Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Every year this day arrives heavy. It presses on my soul in ways I can feel in my bones. And every year, I find myself grieving—not only for the lives stolen by hatred, but for the version of Christianity that formed me, a faith that taught me not to see the humanity of my trans neighbors.

I was raised in a Christianity so stripped of empathy and compassion that I couldn’t even acknowledge a trans person’s existence, let alone embrace them as fully human and deeply worthy of love. That’s what broken religion does. It hollows you out. It distorts your moral compass. It tells you that good is evil and evil is good. It convinces you that cruelty is righteousness.

And that legacy still torments me.

Because seeing another human being as “less than” is not something Jesus would do—not the Jesus I was raised to love, and certainly not the Jesus I know now.

Scripture tells us “there is no male or female, for we are all one in Christ.” That one line alone obliterates the gender binaries that Christians cling to so aggressively today. Jesus moved through the world with a radical openness that terrified the gatekeepers, just as trans people terrify the ones who need rigid categories to feel comfortable.

So what happened?

The patriarchy happened.

Patriarchy took a boundary-breaking, non–gender-conforming Jesus and replaced Him with a sanitized, weaponized, and misogynistic version of Paul—a Paul that scholars widely agree didn’t even write the verses used to silence women and police gender today. We have pulpits across America preaching doctrines written by somebody pretending to be Paul, causing real and measurable harm to real people.

This is not just a failure of theology. It is a failure of biblical literacy. And it is a failure of love.

And if we are honest—brutally honest—most of the church still doesn’t care.

They shrug at the staggering rates of violence. They look away from the fear our trans siblings carry every day. They legislate people out of existence and call it “faith.” They mourn the unborn while refusing to mourn the dead. They preach “love your neighbor” while refusing to even speak the names of the neighbors they helped bury.

This is the hypocrisy that rots the church from the inside out. This is the cruelty that makes days like today necessary.

Transgender Day of Remembrance forces us to confront a truth the church has evaded for far too long: its silence has never been neutral. Its silence has always been violence.

But here is where the ancient Celtic stream of our faith rises with clarity and courage.

In Celtic Christianity, every person is seen as a “thin place”—a meeting point between heaven and earth. Every person carries the flame of the Imago Dei, a divine spark no institution, doctrine, or bigotry can snuff out.

And our trans siblings? They shine with a brilliance the church has refused to see—but God never has.

So today, as we speak their names and honor their stories, we also make a vow:

• To repent of the harm done in Christ’s name.
• To stand between trans bodies and those who wish them erased.
• To reclaim a gospel that heals instead of wounds.
• To embody a faith that protects, celebrates, and uplifts the fullness of God’s creation—including the sacred beauty of trans lives.

To my trans siblings:
You deserved better from the church. You deserved safety, celebration, and belonging—not suspicion, erasure, or fear.

We cannot undo the harm that has been done. But we can promise this:

We will not be silent.
We will not look away.
We will not let your light be forgotten.

You are beloved.
You are sacred.
You are a blessing in a world that desperately needs the truth you bring.

And as long as we draw breath, we will fight for a world where you not only survive—but flourish.