"We Love Our Trans Youth"

There's no dignity without God

There’s a baby pink-and-blue yard sign in the front yard of a house down the street from my church that says “We Love Our Trans Youth.” Which suggests that it might be otherwise.

I don’t think there’s a real anxiety that anyone is merely indifferent toward trans youth. That would seem to go against the “you-do-you” ethos that defines contemporary western sexual ethics. The concern is actually that there are people out there who hate trans youth, and that the hate might lead to trans youth being inhumanely treated.

The reason I bring this up is because I think the yard sign touches on a concern that is about much more than the trans debate. There’s an anxiety in just about every political and social faction in the United States that the dignity of a particular group of people is under threat. That broader concern really resonates with me.

Catholic moral theologian William Cavanaugh who points out that, while its wonderful that the Declaration of Independence confesses that all people are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” the truth is that governments—including the United States—routinely alienate peoples’ right.¹ The death penalty is an obvious example. One of the rights the Founding Fathers identified was the right to life, yet sometimes the state determines that right no longer obtains and executes a criminal. Once a right can be legitimately alienated, there’s an immediate anxiety that the government might start alienating rights illegitimately.

The Declaration of Independence says that we are endowed with rights by a “Creator.” The Judeo-Christian framework behind the capital “C” is a conviction that whoever created us creatures is in fact a “who” not a “what.” We use personal pronouns for God because he’s a “he” not an “it.” And Christians confess that this personal God who created us did so out of love.

To be a creature is to be inherently vulnerable. We were made by his free decision, and after having been created we identify our existence at least in part by acknowledging that we might not have been created at all. We exist merely because God decided we should. How terrifying it would be if God had made us for reasons other than love: a potter can fashion clay into a beautiful jar to hold it as a prize possession—or the potter can smash it.

The Creation by William Blake, 1825

We sense this creaturely vulnerability most obviously in relationship to other humans. We’re at each other’s mercy. We can kill each other, and we can do all sorts of other hateful things short of that too. To hate is to reckon that another human is less than a creature, which means that the inverse is also true. To truly love, we must recognize the Creator behind and above every human, the God who is the guarantor of each and every person’s dignity.

Scripturally, the love command is always double. Jesus himself tells us that one cannot love God without loving one’s neighbor, and vice-versa (Luke 10:25-37). More concretely, the Bible says “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

What I’m saying is that I cannot know what it means to love our trans youth, or any other human being for that matter, without knowing God who is love. Without the Creator, we can’t know if what we’re calling “love” for others is actually love or mere preference. Or, to put it as Jon Guerra has, “before I knew what love was, Love was in the beginning.”

The yard sign in my church’s neighborhood doesn’t assume God. But it should. Otherwise we’re at risk of someone putting up a yard sign that says the opposite: “We hate our trans youth.” Both are bald statements of fact, bereft of any ability to oblige others to go and do likewise. But with God, we love trans youth—along with Republicans, white supremacists, witches, payday loan sharks, youth in general, and (even!) billionaires—because only the Creator God guarantees New Creation in which the dead will rise, receiving their humanity back by the accomplishment of his love. And all those who hated will be called to account for having not regarded their neighbor as God’s creature of love (Romans 2:6).

1. For more on this, check out his Torture and Eucharist (Blackwell, 1998)