God Made Me Transgender, And God Does Not Make Mistakes
It is always a tragedy when anybody takes their own life, doubly so when they are so young. This week Leelah Alcorn took her own life. In her note, she mentioned various reasons for her course of actions, from not thinking she would be able to pass as female to the lack of acceptance from her family. In her suicide letter, she stated that she had come out to her mother, and her mom’s response was that “God doesn’t make mistakes.”
God doesn’t make mistakes.
Out of the whole situation, which leaves a lot to digest, this one statement has been rattling around my brain ever since the public outcry to end reparative therapy began. This statement is at the core of why so many right winged, conservative Christians are at odds with the transgender community.
There is a view amongst some Christians that being transgender is an affront to God’s design and an outward sign of rebellion. The purported argument goes if you were born male that is the way God intended you to be. Since “God doesn’t make mistakes,” living as anything other than male is an abomination worthy of scorn, admonition, isolation, or worse.
God doesn’t make mistakes.
It is not only right winged Christians that hold onto the belief that being transgender means that there is something wrong with a person. Transgender identity has been labeled as a mental disorder, a birth defect, an abnormality and a variance. Boiling it all down, it all equals the same message: if you are transgender that must mean there is something wrong with you.
It is thinking like this that makes transgender people an outcast class of citizens.
It is thinking like this that makes it okay to minimalize a transgender person and to make them the subject of ridicule and attack. The notion that transgender people are somehow defective leads to bigotry, discrimination and other forms of nastiness.
The conservative Christian argument is that God doesn’t make mistakes, and with that statement I totally agree. God doesn’t make mistakes; He is omnipotent and omnipresent; He created all things, and by His divine will all things continue to operate the way that they should. He holds the bonds of the universe together.
God doesn’t make mistakes.
It is the opinion of some conservative Christians that transgender individuals must answer for their so called “abomination.” The church does not ask anyone to answer for being born blonde-haired or brown eyed. Nor does the church ask anyone to answer for being left handed. So why do they make that a condition for the person who is born transgender to be accepted?
In fact, being transgender does not mean that I was born in the wrong body. Being transgender means that God has placed me in the body that looks like one gender while I identify as being another. It is neither right nor wrong that I am a female in a male body, as much as it is neither right nor wrong that I am six foot tall and left handed. These things just are.
It might be a hard truth for some Christians to swallow, but God in fact made people who are transsexual.
The amount of data leaves no doubt that transgender people are well aware of their situation even before the concept of sexual orientation enters the mix. When a Christian says that being transgender is a sin or an abomination, they are really trying to tell God that He made a mistake and that flies in the face of all that they say they believe. For those who question why God would make a person transgender, He has already answered them in his word.
Let’s look at Job 38:2, “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?” Isn’t that what the church is doing? If we are honest, we should admit that we do not have the capacity to understand how or why God works.
Nor should we try to speak for God when we can never have a complete understanding of how He operates.
In Isaiah 55:8-9 God says, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts.”
It is common for people to question why and to act out of their own frame of reference. We want things to operate in ways that we understand and process. The problem is that we are not omnipotent, we do not have all knowledge, and we operate more out of assumption than we do on fact. Though I would like to understand why I was born transgender, why God would put me in one vessel instead of another, it is likely that I will never understand until I am in His presence. It is a human failing to operate under our own limited understanding and often times that leads us astray.
God made me transgender for a reason, and when I try to fight against my own nature is when I leave the path that he had laid out for me.
Likewise, good meaning people want transgender people to conform to their assumption of what God intended for their lives. Since some cannot comprehend what being transgender is, they have a hard time accepting that it is ordained by God. Instead of aiding transgender people along life’s journey, some try to deter them down a path that the Lord never intended them to travel. Since we do not understand why God made a person transgender, who are we to question?
God doesn’t make mistakes.
God made me transgender; that is the way that it is. He did not make a mistake, for it was in His plans that I am who I am. Psalm 139:13-14 still hold true:
“For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well.”
Photo via flickr Kyknoord