Thank you to David Levy, the Keshet leader who Twittered this.
"Diversity is an article of faith for Utah gay-friendly church"
South Valley » Transgender minister leads flock of LGBT and straight congregants.
By Rosemary Winters
rwinters@sltrib.com
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 06/19/2009 10:38:14 PM MDT
http://www.sltrib.com/features/ci_12611602
Cottonwood Heights » The Rev. Sean Parker Dennison knows how it feels to struggle to fit, to blend, to belong.
Now, Dennison greets a variety of people -- young and old, gay and straight, Anglo and non-Anglo -- to Sunday services at the South Valley Unitarian Universalist Society, a religious community that bills itself as "intentionally diverse."
On the chapel's exterior hangs a giant rainbow flag with the label "hate-free zone," a welcome mat for at least one sometimes-marginalized community that has found refuge at the church: lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.
Dennison himself is transgender. As a young woman in Iowa, he "tried on every single
Rev. Sean Parker Dennison, minister of the South Valley Unitarian Universalist Society, has led the congregation for seven years. (Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune)
feminine identity" he could find, from "fundamentalist Christian" high-school girl to "butch dyke," before realizing his true self is a man, not a woman.
Dennison, 43, had his epiphany when he began attending a Berkeley, Calif., seminary to be a Unitarian Universalist minister. He came out a year later in 1997.
"I went to the president of the seminary, scared to death, thinking she might kick me out," he recalls. "When I'm scared, I tend to overcompensate. I marched into her office and said, 'You and the school are going to have the privilege of watching me transition from female to male.' "
The president told him, "How wonderful. Tell me about it."
Dennison says he then "burst into tears because she believed me. I didn't even believe me."
In 2002, he found his first "settled" ministry at the South Valley church in Cottonwood Heights. As a transgender minister, even in the liberal Unitarian Universalist religion, it took a little longer for him to find a long-term post.
"Who would've thought it would be in Salt Lake City?" he says. "They were just ready here. And I think there is something to them feeling like outsiders in the culture of Salt Lake City that made them have a different way of looking at me being different than the normal minister."
Dennison's congregation has embraced the push for civil rights for LGBT people in Utah. Members of the church hoisted a giant rainbow flag in Salt Lake City's pride parade earlier this month. South Valley signed onto Equality Utah's Common Ground Initiative -- a legislative campaign crafted around LDS Church statements about certain rights for same-sex couples, short of marriage, that the Mormon leadership does not oppose. The LDS Church has not endorsed the push, which fizzled in the 2009 Legislature but will return in 2010. Dennison testified on behalf of one of the bills at a House committee hearing, quoting the Bible and the Book of Mormon.
Still, members of South Valley congregation -- 150 adults and 60 children -- are quick to point out theirs is not a "gay church." About 10 percent to 15 percent of attendees are LGBT, estimates Dennison.
Unitarian Universalists -- UUs, as they like to call themselves -- welcome everyone.
That was an important factor for Darin Adams when he adopted the faith in Connecticut a few years ago. A former Mormon who left his church and his wife of eight years after coming out as gay, Adams felt a "void." He missed having a community where he could talk about spiritual things.
He typed "gay-friendly church" -- intentionally avoiding "gay church" -- into Google. He found the Unitarian Universalist church in Westport, Conn. He began attending the Cottonwood Heights chapel last year after moving to Pleasant Grove.
"Everyone's welcoming. Everyone is loved and valued," says Adams, 36. "That's a powerful thing and something that didn't exist in my previous church."
South Valley also has provided support to Robyn Taylor-Granda and her husband, Eddie Granda, as they've worked to adopt five Ecuadorean orphans, who also are Eddie's half-siblings. The kids, ages 11 to 18, arrived in Cottonwood Heights in March. Church members have donated cash, clothing and gift cards to help the couple -- both of whom recently lost their jobs -- provide for the kids.
"Everyone's been really involved," says Taylor-Granda, who also has an 8-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son. "It's a congregation of people who want to be useful and want to give something back."
The kids enjoy coming to church even though they don't speak English, Taylor-Granda says. They like the social aspect of the meetings, which often are followed by pancake breakfasts or other gatherings.
The kids, she says, ask her, "Do you guys have parties every Sunday?"
There aren't parties every week. But South Valley does celebrate diversity -- every day.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
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
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
Thursday, June 4, 2009
AN ACT OF FAITH: Western Massachusetts Communities of Faith Speak Out for Transgender Rights
(Crossposted to my blog, MasadArts.)
On January 21st, the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality (ICTE) and Keshet held the event “AN ACT OF FAITH: Massachusetts Communities of Faith Speak Out for Transgender Equality” – officially beginning the faith-based campaign in support of the bill.
Tonight, Beit Ahavah (The Reform Synagogue of Greater Northampton), The Edwards Church (United Church of Christ), ICTE, Keshet and many co-sponsors held the event “AN ACT OF FAITH: Western Massachusetts Communities of Faith Speak Out for Transgender Rights” at The Edwards Church in Northampton.
Ten congregations, eleven organizations, fourteen speakers (half of them transgender) and a full house of attendees came together for an incredible service to celebrate transgender people and commit to working for transgender rights.
These are the first and second interfaith transgender events in Massachusetts history! I wish I could tell you everything that they mean to me as a transgender person and leader of faith. What they mean to everyone who attended and everyone else who was part of them. They are miraculous, powerful, wonderful, beautiful beyond description. They are truly transformative.
With their program, each attendee was given the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition’s (MTPC) information about the bill and how to support it, ICTE’s signed Declaration of Religious & Faith-Based Support for the bill, information about the Transgender Emergency Fund, a green commitment card with several actions for the bill and transgender social justice, and wildflower seeds.
The first part of the service was a Welcome. Rev. Dr. Peter Kakos (Pastor, Edwards Church) gave an Invocation, and Rabbi Riqi Kosovske (Rabbi of Beit Ahavah) a Welcome. Gunner Scott (Director, Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition) spoke about Testimony. Rev. Dr. Andrea Ayvazian (Pastor, Haydenville Congregational Church) sang Libby Roderick’s “How Could Anyone Ever Tell You”.
The second part was Tilling The Soil. I preached about the meaning of Transfaith -- to read my sermon (Google Document), click this sentence. Rabbi David Dunn Bauer (Rabbi of the Jewish Community of Amherst) spoke On Chaos And Order and co-led Holly Near’s song “We Are A Gentle Angry People”. My fellow ICTE Co-Chair, Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge (Priest, St. Luke’s & St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church; Founding Member, TransEpiscopal) spoke about Giving Voice To Remembrance – for his blog entry, including his speech, click here. Tynan Power (Regional Coordinator, Al-Fatiha), read from the Qur’an -- Surah al-Inshirah (The Expansion).
The third part was Planting Seeds. Minister Louis Mitchell (Deacon, South Congregational Church; Minister, Recovering The Promise Ministries) gave words and an original prayer. Jan Alicia Netter (President, Unitarian Society of Northampton & Florence) spoke about the Circle Of Caring and read Rev. Richard Gilbert’s poem. Rabbi Kosovske (Beit Ahavah) spoke of the Seeds Of Tradition.
The fourth part was Watering. Yohah Ralph, MDiv (Community Minister; Graduate, Episcopal Divinity School; In Care in the United Church of Christ; Member, First Churches Northampton) gave a Reflection On Faith. Arinna Weisman (Founding Teacher, Insight Mediation Center of Pioneer Valley) spoke and led us in Meditation & Movement.
The fifth and last part was a Closing. Rabbi Justin David (Rabbi of Congregation B’nai Israel) gave a Call To Action. Jennifer Levi (Director, GLAD Transgender Rights Project) spoke of our Next Steps. Rev. Kakos and Rabbi Kosovske gathered all the speakers to give the Benediction.
We speakers processed down the aisle and formed a receiving line behind the pews for the attendees. During that time and the reception that followed, I met many of my fellow speakers for the first time, and was gifted with several people’s responses to my sermon and the rest of the service. How much more so with personal stories about their lives from each of the transpeople, loved ones and other allies I spoke with.
A transman about to come out and begin his transition, who shares my fascination with mixed gender identity and expression. A transman who was partly sustained in high school by looking at my photograph in The Shared Heart (a book, exhibit and curriculum of GLBT youth portraits and essays – I’m the only transperson) every day. A transwoman who came out when she was eight, and went to a GLBT high school. A transwoman who shares my love of creating and wearing jewelry – and possible need for Jewelry Anonymous! A transwoman whose circus work taught her how to unite groups of people through the spirituality of their bodies and the rest of the natural world. A transwoman who like me comes from an interfaith family and has felt unwelcome, but sees and hopes for change. A transman who shares my interest in how faiths can learn from each other’s greatest teachers, including Jesus.
I am so blessed, grateful and proud to be part of tonight’s service, and the work which led to and will follow from it! Massachusetts has always been my beloved home (I was born and have always lived here). I’ve always felt closer to the Western part of the state than most greater Bostonians, yet I haven’t had nearly enough interaction with that community. This evening and its process was a rare and precious window and door into the amazing transgender and allied community of Western Massachusetts. What a privilege to witness such a thing, never mind be so welcomed and included! Hinei ma tov, how good it is to see the parts of my state uniting for transgender social justice and becoming more (of a) whole in the process.
Transpeople and our loved ones have been and are hurt, in faith communities and the rest of the world. We and our allies have much work and a long journey ahead of us, towards our inclusion in communities of faith and social justice. Tonight’s service acknowledged all of that, and yet was also so healing and hopeful. Tonight is part of a movement that will transform this state and country and beyond.
For the flyer (PDF), click here.
For the program (PDF), click here for the outside and here for the inside.
For the Facebook page, click here.
For my photos (Picasa Web album), click here.
The event was also photographed and filmed.
For the Edge Boston article, "Bay State religious groups back transgender rights bill" (by Joe Siegel, New England Editor), click here. For more press coverage, you’ll soon be able to click here.
Thank you to the event committee – Rev. Andrea Ayvazian, Rev. Eric Fistler (Minister of Christian Education, Edwards Church), Orly Jacobovits (Senior Organizer & Community Educator, Keshet), Rabbi Riqi Kosovske, Jennifer Levi, Jan Alicia Nettler, Tynan Power, Gunner Scott, Marcus Simon (Office Manager, Beit Ahavah), Marsha & Bill Zimmer (latter is President of Beit Ahavah).
I must especially kvell (be proud) about Marcus because he’s also a “TWiG”, a member of Keshet’s Transgender Working Group. And I must especially thank Tynan because he coordinated press coverage, and his family photographed, filmed, and co-led a song. Also, special thanks to Cameron for schlepping Orly and I from and to Boston.
Thank you to our cosponsors, speakers, volunteers, attendees and everyone else who was part of this event!
Mycroft Masada Holmes
Co-Chair, Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality (ICTE)
Chair, Keshet Transgender Working Group (TWiG)
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Cambridge Welcoming Ministries -- Reconciling Saint Sunday
ICTE Supporters and other readers, I want to let you know about a wonderful faith event that will take place this Sunday, April 19th, at 5:00 p.m. Cambridge Welcoming Ministries will be celebrating their annual Reconciling Saint Sunday, at College Avenue United Methodist Church (in Somerville, just outside of Davis Square).
I’ll be attending with a friend and am so looking forward to it!
A Reconciling Saint embodies the qualities of a faithful believer who is passionate, courageous, caring, audacious, and dedicated to the vision of a fully inclusive church in which one day lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons will be welcomed and loved as equal believers in the Church of Jesus Christ. A Reconciling Saint has, through their leadership, witness and action, diligently advocated and struggled for such a vision in the United Methodist Church.
Cambridge Welcoming Ministries is the spiritual home of my fellow ICTE members Sean Delmore and Marla Marcum. Sean co-chaired ICTE’s An Act Of Faith event with me, and CWM’s pastor Reverend Tiffany Steinwert was one of the AAOF speakers.
I celebrated Easter this past Sunday at CWM’s Worship Service and Fellowship Dinner. I had the most wonderful time. It was the perfect way to return to celebrating the holiday and Holy Week.
I’ll be posting an entry about that experience soon. In the meantime, I will tell you this. I’ve been very fortunate in my experience as a transgender person and leader of faith. But I have never felt so welcomed and included by a faith community as I did on Sunday night.
Even though it was my first visit to the congregation, I found that CWM truly embodied the words and phrase “welcoming” and “ministry”. (Though I shouldn’t be surprised after my experiences with Sean, Marla and their colleagues!)
One of the most meaningful things about the evening was the way transgender people and issues were raised up during the service. How much more so because this wasn’t done by the transpeople present but by the allies. It is more important than ever to empower transpeople to speak for themselves. It is also wonderful to be entering a time when we transpeople don’t always have to be the ones to raise trans issues; a time when even when we’re not at the table, we can know that someone there is raising them. It was so powerful to witness these acts of alliance, including the congregation and pastor’s positive response. Especially as last week was Transgender Equality Lobby Day here in Massachusetts and beyond.
I invite you to learn more, attend this Sunday, and invite others. All are welcome! Indeed, Reconciling Saint Sunday is an important step forward in the movement towards “all means all”.
Cambridge Welcoming Ministries has a website and a blog, and can be reached at info@cambridgewelcomingministries.org and 617.776.4172. CWM is also on Facebook, MySpace and elsewhere.
href="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/william/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml">
Mycroft Masada Holmes
Chair, Keshet Transgender Working Group (TWiG)
Co-Chair, Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality (ICTE)
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
a Holy Trans Week
Earlier this week I got an email from the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) detailing "Transgender Rights Week in New England," an amazing confluence of events: in Connecticut today there was a Gender Identity and Expression Lobby Day in support of their non-discrimination bill; in Rhode Island this evening there was House Judiciary Committee hearing about their hate crime definition; tomorrow (April 8th) New Hampshire is possibly holding a second vote on its transgender non-discrimination bill. And at the State House in Boston MTPC held a rally in support of the Massachusetts non-discrimination bill, "An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes". And as if the stars weren't already apparently aligning, Iowa's supreme court unanimously legalized equal marriage last Friday (April 3), and this morning, Vermont's legislature overrode it's governor's veto, making Vermont the latest state to claim equal marriage.
I arrived with fellow members of the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality(ICTE) at 10am. What an amazing sight it was to emerge from the main stairs and see so many people gathered-- at least as many as last year, and likely more. MTPC has now put up a number of photos from the event (source of the photos in this piece).
I was honored to briefly speak as one of the co-Chairs of ICTE (the other being Mycroft Holmes) and to introduce two other clergy speakers,
Rabbi Stephanie Kolin (photo, left) of Temple Israel in Brookline, and Rev. Will Green, Pastor of St. Nicholas United Methodist Church in Hull. I'm hoping to be able to reprint their remarks in the coming days. In the meantime, what struck me about Rabbi Stephanie's comments was her strong claim that the work we are all doing is holy work, and that the place in which we were standing was a holy place. Pastor Will (photo, below right) passionately underscored how supported we are in our struggle by communities of faith-- much more than we know. 
In our own ways, each of us reflected our convictions that religious traditions and communities of faith *should not* be assumed to be anti-trans, despite the terrible reality that many transgender people have been betrayed by communities of faith. Nevertheless, some of our strongest wellsprings of support can, do, and should come from precisely communities of faith and the rich traditions they sustain.
One particularly firey speaker-- whom I had to follow directly (!)-- was the Honorable Byron Rushing, a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He spoke of how we weren't gathered to gain the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, because we already have those rights. Massachusetts has failed to live up to its obligation to guarantee those rights, he said, for which the state has no excuse. We were there to hold the state to account. Amen!We heard several speakers who shared stories of discrimination and extreme difficulty. One such story was told, haltingly, by Ken Garber, the father of a transgender son, CJ, who died a couple of months ago. I remember Mr. Garber speaking in support of his son at the hearing last Spring, and it was so devastating to hear of CJ's death. I attended this young man's funeral a couple of months ago, and my heart has been with the Garber family ever since. Even incredibly supportive parents cannot finally protect trans young people from the pervasive toll of the cruelties that lie outside a home's door.
As I look back on this incredibly long day, the overall pattern is of border walking, crossing in and out of contexts and communities that often misunderstand one another. As a clergy person at the trans lobby day-- and quite visibly clerical at that-- I felt like an emblem, a living, breathing progress report on how far religious traditions in general and my own in particular have come in their support of transgender people, and the distance they still have to travel. And so it was important to me to state quite clearly the truth for which the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality stands: that people and communities of many faiths support transgender people, and that transgender people come from and claim many faith traditions. I talked about how proud I am that my own diocese, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts passed a resolution in support of exactly what we were doing at the State House today. The audience interrupted me at that point to clap, which really moved me. I was reminded of moments at Trans Day of Remembrance and Diocesan Convention last November, when the intersections of my particular faith and gender journeys felt not only present but in some sense uplifted.I then said that for Christians, this week is Holy Week, the most significant, and indeed holy, week of the entire liturgical year. And I said that, for me, being at the State House and doing what I was doing right then was a spiritual practice, a fitting complement to the several other spiritual practices of prayer and worship that I will be doing as this week continues. These practices are of a piece for me, I explained, because of the narrative that propels the events of Holy Week: the movement from bondage to freedom, from fear to hope, from death and despair to transformation and newness of life.
After the conclusion of the event, a parishioner and I made our way first to the Cathedral Church of St. Paul where a service of "the Blessing of the Holy Oils" was in progress, and then to the university department where I am teaching a one-on-one course ("Junior Tutorial") this semester. When we got to the cathedral, Bishop Tom Shaw was in the midst of his sermon, sitting in the central aisle. As we stepped into the cathedral, directly opposite him, he was in the middle of saying, "gay, lesbian, bisexual..." I felt like something of a transgender jack-in-the-box, with my "trans rights now" sticker still stuck to my lapel from the rally. I imagine Tom was saying something celebratory about the Vermont override, the announcement of which had elicited prolonged cheering during the rally.
The theme of the service was healing-- the various ministries of healing, lay and ordained, taken up by people throughout the diocese. There was a moment in the service when people in healing ministries were invited to come forward for the anointing of the palms of their hands. I walked forward with my parishioner, who recently started a queer, non-sectarian spirituality group at my church (called "BEND"). I loved seeing people with whom I work in the diocese in this context, in the middle of this intense week. And particularly after being at the rally, it felt good to walk across the Boston Common and into the cathedral. I felt both a sense of difference between how I spent my morning and how I imagine most people in the cathedral spent theirs, and a sense of affirmation that I was indeed walking from one holy space and activity to another.
From the cathedral, I made my way to a coffee shop, where I finished preparing for my class. Somewhere between the Statehouse and the classroom, I divested myself of both the "trans rights now" sticker and the clerical collar, aware of myself crossing into yet another communal space, this one academic. The course, "Thirty Years of Trans Studies" is a blast to teach, and also very much of a piece with the morning's activities.
What a day it was. And the holiness of the week continues.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Transgender Equality Lobby Day – Massachusetts
“‘Cause I'm bound by love
And I'm thinking of what could be
Where there's a will there's a way…”
Today was the Massachusetts’ Transgender Political Coalition’s Transgender Equality Lobby Day at the Massachusetts Statehouse. Three hundred of us, transgender people and allies, gathered to urge our legislators to support the bill An Act Relative To Discrimination and Hate Crimes. This bill would finally give transgender people and all citizens basic civil rights by outlawing discrimination (in housing, credit, employment, public accommodations and public education) and hate crimes based on gender identity and expression.
At 9:30, I gathered outside the Statehouse with Keshet – including our Transgender Working Group (TWiG), other members of the Jewish community, and the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality. After several weeks of news and work, how exciting to arrive and begin! Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha’olam, shehechianu ve'kiemanu ve'hegianu lazman ha'zeh. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the world, who has kept us in life, sustained us, and brought us to this moment.
We all walked together through security and to the foot of the Grand Staircase. It was wonderful to see the standing room only crowd – how much more so to realize how few of them I recognized! It was so good to connect and reconnect with those I knew, and meet many of those I didn’t. And people continued to arrive all day. Hinei ma tov umanayim, shevet achim / achyot gam yachad. Behold how good and pleasant it is for brothers and sisters [and siblings] to sit and dwell together.
Gunner Scott, Executive Director of MTPC , spoke and MCed several fine speakers; including transgender people, their loved ones, legislators and other politicians, and others. One of my favorite moments was Representative Byron Rushing’s speech / sermon. He told us we weren't, couldn’t be, gathered to gain our civil rights -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- because we were born with and have always had them. We were gathered to remind our state of its failure to guarantee those rights and demand justice. I though of the early 1990s, when I first became a GLBT leader, met Rep. Rushing and heard him preach this -- during the GLBT safe schools movement, when we were working to pass the bill that added “sexual orientation” to Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 76, Section 5: “No person shall be excluded from or discriminated against in admission to a public school of any town, or in obtaining the advantages, privileges and courses of study of such public school on account of race, color, sex, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation.” Perhaps most moving was the presence of Kenneth and Marcia Garber – their son CJ was a transman who lost his life in January, at age twenty; Ken spoke and received a standing ovation.
ICTE had the honor of organizing today’s clergy speakers – Rev. Cameron Partridge (St. Luke's and St. Margaret's Episcopal Church), Rabbi Stephanie Kolin (Temple Israel, Boston), and Rev. Will Green (St. Nicholas United Methodist Church, Hull). They spoke so passionately and beautifully – how wonderful it was to witness leaders of my own faiths and those of my colleagues preaching not only transgender equality but the inclusion and welcome of transpeople in faith communities. How much more wonderful to be able to think: This priest is my co-chair, this rabbi and pastor are our colleagues…I am so proud and blessed. To put it Yiddishly, I was kvelling! Cameron co-chairs ICTE with me, and has written a lovely blog post about today.
There was also a showing of the excellent ten-minute video MTPC created with GLAD’s Transgender Rights Project and MassEquality -- “Everyone Matters : Dignity & Safety For Transgender People”.
After the rally program, many attendees checked in at MTPC’s well-organized and stocked information table and went to prescheduled visits with their legislators – asking them to support the bill or thanking them for doing so. My fellow Keshetites and I delivered MTPC's thank-you cards to our supportive legislators and spoke with their aides and other staff, and were photographed by Ethan Halainen, Keshet’s Communications Assistant.
It was one of those days I didn’t want to end, and needed to see the end of. After most people had left, I returned to the almost empty rally site and talked with some of those who returned from their legislator visits. Even after MTPC left between two and three, I sat and talked with Joan Stratton (National Association of Social Workers) and Denise Leclair (Executive Director, International Foundation for Gender Education). Sometime after four, I had the gentlemanly pleasure of escorting the ladies out and to their next destinations.
This is one of the days when I think, over and over: I love my job. I love my work. I love my calling. I love my people, my community, my organizations and my colleagues.
How miraculous that there was a similar Lobby Day in Connecticut today, a House Judiciary Committee hearing about their hate crime definition in Rhode Island tonight, and a second vote on a similar bill in New Hampshire tomorrow. Also, Iowa legalized same-sex marriage on Friday and Vermont this morning.
And how wonderful that today is Birkat Hachama (Blessing of the Sun, the day every twenty-eight years when the sun returns to its position during Creation), that Pesach (Passover) begins tomorrow, and that it’s Holy Week (the Christian week that includes Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter).
(Crossposted at my blog MasadArts.)
Mycroft Masada Holmes Chair, Keshet Transgender Working Group (TWiG)Co-Chair, Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality (ICTE)http://MasadArts.blogspot.com/Sunday, April 5, 2009
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 7th. 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
Monday, February 9, 2009
An Act of Faith: Kairos
I originally posted this entry to my blog, www.peculiar-honors.blogspot.com:
On January 21, I participated in an event called
"An Act of Faith: Massachusetts Communities of Faith Speak Out for Transgender Equality." It was organized by Keshet and the Interfaith Coalition for Trans Equality (ICTE), a group that several of us founded in 2007 to actively create spaces supportive of trans people in communities of faith; to recognize the reality that many people of faith support trans people, and that many trans people are are people of faith; and to galvanize and harness the support of faith communities in support of trans civil rights. All of that was on display at our Act of Faith last Wednesday night, and it was powerful to experience. For images of the event by Bay Windows photographer Marilyn Humphries, click here.
We had an array of speakers who shared stories of the intersection of their faith and trans equality: Rabbi Daniel Judson (Director of Professional Development and Placement at Hebrew College Rabbinical School and Member, ICTE), co-chairs and MCs for this event Sean Delmore (Program Coordinator, LGBT@MIT, Candidate for Ordination as a Deacon in the United Methodist Church, and member, ICTE) and Mycroft Masada Holmes (Chair of the Keshet Trans Working Group and Founding Member, ICTE), Gunner Scott (Executive Director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition), Matthew O'Malley (Political Director of MassEquality), Judah-Abijah Dorington (Chair of Boston Area Black Pride and Director of LGBTQI Programs at Wellesley College & Executive Director of People to People/Dorrington & Saunders and Associates), Jennifer Levi (Director of the Transgender Rights Project at GLAD), Rev. Tiffany Stewart (Pastor, 
Cambridge Welcoming Ministries, United Methodist Church), Rev. Fr. Toni Amato (Order of Saint John the Divine and Founder of Write Here Write Now), Marla Marcum (Co-Chair, Reconciling Ministries, New England United Methodist Church, Candidate for Ordination as a Deacon in the United Methodist Church, and Member, ICTE), and Massachusetts State Representatives Carl Sciortino (pictured above left) and Denise Provost (pictured to the right). I spoke near the end and introduced the action component of our program. It was especially fun for me to hear Denise's remarks, because she is a member of the parish that sponsored me for ordination, and she told a story about the goofy, supportive way her youngest daughter responded when I transitioned about seven years ago.
I can't possibly convey all that people said that evening, but in what follows, I'll share the comments I made. Of course, what others said caused me to change what I'd prepared, but one speaker in particular got me thinking in a new light about an experience I had twelve years ago.
Judah-Abijah Dorrington got up and sang James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the Black National Anthem, and spoke of the multiple struggles against oppression to which it can speak. As I heard her sing it, I suddenly remembered a moment in my life that was punctuated by that particular hymn. And when I got up to speak a few minutes later, I told a story I had not quite narrated in my mind up until that moment.
I said that in 1997, when I was in my second year of divinity school and was very new, unsure, and private about wrestling with gender identity, I was also actively discerning when to apply for the ordination process toward priesthood in the Episcopal church, and whether I should apply in Massachusetts (where my partner and I had moved in 1995). But then Phil Nightingale, the senior warden of our parish, died. Phil had an lively, quirky, inspiring spirit, and I very much admired the Ecumenical Task Force on Aids that he and his partner Rusty Miller had co-founded. As Phil's Boston Globe obituary explained, the Task Force brought healing services to churches across the state, beginning in 1985, at a time when churches basically were not dealing with the AIDS epidemic. The process of Phil's death, the vigil we held all night at the parish, and particularly the funeral itself, held at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, had a catalyzing effect upon me. It's still hard to articulate, but what I knew then was that something about that process, and about this diocese and the ministries it supports, grabbed a hold of me and refused to let go. After that funeral, I knew that this was the time and the place to cast my bread on the waters and seek entry into the ordination process.
Almost twelve years later, as I listened to Judah singing, "God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who hast brought us thus far on the way," I suddenly remembered choking out those very words as Phil's casket was rolled down the cathedral aisle, out the door and into its waiting hearse. All of a sudden, I could see how that hymn-- and not simply the existence of it, but the singing of it in that context-- had opened up a space of musical narration in which somehow, with hope, grief and resolve, I could sing in solidarity struggles that I could not yet name, in a community that felt infinitely expansive.
That experience marked an extraordinary moment for me, the kind I like to think of with one of the ancient Greek terms for time, "kairos." While "chronos" refers to time as it unfolds sequentially, kairos speaks to a particularly momentous time, the critical juncture, "the moment of danger and opportunity," the kind of moment in which we stand right now.
[with that, I jumped into my prepared remarks:]
As trans people, as partners and family members, as allies, as people of faith, it is nearly impossible to forget that this is a moment of danger. For one thing, it continues to be dangerous to be a trans person in this country at this time, even as our community makes extraordinary gains. There are so many reasons why now is the time for us to act. We need to act now because trans people are dying in this country at an appalling, under-recognized rate. We know this from our own history here in Massachusetts, having lost Debra Forte and Chanelle Pickett in 1995, and Rita Hester in my own parish’s Allston neighborhood in 1998. But in Memphis, TN, over a six month period between July and December of 2008, three transgender, African American women were shot. Two of them, Duanna Johnson and Ebony Whitaker, died. The third, Leeneshia Edwards, who was shot in the face on December 23, has survived.
We need to act now because many of us come up against discrimination, sometimes overt, often subtle, in our searches for housing and jobs, as we apply to schools, for credit, or seek medical care. Particularly in this chaotic economy, trans people, like all people who struggle against oppression, come up against an enhanced sense of vulnerability, not only through particular acts of discrimination but also because hope can be that much harder to cling to in difficult economic times. And so we stand here tonight, gathered for the first time in the history of this state and, perhaps, in the history of this country, as people of faith communities who have come together to take a public stand for human dignity. Here and now, we join our various voices together, saying explicitly that the “all” in “all are created equal” does and must include transgender people. We stand here tonight, profoundly aware of the danger, sick to death of it, and ready, by God, for change. We cannot let one more year go by without enacting fully inclusive non-discrimination legislation at the federal level, and at the state level, here in Massachusetts.
We are here as people of faith because we believe that danger, like fear, can never have the last word. And with what our new President has called the “audacity of hope,” we are here because we know that we have an unprecedented opportunity. Particularly this week, as we celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama, a president more supportive of our lives and livelihoods than any previous president, it could not be clearer that this is a moment of profound opportunity. Indeed, our gathering tonight feels to me like an extension of the incredible dream that we are beginning to live into with this new President. And, of course, this dream is the expansive vision articulated so passionately and brilliantly by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose birthday we celebrated earlier this week.
In April of 1963, as Dr. King sat in a jail cell, he responded to white, moderate clergy who had come out against his work in Birmingham, arguing that he was being too disruptive, that now was the time to wait, to be patient, not to press forward. This was an argument that Dr. King could not abide. He responded in his open “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail”, with the familiar words “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Then he continued, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly” [Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail,” in ed. James Melvin Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers), 290]. That is why we are gathered here as people of faith tonight—because while our faiths are many and varied, we know and we honor the sacred reality that we are all connected. Those of us who are transgender may differ from those of us who are not in a number of profound ways, but make no mistake, all of us suffer when any of us does.
But it isn’t enough for us to simply know that. We have to act on it. As Dr. King continued, “We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of [people] willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always right to do right” (296). My hope is that, in this kairos, this moment of danger and opportunity, we will leave this gathering tonight with what Dr. King termed “a sense of cosmic urgency” (297).
But not before we make our commitment real. I ask you to turn now to the leaf cards under your chairs. These leaves are our way of calling one another forward to recognize our interconnectivity, and the profound impact that we, as people of faith, can have in our communities when we work together in recognition of that connection.
The Tree of Life is an image with which a number of faith traditions express our connection to one another and to all life. And so I invite you to read the suggestions onyour card and to consider how you can make a unique and lasting impact on transgender equality in your faith community and beyond. Then, beginning with those of us in the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality, and our invited speakers, I invite you to fill out your card and to mark that commitment and connection by coming forward to put it on the tree. When you have finished, please return to your seats for the conclusion of our program.
*******
The cards on the tree were quite beautiful, and symbolized nicely what the gathering was all about. Event Co-chairs Sean Delmore and Mycroft Masada Holmes then wrapped up the event.
I am incredibly grateful to Keshet, especially senior organizer Orly Jacobovits, without whom the event would never even have gotten off the ground, let alone come to fruition.
On January 21, I participated in an event called
"An Act of Faith: Massachusetts Communities of Faith Speak Out for Transgender Equality." It was organized by Keshet and the Interfaith Coalition for Trans Equality (ICTE), a group that several of us founded in 2007 to actively create spaces supportive of trans people in communities of faith; to recognize the reality that many people of faith support trans people, and that many trans people are are people of faith; and to galvanize and harness the support of faith communities in support of trans civil rights. All of that was on display at our Act of Faith last Wednesday night, and it was powerful to experience. For images of the event by Bay Windows photographer Marilyn Humphries, click here.
We had an array of speakers who shared stories of the intersection of their faith and trans equality: Rabbi Daniel Judson (Director of Professional Development and Placement at Hebrew College Rabbinical School and Member, ICTE), co-chairs and MCs for this event Sean Delmore (Program Coordinator, LGBT@MIT, Candidate for Ordination as a Deacon in the United Methodist Church, and member, ICTE) and Mycroft Masada Holmes (Chair of the Keshet Trans Working Group and Founding Member, ICTE), Gunner Scott (Executive Director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition), Matthew O'Malley (Political Director of MassEquality), Judah-Abijah Dorington (Chair of Boston Area Black Pride and Director of LGBTQI Programs at Wellesley College & Executive Director of People to People/Dorrington & Saunders and Associates), Jennifer Levi (Director of the Transgender Rights Project at GLAD), Rev. Tiffany Stewart (Pastor, 
Cambridge Welcoming Ministries, United Methodist Church), Rev. Fr. Toni Amato (Order of Saint John the Divine and Founder of Write Here Write Now), Marla Marcum (Co-Chair, Reconciling Ministries, New England United Methodist Church, Candidate for Ordination as a Deacon in the United Methodist Church, and Member, ICTE), and Massachusetts State Representatives Carl Sciortino (pictured above left) and Denise Provost (pictured to the right). I spoke near the end and introduced the action component of our program. It was especially fun for me to hear Denise's remarks, because she is a member of the parish that sponsored me for ordination, and she told a story about the goofy, supportive way her youngest daughter responded when I transitioned about seven years ago. I can't possibly convey all that people said that evening, but in what follows, I'll share the comments I made. Of course, what others said caused me to change what I'd prepared, but one speaker in particular got me thinking in a new light about an experience I had twelve years ago.
Judah-Abijah Dorrington got up and sang James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the Black National Anthem, and spoke of the multiple struggles against oppression to which it can speak. As I heard her sing it, I suddenly remembered a moment in my life that was punctuated by that particular hymn. And when I got up to speak a few minutes later, I told a story I had not quite narrated in my mind up until that moment.I said that in 1997, when I was in my second year of divinity school and was very new, unsure, and private about wrestling with gender identity, I was also actively discerning when to apply for the ordination process toward priesthood in the Episcopal church, and whether I should apply in Massachusetts (where my partner and I had moved in 1995). But then Phil Nightingale, the senior warden of our parish, died. Phil had an lively, quirky, inspiring spirit, and I very much admired the Ecumenical Task Force on Aids that he and his partner Rusty Miller had co-founded. As Phil's Boston Globe obituary explained, the Task Force brought healing services to churches across the state, beginning in 1985, at a time when churches basically were not dealing with the AIDS epidemic. The process of Phil's death, the vigil we held all night at the parish, and particularly the funeral itself, held at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, had a catalyzing effect upon me. It's still hard to articulate, but what I knew then was that something about that process, and about this diocese and the ministries it supports, grabbed a hold of me and refused to let go. After that funeral, I knew that this was the time and the place to cast my bread on the waters and seek entry into the ordination process.
Almost twelve years later, as I listened to Judah singing, "God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who hast brought us thus far on the way," I suddenly remembered choking out those very words as Phil's casket was rolled down the cathedral aisle, out the door and into its waiting hearse. All of a sudden, I could see how that hymn-- and not simply the existence of it, but the singing of it in that context-- had opened up a space of musical narration in which somehow, with hope, grief and resolve, I could sing in solidarity struggles that I could not yet name, in a community that felt infinitely expansive.
That experience marked an extraordinary moment for me, the kind I like to think of with one of the ancient Greek terms for time, "kairos." While "chronos" refers to time as it unfolds sequentially, kairos speaks to a particularly momentous time, the critical juncture, "the moment of danger and opportunity," the kind of moment in which we stand right now.
[with that, I jumped into my prepared remarks:]
As trans people, as partners and family members, as allies, as people of faith, it is nearly impossible to forget that this is a moment of danger. For one thing, it continues to be dangerous to be a trans person in this country at this time, even as our community makes extraordinary gains. There are so many reasons why now is the time for us to act. We need to act now because trans people are dying in this country at an appalling, under-recognized rate. We know this from our own history here in Massachusetts, having lost Debra Forte and Chanelle Pickett in 1995, and Rita Hester in my own parish’s Allston neighborhood in 1998. But in Memphis, TN, over a six month period between July and December of 2008, three transgender, African American women were shot. Two of them, Duanna Johnson and Ebony Whitaker, died. The third, Leeneshia Edwards, who was shot in the face on December 23, has survived.
We need to act now because many of us come up against discrimination, sometimes overt, often subtle, in our searches for housing and jobs, as we apply to schools, for credit, or seek medical care. Particularly in this chaotic economy, trans people, like all people who struggle against oppression, come up against an enhanced sense of vulnerability, not only through particular acts of discrimination but also because hope can be that much harder to cling to in difficult economic times. And so we stand here tonight, gathered for the first time in the history of this state and, perhaps, in the history of this country, as people of faith communities who have come together to take a public stand for human dignity. Here and now, we join our various voices together, saying explicitly that the “all” in “all are created equal” does and must include transgender people. We stand here tonight, profoundly aware of the danger, sick to death of it, and ready, by God, for change. We cannot let one more year go by without enacting fully inclusive non-discrimination legislation at the federal level, and at the state level, here in Massachusetts.
We are here as people of faith because we believe that danger, like fear, can never have the last word. And with what our new President has called the “audacity of hope,” we are here because we know that we have an unprecedented opportunity. Particularly this week, as we celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama, a president more supportive of our lives and livelihoods than any previous president, it could not be clearer that this is a moment of profound opportunity. Indeed, our gathering tonight feels to me like an extension of the incredible dream that we are beginning to live into with this new President. And, of course, this dream is the expansive vision articulated so passionately and brilliantly by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose birthday we celebrated earlier this week.
In April of 1963, as Dr. King sat in a jail cell, he responded to white, moderate clergy who had come out against his work in Birmingham, arguing that he was being too disruptive, that now was the time to wait, to be patient, not to press forward. This was an argument that Dr. King could not abide. He responded in his open “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail”, with the familiar words “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Then he continued, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly” [Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail,” in ed. James Melvin Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers), 290]. That is why we are gathered here as people of faith tonight—because while our faiths are many and varied, we know and we honor the sacred reality that we are all connected. Those of us who are transgender may differ from those of us who are not in a number of profound ways, but make no mistake, all of us suffer when any of us does.
But it isn’t enough for us to simply know that. We have to act on it. As Dr. King continued, “We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of [people] willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always right to do right” (296). My hope is that, in this kairos, this moment of danger and opportunity, we will leave this gathering tonight with what Dr. King termed “a sense of cosmic urgency” (297).
But not before we make our commitment real. I ask you to turn now to the leaf cards under your chairs. These leaves are our way of calling one another forward to recognize our interconnectivity, and the profound impact that we, as people of faith, can have in our communities when we work together in recognition of that connection.
The Tree of Life is an image with which a number of faith traditions express our connection to one another and to all life. And so I invite you to read the suggestions onyour card and to consider how you can make a unique and lasting impact on transgender equality in your faith community and beyond. Then, beginning with those of us in the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality, and our invited speakers, I invite you to fill out your card and to mark that commitment and connection by coming forward to put it on the tree. When you have finished, please return to your seats for the conclusion of our program.*******
The cards on the tree were quite beautiful, and symbolized nicely what the gathering was all about. Event Co-chairs Sean Delmore and Mycroft Masada Holmes then wrapped up the event.
I am incredibly grateful to Keshet, especially senior organizer Orly Jacobovits, without whom the event would never even have gotten off the ground, let alone come to fruition.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Our event "An Act Of Faith"!
I've posted about it on my MasadArts blog -- here's that link:
http://masadarts.blogspot.com/2009/01/icte-keshet-event-act-of-faith.html
And here's that post:
I’m a founding member of the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality (ICTE) and Chair of Keshet’s Transgender Working Group (TWiG), and tonight we held an event called “An Act Of Faith (Massachusetts Communities Of Faith Speak Out For Transgender Equality)”. AAOF was actually the first interfaith transgender event in Massachusetts and perhaps beyond! How long overdue, and yet how timely.
AAOF was the campaign 'kickoff' for ICTE’s and my primary work this year -- helping people and communities of faith support An Act Relative To Gender-Based Discrimination And Hate Crimes. That's the bill that we came close to passing last year; it would add "gender identity and expression" to the state's discrimination (housing, employment, education and credit) and hate crime laws. I and all other transgender people in Massachusetts would finally truly have civil rights (we still have them only in Boston, Cambridge and Northampton)! And everyone else's gender would finally be fully protected too. The bill was refiled on Wednesday, January 14th, in the Massachusetts House and Senate, and we plan to pass it into law this year.
I was one of the two Event Co-Chairs and MCs (Masters of Ceremonies) – the other was Sean Delmore (Program Coordinator - LBGT@MIT; Candidate for Ordination – Deacon - United Methodist Church; Member - ICTE;). I’d never chaired or MCed an event before, but I couldn’t have had a better debut! The event was so wonderful and successful! I am so happy about it and hopeful about our work this year! I’ve never been prouder of ICTE, Keshet, and everyone else involved! AAOF literally meant the world to me as an interfaith transgender person and leader.
We had a Welcome from Rabbi Daniel Judson (Director of Professional Development and Placement - Hebrew College Rabbinical School; Member – ICTE), Sean and I, Gunner Scott (Executive Director - Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition), and Matthew O’Malley (Political Director – MassEquality).
We had Songs from Judah-Abijah Dorrington (Chair - Boston Area Black Pride, Director of LGBTQI Programs - Wellesley College, Executive Director - People to People / Dorrington & Saunders Assoc.) -- Lift Every Voice And Sing and the Battle Hymn Of The Republic.
We had a time called Planting A Seed – Judah spoke, as did Jennifer Levi (Director - Transgender Rights Project – GLAD).
We had a time called Growing Roots -- Rev. Tiffany Steinwert (Pastor - Cambridge Welcoming Ministries - United Methodist Church), Reverend Father Toni Amato (Order of Saint John the Divine; Director & Founder - Write Here Write Now), and Marla Marcum (Co-Chair - Reconciling Ministries - New England United Methodist Church; Candidate for Ordination - Deacon; Member - ICTE) spoke, Rabbi Judson spoke again.
We had a time called Branching Out -- Representative Denise Provost (Massachusetts House), Representative Carl Sciortino (Massachusetts House, co-sponsor of the bill), and Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge (Priest - St. Luke's and St. Margaret's Episcopal Church; Founding Member - TransEpiscopal and ICTE) spoke.
We had a Call To Action – a ritual in which attendees filled out commitment cards about how they would work to support the bill this year; the cards were printed as colored paper leaves and hung on a bare Tree Of Life until it was beautifully foliated.
There was a Closing where Sean and I spoke again. And then there was “schmoozing” – refreshments, talking, photography and more.
For the flyer as a PDF, click here.
For the program as two PDFs, click here for the outside and click here for the inside.
For my speech (given during the Welcome) as a Google (Word) Document, click here.
For Ethan Jacobs’ Bay Windows article, click here. AAOF was also in the Keshet enewsletter, on the ICTE blog, and elsewhere.
One of our many blessings was being photographed by three professionals:
Ethan Halainen, Keshet Communications Assistant – for Keshet’s Flickr page of his AAOF photos, click here.
Marilyn Humphries, Bay Windows photographer – for her Flickr page of AAOF photos, click here.
Bill Wasserman, my father – for my Picasa Web album of his AAOF photos, click here.
Thank you oh so much, ICTE, Keshet, our cosponsors, our speakers, and everyone else who worked on, attended and participated in this event!
http://masadarts.blogspot.com/2009/01/icte-keshet-event-act-of-faith.html
And here's that post:
I’m a founding member of the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality (ICTE) and Chair of Keshet’s Transgender Working Group (TWiG), and tonight we held an event called “An Act Of Faith (Massachusetts Communities Of Faith Speak Out For Transgender Equality)”. AAOF was actually the first interfaith transgender event in Massachusetts and perhaps beyond! How long overdue, and yet how timely.
AAOF was the campaign 'kickoff' for ICTE’s and my primary work this year -- helping people and communities of faith support An Act Relative To Gender-Based Discrimination And Hate Crimes. That's the bill that we came close to passing last year; it would add "gender identity and expression" to the state's discrimination (housing, employment, education and credit) and hate crime laws. I and all other transgender people in Massachusetts would finally truly have civil rights (we still have them only in Boston, Cambridge and Northampton)! And everyone else's gender would finally be fully protected too. The bill was refiled on Wednesday, January 14th, in the Massachusetts House and Senate, and we plan to pass it into law this year.
I was one of the two Event Co-Chairs and MCs (Masters of Ceremonies) – the other was Sean Delmore (Program Coordinator - LBGT@MIT; Candidate for Ordination – Deacon - United Methodist Church; Member - ICTE;). I’d never chaired or MCed an event before, but I couldn’t have had a better debut! The event was so wonderful and successful! I am so happy about it and hopeful about our work this year! I’ve never been prouder of ICTE, Keshet, and everyone else involved! AAOF literally meant the world to me as an interfaith transgender person and leader.
We had a Welcome from Rabbi Daniel Judson (Director of Professional Development and Placement - Hebrew College Rabbinical School; Member – ICTE), Sean and I, Gunner Scott (Executive Director - Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition), and Matthew O’Malley (Political Director – MassEquality).
We had Songs from Judah-Abijah Dorrington (Chair - Boston Area Black Pride, Director of LGBTQI Programs - Wellesley College, Executive Director - People to People / Dorrington & Saunders Assoc.) -- Lift Every Voice And Sing and the Battle Hymn Of The Republic.
We had a time called Planting A Seed – Judah spoke, as did Jennifer Levi (Director - Transgender Rights Project – GLAD).
We had a time called Growing Roots -- Rev. Tiffany Steinwert (Pastor - Cambridge Welcoming Ministries - United Methodist Church), Reverend Father Toni Amato (Order of Saint John the Divine; Director & Founder - Write Here Write Now), and Marla Marcum (Co-Chair - Reconciling Ministries - New England United Methodist Church; Candidate for Ordination - Deacon; Member - ICTE) spoke, Rabbi Judson spoke again.
We had a time called Branching Out -- Representative Denise Provost (Massachusetts House), Representative Carl Sciortino (Massachusetts House, co-sponsor of the bill), and Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge (Priest - St. Luke's and St. Margaret's Episcopal Church; Founding Member - TransEpiscopal and ICTE) spoke.
We had a Call To Action – a ritual in which attendees filled out commitment cards about how they would work to support the bill this year; the cards were printed as colored paper leaves and hung on a bare Tree Of Life until it was beautifully foliated.
There was a Closing where Sean and I spoke again. And then there was “schmoozing” – refreshments, talking, photography and more.
For the flyer as a PDF, click here.
For the program as two PDFs, click here for the outside and click here for the inside.
For my speech (given during the Welcome) as a Google (Word) Document, click here.
For Ethan Jacobs’ Bay Windows article, click here. AAOF was also in the Keshet enewsletter, on the ICTE blog, and elsewhere.
One of our many blessings was being photographed by three professionals:
Ethan Halainen, Keshet Communications Assistant – for Keshet’s Flickr page of his AAOF photos, click here.
Marilyn Humphries, Bay Windows photographer – for her Flickr page of AAOF photos, click here.
Bill Wasserman, my father – for my Picasa Web album of his AAOF photos, click here.
Thank you oh so much, ICTE, Keshet, our cosponsors, our speakers, and everyone else who worked on, attended and participated in this event!