- Hello world, it's Austen.
Lets talk about being
transgender and Christian.
Today I want to talk about
one of the most common
comments trans people receive,
and I see it all the time
in the comments for these videos.
The argument is simply this:
God doesn't make mistakes.
So lets talk about this a little bit.
When person A comes up
to person B and says,
"You can't be transgender
because God doesn't
"make mistakes," what does that imply?
First I think that it
implies that at some point
person A has got it into
their head that being trans
is some kind of an error.
Honestly that's pretty
understandable because
for a lot of trans people,
especially younger kids,
the first inkling we
have that we may be trans
is a feeling of wrongness
that's very hard to explain.
Some trans folks,
especially young kids again,
tend to use phrases like,
"I feel like a boy stuck in a girl's body,
"or a girl stuck in a boy's body."
The problem with this
phrase and ones like it,
though, is that it tends
to give the impression that
somewhere along the
way a mistake was made.
Whether it was when God was
doing this sort of lottery
dolling out bodies or
whether the person is just
confused about who they are.
So in response to somebody saying,
"I feel like something
is a little mismatched,"
Christians tend to say, "No,
God doesn't mismatch things,
"God doesn't make mistakes,
"there must just be
something wrong with you."
So this is where I think
it's important to step in
and offer another kind of narrative
another way of explaining
what it means to feel trans.
Because here's the thing:
if that feeling of wrongness
or that people can't see
who we really are,
or our bodies don't show who we really are,
what if that sense of
wrongness only exists
in opposition to the people
who don't feel that wrongness?
Okay let me explain that more clearly,
we're gonna use being left
handed as an example here.
When you're a little kid
and you're running around
outside having fun with
your friends and maybe
throwing a ball or something,
you don't think about
which hand you're throwing
the ball with, you're
just out there having fun
and being yourself.
But then when you get to
school and you start writing
out letters, your teacher
tries to get you to
write things out with your right hand.
She puts the pencil in
your hand and she guides
you over the letters
and something just isn't
feeling right with how that's working.
You keep wanting to switch
over and use your left hand
because it's stronger and
it doesn't wobble as much,
but everybody else in
the class is using their
right hand and you think,
"There must be something wrong,
"I don't know what going
on, but I can't seem to do
"what they're doing."
You might think, "Hey,
everybody else is writing
"with their right hand,
and I can't seem to do that
"and maybe something is wrong with me,
"maybe there's some kind
of mistake that was made.
"My brain and my body just
aren't talking to each other
"the right way."
But the truth is being
left handed isn't a mistake
and neither is being transgender.
Just because of the majority
of people find there's
no difference between their
assigned sex and their
gender identity, doesn't
mean that the people who do
find that there is a different are wrong.
We're just different and
different is not bad.
Unfortunately there has been
a tendency in human history
to try to correct left
handed kids into using
their right hand.
This can actually cause
dyslexia and even speech
impediments in kids.
In the US left handed kids
were forced into using
their right hand and were
punished when they tried
to use their left hand
up through the 1970s.
And corrections for
handedness are still found in
places like Taiwan, Japan, and Malawi.
We now know more about
handedness than we used to
and most scientists think
there's something genetic
that causes it, but because
we haven't nailed down
an exact cause and because
there are ambidextrous people
and people who can switch
from using left to right hand,
there's continued efforts
at converting people
into using right hands for writing.
Does all of this sound a
little bit too familiar
to LGBT folk?
You bet.
So what if being transgender
is just another example
of human diversity?
A left handed person surrounded
by right handed people
might think that there's
something wrong with them
or that a mistake was made,
just like a transgender
person surrounded by
cisgender people might
think the same thing.
But being different does
not mean you're a mistake.
All we have to do is look
around at our wonderfully
diverse world that has over
12,000 different kids of ants,
over 100,000 different kinds of trees,
over 6,000 spoken languages,
and one-of-a-kind animals
like the platypus to see
that God loves diversity.
And what if we don't
understand why God would
create somebody who's
gender and sex don't match?
Well Isaiah 55 verses eight and nine says,
"My thoughts are not your thoughts,
"nor are your ways my ways, says the lord,
"for as the heavens are
higher than the earth,
"so are my ways higher than
your ways and my thoughts
"than your thoughts."
Sometimes we don't understand
why God does the things
God does, but that doesn't
mean that we have any
right to call any of it a mistake.
So when somebody comes up to me and says,
"You can't be transgender
because God doesn't
"make mistakes," I say,
"You're right, God doesn't make
"mistakes and God made me trans."
I don't know why yet, but
I trust that all things
work together for good
for those who love God
and who are called
according to his purpose.
And I do my best every
day to live according
to that purpose.
So thanks for listening,
friends, and I hope something
in this video resonated with you.
If you have any questions or comments,
leave them in the comments down below.
You can also check out
a couple of articles
I'm putting down in the
description that talk about
this "is being trans a mistake?" thing.
Click the subscribe
button if you want more
videos like these and I
will see you back here
next Wednesday, peace.
