If you read just one post this week, make it “The Lord Looks at the Heart: When My Son Became My Daughter,” by Debi Jackson, a self-described “conservative Southern Baptist Republican from Alabama.”
Jackson, whose daughter is transgender, writes at BlogHer about the journey she and her daughter took to understand and affirm the latter’s identity. She shares some of the uninformed comments she’s heard about transgender people over the years, and addresses them firmly but with compassion — and a bit of Scripture.
It’s funny. In writing this post about a Southern Baptist, I looked through some of my previous posts about transgender and gender nonconforming children, and found one that cited an article that was published in Friends Journal, a Quaker publication, and which I discovered from a rabbi’s tweet. Say what you will about differences among religions and denominations (and they are many), but there are also ways we can build bridges across them. Our common love for our children is one.
(If you’re looking for children’s books about transgender and gender nonconforming kids, try these.)