What We Heard

Listening to Gender Minorities at Revoice

Trans & Gender Minority Listening Project Blog Series: Part 1 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.

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One of the easiest mistakes a ministry like Revoice can make is assuming that, because a particular group of people is present at our conferences, its members necessarily feel known by the community as a whole. That has certainly been the case with Revoice and its transgender and gender minority community members.* We have heard concerns from gender minorities before, but we have not always recognized just how widespread or deeply felt those concerns have been. Trans people have attended, participated, laughed, cried, and worshiped alongside sexual minorities since our first conference in 2018, but many of us have only recently begun to grasp the depth and breadth of how misunderstood and unknown many of them have felt in Revoice spaces.

In the past year, Revoice has taken steps to remedy this, beginning with an apology we released in Fall 2025. This Fall 2026, we continue our efforts to remedy this with a blog series that presents our key takeaways from a Listening Project that we initiated with transgender and gender minority members of the Revoice community. We wanted to begin this season of deeper engagement with gender minorities by intentionally listening to them in their own words, rather than starting with our own assumptions about what they need. 

We firmly believe that Revoice will be a more beautiful community when gender minorities and sexual minorities are pursuing Christ faithfully together–side by side– so that we can all experience meaningful Christian community.

The survey itself posed a variety of questions, both qualitative and quantitative, all aimed at helping us better understand several different facets of transgender experience. Although the intended audience was relatively small, we received 15 total responses to the survey, with respondents representing a wide variety of ages, doctrinal beliefs, and life experiences. The responses of these 15 individuals are a valuable means of identifying recurring experiences, central concerns, and lingering questions that Revoice should take seriously.

Belonging and Being Known

Perhaps the most meaningful thing we learned is that simply being known by other members of your community can open the door to experiencing greater belonging. Several respondents mentioned how meaningful it is when others express curiosity about who they are as people, including their experience as a gender minority, but not limited to that facet of their personhood. Such basic things as listening, expressing empathy, praying together, and even just being present in the daily lives of trans people can increase experiences of being known. Being known then can naturally lead to a greater sense of belonging.

‍By itself, this connection between belonging and being known is profound, but many survey participants’ responses revealed something even more thought-provoking: experiencing the positive benefits of being known did not depend on the other person sharing their beliefs or perspectives about gender identity. In other words, whether or not cisgender Christians understand transgender experience or agree with all the beliefs of transgender people, simply engaging with them in our daily lives as image bearers who are fellow sojourners walking in the Way of Christ can foster belonging.

Difficulty Navigating Christian Communities

Unfortunately, it isn’t always—or even often—a given that gender minorities are able to experience belonging in Christian communities. Survey respondents named a variety of barriers that have prevented them from tasting the blessing of fellowship in the Church. The most common was gender-segregated spaces. Whenever men’s and women’s groups are the only choices on offer for community life, transgender people find themselves with nowhere to go. They don’t fit neatly into either group, so they will often quietly self-select out of participation while navigating the awkward pressure from other Christians to opt in simply because it’s what is expected.

Gender minorities are also frequently overlooked and underserved even if they are treated with a measure of respect by their fellow brothers and sisters. Within Revoice spaces, survey respondents reported feeling like they were outside the scope of the conference and ministry. They often found that material about orientation, celibacy, and marriage left them wanting. Some could relate to it and some couldn’t, but in general, the heavy emphasis on sexuality didn’t meet the needs or questions they were bringing into the community. With different experiences that don’t map onto those of sexual minorities, transgender people resoundingly want to see more content, support, and leadership specifically tailored to their lives.

Visibility and Participation Matter

Toward that end, survey respondents highlighted the importance of visible representation within Christian community. It is one thing to be told you are welcome in a space, and quite another to see someone who looks like you being given the opportunity to use their gifts as a blessing to the Church. Like many sexual minorities, gender minorities long for representative voices and role models to take the stage as valued contributors to Revoice. They want to hear testimonies that sound like their own and know that decisions that affect them are being made with input from other members of the transgender community. They want to feel like their presence here matters.

Rather than simply showing up, gender minorities want to be part of the conversation. Many respondents demonstrated a deep commitment to following Christ in their own traditions and believed that they—or the trans representatives they recommended—had gifts and perspectives that could bless our community if given opportunities to contribute in public-facing roles. They were not simply seeking inclusion but the elevation and appreciation of the unique vantage points they had to offer as transgender people in side B spaces.

Deeper Theological Engagement

Finally, survey respondents almost universally mourned the lack of robust Christian theological reflection about gender minority experience. Among the specific topics that respondents mentioned were theological reflection about the concept of gender itself, as well as the related topic of embodiment, broader doctrinal connections between gender and embodiment within theological anthropology, vocations and discipleship pathways that might exist for transgender people, explorations of cultural influences on various Christian understandings of gender, and spiritual practices that might help gender minorities relate to their bodies and social worlds.

The reason all of these topics are important is that they all feed into the broader doctrinal question: “What does faithfulness in the Christian life look like for gender minorities?” This is the question that the respondents were most interested in discussing, as reflected in the actual language they used. Survey participants used distinctly Christian terms like holiness, prayer, worship, vocation, sanctification, and faithfulness in their responses.

While the task of theological engagement before us might seem daunting, it is a sign of hope that gender minority Christians in the Revoice community are inviting the Church to engage with it alongside them in the first place.

As we look forward to continuing this conversation, it’s important to remember that listening to gender minorities is not just a necessary first step, but something that we must continue to prioritize. We do not claim that Revoice already has clear answers to every question that this listening process has raised. But uncertainty can coexist alongside a desire to learn and grow together in our journeys with Christ. We can invest in deeper relationships with transgender and gender minorities, we can engage in more careful and thoughtful theological reflection, and we can do this while seeking greater dependence on the Spirit of Christ as we discover the wisdom and beauty that is in store for our community.

In the next two posts in this series, we will focus our attention on two themes that we believe will help us take the next steps in our engagement with our transgender and gender minority siblings. First, we will explore what it means to truly know and love gender minorities in our Christian communities. And second, what it might look like to pursue deeper theological engagement with the questions that gender minorities are asking. Our hope is that this listening project will help Revoice become a community in which sexual and gender minorities can increasingly pursue faithfulness to Christ together.

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*To learn more about Revoice’s theological and ministerial postures toward sexual minorities and gender minorities, please see Revoice’s mission statement, Statement of Sexual Ethics and Christian Obedience, and FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).