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

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/

Building Momentum in Interfaith Transgender Organizing

This story about our action last week, "An Act of Faith" appeared in Bay Windows this past Thursday:

Faith leaders strategize for transgender rights at Newton forum
by Ethan Jacobs
staff reporter
Thursday Jan 29, 2009

Somerville state Rep. Denise Provost told attendees at a Jan. 21 forum organized by the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality (ICTE) that they could make a powerful case to lawmakers in favor of transgender rights by appealing to their faith. The forum, held at Hebrew College in Newton, was the first major event organized by ICTE, which is part of a coalition advocating for the passage of legislation this session to add trans-inclusive language to the state’s non-discrimination and hate crimes laws. Provost said she was moved to watch how warmly her own church, an Episcopal congregation, embraced a transgender man who had originally joined the congregation as a woman, and she said she believes stories like these can move her colleagues.

"In my message part of it has to be the story of how wonderfully easy it was and how beautiful it was to have a transgender person in our community of faith, and how not an issue it was when a female member of the congregation went away and came back as a male person, and all the church ladies in their seventies and eighties were happy and twittery and accepting," said Provost. The man in question, the Rev. Cameron Partridge, has since become a priest at St. Luke’s and St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Allston and is one of the founders of ICTE.

Provost, who was joined at the forum by the bill’s co-sponsor, Medford state Rep. Carl Sciortino, said people of faith have a particularly persuasive message to share in support of transgender rights.

"I’ve been thinking about our religion, all of Christianity, and the Old Testament, too, and it’s full of transformations. And God’s usually behind them," said Provost, prompting laughs from the crowd. "In the Old Testament you had sticks turning into snakes and disobedient women turning into pillars of salt, and you had a recalcitrant guy like Jonah turning into a prophet. And then you get to the New Testament and you’ve got water turning into wine and God turning into human form, and it’s so full of transformation. It makes sense to me, thinking about it, that the church ladies and the Sunday school should say, no big deal."

ICTE formed in 2007, and its goals and structure are similar to the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry (RCFM), an interfaith coalition that worked in support of marriage equality during the debates over same-sex marriage. One of RCFM’s core advocacy tools was a declaration of support for marriage equality signed by more than 1000 clergy, congregations and lay people from many faiths. ICTE is currently collecting signatures for its own declaration of support for the transgender rights bill, and currently more than 100 clergy, along with about 200 laypeople, have signed the declaration.

Rabbi Daniel Judson, a member of ICTE and a former member of RCFM, told attendees that the forum was an historic moment in the local campaign for transgender rights.

"As far as any of us can gather this is the first time in Massachusetts history that a group of people of faith have come together specifically around transgender issues. So this is that moment, this is that moment when things change," said Judson, an administrator at the Hebrew College Rabbinical School.

Several speakers at the forum shared their experiences as transgender people of faith. For many of them their faith has been a vital source of support. Sean Delmore, an ICTE member and candidate for ordination in the United Methodist Church, credited his church with helping him come out as a transgender man.

"As I was coming out as a transgender man through the fellowship and the love of one congregation, one community of faith, they really helped love me into being when I could not have the faith and trust to be myself," said Delmore. "Those private conversations, they helped me bring those out into a personal public being."

Matt O’Malley, political director for MassEquality, said that the transgender rights bill currently has 41 co-sponsors. Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC), the lead organization in the coalition working to pass the transgender rights bill, is planning a lobby day for sometime this spring.

Judson told Bay Windows that ICTE has been reaching out to clergy across the state urging them to support the declaration in favor of the transgender rights bill. He said the group has framed its argument as a question of fairness and justice.

"We’re talking about this as a matter of rights, and we’re framing this to other clergy people that in some ways just as you supported equal marriage out of a conviction that it was the right thing to do, that people are created equal, so too in this case," said Judson. "They are people who are created equal, people who are deserving of rights. God creates all of us as equal and as who we are meant to be. It’s just simply saying allow people to be treated under the law equally."

RCFM attracted the support not only of rank-and-file clergy but of local religious leaders, including the Rev. William Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), which has its national headquarters in Boston; the state’s three Episcopal bishops, Tom Shaw, Bud Cederholm, and Gayle Harris; and Rabbi Ronne Friedman, senior rabbi at Temple Israel Boston, New England’s largest Reform Jewish congregation. Judson said ICTE is working to win the support of the state’s religious leaders, and Friedman has already signed onto ICTE’s declaration.

Neither Sinkford nor the Episcopal bishops had signed the declaration as of the evening of the ICTE forum, but all signaled support for the legislation when contacted by Bay Windows. The Rev. Mally Lloyd, canon to the ordinary of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, said she did not know whether ICTE had reached out to the bishops, but she said the diocese as a whole supports the passage of trans-inclusive non-discrimination and hate crimes legislation; last November the diocese’s annual convention passed a resolution supporting such legislation. Janet Hayes, spokesperson for the UUA, said she was not aware of any conversations between Sinkford and ICTE, but following Bay Windows’ inquiries Sinkford sent a letter to all Massachusetts UUA clergy Jan. 27 announcing the UUA’s support for ICTE’s declaration and urging all clergy to add their names to the declaration.

Judson said he believes the voices of people of faith will be essential to winning over support for the transgender rights bill in the legislature, as it was during the marriage debate.

"What we discovered during the struggle over marriage equality was that, lo and behold, the religious voice was really needed because the folks who were saying they were opposed were often doing it on religious grounds," said Judson.

Ethan Jacobs can be reached at ejacobs@baywindows.com

Islam and I

Fellow Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality (ICTE) member (and blog author) Richard Juang talked me into an unusual outing tonight, and I’m glad he did. (No, not that kind of “outing”!) I've known Islam a bit longer and better than many people, I still don’t know enough. Yesterday, a few of Richard's acquaintances of invited him to the Boston Muslim Film Festival, and he invited me.

The BMF Festival is a program of the American Islamic Congress and its Project Nur. The AIC is a civil-rights organization promoting tolerance and the exchange of ideas among Muslims and between other peoples, working globally with offices in Washington, Boston, Egypt and Iran. One of AIC’s student-led initiatives is Project Nur (“Enlightenment”), which helps to build bridges between Muslim and non-Muslim students on university campuses by promoting co-existence, tolerance, and understanding.

This year’s BMF Festival theme is “Art Under Fire”. We attended the premiere, Nina Davenport’s documentary Operation Filmmaker at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square (Cambridge, MA). “OF” is the story of Muthana Mohmed, an Iraqi film student. Liev Schreiber, an American actor, saw Muthana featured on MTV and invited him to intern on the set of Everything Is Illuminated in the Czech Republic. What follows is a long, strange trip through ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, Hollywood, Europe, England and more.

Before the film, the audience was given Festival goodie bags of informational materials and candy, spoken to by the organizers, and treated to a show of bhangra dancing (the folk music and dance created by the farmers in Punjab region of Pakistan and India to celebrate Vaisakhi, Spring) by Boston University’s group to promote an upcoming collegiate competition.

Our after-party was at least as interesting. In keeping with the theme of the evening, we dined at Algiers (next door to the theatre! it seems they don’t have their own website, but I hope I’m wrong, because it’s a wonderful place and that link doesn’t do it justice). And one of our party turned out to be a Swedish woman here as a fellow at Harvard University, working on the philosophy of the ethics of stem cell research. Yes, we both exchanged contact info with her. Thank you to all our hosts for a night of much figurative and literal food for thought!

(This entry is crossposted to my MasadArts blog. I’ll be emailing it to the Festival as a thank-you card.)