Pronouns in Bio

Trans and gender nonconforming people have so much to offer the Church if we can learn to listen.

This is Clusterhuck, my newsletter about faith, culture and a flourishing future for all! I’m glad you’re here. I can only do this through the support of my readers, and I’m grateful for everyone I’ve got. If you’d like to join, just click here. You’ll be able to read this whole post and get a free seven-day trial, including access to all the archives. 

---

When I was a college student living in Chicago, there was an employee at a local burger and fries joint we called Pat. That wasn’t their actual name. I don’t know what their name was. We called them Pat because of their ambiguous gender presentation, and lifted the name “Pat” from a recurring Saturday Night Live character. 

The point was, of course, that we were uncomfortable with this person’s existence, so we made a joke about it. We didn’t know them. The only interaction I ever had with them was telling them how I liked my cheeseburger. It would have cost us nothing to ignore them, but we couldn’t let it go. We had to construct a whole fake name and identity for this person, trying to make sense of something outside of our experience by belittling it until we could fit it into something we did understand — in this case, an SNL bit. 

SNL affirmed our biases by taking our side and making “Pat” the other. Of course, you could also write a funny sketch from Pat’s perspective in which Pat is not a freak to be ridiculed but just a person who exists slightly outside of other people’s experiences and they can’t wrap their heads around it. But that would have required actually challenging the audience (not to mention the writers’ room) to think beyond their comfort zones, just like that Chicago fry cook’s existence challenged me to think beyond my comfort zone. It was a challenge I failed. 

It’s stuck with me though, especially after I started spending more time outside my Christian bubble in the city. I started meeting and actually talking to other people who just didn’t see themselves in the gender they’d been assigned. I saw that, contrary to what I’d been told about gender nonconforming and trans people, their existence wasn’t an act of aggression against my own. Their experience wasn’t a threat to mine. The table was big enough for us both. Therapy language calls this “making space” but at its foundation, it’s simpler even then that. You’re just letting someone tell their own story.

That’s a pretty basic form of common decency, but it’s one we Christians often aren’t comfortable extending to gender nonconforming and trans folks. When people present themselves to the world in such a way that doesn’t fit into one of our two boxes for how men and women are supposed to be, we skip all the way to the end, assuming we’ve more or less got the picture and it’s not a pretty one.

We forget that you can tell very little about a person based on their hair and clothes. We forget that sex and gender is an intimate, complex topic. We forget what a privilege it is to be alive in a world with so many different stories, and what an awesome responsibility it is to handle them with care.