Lisa Salazar's Posts

I ask the question somewhat playfully, but I don’t mean it lightly. Fear has consequences, especially when it becomes attached to a group of people and we start treating them as a threat. There are some stories you never quite put away. For me, one of them is Amber. Amber was 21 when she died. Afterward, her mother wrote words I have never forgotten: “You saved me 21 years ago [when you were born] and gave me a reason to live. I am so sorry I couldn’t save you. I love you more than all the stars in the sky, my beautiful daughter.” There is no ideology or culture war in those words. There is just a mother mourning her child. I spoke publicly about Amber in February 2017, at a rally at the Peace Arch protesting the first Trump travel ban. She had died just days after Donald Trump was sworn in as president. She had watched the political winds changing and could no longer imagine a safe future for herself as a transgender woman. Eight years later, I found myself thinking about her again. ...

It’s a Sleight of hand. Many arguments against trans people work by leaving out important information. This trick is called an ‘enthymeme.’ An enthymeme is when someone makes an argument but leaves out a key idea, and the listener fills in the blank without even realizing it. This works because some words, like ‘children,’ ‘parents,’ ‘women,’ ‘safety,’ and ‘fairness,’ already make people feel a certain way. These words can make people agree with an argument before they even know what it is really about. A recent  study  in Canada found that phrases like ‘protecting children,’ ‘parental rights,’ and ‘gender ideology’ are used to make rules against trans people sound like they are just protecting others, even before it is shown that trans people are a problem. Here are some of the most important enthymemes I see operating now. Once you start listening for them, these missing premises show up everywhere. You can see many of these tricks in how politicians talk today. For example,...

In March 2014, during my second term at Vancouver School of Theology, I wrote a long email to Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, whose book  Omnigender  had recently come to my attention. I had entered theological studies unexpectedly. Only a year earlier, while struggling with severe underemployment after nearly four decades as a graphic designer, a friend had asked me a deceptively simple question: “If money were no object, what work would you most want to do?” The answer that came to me seemed so presumptuous that I was almost embarrassed to say it aloud: I wanted to become a chaplain to the transgender community. By the time I wrote to Virginia, one closed door had given way to another that seemed to open impossibly wide. I was back in school after forty-two years, studying theology and preparing for clinical pastoral education. At the same time, I was trying to find language for theological insights that had first emerged during the private and often painful spiritual journey sur...

Ideological and Theological Battlegrounds Are Claiming Lives
 A Reflection on the Fear Beneath the Culture War Against LGBTQ People
 By Lisa Salazar, MAPPL, SHP **** One of the things that troubles me in conversations about gender identity, same-sex relationships, and scripture is the assumption that we can lift words, prohibitions, and social structures from 2,000 or 3,000 years ago and apply them directly to modern life as though nothing has changed. To me, that overlooks just how profoundly different their world was from ours. At best, it is careless history. At worst, it is cultural and intellectual arrogance. We are not living in the same intellectual, scientific, social, medical, or cultural universe as Paul, the writers of Leviticus, or the audiences who first heard these texts read aloud. The ancient world had no framework for human sexuality, orientation, genetics, hormones, fetal development, psychology, neurology, gender dysphoria, or intersex variations as we understand the...

As Pride Month comes around again, I am reminded about how dismissive I was for so many years because it made me uncomfortable. I think it had to do with how I saw gender-diverse people were treated, which I internalized. It all had to do with my own insecurities. Long before “transgender” became part of everyday language, society had already turned people like us into entertainment. Jerry Springer once claimed that some of the highest-rated episodes his show ever aired featured transsexuals, drag queens, cross-dressers, whatever  terminology was being used at the time. People watched by the millions, apparently. But those shows rarely treated trans people with dignity. The audience was expected and encouraged to react to the spectacle, not listen to the human story underneath it. Behind the makeup and sensationalism were often stories that went unheard. That’s part of the irony I can’t stop thinking about now when I hear people complain that trans identities are being “shoved down...