Known and Loved
What Creates Belonging for Gender Minorities
Trans & Gender Minority Listening Project Blog Series: Part 2 of 3
At Revoice, we believe that building a stronger LGBTQ+/SSA community starts with listening well to every voice. Our 2026 Transgender* & Gender Minority Listening Project was created to help us better understand the experiences, questions, and hopes of transgender and gender minority members of our community.
Through this three-part series, we’ll explore what we heard, including the importance of being known as whole people, navigating gendered spaces in the Church, greater representation and participation, and deeper theological reflection on gender, embodiment, discipleship, and faithfulness to Christ. Our hope is to listen carefully, honor the dignity and experiences of gender minorities, and remain rooted in our Christian convictions on gender and sexuality.
“To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.”
– Timothy Keller
As adopted children in the family of God, our sense of belonging with our brothers and sisters is supposed to be a blessing to each and every one of us. We learn from one another, we encourage one another, we bear one another’s burdens, and we love one another as we pursue Christ side by side. The knowledge that we are seen, known, and loved by our community is a beautiful gift, and it’s one that transgender* and gender minority Christians long for deeply in a world that has increasingly pushed us to the margins. In both secular and sacred spaces, we are often misunderstood, misinterpreted, and even mistrusted. Unfortunately, the posture of many people we encounter is not to get to know us, but to superimpose over us the lens of the public figures they listen to who assert to be the most knowledgeable about us. The stories we carry get buried beneath culture wars and the rhetoric of charismatic speakers. The possibility of being known gets buried beneath mountains of assumptions. The possibility of being loved comes with asterisks.
While many transgender people have experienced their relationship with Christian communities as tenuous at best and traumatic at worst, I still believe in our calling as Christians to be a blessing to one another. That’s why I want to encourage anyone who is reading this and would not consider him or herself to be a gender minority to hear from the voices of transgender people who responded to Revoice’s survey. Each one is a brother, sister, or sibling who took the time to share their perspective. Their insights can help all of us see more clearly where the body of Christ can do better to walk alongside a marginalized group who need her support but who also have so much to give.
Holistic People
Even though the pool of respondents was small, they represented well the diversity that exists in the trans and gender minority (T/GM) community of Revoice. There were a lot of different answers to questions about personal journeys of faith, but significantly, many people repeated many of the same things about their sense of belonging in Christian spaces.
Like sexual minorities, T/GM people experience barriers to belonging when we are reduced to theological issues to solve rather than whole people seeking to follow Christ. Survey respondents stated that simply being able to participate as a member of their local congregation without discrimination or suspicion was hugely important for their sense of belonging. They wanted to be able to show up and worship alongside cisgender brothers and sisters, and they wanted to receive pastoral guidance on all areas of life, not just gender (although they didn’t want to neglect gender either). There were some specific recommendations, such as gender-neutral bathrooms and mixed-gender discipleship groups for the purpose of accessibility, but the heart of the feedback was that transgender believers were tired of being diminished to their identity as gender minorities to the detriment of their spiritual growth as whole human beings. The ability to participate fully in Christian community was a shared desire.
Although we do not want to be reduced in our personhood, transgender people want deep theological engagement. We are people who live perpetually in nuance, with no quick answers to describe the way we perceive and interact with the world around us. The experience of being a gender minority demands thoughtful consideration about our physical bodies, our gendered relationships, and our social webs, and many of us believe the Holy Spirit has guidance for us in each one of these areas. Survey respondents reflected this beautiful complexity by sharing the importance of being accompanied by Christian brothers and sisters who were willing to go deep together and refuse to settle for easy answers when studying theology. Importantly, doctrinal agreement about complex theological topics was not the priority for most of them. Many gender diverse Christians who answered the survey said they wanted to belong to a community that would walk with them even if they didn’t agree on every issue. Having a sense of belonging while exploring theologically complex topics is what mattered to them.
Beauty in the Mundane
On a more interpersonal level, gender minorities benefit from the same ordinary practices as everyone else. We want to be listened to with patience and curiosity, to have our stories met with respect rather than doubt or suspicion. Because we are a tiny demographic that’s been the center of public and political discourse in the current culture war, we often find ourselves on the receiving end of a posture that says “I’ve made up my mind about you before you’ve opened your mouth to speak.” Our lives have already been picked apart and dissected by prominent speakers, and our own voices are drowned out by a cacophony of what everyone else is supposed to think about us. It’s a difficult starting point to experience a true sense of belonging anywhere.
Because of this, simple inclusion practices can feel like a gift. Survey respondents repeatedly highlighted the impact of moments when they were given space to be heard, when they were offered prayer (for aspects of their lives over which they requested prayer), and when they were extended invitations of hospitality by other members of their Christian community. Simple moments with other people who treated them like valued members of their church were a blessing, which I hope is an encouragement to any cisgender readers who have wanted to get to know gender diverse people but who have been unsure where to start. While many members of my community don’t shy away from complex theological topics, that isn’t often where we want to enter into belonging. We first want to know that we are seen by other believers as brothers, sisters, and siblings, and that fellowship and friendship within the Church are accessible to us.
Next Steps
In our current cultural moment, the thought of creating belonging for transgender people can sometimes be made to feel like a thousand-piece puzzle. We’re told there are so many minutiae we need to slot perfectly into place in order to take a single step forward. The theology needs to be sophisticated, the inclusion practices need to be backed up by exegeted doctrine, and the Church body must be ready to deliver profound answers to questions relating to gender and embodiment. While each one of those ideals is a good thing (I pursued my degree in missional theology because I am convinced of the gospel’s ability to speak to every aspect of life), I wonder if the need for theological perfection has paralyzed our muscle to know and love the transgender people waiting outside our doors.
At the beginning of this blog, I included a quote by the late Timothy Keller that I believe captures the heart of what we found in Revoice’s survey results. Gender minorities, myself included, experience belonging when we are known and loved by our brothers and sisters in the Church. When our voices are given space to be heard, when we are received by others as fellow image bearers of God, and when we are offered the same opportunities for fellowship as our cisgender siblings, we are blessed the way we are meant to be as members of Christ’s church. To end, I would like to invite non-gender minority readers to reflect on the insights offered by the survey respondents, these members of our Revoice community, and prayerfully consider what it may look like to participate in creating belonging for transgender people. After all, everyone who has given their life to Christ has been blessed to be a blessing, and we as T/GM people have gifts to offer the broader Church too. We’re better when we’re together.
