My Transgender Neighbors
In the United States, one-half (0.5%) to one-percent (1.0%) of the population over thirteen-years-old identifies as transgender*.
Which amounts to 2.3 million people, or about the population of Houston, Texas.
Over 8,000,000 students play high school sports across the fifty states. Of those, 6% will play their sport at the next level in community colleges through NCAA Division I universities.
Which amounts to a half-million student-athletes in any given year.
In 2025, ten (10) of the half-million collegiate student-athletes were transgender.
The miniscule percentage identifying as transgender are currently near the top spot in the issues fueling cultural wars. Is gender identity more controversial than abortion, ICE and immigration, or racial injustice? If the “hot” issues were based on demographic size alone, gender identify would settle near the bottom.
However, there’s nothing numerically rational in our endless cultural wars.
Why muse about my trans neighbors?
I’m considering working on a novel with one or more transgender characters. It may never get written. I’m an old fart now. Laziness and procrastination seduce me more often than discipline and commitment. And none of the novels I’ve written in the past have been published. Whether or not it’s written, when an idea grabs me, I pursue it. I believe writing is a gift that’s part of my call to ministry. I’m honoring my relationship with God when a story idea creates an itch that I must scratch.
Another reason also involves God. Influenced by my progressive theological strengths and weaknesses, I seek to understand why there’s so much faith-based conflict around this issue.
“What conflict?” someone with beliefs opposing mine could respond. “The Bible’s against and so am I.”
What does the Bible say about sexual orientation? Here is Genesis 1:27,
So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. [New Revised Standard Version]
Gotcha, Larry! The Bible says God created only male and female.
Wait a minute. Didn’t Genesis, earlier in the first chapter, reference God creating day and night?
God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night… (Genesis 1:5)
Male and female; day and night. Simple and binary. Humans are one or the other. It’s light out or it’s dark out.
What about day and night? I’m writing the first draft of this musing on Friday morning, August 7. It’s 5:46 in the morning. I’m in California. My office window faces east. It’s no longer night, but is it day? I can’t see one of our orange trees, fifty feet away. Too dark. But gazing higher, I observe clouds in the distance with dim shades of pink framing their lower edges of gray. One of naturalist John Muir’s favorite words was gloaming: the dawn and dusk time, the literal twilight zone. What is daylight like during a hurricane? I’ve seen the Milky Way reflected in an alpine lake during a Sierra Nevada night, creating a floor and ceiling of ethereal light. I’ve stood in my backyard in midday when a wildfire’s dome of smoke turned the world murky and grim.
My wife and I once lived in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. We joked about the weather forecasts that included predictions of partly cloudy, partial sun, sun breaks, cloud breaks, and on and on. The earth spins, hurtling around the sun. At the equator, day and night are split in two while at the poles there can be only day or only night for months.
There is a wide spectrum of light and dark with variations in between.
There is a wide spectrum of everything.
Male and female we are. But within that spectrum are strait and lesbian and gay and bisexual and transgender and queer. For me, God’s call through Jesus is remarkably simple and profoundly challenging: love your neighbor. God’s creation—weather-wise and otherwise—is not binary, but wondrously complex.
Should a trans woman athlete compete in women’s sports?
Should a trans man be able to use women’s bathrooms?
My answer for both is, I don’t know.
Answering those questions should be done carefully and openly. I physically cringe at simplistic answers from cherry-picking Bible verses or majority vote or the loudest voices. Every reliable poll I’ve read shows a large percentage (Gallupin 2025 said 69%) against trans women competing in women’s sports. A recent “anti-trans” voice is WNBA player Sophie Cunningham. With a smidgen of irony, Ms. Cunningham played on her high school boy’s football team.
We don’t do well with changing or overcoming our biases. The Declaration of Independence, with its all men are created equal, called the indigenous population merciless Indian Savages. The Constitution declared that Black slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person. Not so long ago, my neighbors with Down Syndrome were frequently sent away from families to institutions.
The list for excluding our neighbors is lengthy and disturbing.
I’m trying to learn, hoping others will also. I wish we had more cultural compassion and fewer cultural wars.
Thanks for reading. More next week . . .
in Peace,
Larry Patten
Photo: Karollyne Videira Hubert on Unsplash
*According to research from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.