The museum is packed but I am enjoying looking at the various exhibits. I stand a bit back from the piece I am looking at so as not to block it. As I stand there looking at it, a man walks up, stands directly in front of me and completely blocks my view. He is oblivious to the people around him. He never notices that he has prevented me from continuing to look at the art. After a few moments…

The other night A and I went to a concert. As we hung out and watched the show I noticed two women nearby who were being affectionate with one another. My first thought was “Aw! Cute!” But that thought was immediately followed by, I better keep my eyes open in case someone gives them trouble. For the rest of the evening I kept them in my peripheral vision, making sure they were safe and that no one was giving them…

The other night A and I went to see “Love, Simon”. It’s the story of a young man in high school who is gay and trying to figure out the right time to come out to his family. As I walked out of the theatre my immediate thought was “This film is going to save lives.” That’s not hyperbole. This film is a revolutionary step forward because even though there have been a ton of coming out/coming of age films…

A sermon based on John 20:24-29 given at Queer Grace Community in Minneapolis. Growing up I received all sorts of weird messages about my body. And not just my body but bodies in general. I grew up in a very conservative church that had a lot of ideas about what it meant to be someone in a body. And especially, as someone who was born into a body that was assigned female at birth, there were a lot of rules….

There are limits to empathy. I know, I know I just wrote a whole thing the other day about how much empathy matters and how it can change the world! And yet. 

Lately I’ve been noticing more and more calls for empathy. But often it seems that the calls only go one way: Women are supposed to have empathy for men, we’re asked to have empathy for the lonely kid at school who enacts violence on his classmates, we’re supposed…

There are so many conversations these days about how we talk to people who are different from us. How do we connect? How do we even have a conversation? The world is increasingly polarized with people yelling talking points at one another. 

Or we shut down entirely. We refuse to have the hard conversations about contentious topics. Or we don’t talk to anyone we disagree with. (And sometimes, especially for marginalized folks, we need to. We need to protect ourselves…

It used to be that when someone would ask “Well, what about those verses in [insert book here] that says [insert whatever about LGBTQ lives here]?” I felt that I had to respond. I had explain historical context or languages or textual context or any other number of things. Then I stopped doing that work for a number of reasons: it’s not effective. It wastes my time. Other people have already done it so if the person asking really wants…

When it comes to the acceptance of queer and transgender people for conservative/evangelical Christians often, at the very root of everything, is the need for them to answer question: Do you want to be loving or do you want to be right? 
Because for so many people they feel like they just can’t support queer and trans people because of their religion. Their faith tells them how they have to believe and that correct belief is the most important part…

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how much representation matters for marginalized communities. Especially when that representation is by and for those communities. With the success of Black Panther, the joy of little girls seeing a hero who looks like them in A Wrinkle In Time, and so many more we are maybe, finally, understanding how much this matters. I’ve spoken before about how harmful it was to me to only have one representation of transgender men growing…

Is it possible for me to not change my mind on transgender issues? To believe that it’s wrong? I hear this question a lot. The sense I get is that the asker is saying: “Can I still be a good and loving person and believe this way?” At least that’s the generous understanding. It could be coming from a place of “In this age of political correctness is it possible to hold a viewpoint that feels offensive to some people?”…