Camille is a twentysomething working in the LGBT nonprofit industry. She runs an LGBT news blog at gaywrites.org.
In a few weeks, members of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors will gather in Louisville, Kentucky for their first-ever conference. While the overall focus is on homosexuality, a pre-conference will deal with transgender issues specifically. But no trans people will actually be present — and the speakers will be required to state from the beginning that trans identities aren’t real. The pre-conference, co-sponsored with the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, is called “Transgender Confusion and Transformational Christianity.” Confusion being the key word: Read more
Over the past couple of weeks, an Edmonton Catholic School Board trustee, Larry Kowalczyk (below), has pulled out all the stops to demean and harass his worst political enemy: a seven-year-old transgender girl. The school board recently took up the issue of transgender students and bathrooms because the girl wants to use the girls’ bathroom at her school, like all the other girls do. Read more
Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) and Goshen College, both Christian schools, do not discriminate against faculty or staff on the basis of sexual orientation. That means they allow employees to enter into same-sex marriages. That also means they are no longer part of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) — voluntarily. When EMU and Goshen first announced the changes to their nondiscrimination policies earlier this year, two other schools (Union University and Oklahoma Wesleyan University) quit the CCCU, certain the organization could no longer “defend the rights of Christian colleges if its members were no longer united on what biblical sexuality entails.” But after they left, there remained the question of what to do about EMU and Goshen: Read more
In the last couple of weeks, officials at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville made two big decisions relating to gender-neutral pronouns. First, they recommended the campus community embrace gender-neutral language at their leisure. Second, they retracted that suggestion at the demand of high-profile state conservatives. Gender-neutral pronouns — like “they,” “ze,” and “hir” — are being used increasingly by transgender people who don’t feel like the categories “men” or “women” suit them. Michael Brown of Charisma News is terrified of this. Read more
