*Trans

My longtime friend, almost 20 years … we’ve been through a lot of life on Planet Earth in those 20 years … for all but one of them I knew my friend as a male. We were always actual genuine friends [not wink, wink, “friends“]. Not sexually interested in one another. It was one of those friendships where gender just plain didn’t matter.

Sometime during the past year my friend told me that he was transgender, and was transitioning to female. This year started with the outward transition complete. She has a new name, a new job, a new body, and a new wardrobe. If you met her for the first time today you’d never guess that she spent any amount of time on Earth living as a man.

Jesus commanded his disciples to love one another.

³⁴ “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. ³⁵ By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

John 13:34-35

I did read an interesting book on this topic by an Evangelical Christian author. One question he posed is: why are we biased in favor of the body when thinking about who a person “really” is? Let’s just suppose that God creates some people with the soul of one gender and the body of the other gender. There are plenty of people who claim this is their lived experience … roughly 5% of all humans across cultures and ethnicities. Believing what they say about their lived experience, why would we assume that the gender displayed by their body is who that person “really” is, and the gender they feel in their soul is the “mistake” that needs to be corrected? What’s wrong with saying the soul is right and the body is what needs to be corrected?

My Bible doesn’t tell me to judge others. It tells me to love others.

I have prayed about this a lot, and I am at peace with it. My friend is my friend, living life on earth as best she can. I cannot possibly claim to know better than she does what God had in mind when He created her.