Group of people holding hands outside.

Photo by Engy91

A friend is making plans to leave the state of Florida, fleeing to Colorado where she and her partner can access the healthcare they need. The choice is, for her, this stark: between having access to gender-affirming hormone therapy, or dying. She cannot exist in the world as anything other than the woman she is.

Florida is restricting access to gender-affirming care for adults—yes, adults—unless they receive that care from a medical doctor, as opposed to the nurse practitioners and physician assistants who previously could provide that service. An estimated 80% of transgender people in the state of Florida received that care from an NP or a PA.

This ban on providing routine healthcare for transgender adults is having precisely its intended effect: to create a massive backlog throughout the state of people seeking transgender care. My friend has the resources to leave, although it will be exceptionally hard for her. Many in her same position will be unable to leave.

They may be forced to take the second option. They may die rather than live another day in a world that refuses to allow them to be a beloved child of God.

I have a few friends in the state of Florida. I’ve seen posts about this from my transgender friend’s Facebook wall almost daily.

But I’ve seen almost nothing from Christians. Almost nothing. A few brave statements, here and there, but nowhere near the sustained cry of agony and challenge rising every single day from those of us who call out to heaven and our neighbors for protection.

Meanwhile, in the state of Montana, transgender representative Zooey Zephyr responded to a similar ban on trans people by stating, in a speech from the House floor for which she had been recognized to speak and allotted time to do so, that passage of this bill would mean there would be “blood on the hands” of Montana legislators. This is true: transgender people die when legislators make it impossible for them to live as themselves. They die by their own hand, they die when they are assaulted by those who use “trans panic” defenses in their courtroom arraignments, they die when they are attacked for entering the wrong bathroom.

For stating in plain and clear language the results of these legislative actions on transgender people, the Republican majority in the Montana statehouse had her removed from the chamber. It is now illegal in the state of Montana for a member of an oppressed minority to state the clear objective of the majority. And that objective is to reduce the number of transgender people by any means necessary.

For instance, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, commentator Michael Knowles stated that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life.” He claims to have just been speaking of “transgenderism” as an ideology. But what does it take to “eradicate” an idea? Ask any dictator who has tried it. It takes a mountain of skulls.

Because ideas are held by people. They are passed on among people who share their words and their dreams and their joys. Whenever a transgender person feels their first joy when a stranger calls them “miss,” whenever they share that joy by telling another person, an idea grows again.

The only way to kill an ideology is to kill people.

And when you can’t get away with doing it with bullets, you do it in subtle, even more sinister ways. You make someone feel unwelcome by denying them the ability to use the restroom comfortably without committing a felony. You make it illegal for a certain kind of person to wear a dress in public (and, sooner or later, the only way to “eradicate transgenderism” is going to mean banning slacks for women). You make it illegal for them to access healthcare. You communicate that they are unwanted so much, and so deeply, that until you can find a way to hold the gun yourself, all you have to do is put the gun in their own hands so that they can do the work for you.

And yet: I don’t need more than two hands to count the number of Christian friends I’ve seen posting about this—publicly sharing. I’ve seen them say things in private. I’ve seen them express their support where it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen comment threads full of support for someone who just came out, and then not a word from any of the same people saying “you go girl!” about the same posts from that woman about the ongoing legislative genocide of trans people.

So let me be abundantly clear: the time has come for Christians to do something about it.

This is true even if—perhaps especially if—you don’t understand or don’t fully agree with everything transgender people have ever said about themselves.

Because it can be hard. People I love deeply have told me that they struggle with disgust when they see me in makeup. I didn’t stop loving them; instead I held their hand, and cried with them, and told them that we could work on it together.

Feel free to go on thinking of me with whatever pronouns you want, I’m a big girl, I can take it. I’ve messed up the pronouns and the names of my own friends. I’ve apologized, and moved on to do better.

You can make fun of me with your friends and say that I’m “not fooling anyone.” I can promise you that deceiving others isn’t the reason I wake up in the morning; I’m just trying to make it through my day and go to the grocery store without being spit on.

You can decide I’m misguided. You can call me “mentally ill.” Even though this country has used mental illness as an excuse to lock up runaway slaves and sharecroppers who wouldn’t stay put, I can’t control what you think of my mental state.

You can tell me all the truths you think you are speaking in love, even as you communicate your distaste with every breath. I think you and Jesus have some work to do around loving your neighbor if this is what you want to do with your free time.

But you know what?

I’ll take it. I can live with it. All of us have room to grow, myself included. I’ll never get anywhere demanding you be someone you aren’t or believe something you don’t. I’ll be here when you’re ready to talk about it. And as long as you don’t treat my right to exist as a topic for debate or approach me with hostility, I’d be more than happy to answer your questions.

What I won’t accept, though, is silence in the face of this attack on transgender people.

Because transgender people are under an assault with one aim: our extermination. It’s that simple. Our ability to live freely and love openly and wear the clothing we want and use the restroom in comfort and peace is being challenged and restricted across the country. The challenge is from the same political coalition that brought you slavery, Civil War, the KKK, the end to Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and resistance to women’s suffrage and every other advance this country has made on “liberty and justice for all” in the past three centuries.

This political coalition needs one thing, and one thing only: to divide us against each other. To tell women that trans women are a threat to their safety. To tell gays and lesbians that trans people are trying to invade their bars and clubs. To tell straight people that trans people are coming for their children.

This small, cruel, autocratic, and anti-democratic coalition of American neo-confederates needs you to think these things, because if you don’t, you’ll never be scared enough to vote them into enough power to make their tyranny a permanent feature of the American landscape.

So whatever you think about me and other transgender people, it’s a basic duty of Christian citizenship that you stand up and say we have a right to go to the doctor. Christian citizenship demands that you preserve the right to get the medicine that reduces the risk of trans suicide significantly. It’s a requirement that you say that we have the right to pee in a private stall and take the time we need to wash our hands and fix up our face in the mirror without being charged with a felony.

And it’s not just about adults: a child trying to name their experience deserves the space and the support to do that well, with all deliberate time for reflection and consideration. They might even occasionally need to do that without their parents being notified, because the bare fact of the matter is that some parents are bigots who will kill a child for being queer. The person best situated to know that is the queer child themselves, and preventing them from talking with sympathetic adults and learning how to live their lives safely is an act of abundant malice.

If the Kingdom of God means anything, it is that my life matters. It is that the lives of transgender people are worth protecting.

Transgender people need you now. We need you to see what is happening to us. We need you to see the crucifixions we suffer from. We need you to see the Easter story that surges in us every time we overcome these crucifixions to choose joy instead of pain. And we need you to feel the fire of Pentecost upon your tongue as you find the words to be bolder, every day, in reminding your parishioners, your neighbors, your friends, and your legislators that the God of creation loves us too.