Text from Rev. Brynn Craffey’s forum presentation on July 21, 2024 at 9 am.
As a Queer-Identified Trans Man, Why Am I Still Part of the Church?
So, I was born in the dark ages of the 1950s. A time with no internet, no gay newspapers, no queer bookstores—in fact, the word “queer” itself was a terrible slur. It was a time before there were any visible liberation movements of any kind in the small, California towns and mixed working and middle-class, almost all-white neighborhoods where I was living. No feminist movement to speak of. No environmental movement. No Occupy, nor Black Lives Matter.
Regarding gender, the assumption was there were two-and-only-two, with the correct determination made at birth by a quick peek between the legs. No one was talking about sex; no sex-ed in schools: the very idea of THIS would have shocked the community I lived in!
In this insular, repressive, conformist environment, I didn’t know what to think of myself. I knew I was different, but had no words to articulate what I was feeling. As a result, I was pretty checked out. People regarded me as a tomboy, and by the era’s unspoken rules I was supposed to discard male clothing and start “acting like a lady” when I hit puberty. Under growing pressure to do this, I became increasingly confused and even more checked out.
My spiritual journey formed a backdrop to this identity drama. I was baptized and raised as an Irish Roman Catholic, but going to church was something I tried to avoid—until, that is, I turned 10. We moved to a new town that summer and my parents enrolled me in an outdoor summer school taught by Jesuit seminarians and sponsored by a tiny Roman Catholic parish.
It was a few weeks before the opening of Vatican II. And while I can’t remember details, whatever emancipatory vison of Christianity they presented there, under an open sky beside a beautiful natural wetlands ignited a spiritual fire in me! It was expansive, mystical, and powerful—emphasizing big ideas and an inspired understanding of God and our calls to service in the world. And it kindled an early sense of vocation that prompted me to beg my parents to send me to Catholic school. Which they managed to do, poor as we were, for the next 6 years.
Sadly, the religion I encountered in school focused more on orthodox belief. Joy in being alive was suspect, and our attention was directed to the catechism and sin. The guilt-oriented approach slowly extinguished my spiritual fire.
In the midst of disappointment, denial, and confusion, tragedy struck in my late teens. My mother committed suicide with a handgun and I found her. I lost my faith in a benevolent God in a heartbeat, and from that day forward, it became harder and harder to attend Mass.
The aftermath of my mother’s death took a terrible toll. In the subsequent years, grief and trauma became tangled up with the church’s attitudes, not only toward suicide, but gender, sex, birth-control, abortion—and queerness. Untangling all this took years. It helped greatly that I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the era of Harvey Milk and an amazingly transformative lesbian and gay movement.
Unfortunately, though, as I moved toward greater acceptance and coming out, American Christianity was increasingly embracing homophobia, misogyny, hypocrisy, and reactionary politics.
My denial and confusion led me to complicate my situation by marrying and having a child, but—in retrospect not surprisingly—I chose a deeply closeted gay man to marry. We were both playacting, and after a number of years, both came out. In my case, first as a lesbian, then, ten years later in 1994, as a trans man.
I experienced true joy and genuine happiness for the first time in my adult life; went through puberty in my 40s; and benefited in many ways being perceived as a young white man even though I was entering my 50s. And I was blessed to transition with some amazing history-makers, including Jamison Green, Susan Stryker, Loren Cameron, and Kate Bornstein. I marched in the first trans contingent in both the San Francisco and Dublin (Ireland) Pride Parades, and sat down for burritos once with Leslie Feinberg here in San Diego.
My first tentative steps back to the church occurred through a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Solana Beach, which was my introduction to queer-affirming, “Christian” denominations. A call to ministry surfaced then, but it took the Eucharist to prompt me into actually attending seminary.
Long story short is that I briefly dated a person in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. On a visit there, circumstances conspired to bring me into a Sunday evening service in an Anglican church—not that I knew it was Anglican at the time—on a tragic day. June 12th, 2016. The night before, 49 people, mostly queer-identified and many LatinX or people of color, were shot to death in the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Fl. And two transformative things happened to me in that Anglican church that night.
First, I was stunned when the priest entered and before starting the service, addressed the congregation movingly about the tragedy in faraway Orlando and how it was traumatizing the local community. The vision of a priest—vested like the Roman Catholic priests of my childhood—speaking lovingly about queer martyrs triggered a sort of cognitive dissonance, so accustomed had I become to associating these visual symbols with homophobia and transphobia.
Then the service began, and as the moment to receive the Eucharist approached, I sat back in the pew so that people could pass. That’s when the priest issued the invitation you use here at St Paul’s. He welcomed EVERYONE to Christ’s table.
That invitation moved me more than words can express and I received the Eucharist for the first time in roughly 50 years. And even though I didn’t start going to church for several more years, from that night on, the pull toward ministry grew stronger and stronger.
Coincidentally—or is it the Holy Spirit’s doing?—I was ordained to the transitional diaconate on June 12th, 2021—five years to the day of receiving that Eucharist. Then on June 11th, 2022, I was ordained to the priesthood—as far as I know, the first openly queer-identified, trans person in BC to do so, and the second in Canada. And on June 12th, 2022, six years to that day in Winnipeg, I presided at my first Eucharist service.
We LGBTQ+ people have much to offer the mainstream church—gifts that are relevant NOT just for people like us, but for EVERYONE! Particularly during this time of change we’re in, when so much is uncertain. It’s not just our resilience, insight, and abilities to think outside the box, it’s that we EMBODY hope and transformation. As a trans friend once pointed out, many of us understand viscerally what it’s like to die to one life and be resurrected to another. We understand, similarly to Jesus, what it’s like to transition—in the Lord’s case, from spirit into a physical, body; in our cases, from a life that feels wrong to one that is authentic.
In light of ALL this, how can anyone believe that God wouldn’t want us to be full and affirmed members of God’s family?
