Tackling Infallibility

In reading a story about a player on the George Washington University women’s basketball team who recently came out to teammates as trans, I mistakenly wandered into the comment section of this story on the Yahoo! News page. If you don’t know, the combined hate of the people who comment on Yahoo! News stories rivals the energy of several small suns… but I digress.

The large majority of these comments (as opposed to the magnificently wonderful ones I came across on jezebel.com) screamed out in rage and disgust, citing reason after bloodthirsty reason why the person in this story was so epically “confused.”

...and thus begins the first in my series of blog posts responding to these reasons. Here we go...

Part I: The Infallibility of God
Yikes! That seems like such a big thing to tackle with the first part of any series… though I’ve never really been one to scurry away from an intricate discussion of theoretical abstractions. Seriously though, it does seem like such a grand, sweeping topic, but I’m really only going to be looking at it from the scope of this one issue. Additionally, I’m not here to debate if there is or is not a God, nor whether this deity is indeed infallible. What the practically entitled “Part I” is addressing is an often-used barb that I see hurled at people like myself on a relatively frequent basis:

You were born the way you were born. God doesn’t make mistakes.
If you should have been a girl (or boy), you would have been born that way.

Okay, people do believe this, and I do see their point. I say this because, while I may not be one to subscribe to another’s particular religion, I will in no way ever knowingly disrespect their views and beliefs. So, if one earnestly believes that God is infallible, as I was actually taught for 12 years in school, then I can see them thinking that if someone was born a boy (or girl), that messing with this trifling aspect would pretty much be messing with divine design, because, you know, of God not making mistakes and all of that.

The thing about this is that more and more evidence has been pointing to the fact that people are born trans (and/or gay), so, if that’s true, then God’s design was for us to be this way. If God is infallible, and God governs how we’re born (i.e. we shouldn’t change how we're born), AND we were born with this condition (for lack of a better word), there would have to be a reason for that. GOD would have to have a reason for that… and personally I can only fumble a guess at God’s motives.

Additionally, would these people say the same thing if someone was born with a cleft lip, or 10 fingers on one hand, or myriad other conditions? We live in a time where there are treatments for these issues, so should people not have things like this addressed because it would be messing with how they were born? I, and I think most other people, would say "no." If, however, you think that situations like cleft lips and the like should not be addressed by medical science because you believe that this isn't "God's will," then you should stop reading now and maybe ponder why you believe that God wants someone to suffer with conditions such as these when they don't really have to... because I can't think of a reason.

And even if, in spite of the mounting evidence available, someone still chooses to believe that people are not born this way:

Not only are there people in the world today who are trans, but people have been feeling this way all throughout history. Despite what you believe about the genesis of the issue in an individual, this currently is and has been an issue for a countless number of people. These feelings exist, and they have been existing for centuries.

If you believe that God does indeed have a "design," I think it would be fair to say that you believe that there is a reason for everything (because it is part of said design). So, if there is a reason for everything, why would scores of people have these same feelings that I and many others have? To take it further, why would scores of people have these feelings in a time where means have actually been created to treat this situation and bestow some degree of happiness and sanity on those suffering? If you truly believe that God has a plan and everything happens as a part of this design, there has to be a reason for people like myself to exist. Who are we to say what that reason is?

Now some people may say that God created us the way we are, and that ambling down the path that I'm on is only due to free will and our ability to sin. Fair enough. But, in reality, where is the sin? What are we harming by doing this? It certainly doesn't affect anyone else on any kind of physical level. We're not inflicting pain on anyone.

As I said, loads of people have these feelings of incongruity (which must come from somewhere), AND we currently live in a time where there is a treatment available for this kind of torment (and make no mistake, going through the process I'm going through is widely regarded as treatment for this condition). So... couldn't there be a reason for people feeling the way I do that doesn't have to do with moral corruption, depravity, or mental illness? Since people have been like this for centuries, isn't it possible that there just might be a good reason behind it, a God-given reason behind it?

Well, the only thing we can say for certain is that this is something that’s part of the world today, just as it’s been for ages, and people in this spectrum are now more in the public forethought than ever before. Is the reason for this because God wants everyone to fight and rail against people like myself and pulverize us into the ground, OR should we follow the advice of every major religion and love and accept people the way they are, ESPECIALLY when these people aren't hurting anyone else and are just searching for their own slice of happiness?

And maybe people like myself are more in the public eye because the world is just now getting ready to accept an even wider variety of people into the fold, and in the process, evaporate mounds of hatred and transform it into a massive amount of love for people who were once maligned. I'm not one to be presumptuous about the Almighty, but I’m pretty sure that these sentiments are something that God could get behind. After all, God = Love. :)

That being said... love to you and yours.