When I was at uni there was a trans woman who I really felt for. He/she (and on this occasion genuinely was) had been born with XXY chromosomes and gender identity confusion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome
As a child she was raised as a boy but as time went on she developed female characteristics too.
Spending up till her mid 20s trying to “pass” as a man, choosing very masculine jobs, she finally decided to transition in the other direction, long before the media was making transgenderism
fashionable.
Ironically, both men
and women were unkind to her. Some people transition more easily than others. For her, it was more difficult as she already had stronger masculine features.
She was also a Christian.
I went to visit her with a friend and we just talked and listened to her story. One of the key issues she had was how she might live well as a Christian in such circumstances, when there seemed to be no “right” way for her to be!
It became clear to us that we define ourselves so strongly by our own physical and emotions gender identity. The question of “personhood” that went beyond body parts and personal attractions really emerged.
We are all broken and misshapen in various ways, we are not physically the people we might have been without sin and the fall, or psychologically unhurt by the time we grow up. We have our own hurts, defences and capacities to hurt others. For this trans xxy woman, those wounds were in the outside. She wasn’t asking for straight men to date her, she just wanted to be able to get on with living despite her challenges and to know that God loved her.
I haven’t got some clear conclusion to offer but it was a defining moment for the way I chose to interact with others - it is easy to look at people who have had very different things to ourselves to deal with and pronounce judgement on them.
I know I’ve quoted this one before but it fits really well here:-
The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does dome tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity