On Feb. 22, President Trump rescinded protections for transgender students in public schools. On Feb. 26, Christian churches celebrated Transfiguration Sunday.
The transfiguring story goes something like this. Jesus is walking with some close friends. They are going up the mountain to pray. They get to the top of that mountain and there Jesus is transfigured. Walking up the mountain Jesus had been familiar to his friend, but there on the mountaintop he dazzles. He shines through with white light, beaming from the inside out.
In the changed visual field, Moses and Elijah are seen there with him, figures crossing time in the transfiguring story of Jesus to affirm the change that is happening, the thing is being revealed about Jesus. It is a mystical announcement of a material truth. It is a holy scene of a human being becoming.
Many progressive Christians, look to the story of Jesus’ transfiguration not as event in history telling us only something about Jesus, a biological fact set in stone, but rather as a jumping-off point to expand our understanding of our experience as human beings. Or as a metaphoric way of entering into our human experience of change and becoming.
Putting it in non-Christian framework, we could apply Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualization. Or Eric Erickson’s psychosocial theory of human development. Transfiguration is a celebration of our being and becoming who we are fully, in front of others.
Transfiguration has a particular resonance with transgender experience; a change of figure, of form, an outward expression of a reality already felt within.
I lead the children’s church at Haydenville Congregational Church.
At the end of children’s church, the parents come up to gather their children. One child lost his barrette. When his mom came up this week, we were feeling around the plush high pile rug searching for his new barrette. Success! We found it and it was quickly back in his beautiful black hair on the right side, just where he wanted it.
“This is part of his transfiguring,” his mom said to me. He was leaning into her, hugging with one arm, so at a perpendicular, open toward both of us. He showed his mom his name tag, “look what I put there” raising the name tag proudly up to show us “hir” written in marker, a new declaration.
Haydenville has an easy and exceptional practice of welcome. On their name tags they indicate their pronouns. This 6-year old had been evolving the pronouns ze chose. A couple weeks prior, going around the circle in children’s church, introducing each other by saying our name and pronoun and something we love, “he and sometimes she” was hir declaration.
Last Sunday, the Sunday of Jesus’ transfiguring, a 6-year-old knew precisely what his mom meant by saying to me, “this is a part of his transfiguring.” Hir transfiguring.
Transfiguring is not just transformation from any one shape to another. Transfiguring is a revealing of the figure within the figure, the form within form. Transfiguring is a becoming who we are in front of others. Jesus is shining through – naked – with the light that is associated with God in the story of his transfiguring. And then there are others with him who are representatives of God’s power over the years. There is a voice symbolizing God that calls announcing, “This is my beloved son, listen to him.”
Ze gave hir mom permission, “you can tell her” meaning me, and she told me some of the journey of this 6-year-old articulating who it is ze knows hirself to be. The long hair ze wants and they are planning for, the bows in the hair when it is long, the girls clothes. It is not surprising to hir mom, though the clarity with which hir articulates hir transfiguring self is awesome.
In Maslow’s hierachy of needs toward self-actualization, safety and protection are the second foundational need. Safety need not be extravagant, but it must be assured. It can be conveyed in an act as simple really as allowing transgender students in schools to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity. The Trump Administration pulled out this ground.
The next step up toward self-actualization, toward transfiguring, is belonging and love.
Who among us does not now the desire for belonging and love? You don’t have to be transgender, or gay, to know the real struggle and pain of staying hidden away because you have being taught, told or observed that something about you is expected to stay hidden away, closeted in shame. The protections that had been put in place for transgender children and youth in schools to use the bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity were one part of the puzzle of freeing children from unnecessary and harmful – too often deadly – shame.
Alongside the protections of legal structures are the affirmations of social practice and language. The dialogue of people who care and express their care can itself creating in impulse toward the safety that is needed. Words matter. Haydenville’s practice of using pronouns on their name tags is one example of conveying belonging to a person in their becoming.
Here’s another. I remember as a young teen, my aunt always asking me, “So any lucky boy? You dating anyone?” I would tuck my head, blushing, embarrassed. She never asked me, no one did, “Any lucky girl? You dating anyone?” That simple shift in pronoun, that one word changed, could have opened me to my life much earlier, and I would have been grateful for less time living in shame.
A question like that one, opening room for something a little different, can be offered to anyone. It frees us into the possibility of ourselves. What pronouns do you use? is one such simple but beautifully potent question.
The 6-year-old transfiguring child in children’s church this week has already known the bullying, the shaming of hir difference. When ze was teased last week for wearing a lavender shirt and barrette ze said to the one teasing hir, “I am just being myself.” And when ze was teased again, ze said it again, “I am just being myself.” But then, when ze was teased again, that third time, ze hid behind a chair.
Yes, this 6-year-old child had the conviction of self to say, “I am just being myself.” How many of us – 35, 45, 65 – have not yet been able to say that, out loud, in public? Announcing ourselves, transfiguring. And yes, this 6-year-old is also vulnerable and tender and close to shame’s hiding place.
I support every single thing and person that made it possible for this little one to say I am just being who I am. The pronouns, the love, the questions asked, the signs held up. We are responsible for making space for children to become themselves.
Where safety is no longer assured, where the federal government has failed to use its power to protect, the importance of social expressions of love and belonging is all the more important.
There is speculation that it is to satisfy or in agreement with the religious (read “Christian”) right that the Trump administration acted to rescind these protections for trans youth. The religious right does not speak for Christianity, though many of us on the much more progressive side have let it for too long. No more.
On Feb. 22, the Trump administration rescinded protections for transgender students in public schools. On Feb. 26, Christian churches celebrated the transfiguration. And here in Haydenville, in one of those churches, we celebrated the beautiful and powerful transfiguring of a 6-year-old. And we will continue to do so.
Lindsey Peterson, of Northampton, is director of the children’s church at Haydenville Congregational Church, and creator of “The None & Some Project,” a podcast about people’s religious and spiritual lives.