What's The Church To Do With Transgender Folks? Where I Am Now
David R. Gillespie
http://david-gillespie.blogspot.com/2010/05/whats-church-to-do-with-transgender.htmlWe were sitting on a couch in my living room. He'd just recently moved back to our hometown, where I was also living at the time (early 90s) and we, who'd grown up together, were catching up on our lives. Even though we'd been so close in our younger days, we had not kept in very close contact over the past 10 years or so, even though we'd both become Presbyterian ministers.
He pulled a photograph out of his wallet and showed it to me. "Recognize her?" he asked. I replied that I didn't, thinking maybe it was a lady from up north he'd been talking about. "Look again," he said, "You know her as well as you do me."
Such was the way in which my best friend from my youth "came out" to me as a transgender individual, one who suffered from, in the words of the DSM-IV, Gender Identity Disorder (I understand it's being changed to Gender Incongruence in the next one). He had always felt, from earliest childhood, that his internal identity didn't match with the external presentation of being male.
