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person. I didn’t understand what it meant to be transgender. In a word, I was ignorant. And I’m a pastor. One Sunday afternoon, I sat in a meeting at church where a pediatrician friend and a geneticist friend used a whiteboard to explain to us what “gender dysphoria” is and why we as Christians should understand it. What I heard blew my mind. As a relatively well-educated person and as someone who strives to be compassionate to all people, I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t known any of this before. Here’s what I learned: There is a difference between sexual orientation and gender identity. Sexual orientation is about who you love, and gender identity is about who you are. I also learned about the growing body of scientific research on gender appearance and gender identity and how these get formed in the womb—usually in ways that are aligned but sometimes in ways that are misaligned. I learned about how anatomy, chromosomes and brain cells must line up like three cherries on a slot machine for most of us to experience unconflicted gender identity. And then my pediatrician friend said this: “We must believe that even if some people got a lower dose of a chromosome, or an enzyme, or a hormonal effect, that does not mean they got a lower dose of God’s image.” Her words echoed in my head and my heart for several days. And then the Spirit moved in me in a way I could not control: I wrote down what I had learned and submitted it to a national news
service where I’m a regular columnist. I could not have predicted what those words would unleash, as the column quickly went viral and today has been viewed by more than one million people. In that column, “Seven Things I’m Learning About Transgender Persons,” I confessed that I didn’t know any transgender persons. Within hours, my phone began ringing, my email inbox began pinging and Facebook Messenger poured in messages from people around the world saying: “I read that you don’t have any transgender friends. I’ll be your transgender friend. “In just two weeks, I engaged in more than 450 personal conversations about the column. And 95 percent of those were positive, many filled with heart-wrenching stories of oppression, confusion, family estrangements and rejection by the church. I heard from transgender persons, from their parents and siblings and coworkers. And I began meeting face-to-face with some new friends who are transgender. We met for lunch or dinner or coffee and spent hours getting to know one another. They were shocked that a Baptist pastor would sit down to hear from them, and I was shamed to hear their stories of pain and suffering and how difficult it was sometimes just to be able to use the restroom in peace. And I was changed forever. Every transgender person I have talked with has told me they knew from their earliest awareness, from when they were four, five or six years old, that they were not the gender inside that they
Page 1: FOREWORD Often, the things that are
Page 5: From “God Doesn’t Make Mistakes

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