Chrissie

Chrissie, the Totally Failed Christian.

Why did I choose this title?

Photography by Josh Tinker-Reid.

Chrissie, The Totally Failed Christian.

Someone heard me mention this title for my blog, and immediately assumed I must be meaning Christianity has failed me. That was not, is not my intention in this title. For me, Christianity is an overgrown wild rose that has failed to be lovingly tended, it is more bramble and thorns, with the glimpse of an occasionally beautiful rose. It is full of sinners and saints, past and present, whom I love deeply. What I meant, was that I have been unable to fulfil the demands of Christianity; I have failed.

I have battled with severe gender dysphoria, and dysmorphia, throughout my life, from my earliest memories. Throughout puberty and adolescence, I tried, repeatedly to take my own life. The shame of being somehow queer, yet unable to define it in myself, led to 45 years of relentless suicidal ideation, a life long torment. That ceased when I got honest with God, rather than living a lie, and started living as me, Chrissie, transfemme.

Aliens and Strangers in a Foreign Land.

Today, the general label folks like to slap on us, is that we are transgender. The label has stuck, and many of us have adopted it as shorthand, to indicate a complex inner universe in an individual, and of great diversity within the transgender community. Like being asked where you come from, is not always helpful; generalisations, stereo-typing, and personal experience of one or two other similar people we may have met, all kick in.

‘I’m from India.’, ‘I’m from America.’ Or even, ‘I’m from the USA.’

Usually, ignorance is the larger part of not understanding someone. Listening, seems too much, too difficult, especially for Christians, when it comes to understanding ‘transgender people’.

Instead, we are subject to judgement, especially it seems, from within the church culture I have been formed by; conservative evangelical church. They are rich, powerful, noisy, vociferous and at times just plain ugly, mean, nasty and vindicative.

I came out as transgender to myself in 2013. It was the very painful shock, in the midst of a personal breakdown, and the admittance of a life-time of denial and violent repression. A year later I came out to my wife and family, then slowly and cautiously, to friends, and lastly, fearing rejection, to the church and close Christian friends. My caution was fully justified. Rejection from my closest Christian friends and from the church we were part of, was total.

The Cursing of Priests.

2017, Vaughan Roberts, Anglican Priest in my home town, was one of the first, in the rush to sign the Nashville Declaration, in which the authors and signatories claim that you cannot be both transgender and Christian. They go much further, to state that if a Christian affirms a transgender person in their identity, they are departing from the true Christian faith. On this basis, St Aldates Church, just a minute’s walk, from Roberts own dominion, St Ebbes Church, have departed from the true Christian faith, having welcomed me, (superficially) for the last four years.

So there we have it, from Vaughan Roberts, Priest and judge, part of the GAFCON mob, – I’m not a Christian in his book.

Is Roberts a religious extremist, a fundamentalist? He objects to clergy being critiqued, or as he calls it ‘caricatured’, yet seems to have no problem at all, excommunicating me from the body of Christ as a heretic. So, yes, I guess I am a totally failed Christian in his heart, mind, and eyes.

The same year, another Anglican Priest, one you might consider one of their ‘High Priests’, the Right Reverend, Professor and revered, almost worshipped theologian, NT, or more affectionately known as ‘Tom’, Wright, wrote a letter to the Times.

‘The confusion about gender identity is a modern, and now internet-fueled, form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism. The Gnostic, one who “knows”, has discovered the secret of “who I really am”, behind the deceptive outward appearance (in Rifkind’s apt phrase, the “ungainly, boring, fleshy one”). This involves denying the goodness, or even the ultimate reality, of the natural world. Nature, however, tends to strike back, with the likely victims in this case being vulnerable and impressionable youngsters who, as confused adults, will pay the price for their elders’ fashionable fantasies.’

I’m not going to say much about Wright, waste my time on such bigotry, there are many highly qualified critiques of his letter, except to note his mocking, contemptuous tone, expressed towards people like myself, and that this priest is yet again parading, – is claiming his personal opinions as absolute truth. Classic Dunning Kruger syndrome.

Wright parodies and curses us. He seems wholly ignorant of the clinical conditions of gender dysphoria and dysmorphia, and exerts the Trumpism of his own peculiar and personal faith.

So yet again, I find myself condemned by the high priests of Christian faith.

You might find this critique insightful. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/mercynotsacrifice/2017/08/04/nt-wright-calling-transgender-people-gnostics/

My last example, is sadly, tragically, yet another Anglican Priest, Ian Paul. I can’t call him reverend, because quite simply, he is not. I have yet to encounter any reverence towards me in his online persona, only contempt. Paul has been campaigning, for years, from his privileged position as priest and respected theologian, against transgender people, clearly labouring under the belief, like Roberts and Wright, that transgender people threaten their/his, perceived purity of the church. We are a convenient scapegoat for their own many sins, that they are blind to, and unable to confess.

Ian Paul’s latest online incarnation is as a leader and co-author of the ‘No Greater Love Foundation’. Here he chooses to platform and promote an article about transgender people, which should really warrant him being subject to a Clergy Disciplinary Measure, and the suspension of his license until he shows some humility and repentance, but hey, ‘No Greater Love Foundation’ have clearly set themselves up as martyrs for the cause they serve, and this is, after all, is the Church of England, – perfectly gifted at sweeping things under their carpet.

The Rhetoric of Erasure.

In an article written by one of the foundations authors/leaders, about Katy Forbes, Paul platforms the following rhetoric,

‘It was Nicola Sturgeon’s descent into transgender absurdity which brought her premiership to an end. The belief that women and men are interchangeable, and its necessary corollary, that women are a disposable category, foundered on the rocks of its total absurdity. Getting away from this should, if the SNP has any sense at all, be a top priority.

Which is why it needs Kate Forbes. Her opposition to gay ‘marriage’ is not a quirk which should be tolerated. It is, on the contrary, the only possible position for anyone who does not wish also to affirm transgenderism. Because all of the absurd conclusions of transgenderism are already present in gay ‘marriage’, and it is a vain hope to think we can have the latter without the former.

Like Mare’s Tail growing in the garden, pulling up the Trans plant will do nothing to destroy the root. And while the root remains, the plant will simply grow back.

…cont’d,

And so it is that support for gay ‘marriage’ in fact leads to the absurdities of transgenderism. The roots of the former, lead to the invasive weeds of the latter.’

It does need to be pointed out that the use of ‘transgenderism’ as a collective noun and verb, to describe transgender people, is the obvious attempt to dehumanise us, to make us nameless and faceless. This is to make their argument about an ideology, and not about people. The reality is, in their lived experience most transgender people are trying to deal with gender dysphoria and dysmorphia, and the acute suffering those conditions can afflict someone with, as best we can. For Paul, in his role as ‘white’ saviour, (and I don’t mean white as meaning race here, but am equating it to notions of empirical and colonial superiority), his only remedy is ‘conversion practises’. Arguing about transgenderism, dehumanises us, and removes us from their conscience. Talk about us as weeds and they can erase us.

What is more frightening here, is Priests, taking the rhetorical devises of pre-war Germany, to dehumanise us still further, in their language we are reduced to being invasive weeds that need to be uprooted and destroyed, in order to prevent further damage to their ‘garden’. The allegory is both stark and chilling.

How does Paul suppose he can get rid of the invasive weed of ‘transgenderism’ without getting rid of people like me? I am employed full time as an Outreach and Development Worker with Transgender, Intersex, and Non-binary People’ by St Columbas United Reformed Church, Oxford. I spend my life loving, serving and seeking to protect transgender people from the type of extremist spiritual abuse being hurled at us here on his website, constructed for just this purpose.

George Lemkin, created of the word genocide, and its various definitions. When the United Nations adopted Lemkin’s definition of genocide, they only adopted the definition that describes the physical annihilation and erasure of a people group by murder, war, and violence.

Lemkin also defined genocide as the attempts to erase a people and their culture by ideological, philosophical, and political means. We have seen this in the assimilation programmes run by church and state in Canada. Here ‘conversion practises’ were extensively employed, that was the whole purpose of assimilation, to ‘convert them’ to the superior, – or the supremacy of ‘white culture’ and beliefs.

Maybe someone can explain to me how Paul’s promoted rhetoric, his ideals, and his desire to convert transgender people by retaining the use of ‘conversion therapy’ is anything but an attempt to erase transgender people from his church, and it would seem, with his political campaigning, from this nation? The rhetoric he platforms is both sick and evil. It is the rhetoric of erasure. We are defined as weeds to be destroyed. No doubt he will protest and beg his innocence. He is a clever man, (in some areas of intelligence), but seems devoid of the gift of empathy towards us.

If Roberts, Wright, and Paul are representatives of the ‘True and pure Faith’, then yes, I am a totally failed Christian. I have no desire to rejoin the industry, the church, or the ideology that pays their wages. I am done with it.

The tragedy is, I hear no one in the Church of England, really calling them out, so I can only assume, therefore, that the Church of England is happy for them to demonise, dehumanise, stigmatise and pathologize me?

I guess the last thing, the thing that really broke me, and made me say, ‘I quit’, was being bullied out the church we were married in, the church we have served for 20 years, – by a gang of priests.

‘I’m done.’

I may no longer be a Christian, (if I ever, truly was), but I remain captivated by the love, beauty, and grace I find in Christ. I commit my whole being to following the Palestinian Jew from Nazareth, and I am continually renewed and transformed by their love and power within. I am, and remain, a stumbling disciple of Jesus.