'Born in the Wrong Body'

Transgender youth share their stories in an MSNBC documentary.

The page includes two videos (MTF and FTM).

Gender and the Pulpit

Workplace difficulties can arise for trangendered persons in nearly all professions, but what about those who are called to work for God?

WEB EXCLUSIVE

By Lauren McCauley

Special to Newsweek

Updated: 4:42 p.m. ET Jan 23, 2007

Jan. 23, 2007 - In 1973, Eric Karl Swenson was ordained in the Presbyterian Church and went to work doing what he’d always dreamed of: ministering to a congregation of the Southern Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. More than 20 years later, one dream almost ended when another began. When the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta discovered in 1996 that Swenson had finally fulfilled another lifelong desire—having sex-change surgery to become a woman—it started proceedings to revoke Swenson’s ordination.

At the time of her “transition,” Swenson did not resist the church’s questions nor blame its reluctance. “I had been in the closet for 30 years, learning to accept myself,” she says. “It is difficult for me to be angry at others for not accepting.” Married with two daughters before her transition, Swenson described her struggle, years later, in a sermon: “I had spent the better part of four decades wrestling secretly with the unreasonable and incorrigible desire to be female.” After almost three years of grueling questions and debate, the Presbytery finally agreed, 181-161, to sustain her ordination, making Swenson the first known Protestant minister to transition from male to female while remaining in office. Now 59, Swenson is tall and blond, with shoulder-length hair and an assertive manner. Erin, as she’s called, continues to work as a pastoral counselor and, she hopes, as an inspiration for others who find themselves living out, what may be, the last taboo in society, let alone organized religion.

This past weekend, Swenson and her peers gathered in the hills of Berkeley, Calif., for the first National Transgender Religious Summit at the Pacific School of Religion, an ecumenical seminary that prepares students for ordination in the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church and the Disciples of Christ. The conference, open to members of all faith traditions, is a joint project of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) in Washington, D.C., and the Pacific School’s own Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS). Sixty-five religious leaders attended, from Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Quaker, Jewish and Agnostic communities across the country. On the agenda: denominational policy and outreach to transgender communities.

At the heart of almost every conversation that occurred during the conference was this: how does a person who chooses to live “with permanent gender ambiguity,” as one handout put it, also participate as a leader in an institution as traditional as religion?

Conference organizers think the time is right for transgendered persons of faith to come out of the closet. “Transgendered people are beginning to find their public voice with more advocates and opportunities for protection,” explains Justin Tanis, an ordained minister who helped put together the summit—and who was born female. With the House and Senate now under Democratic control, Tanis says, activists in the transgender community feel that they may finally be heard, and they are working hard to put together legislation on Capitol Hill, especially on the issue of workplace rights. No one knows how many people in the United States live with an ambiguous gender identity, either because of a firm conviction that they were born in the wrong body or because of a political ideology or youthful experimentation. But the issue has gained great resonance on college campuses of late, as well as in local legislatures and in gay activist circles. Last weekend’s conference was evidence that at least some of these people have strong religious identities as well.

The transgender issue is so new that most religious denominations have not yet made policy statements about it. In 2003, the Roman Catholic Church announced that transsexuals suffer from “mental pathologies” and should be barred from religious orders and the Catholic priesthood. Often using Biblical language to make their point, conservative Christian groups have treated transsexuals and other people with ambiguous gender as having psychological defects that can be cured with psychotherapy. Swenson, not surprisingly, objects to this characterization. “To pick out small pieces of Scripture and use them in a hateful way is damaging to me and to the Scripture,” she explains. “God says to love one another; should anything else matter?” Swenson finds evidence of God’s love, for her unique case, in Isaiah: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than songs and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” (Isaiah 56:1-5).

Transgendered people say another difficulty is that many religious denominations reinforce gender stereotypes—conventions about women’s and men’s roles in the life of a church, for example, that pose problems for people who want to live outside those rules. “The Bible has been used incorrectly throughout history to justify slavery and to oppress women,” says Joshua Holiday, a female-to-male pastor at the LIFE (Love Is For EveryBODY) Interfaith Church in Louisville, Ky. A year and a half ago, Holiday organized a gathering of African-American transgendered people, The Transsistahs, Transbrothahs Conference (TSTB), to promote greater acceptance in the black community.

Transgendered clergy say they know that parishioners can become distracted by thoughts about what lies beneath their robes, but they hope that people in the pews can learn to see them as ministers with a holy mission. Religion, says Tanis, “is about compassion and human dignity”; he hopes the seminar will teach transgendered clergy to embrace their uncommon situation and use it for good. After going through his own transition, he says: “I had a greater sense of internal peace; I was wiser and could be a better religious leader. It is a gift to be able to see the world through more than one gender’s eyes.”

College made easy

Best of the Best: Top 20 Campuses from The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students
(in alphabetical order)

American University
Duke University
Indiana University
New York University
Oberlin College
Ohio State University
Pennsylvania State University
Princeton University
Stanford University
Tufts University
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Santa Cruz
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
University of Michigan
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
University of Oregon
University of Pennsylvania
University of Puget Sound
University of Southern California

Schools adjust to transgender teachers

By Wayne Parry, Associated Press Writer | November 25, 2006

TUCKERTON, N.J. --For nine years, he was Mr. McBeth, a substitute teacher who kept things moving along in the classroom and filled in ably when the regular teacher was out sick.

And then one September, he was Miss McBeth.

The sex-change operation William McBeth underwent in 2005 roiled this rural, conservative area when she applied to be rehired as a substitute in Eagleswood Township. Parents packed a school board meeting last winter, some decrying what they termed an experiment, with their young children as guinea pigs; others supported her right to be who she is and work at what she does best.

But then a strange thing happened a few months later: When McBeth was up for a job at a different school in the area, no one protested. In fact, no one voiced an opinion at all when she was hired.

"There's no doubt about it; they've calmed down," said McBeth, a retired marketing executive and divorced father of three.

"There's no reason I shouldn't teach," said McBeth. "Look at me as a person: Am I qualified to teach? Yes. Do I have experience? Yes. Do I have a good report card from the schools? Yes. I have nothing to hide, and I'm proud of who I am."

About 20 transgender teachers are working in classrooms nationwide, but more are in the process of "transitioning," experts estimate. That opens up a host of issues the teachers -- and their employers and students -- have to deal with.

"The question often arises: Are transgender people competent to be employees, and those questions can come from co-workers, management or students," said Chris Daley, director of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco. "A lot of that is because there is a lack of information about who transgender people are."

David Nielsen, a librarian at Southwest High School in Minneapolis, began living as a woman in the spring of 1998 and came to school one Monday as Debra Davis. She was sued by a co-worker who objected to her using the women's restroom. The claim eventually was rejected by an appeals court, but not before local police got involved.

"I had a sex crimes detective in my building investigating me," she said.

Part of the difficulty was the suddenness of Davis' transformation.

"As far as I knew and as far as the school knew, I was among the first people to suddenly do that in a high school who worked directly with children, basically over a weekend," Davis said. "I didn't take a year off, I didn't do it over the summer. Literally, a man left on Friday and a woman came back on Monday."

She met with school officials and staff, and again with students to answer any questions they had.

"They asked, 'What do we call this person?' It's Miss Davis now, it's Debra," she recalled. "It's 'she' now. 'What bathroom is she going to use?' The kids did pretty well. Did they come to the library to see their new, improved librarian? You bet they did!"

The students were great, she said. Some festooned the hallways with signs of support, including one with the slogan "Hate Is Not A Family Value."

Not every adult was as welcoming, though.

"The people who struggled were people who struggle with diversity," she said. They were concerned that "the kids would have to have contact with someone like me who's an abomination of God."

For 72-year-old William McBeth, he had the feeling he was different from the age of 7. Growing up in Atlantic City, N.J., he would sneak into the closet to try on his mother's and aunt's clothes when no one was around, and wasn't quite sure why.

"You had these feelings that you didn't clearly recognize," she said. "You knew you were different, and you knew these were thoughts you couldn't bring up to anybody. I lived that life in fear. I did everything I could: I was a Boy Scout, a surfer, I was in the military. I ran a ski lodge in Alaska. I had a magnificent life.

"But you're living under the fear that someone would find out about you," McBeth said. "You know they wouldn't understand; I didn't understand it. It wasn't until middle age that I knew there were other people like me."

In 2003, while hospitalized for a heart condition, McBeth did some soul-searching.

"I said to myself, 'What is the one thing you've always wanted to do in your life?'" McBeth recalled. "On your deathbed, you regret not the things you did, but the things you didn't do. I said, 'Well, let's do it.'"

McBeth had a sex change operation in May 2005, after a long process of psychological evaluation, hormone therapy and electrolysis.

She said she erred by not keeping her certification as a substitute teacher current while she was out of work during the surgery. That required her to reapply, and set the stage in February for a contentious school board meeting in Eagleswood, a community near Atlantic City. One parent, Mark Schnepp, took out a full-page ad in a local newspaper urging parents to oppose the hiring.

"This person taught as a man, left for a year, and came back as a woman," Schnepp said. "My biggest problem is it's very young children in the Eagleswood school. For the young ones, it could cause tremendous confusion."

But Scott Rodas, whose son is a third-grader in Eagleswood, said McBeth's hiring "should have been a no-brainer. We should give enough credit to our children to know that someone like this isn't going to hurt them."

When McBeth was up for rehiring at the Pinelands Regional School system in September, no one said a word.

"I personally don't think there's anything wrong with it," said Katie MacPhee, a student at Pinelands Regional High School. "I can see where some people might have concerns, but people just need to get over it."

Jennifer Boylan, an English professor at Colby College in Maine and author of the best-selling autobiographical novel, "She's Not There: A Life In Two Genders," said she was concerned about how students and faculty would respond to her transition six years ago.

"Everyone was extremely supportive and generous," she said. "That surprised me, but maybe it shouldn't have. It's possible that we are all more grown up than we think."

For some who have made the transition, what's at issue goes beyond an identity change.

"This is about how we treat people in the workplace in a civil society," said Jillian Todd Weiss, an assistant professor of law and society at Ramapo College in New Jersey, who transitioned in 1998, about five years before she began teaching. "It's not about acceptance, although that would be nice. It's about law and policy, which states that it's illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of gender."

Daley said the same rules apply to transgender teachers as anyone else.

"Just treat them like you would any other employee," he said. "Give them a supportive, comfortable work environment, and you won't have any problems."