Welcoming Jo Anne
by Muffie Moroney

Last spring, several of my friends and I had dinner in San Antonio, Tex., with Louie Crew, Integrity’s founder. In light of Integrity’s mission – to be the advocacy organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) persons in the Episcopal Church, and in turn to represent the church to the lgbt community – I asked Louie about Integrity’s resources for understanding transgender concerns. Jo Anne Roberts, a transgender person, had recently joined my parish of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Houston and her arrival turned a theoretical situation into a real and practical one: What can we do and say to welcome Jo Anne into our midst?

William Stringfellow, highly respected lawyer and theologian in the Episcopal Church, and Stephen Jay Gould, renowned professor of zoology, geology, and paleontology at Harvard, have provided some wonderful background material about human differences in general.

In his address, "An Exhortation to Integrity," given at the 1979 national Integrity convention, Stringfellow was speaking about homosexuality, but his comments are relevant to any discussion of other sexualities and identities as well. Some excerpts: "... The issue is not homosexuality but sexuality in any and all of its species and that, as much as I can discern, sexuality is as extensive and diverse as human life itself. There are as many varieties of sexuality as there be human beings. I commend you to consider sexuality in the context of conversion – in the context of the event in which one becomes a new person in Christ. In that event ... all that a particular person is, sexuality along with all else, suffers the death in Christ that inaugurates the new (or renewed) life in Christ. ... But that death in Christ in which we are restored for new life does not involve the denial or suppression or repression of anything that we are as persons. It involves instead the renewal of our persons in the integrity of our own creation in the Word of God. ... The new life in Christ means ... that we have the exceptional freedom to be who we are and, thus, to welcome and affirm our sexuality as a gift, absolved from guilt or embarrassment or shame." (A Keeper of the Word, Bill Wylie-Kellermann, ed., William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,1994, p. 331ff.)

Stephen Jay Gould takes Stringfellow’s varieties of sexuality to another level. In the introduction to Full House (Harmony Books, 1996), Gould summarizes his ideas from an earlier work, Wonderful Life, and states his conviction that variety – not complexity – is the true measure of excellence: "We must give up a conventional notion of human dominion, but we learn to cherish particulars, of which we are but one ... and to revel in complete ranges, to which we contribute one precious point – a good swap, I would argue, of stale (and false) comfort for broader understanding. It is, indeed, a wonderful life within the full house of our planet’s history of organic diversity." Although he is not specifically addressing diversities of human sexuality or gender identity, these would fit comfortably within his thinking.

Both William Stringfellow and Stephen Jay Gould are dead. As far as I know, they did not write about transgendered persons in the Episcopal Church. But Stringfellow and Gould (and others) lead me to believe the following: There is a distinction between gender identity (whether you identify yourself as male or female) and sexual orientation (whether you are sexually attracted to males, females, or both). Transgendered persons (along with heterosexuals, homosexuals, and bisexuals) represent but one of many normal kinds of human sexual orientation and gender identity in the rich variety of creation, and within that single category known as transgender, there are as many varieties as there are people. Although being transgendered may be unusual and unfamiliar to us, it is nonetheless normal. In the Christian Church, the gender identity of each transgendered person (as well as the sexual orientation of each heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual person) who seeks the sacrament of baptism is affirmed as integral to that person’s identity in Christ Jesus. The Body of Christ inhabits a full house.