Beyond Binaries by Mike Perez Rachel Friedman

Author:Mike Perez, Rachel Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498593663
Publisher: LEXINGTON BOOKS

Chapter 8

8Transgender Talk and Conservative Christians

Framing a Persuasive Conversation

Jim Shoopman

While progressives struggle to heal the suffering and expand the rights of transgender persons, one of the major stakeholders objecting to such expansion are conservative Christian communities. They are a vocal minority and significant voting bloc at election time. This chapter will suggest rhetorical strategies that might be productive in the personal and public discussions that progressives have with the people in these communities. There are pathways to successful dialogue that can, at least sometimes, get past name calling and refusals to discuss the matter any further. Some arguments might even be persuasive.

By “transgender rights” this chapter refers mainly to the right of transgender persons to legally define themselves—on a driver’s license for instance, or in a public restroom, by the gender with which they identify. This also refers to the right to obtain gender reassignment surgery as a medically necessary procedure and not as an elective procedure. Transgenders should also have the right to seek redress if they experience violence, harassment, or discrimination, as a protected minority in a culture that overwhelmingly privileges the heterosexual majority. This includes protection from discrimination in hiring and housing, and the right to receive the same business and government services enjoyed by everyone else.

By religious conservatives, this chapter refers primarily (though not exclusively) to two large groups in the United States—evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics. Neither religious community should be characterized monolithically. Much to the chagrin of European Catholics, Roman Catholicism in the United States is a very complex community that cannot be easily pigeonholed. American Catholics revere their pope and priests but reserve the right to their own opinions on a whole host of social issues, from birth control to the rights of sexual minorities. A 2019 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute reports that 68 percent of responding Roman Catholics were more comfortable in supporting transgender persons than they were five years ago (Greenberg et al., 2019). Despite this range of American Catholic opinion, in June 2019 the Vatican issued an official statement entitled “Male and Female He Created Them: Towards A Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education.” According to one online analysis this official Catholic statement argues that the transgender movement is an instance of placing human desires over an obviously divine mandate (Horgos, 2019). Traditional Catholic argument usually stresses their concept of natural law as an expression of divine intention. Despite these official stances, there exists organized advocacy for sexual minorities within the Roman Catholic church through such associations as Equally Blessed, which describes itself as “a coalition of three Catholic Organizations that have spent more than 120 years working on behalf of LGBT+ people and their families” (Equally Blessed, 2020).

Evangelical Protestants are often lumped together and perceived in popular terms as a religious bloc of predictable social conservatives, but this also is not entirely accurate. Evangelicals themselves cannot even agree on exactly what the term “evangelical” really means. It may be best defined

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