By Sister Luisa Derouen, America, February 25, 2021
Courtney Sharp is the first transgender woman I met, back in 1999, and we have remained friends all these years. I got an email from her recently. She had just read the document from June 2020 written by retiring Archbishop Robert Carlson regarding transgender people. She began her comments by saying, “I’ve been thinking about how Christians can take a simplistic view of things and quickly reach harmful conclusions that support their predetermined concepts.” What he said about her and other transgender people did not at all reflect who she is. Like her, I was deeply disheartened by his statement.
What is said about transgender people is personal to me since they have profoundly shaped my ministry and my own life in God for more than 22 years. When I began to minister among them, very few people even knew the word. In the last few years transgender people have become much more visible, but given the fact that there are only about 1.5 million trans people in an American population of about 330 million people, most Americans don’t personally know someone who is transgender. As a result, there is a lot of confusion about what “transgender” means and how cisgender Catholics should think about and relate to the transgender people in their midst.
Archbishop Carlson is the most recent of several bishops to offer directives about transgender people to the Catholic faithful of their dioceses. Like other bishops before him, the statement begins by declaring how important it is that transgender people be respected and treated with compassion and sensitivity as children of God.
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