An Act of Faith: Western Massachusetts Communities of Faith Speak Out for Transgender Rights

Last evening, about a hundred people gathered at the Edwards Church in Northampton, MA for "An Act of Faith: Western Massachusetts Communities of Faith Speak Out for Transgender Rights." After the first Act of Faith in Newton, MA this past January, several leaders of faith in Western Massachusetts organized an event to bring together communities of faith there in support of trans civil rights. I was honored to be asked to speak at the event, along with Mycroft Masada Holmes, with whom I am a co-chair of the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality (ICTE). The evening featured speakers (sixteen in all) from a wide range of faith traditions-- Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Unitarian, Buddhist. The event was punctuated with exhortations, stories, song, prayers, and blessings. Below is an excerpt from my remarks:

This past November, my congregation, St. Luke's and St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Allston/Brighton, MA, was honored to host Boston’s annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. We had been asked to do so because the murder of Rita Hester in 1998, which sparked this now international movement of remembrance, took place mere blocks from the church. I have always found it both moving and sobering to come together with the trans community every year on November 20th, but this time the experience was for me, as a transgender priest serving in that context, truly profound.

But the story I want to tell you tonight took place three years earlier, at a different juncture in my life.

When my partner and I decided to get married in 2005, we had already been together for twelve years. We had each come out in the lesbian community of our women’s college, and had come to the Boston area in 1995 for graduate school. Over the years, we went through a number of changes, not the least of which was my coming out as trans between the late ‘90s and the early years of this decade. Throughout this time, our community of faith-- Christ Episcopal Church in Somerville, MA-- was a tremendous source of support. And so when we decided to get married a few years after my transition from female to male, doing so at our church felt completely fitting. We wanted to get married in a context that recognized and celebrated our journey as much as our arrival at that particular point in time, even as we looked forward to journeys yet to come. Massachusetts’s then recent attainment of equal marriage—indeed, the first such legalization in the U.S.—created a yet more fitting context for acknowledging and celebrating our history, even though we would not be married as members of the same sex. With the day of the wedding nearing, the service and reception planned, the invitations long out, we went to the city hall of our town to apply for a marriage license.

In the time-honored tradition of people about to be married, we were nervous about any number of things that could go wrong, little or big. My slightly less generalized anxiety circled around the procurement of our marriage license: my secret fear was that the clerk at city hall might find some reason not to recognize me as legally male. And while I knew that if that happened, here alone in the U.S. (at that time) we could still have been legally married, the event would not have reflected the journey we had taken.

So there we stood at the clerk’s office counter, each of us in turn filling out the two required sheets of paper. Amid the various questions they might ask, I was concerned about one type of question, more common than one might think, that can come up and cause trans people difficulty in all sorts of contexts: "have you ever had another name, and if so what was it?" If a person has a former legal name that is unambiguously gendered, revealing that name can instantly expose your trans history -- perhaps even an aspect of your medical history -- in contexts where you have very little, if any, control over its reception and dissemination. As is so often the case, documents or decisions with huge impacts on the lives of trans people can be decided on the whim of someone behind a desk. If s/he is having a bad day, so might you, and then some.

After I finished filling out my half of the first form, I looked over my partner’s shoulder. With horror, I noted that she had written out my former first name. After she finished filling out her side of the sheet and we switched, I looked more closely at the form. But it asked “what are your parents names?” and what I had seen was her mom’s first name, which is the same as my old name. Sigh of relief.

So we finished filling out the forms and slid them across the counter to the clerk. She went down the list making sure we'd answered everything... and then, pointing to the “profession” line on my side of the form, she asked, "what does that say?" She had pinpointed the word next to “graduate student”, which I then read aloud: “priest.” "Then you can't get married," she responded. After a shocked pause, I explained that I am an Episcopal priest, not Roman Catholic, and that we can in fact get married. With evident annoyance, she took our paperwork to finish her part. The moment had felt teachable enough as it was, so I kept my thoughts to myself. But I will now report that at the very least, the following sequence flew through my head. Thought #1: you can't make this stuff up. Second thought: what was a city employee thinking telling me what my religion would or would not allow me to do? Third thought: being a married priest hadn't previously struck me as a particularly challenging concept-- at least, not in the context of my life. But hey, you never know.

The end of the story is that the license was issued and we went on to have a fantastic wedding. Our church community warmly and enthusiastically welcomed our friends and family from around the country. The service was beautiful. And although it was late October, with balmy seventy-degree weather the days before and, on the day itself, it snowed, just enough to dust the ground and wow our West Coast guests. As we gazed out the picture windows of our reception hall, beautiful fat snowflakes fluttered to the ground. Fittingly, it was a day out of time — a sacred, holy day.

This evening, too, is a holy one: a night in which we have come together to lift up a people who have traveled far and seen much, and who wish to be recognized as the people we are, the people we have been, and the people we are called to become. We come together to celebrate our humanity, both common and distinctive, blessed by unique opportunities but also regularly thwarted by challenges we should not have to face. We gather to galvanize one another and all those who care about peace and justice to do more to make the world a truly welcoming place for all of us. We must pass transgender civil rights legislation right here and right now. We should not have to worry about whether our identities or histories might prompt someone to deny us opportunities of livelihood-- whether in housing, credit, the workplace, schools, a hospital or a doctor’s office-- or even, as our litany of tragedy continued this week in Memphis-- of life itself. May we leave this gathering more committed than ever to doing our part, to supporting one another particularly in our faith communities, to make our world a place where all can be truly free to become the people we are called to become. Thank you.

Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge
Vicar, St. Luke's and St. Margaret's Episcopal Church
Co-Chair, Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality

a Holy Trans Week

Earlier this week I got an email from the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) detailing "Transgender Rights Week in New England," an amazing confluence of events: in Connecticut today there was a Gender Identity and Expression Lobby Day in support of their non-discrimination bill; in Rhode Island this evening there was House Judiciary Committee hearing about their hate crime definition; tomorrow (April 8th) New Hampshire is possibly holding a second vote on its transgender non-discrimination bill. And at the State House in Boston MTPC held a rally in support of the Massachusetts non-discrimination bill, "An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes".

And as if the stars weren't already apparently aligning, Iowa's supreme court unanimously legalized equal marriage last Friday (April 3), and this morning, Vermont's legislature overrode it's governor's veto, making Vermont the latest state to claim equal marriage.

I arrived with fellow members of the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality(ICTE) at 10am. What an amazing sight it was to emerge from the main stairs and see so many people gathered-- at least as many as last year, and likely more. MTPC has now put up a number of photos from the event (source of the photos in this piece).

I was honored to briefly speak as one of the co-Chairs of ICTE (the other being Mycroft Holmes) and to introduce two other clergy speakers, Rabbi Stephanie Kolin (photo, left) of Temple Israel in Brookline, and Rev. Will Green, Pastor of St. Nicholas United Methodist Church in Hull. I'm hoping to be able to reprint their remarks in the coming days. In the meantime, what struck me about Rabbi Stephanie's comments was her strong claim that the work we are all doing is holy work, and that the place in which we were standing was a holy place. Pastor Will (photo, below right) passionately underscored how supported we are in our struggle by communities of faith-- much more than we know.

In our own ways, each of us reflected our convictions that religious traditions and communities of faith *should not* be assumed to be anti-trans, despite the terrible reality that many transgender people have been betrayed by communities of faith. Nevertheless, some of our strongest wellsprings of support can, do, and should come from precisely communities of faith and the rich traditions they sustain.

One particularly firey speaker-- whom I had to follow directly (!)-- was the Honorable Byron Rushing, a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He spoke of how we weren't gathered to gain the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, because we already have those rights. Massachusetts has failed to live up to its obligation to guarantee those rights, he said, for which the state has no excuse. We were there to hold the state to account. Amen!

We heard several speakers who shared stories of discrimination and extreme difficulty. One such story was told, haltingly, by Ken Garber, the father of a transgender son, CJ, who died a couple of months ago. I remember Mr. Garber speaking in support of his son at the hearing last Spring, and it was so devastating to hear of CJ's death. I attended this young man's funeral a couple of months ago, and my heart has been with the Garber family ever since. Even incredibly supportive parents cannot finally protect trans young people from the pervasive toll of the cruelties that lie outside a home's door.

As I look back on this incredibly long day, the overall pattern is of border walking, crossing in and out of contexts and communities that often misunderstand one another. As a clergy person at the trans lobby day-- and quite visibly clerical at that-- I felt like an emblem, a living, breathing progress report on how far religious traditions in general and my own in particular have come in their support of transgender people, and the distance they still have to travel. And so it was important to me to state quite clearly the truth for which the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality stands: that people and communities of many faiths support transgender people, and that transgender people come from and claim many faith traditions. I talked about how proud I am that my own diocese, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts passed a resolution in support of exactly what we were doing at the State House today. The audience interrupted me at that point to clap, which really moved me. I was reminded of moments at Trans Day of Remembrance and Diocesan Convention last November, when the intersections of my particular faith and gender journeys felt not only present but in some sense uplifted.

I then said that for Christians, this week is Holy Week, the most significant, and indeed holy, week of the entire liturgical year. And I said that, for me, being at the State House and doing what I was doing right then was a spiritual practice, a fitting complement to the several other spiritual practices of prayer and worship that I will be doing as this week continues. These practices are of a piece for me, I explained, because of the narrative that propels the events of Holy Week: the movement from bondage to freedom, from fear to hope, from death and despair to transformation and newness of life.

After the conclusion of the event, a parishioner and I made our way first to the Cathedral Church of St. Paul where a service of "the Blessing of the Holy Oils" was in progress, and then to the university department where I am teaching a one-on-one course ("Junior Tutorial") this semester. When we got to the cathedral, Bishop Tom Shaw was in the midst of his sermon, sitting in the central aisle. As we stepped into the cathedral, directly opposite him, he was in the middle of saying, "gay, lesbian, bisexual..." I felt like something of a transgender jack-in-the-box, with my "trans rights now" sticker still stuck to my lapel from the rally. I imagine Tom was saying something celebratory about the Vermont override, the announcement of which had elicited prolonged cheering during the rally.

The theme of the service was healing-- the various ministries of healing, lay and ordained, taken up by people throughout the diocese. There was a moment in the service when people in healing ministries were invited to come forward for the anointing of the palms of their hands. I walked forward with my parishioner, who recently started a queer, non-sectarian spirituality group at my church (called "BEND"). I loved seeing people with whom I work in the diocese in this context, in the middle of this intense week. And particularly after being at the rally, it felt good to walk across the Boston Common and into the cathedral. I felt both a sense of difference between how I spent my morning and how I imagine most people in the cathedral spent theirs, and a sense of affirmation that I was indeed walking from one holy space and activity to another.

From the cathedral, I made my way to a coffee shop, where I finished preparing for my class. Somewhere between the Statehouse and the classroom, I divested myself of both the "trans rights now" sticker and the clerical collar, aware of myself crossing into yet another communal space, this one academic. The course, "Thirty Years of Trans Studies" is a blast to teach, and also very much of a piece with the morning's activities.

What a day it was. And the holiness of the week continues.

ICTE's first e-newsletter!

ICTE published our first e-newsletter today -- it was emailed to everyone who has signed our Declaration Of Religious And Faith-Based Support For An Act Relative To Gender-Based Discrimination And Hate Crimes. Click here for the PDF of the 3-page MS Word document.

April 5, 2009

Welcome to our first newsletter. You are receiving it because you signed our Declaration of Religious and Faith-Based Support for An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes.

First of all, thank you so much for being part of An Act Of Faith. You helped make the first interfaith transgender event in Massachusetts a huge success – a truly powerful and inspirational experience for everyone who attended and many others. Have you seen the Bay Windows article yet?

http://www.baywindows.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=glbt&sc2=news&sc3=&id=86528

Those of you who attended and filled out a commitment card – a Tree Of Life “Leaf” – will be contacted by a Coalition member. Thank you for your commitment to take action for transgender equality in Massachusetts.

MTPC’s Transgender Equality Lobby Day is this Tuesday, April 7^th. Please attend, even if you are not visiting a legislator or can only be there for part of the time, and spread the word -- one of the best and easiest ways is the event’s Facebook page.

Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition

Transgender Equality Lobby Day

THIS Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Massachusetts Statehouse

(Park Street / Downtown Crossing)

ICTE will meet outside the front gate of the Massachusetts State House at 9:45 a.m., joining Keshet and its Transgender Working Group (TWiG), Jewish Alliance for Law & Social Action (JALSA), Ohel Tzedek of Temple Israel, the National Council of Jewish Women and other Jewish groups and individuals. If your faith community is attending, please invite them to gather with us at any time during the Day.

There will be a panel of speakers including clergy, policy makers, transgender people and family members; light refreshments; and a short lobbying training. Then, prescheduled legislator visits – people will meet with their legislators to thank them for supporting or ask them to support the bill.

We realize that we, the members of the Coalition, haven’t formally introduced ourselves to you.

Our Co-Chairs are Mycroft Masada Holmes (Chair - Keshet Transgender Working Group (TWiG)) and Rev. Cameron Partridge (Priest - St. Luke's and St. Margaret's Episcopal Church, Founding Member – TransEpiscopal). Our Clerk is Rev. Michael Cooper (Pastor - Metropolitan Community Church / Boston).

The Coalition is also led by:

Sean Delmore -- Program Coordinator - LBGT@MIT; Candidate for Ordination – Deacon - United Methodist Church
Orly Jacobovits -- Senior Organizer & Community Educator - Keshet

Richard M. Juang -- Committee for Transgender Inclusion – Massachusetts Lesbian & Gay Bar Association

Rabbi Daniel Judson -- Director of Professional Development and Placement - Hebrew College Rabbinical School

Marla Marcum -- Co-Chair - Reconciling Ministries - New England United Methodist Church; Candidate for Ordination – Deacon - United Methodist Church

The Coalition at An Act Of Faith (l-r): Sean Delmore, Mycroft Holmes, Rev. Cameron Partridge,

Richard Juang, Rev. Michael Cooper, Orly Jacobovits, Marla Marcum, Rabbi Daniel Judson.

With us is Gunner Scott, Executive Director of MTPC.

We also wanted to update you on our current work:

We’re continuing to gather signatures for our Declaration of Religious and Faith-Based Support for the bill. Do you know people who might be interested in signing? It takes just a few minutes at our website: http://www.interfaithcoalition.org/. We especially need clergy and congregational signatures.

• We’re organizing postcard-signing events with congregations. These are MTPC’s orange postcards to legislators, asking them to support the bill. Is your congregation interested in organizing an event? Please let us know.
• We’re supporting interfaith transgender organizing in Central and Western Massachusetts. The focus is planning an interfaith transgender event modeled on An Act Of Faith. Do you want to be part of this conversation? Please contact us.
• We’re part of the conversations about faith with the Pride Interfaith Coalition, National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, National Center for Transgender Equality, Transgender Religious Leadership Summit, Philadelphia Trans Health Conference and other local and national organizations, conferences and events.
• We’re collecting and creating educational materials about transpeople and faith. Have you seen effective materials? Are there materials you would like to see? Please share your recommendations with us.

Thank you again for your partnership in this work. Together, we can pass the bill into law, and continue to work for transgender inclusion in communities of faith and elsewhere.

To get involved, or for more information, reply to this email or contact us:

Orly Jacobovits, Keshet Senior Organizer & Community Educator

orly@keshetonline.org 617.524.9227

InterfaithCoalition@gmail.com http://www.interfaithcoalition.org/