures to undermine same-sex marriage rights. They won’t stop with trans people. What is wrong with you homos? Have you forgotten how we got to where we are now? How did we get marriage equality in the first place? Not by staying in the closet, that’s for damn sure. Know your history.
Representation. Visibility. Pride. Protest.
I love you, my transgender siblings. We’re here, we’re queer, we’re in it together, and we’re not going back into any closets.
