ABSTRACT
182The religious perspective on transgender people reveals a variegated quilt. Patches of positive, negative, and indifferent opinion combine and cross, those same opinions shifting in shape, pattern, and tone over different periods of time. Of course, I use the term “transgender” anachronistically, and in a very loose sense, only to have a convenient way to refer to a swath of categories in different cultures of different times and places. In psychological and medical circles, differentiated awareness of gender variation as a fact of human experience is recent. Even more than issues of sexual diversity, transgender and other types of gender identities remain little understood by the scientific community and profoundly challenge the religions, especially the Abrahamic. People living with gender dysphoria, endowed as humans with native spiritual sensitivity, generally suffer incomprehension and outright rejection not only on the part of family, friends, and society at large (James et al., 2016), but also on the part of the very religious institutions whose key role is to highlight and foster spirituality. The spiritual situation of transgender people is a desert, often one of despair; they are “a community in exile” (Salazar, 2015, p. 51).
