A Transgender Nativity

on January 3, 2014

If Claremont United Methodist Church’s Trayvon Martin-themed nativity — in which the teenager hunching over a pool of his own blood stands in for the baby Jesus — hasn’t fully satiated your appetite for politicized Christmas displays, there is more on offer this season.

Massachusetts Episcopal priest and transgender man Cameron Partridge waxed nostalgic about a transgender nativity just before Christmas over at Episcopal Café. The Boston College Episcopal Chaplain writes of a childhood experience as a young girl:

“But what I recall with complete and joyful clarity was what I got to be: a boy. Or, more exactly, a man. A man in flowing robes and—the best part—a beard. I remember being brought into the makeup area and having facial hair glued to my gleeful face. I stared and stared at myself in the mirror. With Mary I thought, How could this be? But in any case: Yes!”

Now, I should hasten to state that neither I nor IRD include gender segregation of nativity characters in our church reform efforts. My own church certainly had a good number of female shepherds and — last I checked — angels don’t necessarily need to be female.

Partridge’s Daily Episcopalian article, however, serves to illustrate how embrace of “the new thing” eclipses the actual meaning of the nativity in exchange for our own agenda.

“Since those days I have, shall we say, traversed afar. And yet what strikes me now was how, amid the most ubiquitous of Advent/Christmas/Epiphany children’s activities, church created a space, a moment, in which– completely unexpectedly– I could be myself.”

Partridge, who also serves as a counselor for Episcopal/Anglican students at Harvard Divinity School, asserts that what matters is that churches “can and do bring this story of Incarnation to their contexts in wonderfully adaptive ways.”

“Our work here is to create spaces of holy play,” Patridge claims. “To invite all of us—kids from one to ninety-two, as they say– to enter these stories, to make them our own, in some mysterious way to read our own lives in and through them, to illumine and be illumined by them. The ultimate invitation to all of us is to encounter and embrace the mystery of Incarnation, whoever we are, whoever we grow up to become.”

So in short, what we have is another opportunity to turn the Gospel inside out – to affirm our own vision of ourselves, rather than to surrender it at the feet of the Christ child and let him work on us.

Bizarrely, Christmas pageants seem to have special interest to transgender activists. At this summer’s Wild Goose Festival, participants in a transgender workshop pointedly suggested making them more inclusive, apparently determining that dressing up as an angel, sheep, or first lobster isn’t inclusive enough on its own merits. I wish them well, but note that any choice to replace Christ with a political statement or gender-swapping affirmation is just that – making our own statement, rather than coming to worship the Lord who arrived in a humble manger.

  1. Comment by Cincinnatus1775 (@Cincinnatus1775) on January 4, 2014 at 10:25 am

    Precisely why my family and I left the Episcopal Church and converted to Catholicism almost as soon as the Ordinariate opened its doors. That the Episcopal Church would place this “priest” in a position to counsel young people at precisely the point in their lives when they are most vulnerable to to such deception is a truly monstrous evil. There are millstones being fashioned for HER and for those involved in the decision to appoint her unless they repent. Pray for that, but pray especially for those she will lead astray.

    St. Michael, pray for them.

  2. Comment by Boris Bruton on January 5, 2014 at 11:58 pm

    Absolutely amazing. Bp Robinson’s pigeons coming home to roost. Episcopalians of faith, please find a welcome entry to the Ordinariate. This episcopalian ship is sinking very fast.

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