I’m transgender, I’m a layperson, and I’m 39 years old. I grew up in a tongues-talking United Methodist Church in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, where my dad was the pastor. We were a poor congregation in a poor community, deeply divided over the inclusion and dignity of LGBTQ+ people. I remember thinking to…

In the fall of 1995, I was a first-year divinity school student interning at Fenway Health’s Violence Recovery Program, which supports LGBTQIA2S+ people who have experienced violence. I had only recently heard the word “transgender,” learning how it could refer both to people who transitioned from one binary gender to another, and to people whose gender…