I’m not a person of faith, but I thought this speech by Jay Hulme, “The Genderweird Vibe of God”, was illuminating. It’s about transgender people and the Christian faith, and whether the latter has room for the former. For Hume, the answer is a definite hallelujah.

The core of the anti-trans movement, and therefore anti-trans theology, is restriction. A restriction placed upon the possibilities held within humanity, and a restriction placed upon God. A restriction that shrinks and conforms God to the image of the oppressor, denying the oppressed full personhood, as delivered by the wondrous seal of imago dei – the promise and fact that we are created in the image of God. Because if trans people are not made in the image of God – or, if we follow a more polite, but still transphobic form of the stance, if trans people are made in the image of God, but our transness is not – then God is a cis person. Just as, in times gone by, it was believed that God was a white person. A white man. A rich white man. A rich white man with power. But God is bigger than that. God is bigger than the boundaries we build around ourselves, and the categories we use to confine and divide humanity.