‘To be trans is to enter a sacred journey of becoming whole’

[tabbycatstripy]

This isn’t a quotation from India Willoughby. It’s from a letter signed by senior religious leaders, including Rowan Williams, ex Archbishop of Canterbury, to Boris Johnson, urging him to ban trans conversion therapy.

I’m not a member of the CoE, but I don’t think I’m unreasonable in thinking they are going outside their religious remit. If I attended their church I would be seriously questioning whether these people shared my religious faith, and whether they had lost their ability to lead me in faith.

Be trans, don’t be trans. I don’t mind. But I don’t think it has anything to do with Christianity and see nothing in any Christian thought that would regard being trans as ‘sacred’ (obviously being kind etc is a Christian way to live your life - that’s different to calling being trans ‘sacred’).

All a bit odd.

I don’t think this has any connection to Biblical teachings at all. It’s what people might call ‘made up’.

Sacred journey >>>> Sacred caste >>>> gender woowoo >>>>> men's rights.

Why would anyone expect an institution that has oppressed women for millennia to refrain from grabbing at yet another way of showing its misogyny?

Erm....

there's the religious belief that a human soul is a thing that exists separately from the body, inserted by divine miracle and has separate life after the body has ended.

Is this what we're talking about here? Because I absolutely respect people's right to a religious faith but also people's right to hold other faiths or to be atheist: no one is required to genuflect at anyone else's altar, nor to participate or enable one faith over others.

Plus let's talk about 'sometimes God makes a mistake and puts the wrong soul in the wrong body'?

Because many of those believing in and studying the philosophies here would say that souls have no sex, and that in the course of growing through their spiritual journey a soul will enter many bodies for the spiritual knowledge and experience of that lifetime, those bodies being of both sexes. So in this philosophy, a soul enters voluntarily into a body that experiences gender dysphoria having intentionally set out to gain that experience - in the same rather potentially offensive way that the theory goes that a soul may enter a disabled body, or a body destined for a particular catastrophic event.

Again, you don't have to believe this, it's a faith based position. But if we're going to talk woo, can we at least talk standard and well known, researched and logical woo?

And does Rowan Williams personally support gagging a therapist from helping a child with Autism or trauma or CSA? In his rush to burbled sentimental niceness?

I saw a photo on Twitter with the altar covered in the trans flag. If I were CoE I wouldn’t go back. No issue with trans people at all but why don’t we all get to put our personal flags on the altar where they’re meant to worship God?

Well as (ex) CofE I always thought of Williams as a fool, and this will likely cement it, if I can actually see the letter.

Don’t do Twitter - can someone please post a link?

‘But if we're going to talk woo, can we at least talk standard and well known, researched and logical woo?’

I want my old woo too.

@Redshoeblueshoe

The church loves to put people in their place - especially women

Hallelujah

Nice bit of homophobia from the church, unsurprising. Gay conversion therapy may be banned but if they can trans people then they can get rid of all the inconvenient homosexuals.

@tabbycatstripy

They’re really stepping it up here. People who believe what the Church of England has taught for hundreds of years have every right to feel lost by their church’s hijacking of ‘sacred’ to describe this nebulous concept.

Members of the Church of England have felt this way for many many years. It's why they've had an exodus of members, and clergy to the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

But speaking more generally, it's crazy that someone like rowan Williams, who is an educated man and a scholar, would sign something like that. Theologically speaking this idea of "being born in the wrong body" is meaningless at best, and he should know better. Especially in a country where the press is now being open about the lack of medical support for much of it and the problems with teenage girls in particular.

It really just goes to show the extent to which any claim that the CofE had to intellectual rigour is dead. Someone like C.S. Lewis couldn't be found there today, or he'd be shunned if he was.

I am C of E and think that this is being grandfathered in somewhat - because, very bluntly, the church has had a homophobia problem and they seem to want to fix it by being on the "right side of history" this time round. From a religious perspective I have struggled a lot with it. I believe Jesus would approach trans people with kindness and love, but my female socialisation makes me worry that I'm being selfish and unChristian to want women to have things of our own, somehow, even though I know intellectually that that is nonsense. But to be frank the older ladies who make up the backbone of the church aren't going to have much truck with it - and why should they? It's an attempt to be seen as being progressive even if that means quite circuitous exegesis etc. And I have always admired Rowan Williams as a theologian so I am very about this latest output.

Yes, there’s a lot of trying to be on the ‘right’ side here as well. But theologically I think it’s a mess and it lets down people who look to the Church for spiritual, not secular leadership.

I can't see that the High Tory/High Anglican sections of the Conservative party would be impressed with a letter from religious figures urging the government to ban conversion therapy, especially from a previous incumbent and not the current Archbishop of Canterbury.
As the Tories recently dropped the bill to ban conversion therapy, a move which probably did not perturb many rank and file party members to say the least, this letter seems to be little more than virtue signalling, safe in the knowledge that it won't happen. Under this government, anyway,

@tabbycatstripy

Recruitment, Torunette. Ageing Christian population, young people believing in a new social ideology. Why not harness it to the older ideology, and target all the most gullible people in society? If it keeps the church coffers full, I suspect some of them would call anything sacred.

There are people who have been trying to do this for years. It's not all that successful, however. Only very naive people want a philosophy or religion that follows every social fad, most see that for what it is very quickly. Plus, what's the point, they can get that without getting up early every Sunday or giving their time or money to an institution.

Not to mention letting down lots of very confused young people.

@tabbycatstripy Yes it does, and this is why I know people who've become Catholic, or Baptist or joined Anglican breakaway groups in the US. I don't know the answer really, I joined the C of E knowing that in many respects it was not perfect but that if I continued as a Catholic I would drive myself further into extreme self harm. From a spiritual perspective I have no clue what's meant to be going on with this statement. From a practical perspective I am unsure that the younger, woker vicars I see on social media are going to get far if they denounce the congregation as TERFs.

@Artichokeleaves

Erm....

there's the religious belief that a human soul is a thing that exists separately from the body, inserted by divine miracle and has separate life after the body has ended.

Is this what we're talking about here? Because I absolutely respect people's right to a religious faith but also people's right to hold other faiths or to be atheist: no one is required to genuflect at anyone else's altar, nor to participate or enable one faith over others.

Plus let's talk about 'sometimes God makes a mistake and puts the wrong soul in the wrong body'?

Because many of those believing in and studying the philosophies here would say that souls have no sex, and that in the course of growing through their spiritual journey a soul will enter many bodies for the spiritual knowledge and experience of that lifetime, those bodies being of both sexes. So in this philosophy, a soul enters voluntarily into a body that experiences gender dysphoria having intentionally set out to gain that experience - in the same rather potentially offensive way that the theory goes that a soul may enter a disabled body, or a body destined for a particular catastrophic event.

Again, you don't have to believe this, it's a faith based position. But if we're going to talk woo, can we at least talk standard and well known, researched and logical woo?

This idea of sexless souls just popped into a random body is quite opposed to any kind of orthodox Christian teaching though. All the apostolic churches, mainline Protestantism, etc, teach that the soul is the form of the body, they are a unity. The soul makes the body what it is, you can't have a disembodied soul that carries on and gets put into another body like reincarnation of something like that. So souls are in a certain sense sexed, you have a man's body because you have a man's soul, and a woman's body because you have a woman's soul.

I suspect that many of these people have bought into the idea that being trans has to do with a medical condition that is similar to being intersex.

@Artichokeleaves

And does Rowan Williams personally support gagging a therapist from helping a child with Autism or trauma or CSA? In his rush to burbled sentimental niceness?

Exactly 💯 Spot on

But that would imply that God had made errors in not creating people whole. Are these senior Christian leaders really doubting the infallibility of God, one of the main tenets of Christian faith? In that case, would they like to apologise to all those born disabled, or to those mothers who’s babies die too soon, how that is not a mistake of God. One of the few things that usually gets people through tragedies and troubles is that God has a plan. They have more or less said that this is not true, and God does not know what he is doing.

Crcohetmonster

Exactly. By all means be an atheist, but if you’re not and you actually believe that one day you’ll be standing before God, is it really reasonable to think you’ll be able to say, ‘Think you just messed that one up, mate?’

I have always thought that I ought to have been a pixie, I long to burst into people's second home cottages in small, quaint villages and fuck with their saucepans and milk.
I want people to wear charms with my image on them, and to invoke me for special tasks. Then I can laugh at them mercilessly as I deliver their comeuppance or spoil their cows.

But seriously, this political hot potato is being used and abused by whoever sees fit. I wonder why something that concerns a rather small minority has come to have so much political weight, and simply don't trust anyone's treatment/analysis of it at this point. It has become a token now, employed by various sectors, health bodies and corporations to inflate their own credibility, and makes a mockery of what trans actually is.

I'm sort of with Germaine Greer on this subject, and don't think any of this is the fault of trans people themselves. In fact I believe they are being used for other people's more militant interests. The church getting involved is no surprise here. Sometimes I wonder why people don't make this much noise about poverty, rape, the tabloid media, our horrendous electoral system.
I'm tempted to think so much of this is a smokescreen.

Haven't world religions always shuffled their rules about to suit what is fashionable throughout the ages?

And a 'sacred journey of becoming whole' has nothing whatsoever to do with gender or biological sex. In a spiritual context our state of being and beliefs are what facilitate that.

Again, yes, in Christianity, if you die it’s nothing you did, it’s nothing God did ‘wrong’. The soul is with God. That (at least in Christian terms) is meant to be a good thing.

‘I long to burst into people's second home cottages in small, quaint villages and fuck with their saucepans and milk.’

Me too.

Sacred journey