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I thought with Thanksgiving coming in two days I thought I would write something that hopefully inspires you to look beyond the parade, the food, the football and what it means to truly be thankful. Now I admit it is hard to be thankful when you are not living your truth. It has taking me a long time to figure this out... and then some more time to do something about it. Being grateful; living in gratitude; being thankful; living in thanksgiving, are concepts that come naturally to me. However, it seems to me even when taught to us, many of us struggle with allowing these core values to become part of our being, rather than lofty goals that only others may achieve as we focus on our own personal stories and challenges. Perhaps we may admire those who can live in gratitude, but for some reason we may not be fully inspired enough so that we will also do this.  I have taken some time to pay attention to those teachers out in the world who have inspired me. I was so resistant for such ...

“Is it OK to be Christian and transgender?” and “What’s it like to be a transgender Christian?” are questions I get asked from time to time. Just the other day, I got asked this question: “What is different about the reasons Christianity uses to condemn trans folks than LGBTQ+ folks?” It’s a really important question.  Often people talk about the “clobber passages” about LGBTQ+ people and then only talk about the ones that deal with being LGBTQ+. There are different issues at play here. If you want to go deep into the Bible verses, check out Transgender: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith by Justin Tanis. His is the absolute BEST 101 book about trans issues and the church. He covers what I’m about to outline in much more depth. Clobber passages are what people call the verses that are often used to condemn LGBTQ+ people. Normally they pull out the same seven and use them to talk about the entire community but the typical seven are about LGBQ+ identity and not transgender ...

Christian, Jewish, Muslim… Anti-Trans?  The National Records of Scotland just unveiled their most recent census results, revealing a faith demographic portrait unlike any other. For the religion category, the census offered a number of check boxes for common faiths like Roman Catholic or the Church of Scotland. It also allowed respondents to write in their own faiths. The results? Some 2,883 individuals recorded their faith as "believer in biology" – a phrase used by activists who oppose expanding transgender rights and who push back against the notion of changing genders. Notably, amongst those write-in voters was one of the world’s most famous writers. Is there a new anti-transgender faith in town? The Biology Believers The nearly 3,000 "believers in biology" didn’t come by their newfound faith by happenstance.  The campaign for women to record their religion as "believer in biology" was largely organized by the group For Women Scotland, a gender-critica...

Donald Trump has gone back to the same message, time and time again, as he criss-crosses the United States to try to fire up his Make America Great Again base. At nearly every campaign stop and in all-caps screeds on social media, he is unequivocal: The only way he will lose the presidential election on November 5 is if his Democratic rivals cheat. “Now we have two things we have to do,” he told a crowd in the battleground state of Georgia in early August. “We have to vote, and we have to make sure that we stop them from cheating because they cheat like dogs.” The former president’s false claims — widely debunked as misinformation, or outright lies — aren’t new: He’s been saying for years that the US electoral system is rife with voter fraud. But as the election fast approaches, experts say his rhetoric is intensifying, and they warn that Trump appears poised to try to subvert the results just as he did in 2020. “We are seeing this constant narrative that there’s something nefarious at...