* Beyond Adam and Eve
    * Christians reach out to the transgender community
    * By Becky Garrison

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/3071/beyond_adam_and_eve/

      When people discuss the rights of lesbians and gays in contemporary U.S. culture, and across religious denominations, the acronym "LGBT" is used as a shorthand: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender. But are transgender people really being taken into account? What's the state of the struggle, where transpeople are concerned?

      "Am I still your child, God?"

      The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco recounts how this gay-positive church struggled with how to welcome a very attractive ->-bleeped-<- man who walked through their doors in the mid 1980s. Some straight men in the congregation felt odd when they learned the woman they'd felt attracted to was a man, while some women did not want to share the bathroom with a male—even though she dressed like a female. After a month or so this person ended up leaving the community because at this time, the church could not create a welcoming space for those on the outer fringes of the LGBT community. By the time distinguished evolutionary biologist and transwoman Joan Roughgarden came to St. Gregory's around 2002, the community had learned enough that she could call this church her home.

Interesting here -- my CHOICE was to become and Episcopalian 40 years ago, but I am one who has NEVER felt a choice about being at first, ->-bleeped-<-, and now fully realized as transsexual.  They missed that little point about the choice of church membership in an otherwise hopeful article.

I am not "out" at my parish yet, but its a matter of months by now.  I don't think it was a conscious thing toward transgenders, but recently a bathroom that had been Women, became unisex due to a plumbing problem where a permit was needed and this one was the only one that we could make into a handicapped facility too. 

On a note that nearly had me in tears from laughter, our priest (who is female) was preaching about the church Feast Of The Transfiguration from which the parish name comes, and actually said that " a transgendered person who goes through surgery has physically stepped into the complete sort of change that a spiritually transfigured person should be approaching, complete and defining for the rest of their lives."  Next morning I got my first installment on my hormones.