World Religion Day: Religion and LGBT+

In this event, we met Sarah Jones, the first person to be ordained as an Anglican priest, having previously made a gender change.

At Powered By Diversity, we get asked variations of the same question time and time again:

"I support people's rights to practice their religion - but do religious people support the LGBTQ+ community?" 

When we met Sarah we knew she was the perfect person to talk about how religion and LGBT+ identities can intersect - and how one can be both religious and identify as part of the LGBT+ community.

Sarah, the vicar of Cardiff, hit the headlines in January 2005 when she was outed to a national newspaper as having made a gender change many years previously. In this event she tells her story leading up to her gender transition and the time her life which hit the headlines, including barging into a friend’s house during dinner in order to tell them her story before they read about it in the next day’s papers.

Sarah’s story was picked up by newspapers, television and radio stations throughout the world. Reporters descended on her parishes and asked people what they thought about having a curate who had made a ‘sex-change’. 

Sarah’s sense of humour was a particular highlight of this incredibly engaging event. She quotes areas of the bible whice are often used against those with LGBT+ identities - and talks about how the LGBT+ community - and allies - can enter into debates with those using the bible as a tool of exclusion.

Here is the event trascript:

Cat Wildman 

Hi, everyone. Welcome, welcome! This is the first Cultural Calendar Club event of the year. We've got Sarah Jones joining us today and we're marking World Religion Day; very exciting. I'm going to do my usual thing of pressing the button, letting everyone in and being quiet and let Sarah kick off. So Sarah, if you're ready, I can't wait to see your talk.

Sarah Jones  
OK. Thank you very much indeed and welcome everyone. This is my first time doing something on Cultural Club and working with Cat and so I'm delighted to be doing this. I'm going to hope to make this interesting and informative. We might have a little laugh along the way and I will be totally honest with you. 

When we come to questions, you can ask me anything you like, so, the plan for the session is I'll tell you a little bit about me just at the beginning, and then because I made a gender change and was the first person to be ordained in the Church of England, having previously made a gender change, we will start looking at the question of religion and Christianity, and LGBT issues. 

We will start at the “T”, actually, we'll start with the ‘transy’ stuff because it'll just follow on from what I've just been telling you about my journey, and then we'll move towards the ‘L’ and the ‘G’ and the ‘B’. I hope you enjoy it. And as I say, we'll leave some time for questions at the end. You're unlikely to upset me with any questions. My anger management sessions have been going really well so I won't get angry either! So, I'm here for you and hopefully you'll enjoy it. 

Here's a little bit about me. Just so you know where I'm coming from. I am the parish priest of Saint John the Baptist Church in the centre of Cardiff. It's a Church of Wales church. If you're in England, think: Church of England. We're right in the city centre.
Surrounded by pavement and shopping area. So we are, if you like, our own little island there. 

They're not great photos. These, but you can see we're in the pedestrian area and the church is around 700 years old. Not particularly important, but I just thought it might help you place where I am. And I am in a full time parish ministry role - and I do these talks simply as a result of being outed in the press some years ago. I might speak a bit about that a little later on.

I do events like these alongside being a full time parish priest. Before I was ordained, I played on the acoustic music scene and there's a happy shot of me about 3 sizes smaller than I am now, and probably 25 years younger, maybe 20 years younger, playing in a in a venue in in Hull.

So, what I what I'd like to do is ask you a question, I think. And the question is this, can you spot what's wrong with this crib? This is a real crib we had in our church some years ago, as someone suggested, doing a crib festival. I'll be honest with you, I thought it was quite a boring idea actually, but someone organised it and it was a lot of fun. People brought their cribs in and we had cribs from all over the world and the different styles were interesting. 

But the person who brought this crib in stood me in front of it and said I think you'd like to see this. And for the life of of me I could not work out why. Perhaps you're quicker than me. Here it is. There is an HR issue with this crib. It's a personnel issue if you like. I didn't spot it. Shame on me. But anyway, look, Jesus has two mothers in this. There's two Mary's at the front of this crib. Now personally, I quite like that because I'm quite inclusive in nature. I think it makes a number of theological points, but actually the truth is it may just have been a moment's inattention on behalf of the person who was sticking figures in a small crib for 8 hours a day, and there we are two Mary's. It also gives me quite a bit of joy to think that somewhere there's a crib with two Joseph's in it. But anyway, I guess we could all agree that it wasn't exactly what the person thought they were buying.

What about this? This is a posh hotel wash basin near Kettering and when I go to speak in the East of England I get up stupidly early, I drive to Kettering and I have a wonderful Big Breakfast while I just kind of gather my thoughts and the first time I did it, I wandered in there - and there you go. Look: 2 cold taps.
Doesn't even promise you hot water, does it? Nope. Just two cold taps, 2 cold taps. 

Or what about this? From my local Morrisons some years ago this is a pick and mix. Each one of these are individual little plastic containers with the sweets. Discover something new.
“Smat is for sleeving.”
Not exactly what the designer had in mind. 

I show you these photos, which I've taken, simply because that's how I turned out. 

You see, I was brought up as a boy.

And I was brought up as a boy because we thought I was a boy. My parents thought I was a boy. I thought I was a boy. I was an only child, and I had no reason to doubt I was anything other than what everyone thought I was, till I rocked up at school and at primary school. It just turned out that I seemed to be more, one of the girls than one of the boys, I wasn't looking for it. I was 5.

But it just turned out that I was more feminine than masculine, more female than male, more girly than boy-y. If you like. It wasn't the biggest single issue in my life.
But I just sort of belonged more with the girls than with the boys. I played with the girls until it became socially unacceptable to do so. Somewhere round about 9 or 10 and - I don't know if they still do it - but in my day, after break, the boys would line up in one line, and the girls would line up in another line and I always somehow belonged more in the girls line than in the boys line. 

As I say, it wasn't the biggest single issue in my life, I didn't really discuss it with anyone. This was the 1960s. If I had, we might have had a lovely heart to heart or I seriously might have been carted off for electric shock therapy or or or something, who knows?

Through secondary school, it was the same, and I thought it was just all in my head. I thought it was just a little part of me that didn't really show. I mean, again, I was never really one of the boys. I was never bullied. And besides which, there were weirder kids. To be fair, there were. 

So that's happiness, isn't it? When you're not the weirdest kid in the school, so...

I wasn't bullied, but we did do French and it came to a bit of a head in French when I was about 14. The teacher was talking to us about French being a gendered language and masculine nouns and feminine nouns; “La” and “Le” and we probably played the game where she'd hold something up “qu'est-ce que c'est?” and we'd, you know, we'd have to say whether it was “La” and “Le”. And then at the end of the lesson, her kind of closing point to us was there are some things that are neither masculine nor feminine and the guy behind me literally, stood up, pointed at me and said “what, like him?”

Now, he wasn't trying to bully me. I mean, bless him. He'd thought of a really funny line. And he nailed it. I mean, he delivered that line and we all laughed. I laughed. 

But I do remember literally shrinking down in my seat and thinking, “oh gosh, it shows. Everybody can see what I thought was just a small thing in my head.”

Long story short, this was the 1970s. No one talked about transgender people in those days, and I wasn't up for a discussion on it. No one wanted a discussion about it anyway, so I just carried on trying to be normal. Why not? And eventually, actually, I did get married. I did tell my betrothed that there was a large kind of feminine chunk in me and she said that it was all ‘handlable’, you know, after all, it did appear to be all handlable, but Long story short, after three or four years of very happy marriage, actually I gradually slid across towards a femininity almost imperceptible. I didn't really realise it to be fair. And she sat me down one day and she said “I love you and all that, but it's a bit like living with a woman and I've no problem with women living with women, but it's not what I want to do.”

And so the marriage was over and I was devastated. I mean, really devastated. We went on to have a really amicable divorce. 30, 35 whatever years later, maybe even 40 years later, we're still in touch. We send text messages, and one bizarre day her and her husband and I had a pub lunch together in my last parish, so we're OK, but it was still a bit of a tragedy, wasn't it? You know? People making vows to be married and in a way, I couldn't...I couldn't keep it.

For that reason, I am an advocate in saying we do need to talk about gender identity in an age appropriate way in schools because my lesbian and gay friends tell me they knew they were different even when they were at primary school or secondary school. And I knew I was different, I just didn't understand what it was at that age.

Long story short, I took nine years to make a gender change. I tried everything - I really did. I thought, well, maybe I'm a gay guy and wouldn't you know it, this most beautiful guy came into my life.

And we had a relationship and it was really, really fantastic. I loved it. And then he sat me down one day and said, look, it's a bit like being in a relationship with a woman, and I've nothing against men being in a relationship with a woman. But I'm a gay man and I don't really want to do that. It was exactly the same conversation that I had had before when my marriage ended. So eventually I just ran out of options. 

It took me 9 years. Nine years from tumbling down to the doctors to say, “look, hang on, I think I might have a bit of a problem” to actually making my gender change. I really hoped for a while. I was transvestite, to be fair.

Because there are worse hobbies. You know? There are. You don't have to tell your boss. You don't have to tell your mum. You don't have to tell the neighbours. And there are worse hobbies. I mean, have any of you actually tried country dancing?

So I tried everything and in the end I had to just accept I was what I was and I tried and made a gender change and you know, it was traumatic for about four days and after that the whole world settled down around me and most of my friends said “we prefer you like this”. 

My dad stopped talking to me, lost all contact with him for three years and it was never the same really. 

I did lose a few friends, but at least I was me. 

So, that's my journey. 

You may think I'm crazy now - if you didn't before - because I'm going to tell you I forgot, really, about my gender change. And you might think “that's ridiculous. How can you forget? You made a gender change!” but do you know, it was just so real for me that I didn't. 

I mean, it's a bit like if you're happily married and someone says “are you married or single?” you can think back to a time when you were single, but you can just answer “No, I'm married”. 

While I'm in a relationship now, I've always been fairly religious. Can you tell? [points to the priest's shirt and collar that she’s wearing] and I take my religion seriously. And I did have to engage with it. And we're going to start engaging in in some of this stuff in a minute. But I did offer myself for ordination, for the Church of England.

And let's face it, the Church of England is not known for being a bastion of diversity and inclusivity now, is it? So this was the end of the 1990s, and I offered myself as a post gender change. Everything finished ten years before or whatever it was, and I offered myself alternation. I told them at the very first interview, there's loads of interviews. It takes two or three years. You just go every two or three months to a different person, round and round and round in a big circle before you even get accepted for training, which is two or three years long, they don't want to make any mistakes, so it's a long process. But at the end of the very first interview I told them I thought, “how can I leave this room if I haven't told them? I'll never be able to mention it to the next person.” So I told them straight away and they would have found out anyway, you know that they check your birth records and all of this kind of business.
So I did tell them.

They were better than expected, actually. They were like, “oh, we don't know about this, but we'll keep you in the system while we work it out.”
And unbeknown to me, there were two or three other people nationally who had made gender changes, who were exploring ordination. So the Church of England knew it had to make a policy and the policy it made was that there was no reason in church law why somebody who'd made a gender change should not be ordained if we met all the other criteria. It took them about a year and a half to make that decision, and I was in the system for a year and a half, not knowing whether I might be kicked out. But the church moves slowly, and eventually it was decided that I could stay in the system and I went off to Theological College, and was ordained.

About six months after I was ordained, I got a phone call from a national newspaper. They had all my old records;

“Is it true that this used to be your old name and were you born a boy?” 

There was no point in trying to fob them off, and I hadn't done anything wrong. I told the church at the first interview and they had always said if the press come for you, which, in fairness was always likely, I mean anything to do with sex and vicars sells papers, doesn't it? And the Bishop said he would defend me if the press came calling. 

The press came calling and he did defend me and I kept my job. But literally, people tumbled into the market town where I was working, asking people on the street. “What is it like to have a sex change vicar?” and all these kinds of questions. There were 12,000 people in that market town, all of whom knew my intimate medical history.

I could do nothing about it. Some of them might think I was a hypocrite. Some of them might think it was awful. Some of them might think it was disgusting and perverted. Some of them may have cheered and I could do nothing about it at all, and I had to face them day after day. 

Well, that was 20 years ago and here I am still standing. And if that's helpful anyway, by way of an introduction, now we can get into the God stuff. And we’ll start with the ‘transy’ bit simply because this is where I've led us to by talking about me and my experience.

And then we'll go towards the lesbian and gay stuff now, although it's World Religion Day, the truth of the matter is I think there's a lot of harm done in public by people talking about stuff they don't really know about and I have a rule, which is if you don't really know, then best to keep quiet. So although we'll be talking a bit about religion for obvious reasons, it's going to mainly be Christianity, but we're fairly closely aligned with our Jewish siblings and some of our scriptures are exactly the same, so there will be echoes there and I'll do what I can for you in terms of other religions, but I'm the expert in Christianity if you like. 

So we're going to be doing it from the Christian standpoint, but there'll be lots of generalisations I'm sure we can take, and if you are a member of another faith, when we get to the questions, feel free to tumble in and just say, “OK, you know, I'm a Muslim and this is how we think about this.”
Or “I follow the Baha'i faith” or whatever it is, you know? All contributions welcome. 

So let's think about the religion bit, because I had to face this, you know: If God had made me a guy, was I committing a mortal sin by trying to change that? I really did have to face that.

And I think the first bit I would say is true is the Bible, and Christians are often not helpful when it comes to queer issues, LGBTQ+ issues. I think a lot of people feel that Christians and institutionalised religion are pretty uneasy about those of us who are not cisgendered and heterosexual. As it happens, of course, the reality is far better than that. What tends to happen, actually, is the Christians often we see or hear in the media are the more conservative Christians and they have a certainty about them.

In a way, I keep thinking about my friend who says it's a bit like a swimming pool. Most of the noise is in the shallow end. It's easier to go on television or radio and say “Christians believe this” as if there's only one view of the Bible.

I take the view that the Bible (I mean the Bible, is just wonderful) but you can't just open it up and read it off the page for a start. Many parts of it are 3, 4000 years old, written in other languages, translated from the original languages, or even fragments of the original languages into other languages and then finally into English or Welsh, and you can't…translations…you lose a lot - even if you go back to the original sources.
You can't just translate a language without the context, so we're going to think a little bit about some of the bits in the Bible, and I'll just come straight off the bat and say the Bible is not always eminently sensible. 

I mean, take this regarding women. This is from Saint Paul. St. Paul is one of the chief writers of what US Christians call ‘the New Testament’. I prefer to call it ‘the 2nd testament’, but anyway he's an important chap. 

Here's what he says about women in his letter to the Corinthians, “women should be silent in the churches”. They're not permitted to speak. They should be subordinate, as the law says. If there's anything they desire to know (I'll take a breath before I say this), “let them ask their husbands at home. It's shameful for a woman to speak.
In church now”.

There's lots of good things about Saint Paul, but you can't just read that passage without understanding the context in which it was written. And I think when we get on to issues of queerness, lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual identities, the Bible, if you just read it off the page, it kind of lets us down a bit, even though Jesus said.
nothing about lesbian people, gay people, bisexual people or transgender people, 

Jesus said nothing. There is nothing in there that Jesus said. 

Now there is a very big passage that people will say, “oh, no, he did talk a bit about sexuality and gender”, but actually it's not true.

Christians often cite this passage from Saint Matthew's gospel.
Jesus saying to the people, the scribes and the Pharisees and the people, “have you not read that the one who made people in the beginning made them male and female, and for this reason the man should leave his father and mother be joined to his wife and the two should become one flesh.” But here's the thing. Actually, Jesus isn't talking about sexuality here - men made for women and vice versa - he isn't talking about sex, like 2 sexes: men and men and women. He's actually answering the question, and the question is about divorce. Some Pharisees had said to him, “is it lawful to divorce our wives?” And then he replied with his, with his reply.

There. Now that is not the same in any way as Jesus advocating that everybody has to be straight and everybody has to be either male or female. So there's a lot of times people use the Bible in a way in which it was not actually meant.

Let's look at a few of them. The very beginning of the Bible and the beautiful bit we share with our Jewish siblings, Genesis, the first book in the Bible.
This is responsible for a lot of the misunderstanding. I think the very first chapter, the very first few lines in the Bible and we learn God's created humankind in his image in the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them.
And that's been taken as a basis for how our identity should be, male and female, as if they're two completely separate things. And there's nothing in between. The passage, though, doesn't actually say that.
It doesn't say that there's only these two categories; we tend to interpret it as being male, and then nothing, and then femaleness. So it's a binary choice, and we interpret that because most people are binary, aren't they? For most people, there are only two sexes, and it all works beautifully. And that's all they ever had to consider. But here's the thing. That passage from Genesis goes on - you'll know this bit even if you don't know the Bible - it talks about the whole of creation.
So before the male and female bit we have this bit about God creating the universe and God separates, in this case, the day from the night, and there's light and there's darkness, day and night, day and night. How many of you have ever seen a day which was day, Day, day, day, day. Night, night, night, night?

Light, light, light.
Dark, dark, dark. 

That isn't what happens. Is it? 

The sun rises gently and then it gets darker gradually, there isn't just two total opposite poles, so this whole passage of Genesis is…it's Hebrew poetry, it's called a ‘merism’, and it's about saying at one end there's this and at one end there's that. And there's all these things in the middle. Now, unless you understand that, it's all too easy to see this passage from Genesis as saying God's created only two things- there's definite males and there's definite females. 

And as I say, just think about it. None of you have ever really seen a day where it's been bright light and then total darkness. The only way you've seen a day like that as if you've been drinking at lunchtime. I would just like to suggest maybe on holiday you go for a nice drink in the middle of the day, nice meal. You wake up and it's 8:30 at night and it's all dark. 

But that's not how days are meant, are they?

Here's some more little things. Just we'll rattle through these in terms of gender, and then we'll get onto sexuality. When I was thinking about that, I could make a gender change or how Christians should regard transgender people. People often quote phrases from Deuteronomy, and it appears to be clear. Look: “a woman shall not wear a man's apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment. Whoever does such things is abhorrent to the Lord.”

Abhorrent. I mean, not just on the naughty step; Abhorrent! I mean, that's pretty big ticket stuff, isn't it? But that's verse five of Deuteronomy 22. Let's move forward. Just six verses later - 6 sentences if you like - to 22 11 “you shall not wear clothes made of wool and linen woven together.”
How many of you are wearing clothes of only one fibre?

I should think all of us are wearing mixed fibres and yet to be fair, it's there in the Bible and if we wanted to put a point on it, we might say, well, that is abhorrent to the Lord. It's certainly wrong if we want to be a bit more sophisticated by it. The point is that you can often find different things in the Bible and a lot of things which are very cultural and time specific.

Let's move on. This is a bit shocking, to be fair, and if I only read this from Deuteronomy Chapter 23, I might think that gender changes are completely out of bounds for any Christian. I'll read it in case we need to read it: 

“No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” 

Well, yeah. I mean, you know, you could read that and say, pardon the pun, you could not have a more clear cut example, could you? I mean, you really couldn't. 

But hey, hey, look, let's take this bit of advice from the Bible:

If you marry a woman and you find that she's not a virgin on your wedding night.
It says here in Deuteronomy: “the young woman's virginity was not found” right. “Then the men shall bring the young woman out to the entrance of her father's house. And the men of her town shall stone her to death”.

Now I find it difficult that there would be some people who would argue that you can read some sentences in the Bible straight off the page, and of course they make sense and you have to interpret them that way. But then when it comes to stoning people, they say, “oh, well, no, that's not what the Bible means”. 

Here's the truth of it. I think the Bible is a beautiful and wonderful, holy and truthful book, but I think even from our very quick walkthrough, you can see that there are lots of things in there which actually you can't just say, “OK, that's what it says. Let's go off and do it.”

Let's think a bit about sexuality and the Bible. Let's think about the big story that most people know. There's two big stories that most people know.
Genesis 19 it's still the first book of the Bible; Sodom and Gomorrah. 

And that's often used as saying, “oh, you know homosexual relationships are wrong”, Honestly I don't think many people who are saying that have actually read the story. I really don't think they have because if you read it there what happens is some strangers come to town, they want to sleep in the marketplace, outside, and Lott offers them hospitality, says “don't sleep outside. Come on in, you'll be safe in my house”. They go into his house and then the men of the town knock on his door and say we want to know these strangers now.

“Know” is a biblical way of saying ‘have sexual relationships with them’ and it's about dominance. It's about saying if strangers come in well, we see to them. We see it in war crimes today don't we? Rape being used as a weapon?

So the sin of Sodom is actually not to do with homosexual relations, it's not to do with two guys living in Nottingham together having a lovely life together, perhaps with a cat. It's not about that. It's about forced sexual relationships.

What I wanted to say is this. The Bible is actually quite a queer book. Joseph, can you pop in the chat? Everyone knows the story of Joseph. What does Joseph have? Joseph has something. Just bang it in the chat if you can. And if not, just shout it at your computer. I won't hear because your mic's are off. Of course.

I think most of us are going to be saying that Joseph has a multi coloured coat. Joseph has a multi coloured coat and loads of brothers. He's got a beautiful coat. A coat of many colours. Everybody knows that, don't they? From the musical. Here's the thing. The Bible, of course, unbelievably wasn't written in English, this bit of the Bible was written in ancient Hebrew, if you like, and the word for Joseph's coat only appears in one other place in the Bible, just one other place. And if you look in most Bibles, there'll be a little asterisk there and it will say “the meaning of this word is uncertain”.
Hang on to that. I mean, most good Bibles will say that - meaning we don't really know what this word means when it describes his garment. 

The word is only used in one other place, and it's used to describe the outfit that Princess Tamar was wearing in the Royal Courts.
Here's the thing. The possibility exists, that Joseph's coat of many colours was actually maybe more like a Princess dress.

Here's the thing. Imagine Joseph with his brothers Big, Strong, sweaty men moving animals from one bit of the territory to another bit, meeting up with lots of other great big, sweaty men. A very masculine environment, lots of strong families, lots of brothers in all the families. And then when other families meet them.
“You're Joseph's brother, are you?”

The possibility, friends, exists that Joseph was a mincer. Joseph had a dress or a garment which was more applicable to a Princess than it did to a rough, tough cattle herder or manual worker. Perhaps that gives you some indication why his brothers may have wanted to kill him.
As a biblical scholar, I can tell you that there are other reasons too. He was a very arrogant young man, a very arrogant young man. But look, if you put the pieces together, that's an outstanding thought which most people will never have come across in their entire life, and you're not going to get straight preachers telling you this. They're not going to say, “well, you know, there's what I've just said to you about the word catonet passing, which only occurs in one other place and that was Princess Tamar's outfit.”

Let's go back to the Last Supper, then. Another place where perhaps a little bit of gender nonconforming roles is going off. You see in the Last Supper in one of the accounts of the Last Supper, Luke's gospel, Jesus sends the apostles off to make the room ready for the Last Supper, and they say, “well, that's fine. How will we know where this is all to take place?” And Jesus says “when you've entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house he enters, say to the owner of the house. ‘The teacher asks you where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’”

Well now. Think about any agrarian society you have ever seen, even today, on the television where they do reports from societies which are basically just existing subsistence farming without much machinery. Question for you, whose job is it to carry the water?
It's the women, it's the women's job.

There is again at least a possibility here that what Jesus has asked his disciples to do is to go and follow a bloke who was doing something that more typically would be done by a woman, than a man.
Now there are male water carriers. None of this is conclusive. But what I'm trying to say to you is the Bible is actually quite a delicate book and its lessons need to be teased out in a lot of context. So to sum up this section, I'll just go back to a couple of things about sexuality.

In Leviticus, we're told here “if a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They should be put to death. Their blood is upon them.” And perhaps here you can see where we get our ideas that same sex relationships are bad. I mean, it's pretty clear, isn't it, really? 

And then in one of Saint Paul's letters, again, Saint Paul, key player in Christian theology, in his letter to the Romans - there he talks about a society where women exchange actual intercourse for unnatural. And in the same way also the men giving up natural intercourse with women and who are consumed with a passion for one another. Now again, you could read that as saying same sex relationships are totally, absolutely out of bounds. 

But if you do just a tiny bit more research you'll see that the problem is not really about them having sexual relationships with each other. For a start, there was a whole bit about dominance. More powerful men subjugating less powerful men, and that may also have been true for the women, but here it's even a little starker, because the actual problem here, the actual problem here is in gold.
What Saint Paul is saying is actually, although they knew God, they didn't honour God or give thanks to him. In other words, the real problem here is that people had become incredibly worldly and turned their passions into false gods and forgot to say, well, thank you God for all the blessings in our lives.

What I've been trying to suggest is that the Bible may seem to be very, very, very clear cut, but my understanding of the Bible is actually it isn't anywhere near as clear cut as you might think. And actually when I look around, God is the God of infinite possibilities. I don't know why I exist as a trans person, honestly.

I was only half joking before when I said, you know, I wished it was more of a hobby. 

I don't want to be a trans person. I just AM. 

And the more we know about medical science, the more we know that our sexuality and our gender identity are perhaps more based in science than you might think. So, for instance, there are slight differences in the brains of men and women, and some studies have shown that there are slight differences in the brains of straight men versus gay men.

In terms of sexual identity and gender identity, when we're conceived, there's an awful lot goes on between that moment of conception and us being born. Here's something you may not know.
You have the potential in the very first few weeks of your life, you have all the cells that would do both the male and female internal ‘wiring’ if you like. And what happens is if you're going to be a female, the male stuff dissolves early on. And if you're going to be male, the female stuff dissolves, and then your genitalia are formed by a different set of hormonal and chromosome and gene interplays. 

And we know that, actually, intersex people do exist where people are born and their genitalia are actually rather not one or the other. It's rather confusing and we know that there are lots of subtle variations in people's genitalia when they're born. There's a beautiful chemical cascade, this interplay of biology, and it does occasionally result in people, not conforming to the male or female a stereotype.
So, to wrap up this sort of section, really I just want to say, I hope you've found that quite interesting. I hope you may realise that things are perhaps a little bit more flexible than some people would have you believe. I will say that I sit here having been ordained for 21 years (I think) as a Anglican priest.

And the Anglican church isn't known for being wonderfully diverse and inclusive, and there are lots of people who think like me. There are also lots of people who, quite frankly, would stop me being a minister if they could. Just look at what's happening in Trump's America at the moment. The day he was inaugurated as president, he signed.
1600 executive orders and one of those was to say that the United States recognises only male and female, that there are two biological sexes and this is a matter of truth. 

Well, actually, biologically it isn't so, and he's going to take the gender markers that people have been given post transition, he's not going to allow those to be continued. So if you make a gender change, your name might now be Ben. You may have been classified female at birth, but your driving licence or your passport will have that F on it rather than M for male, and you may look like Ben. You may be Ben. You may be a chap in all respects, but your records. 

He wants them to clearly indicate that you're female. And interestingly enough, America did allow X as a third gender marker, so it's a bit heavy at the moment and it's a bit worrying.

I do think that in Jewish terms, that the people that I know, they're similar debates as I've walked you through with Christianity.

It's more difficult I think in the Muslim world, but there are organisations that are helping queer Muslims and of course, lots of people don't get too worked up about these things. 

Hope it's been interesting. I hope it's been fun. If you've enjoyed it, that's great. If you haven't enjoyed it, it's a bit late now!
Thank you very much.