A Brief Guide to Ministry with LGBTQIA Youth

Cody J. Sanders

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781611648164
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Sexualidad y género en la religión

Despite our best efforts to create welcoming and affirming congregations, the reality is that church can still be a harmful place to LGBTQIA youth.

Inside A Brief Guide to Ministry with LGBTQIA Youth, author Cody J. Sanders challenges pastors and church leaders to reflect on the various trials that adolescence brings for LGBTQIA youth. Designed for congregations that currently have a theologically and biblically affirming stance toward the LGBTQIA community, this unique resource provides insight and practical advice for tough questions like:

• How does an affirming stance toward LGBTQIA people affect the day-to-day experience of teenagers in a church setting?
  
• In what ways can a church's youth ministry have a positive impact on the lives of LGBTQIA youth who want to fully live out their Christian faith and their gender identity?
  
• How can a pastor, youth minister, or youth ministry volunteer embrace, nurture, and provide skillful care for LGBTQIA youth in a congregation or community?

A glossary of terms to use when talking about LGBTQIA issues and a list of national and location resources that can be used to support LGBTQIA youth are included.

1

A Brief Guide to Gender
Identity and Expression

Lydia has been an active part of the community at First Church since she was a toddler. She grew up in the church’s Sunday school and when she hit the seventh grade, Lydia entered full force into the church’s youth group, singing in the youth choir, serving on the leadership council, and never missing a youth retreat. Gregarious, smart, funny—Lydia is a youthful, energetic fixture at First Church, and her parents are a steady presence in the congregation’s life as well.

At fourteen, Lydia is beginning to verbalize to herself some things that she has sensed in a more intuitive way since she was very little. Emerging into adolescence, Lydia knows that living life as a woman doesn’t fit her experience. For as long as Lydia can remember, she hasn’t felt at ease with the gender roles and expressions she was expected to live into.

Lydia has grown up in an era when transgender people on television and in the media are no longer a rarity, so she has identified with the experience of trans people she has heard on television for a few years now. But Lydia also doesn’t believe that transitioning to living life as a man quite fits her experience either. In Lydia’s words, “It’s not necessarily that I feel more like a ‘boy’; it’s just that I’m very sure I don’t feel like a ‘girl.’ ”

Since youth group at First Church is such an important part of her life, Lydia decides to speak about her experience to her youth minister, Jason. Lydia tells Jason all she has been thinking and feeling about her sense of gender, the ways that being identified as a “girl” don’t work for her, and her uncertainty about how to live into her sense of self beyond this gender label. Jason is a bit taken aback, as he has never encountered any of these feelings and questions before in his five years as a youth minister. He has a ton of questions he wants to ask Lydia, but realizes that this is her time to share what she wishes, so he just listens attentively, making sure Lydia knows he cares about her and wants to be helpful in any way he can.

A week later, Lydia stays after church on Sunday evening to talk with Jason again. Lydia tells Jason that she is sure about one thing at this point: living life as a woman just doesn’t fit her experience. What she wants is to live in-between, not “buying in” to the gender binary. Lydia says, “I know that what eventually may feel like the best fit for me is making a more formal transition of some sort, but right now, I’m not sure that is what I want. I just don’t want to present myself to the world as a woman anymore.”

In the subsequent weeks, Lydia decides to be called Reed, a gender-neutral name that isn’t confined to a female-identified gender identity in people’s minds. Reed also asks her peers, teachers, family, and church community to use gender-neutral plural pronouns—they, them, their—used in the singular, to refer to Reed rather than female pronouns—she, her, hers. Reed’s peers respond positively to this and, except for the occasional slipup, they honor Reed’s pronouns. It is more difficult for the adult members of the church who have known Reed as “Lydia” for all of Reed’s life and haven’t benefited from the kind of intimate conversation with Reed about these decisions that Reed’s youth peers have had.

Reed has questions for Jason about what it might mean for Reed’s faith that their experience of gender doesn’t fit what Reed has always been taught at church and at home. Is there really room for a non-binary Reed in this faith tradition? Reed also has concerns about their parent’s reactions to this news, which Reed is just beginning to share with them. Jason is concerned about ensuring that Reed’s experience at First Church continues to be one that nurtures and supports Reed’s spiritual life and faith development. He knows that he will need to seek conversation with others and read published resources to help him think through how to be the best possible youth minister to Reed.

GENDER IDENTITY AND EXPRESSION: THE BASICS AND BEYOND

Gender identity and expression are aspects of everyone’s human experience, though we speak very little about them—especially if we identify as cisgender. If cisgender is a brand new term to you, it’s because we’ve talked so little about gender identity over the years that we needed to create a term to describe an experience for which we previously had no term. Cisgender is a word created to describe the experience of people whose sex assigned at birth matches their bodily presentation of gender and their own psychological and spiritual sense of gender identity.

The prefix, “cis,” is from the Latin word meaning “same”; the prefix, “trans,” comes from a Latin term meaning “across.” Cisgender people identify with the same gender assigned to them at birth—with either the label “male” or “female.”¹ Transgender people do not identify exclusively with this gender label given to them at birth. For example, if you were assigned the biological designation of “male” at birth and your internal sense of gender as male aligns with this biological assignment, it would be appropriate to describe yourself as a “cisgender man.” This chapter aims to address the lived experience of youth who do not experience life as cisgender. In one way or another, these youth identify under the broad umbrella we typically call transgender or one of another cadre of terms to describe gender nonconforming experience. Reflected in this chapter, at the time of this writing, the language is shifting toward a preference for the simple term trans rather than transgender.

Gender identity refers to a person’s social, psychological, spiritual, and behavioral experience and expression of gender as: male or female, both, neither, or those for whom gender is experienced in a more fluid state not captured by the male/female binary. Gender expression, on the other hand, refers to the public cues and symbols that a person uses to communicate a gendered presentation that includes such things as dress, mannerisms, behaviors, communication styles, and so on.

A person’s gender expression, or gender presentation, may not match the person’s gender identity, as when a trans person enacts a gender expression or presentation that is congruent with their gender assigned at birth rather than their deeply felt sense of gender identity, which is different from their gender assigned at birth. For example, a person assigned the gender of “female” at birth because of a doctor’s interpretation of their genitalia, but whose sense of gender identity is male, may live for a very long time presenting or expressing gender as female because there isn’t sufficient safety or support or resources to live out a gender presentation as male. An example is the chapter vignette above, in which Lydia was presenting as a girl for many years, all the while not identifying in heart, mind, and soul with a female gender identity. Gender identity and gender expression can be at odds with each other.

It is important to understand at the outset of this discussion that gender identity and sexual orientation are two distinct aspects of our human experience. It may be helpful to go and do a little exploration of your own gender identity in relation to your sexual orientation using an online tool such as the Trevor Project’s “Coming Out as You” guide.² This tool will help you to visualize how different identity categories are related but distinct aspects of who you are. Trans people, just like cisgender people, also have a sexual orientation: gay, straight, bisexual, asexual, and so on. Just as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and heterosexual people have a gender identity: transgender, cisgender, intersex, genderqueer, and so on. Likewise, we all have particular ways of expressing our gender that do not necessarily indicate anything about our sexual orientation. For example, a cisgender man whose gender expression includes dress, mannerisms, behaviors, and communication styles that society might typically categorize as “feminine” is not necessarily a transgender person, nor is he necessarily gay, as social stereotypes might suggest. Everyone has both a gender identity and a sexual identity, and these two aspects of our human experience intersect, but are not strictly tied to each other.

But are the designations, “male” and “female,” even sufficient to describe the experiences of our youth? In the chapter vignette, Reed experiences these terms as stifling rather than descriptive. Now I invite you to look beyond the male/female binary to understand more deeply the experiences represented among the youth with whom you minister.

Beyond “Male” and “Female”

For many of us, our cultural imagination for what gender means is transfixed by the designations of either “male” or “female.” From the first chapter of Genesis, we’ve heard that God created the first people “male and female.” Since this chapter intends to introduce you to the lived human experience of gender identity and expression for the youth in your church or community, we won’t address all of the theological or biblical questions related to this concern, though there are helpful resources available on the subject.³

For a great many people, the very biological experience of life—even down to the chromosomal level—challenges the assumption that we can all fit our lives into this male/female binary. The identification as intersex (the “I” in “LGBTQIA”) is descriptive of people whose physical, hormonal, or chromosomal sex characteristics at birth do not fit neatly into the categories of either male or female but are ambiguous at birth.

If you think this is too rare for anyone in your youth group to have an intersex identification, consider this statistic: Anne Fausto-Sterling’s research suggests that around 80,000 births per year exhibit some anomaly in genitalia with approximately 2,600 of those babies born with genitals not immediately recognizable as either male or female.⁴ Other intersex conditions are less visible and often go unobserved by medical practitioners until a person experiences a medical concern such as fertility issues.⁵

For many intersex people, doctors and parents will decide early on which gender (male or female) to assign to a child for whom these gender designations are not easily identifiable via physical characteristics. Often, it is only much later that the intersex person will come to an awareness that the “assignment” made on their behalf doesn’t fit their lived experience of gender identity. The Intersex Society of North America is a helpful resource for understanding the complexity of these differences that exist from birth for so many people.⁶

When considering the lived experience of someone whose very chromosomes are neither XX (female) or XY (male) but, for example, XXY, XYY, or XXYY, we might wonder what it could mean for us theologically when Genesis 1:27 says God created humankind “male and female,” which is how we typically translate that verse (emphasis mine). Perhaps the “and” in that verse takes on new theological meaning in light of the lived human experience of those whose very chromosomes betray the accuracy of the male/female binary we so often use to categorize people based on their sex or gender.

For others, the designation of “male” and “female” fits lived experience quite well, only the gender one was assigned at birth based on visible sex characteristics doesn’t match one’s psychological, emotional, and spiritual experience of gender identity. The umbrella term, transgender or trans, is typically used to describe people whose own psychological and spiritual sense of gender differs from the social and cultural expectations attached to the biological/physical sex characteristics with which they were born. All of the biological characteristics may communicate to doctors and parents upon birth the message, “this child is male,” but this designation is made only based on what can be seen externally, not accounting for how one’s gender identity develops psychologically and spiritually.

When trans people come to the realization of their gender identity, some (but certainly not all) may choose to go through a process of transition at some point in life, a term used to refer to the process that a transgender (or transsexual) person undergoes to alter one’s birth sex to align with one’s gender identity. For some, this transition takes place at the level of gender expression—in other words, altering the public cues and symbols that a person uses to communicate a gendered presentation, which includes such things as altering dress, mannerisms, behaviors, and communication styles to match one’s sense of gender identity as either male or female. Others may choose to engage in a medical transition involving hormone therapies or surgery, if such a transition is even financially possible. But no matter what type, if any, transition one undergoes, the experience of a person’s gender assigned at birth not fitting their psychological, emotional, and spiritual sense of gender identity can be an important realization in the life of the youth with whom you work. As a minister or ministry volunteer, having some knowledge about how common this experience is can help you to become more receptive to youth who engage in conversation with you about their gender identities. No matter how small your congregation’s youth group, you should never rule out the possibility that some transgender or intersex youth will at some point come through your church’s doors.

Many trans bodies have been highly medicalized and put under the scrutiny of medical professionals—sometimes helpfully and sometimes harmfully. In the best cases, medical consultation leads to opening up possibilities for living life more fully according to one’s sense of gender identity. In the worst cases, medical scrutiny has resulted in stigmatization of transgender and intersex experience.⁷ While a great deal of information exists in print and online to help you understand the physiological and medical information related to the experience of trans people, I will not address this research any further here.⁸ Consider this a crash course in the medical aspects of this experience: what you need to know in order to begin to be helpful, not all you ever need to know about the subject.

Beyond the medical explorations, there are other ways of viewing trans experience, two of which are experiential and theological. These are the perspectives that I want to develop as we move forward, inviting you into more expansive and freeing ways of addressing gender identity in your work with youth.

Beyond “Transgender” to “Genderqueer”

It is typical for people to treat both transgender and intersex experiences through the lens of binary gender norms (i.e., male/female). But ...