WINFIELD – On a recent Sunday morning, sunlight filtered into Grace United Methodist Church through stained glass windows depicting the life of Christ.
At the pulpit was Pastor Charles McKinzie.
“I use he/him pronouns,” he told congregants gathered for service, “and I welcome you into this space.”
McKinzie, who calls himself a lifelong Republican, grew up in a Protestant church that taught that homosexuality and gender diversity went against Christian teachings. He says that prompted a crisis of faith as he came to believe that all humans, regardless of their gender identity, are made in the image of God.
“We all bear divine image,” he said.
“Just as there is a spectrum of light and dark because we have sunrises and sunsets — in the same way, I think that God's creation is broad enough and beautiful enough and wide enough to include variations of what we have understood as a gender binary.”
Legislative advocacy
Last month, Kansas became the 26th state to ban or otherwise limit gender-affirming medical care for minors, according to KFF. It’s the latest in a series of state laws restricting the rights of transgender Kansans, including their ability to change the gender marker on their driver's licenses and play on school sports teams that match their gender identity.
The laws reflect growing concern among conservatives about transgender issues and have been lauded by some faith leaders. But not McKinzie.
Earlier this year, he traveled to Topeka to testify against Senate Bill 63, which bans minors experiencing gender dysphoria from accessing puberty blockers, hormone therapy and other medical treatments.
In a packed legislative committee room, Bible in hand, he rose.
“I just want to take a page and a moment from this book that I hold dear and remind us of the words of the prophet Micah, who wrote in chapter six, verse eight: ‘What does the Lord require of you, Human, but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly?’
“As I read the literature of this bill,” he said, “I see in it something that is terribly unkind.”
McKinzie says it was precisely due to his faith that he was compelled to testify.
“Scripture points us towards the heart of God, and that desire has always been to look towards those who have been marginalized and cast out by normal and polite society,” he said.
“Today, LGBTQ folks, poor folks, people of color, and right now, especially trans folks are being targeted in real, tangible and deeply unfair ways.”
But not everyone agrees with his interpretation of the Bible.
Lucretia Nold, a public policy specialist for the Kansas Catholic Conference, testified to lawmakers that while the Catholic Church urges compassion for all people, it supports prohibiting minors from receiving gender-affirming care.
“Kids are innocent,” she told lawmakers. “They’re just trying to figure out the world and who they are in it.
“It is our responsibility as adults to help show (children) the truth, beauty and goodness that is out there — and who they are and who God created them to be — and not affirm them in a lie,” she said.
Supporters of the bill prevailed last month, when Republican lawmakers overrode a veto of the bill by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.
New polling by the Public Religion Research Institute indicates that Americans’ stances on transgender rights often divide along religious lines. A majority of Unitarians, Jewish Americans, Hindus, Buddhists and the religiously unaffiliated who responded to the group’s survey said they oppose bans on gender-affirming care for minors.
Catholics and mainline Protestants across races were relatively evenly divided on the issue, while a majority of Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, white evangelical Protestants and Latter-day Saints said they support the bans.
Faith and family
McKinzie’s office at Grace United Methodist Church is decorated with rainbow flags. A banner behind his desk proclaims, “you are loved.”
Like many Americans, his perspective on gender identity is shaped by his personal relationships. In his case, being the dad of a gender-fluid teenager.
“The experience of parenthood should lean us towards empathy,” he said. “My children have, in many ways, made me a much better version of who I am.”
His child, Cambria, is 17 and uses they/them pronouns. They say, as political debates over trans rights continue, having an accepting church community makes all the difference. They’re grateful for faith leaders like their dad who stick up for the queer community.
“I can look at him and I can know that there is somebody with a voice — somebody who is the epitome of what people will listen to — who is out there, standing for me and for others,” they said.
Cambria says that SB 63 and other Kansas laws may impose new restrictions on gender-fluid youth, but it will not erase them.
“We’re still here,” they said. “We’re not disappearing.”
