A Revival of Renewal & Resistance

Last month Transforming Hearts Collective co-leader Rev. Mykal Slack joined with other trans spiritual leaders and clergy during the weekend leading up to the International Transgender Day of Remembrance to organize and offer "TRANS-forming Proclamation," an inaugural trans-led, trans-voiced, trans-envisioned revival of renewal and resistance hosted by Peace United Church of Christ in Hickory, North Carolina.

For the first time, trans clergy from across North Carolina came together to offer words of celebration, encouragement, hope, healing, and call to community-building to the whole of our communities of faith—trans people of faith, LGBTQIA people of faith, and allies and accomplices in the hope-filled work for unity, common ground, and healing the breeches for deeper connection in the work ahead. The group put together three evenings of worship that included music, responsive readings, and preaching, followed by community-building and dessert, culminating with words of remembrance, resistance, and hope on Trans Day of Remembrance, Monday November 20th.

It was a powerful moment in our lives as trans clergy and in the lives of trans folks who came from all over the state to be with us. Over the course of the three nights, there were close to sixty people in attendance altogether. It was such a rich and inspiring time that we are planning to move beyond the context of Trans Day of Remembrance and into having two to four town hall meetings in 2018 to engage in some real talk about what we all need to get free in North Carolina and around the country.

"We Can't Thrive If We Don't Survive"

Last week Transforming Hearts Collective co-leader Teo Drake delivered a keynote address at the annual South Carolina HIV, STD and Viral Hepatitis Conference, held October 25–26 in Columbia, South Carolina. The theme of this year’s conference was “Thriving Together for Tomorrow.”

Teo’s keynote was titled “We Can’t Thrive If We Don’t Survive: Addressing Disparities in Access to Care for Transgender People,” and covered the current landscape faced by transgender people living with HIV, the particular barriers that HIV-positive trans people face in accessing competent care, the strengths and resilience that trans people bring forward to get their needs met, and the ways in which race, class, ability, sexuality, and gender intersect within HIV-positive trans communities and how these intersections affect disparities, access, and health outcomes.

Teo also teamed up with fellow Positively Trans National Advisory Board member Kiara St. James to deliver two workshops: “Transgender 101” and “Fighting for Survival: The Call to Center the Needs and Expertise of Transgender Women of Color.”

Radical Welcome Pilot Program

The Transforming Hearts Collective is thrilled to announce the beginning of plans to launch a pilot program for congregations that want to take their “welcome” to the next level—with the support of a grant from the Unitarian Universalist Funding Program!

Growing out of a call to support congregations in becoming places where queer and trans people of all races/ethnicities, abilities, classes, and ages can fully get their spiritual needs met and bring their gifts forward, we are working to create a pilot program that will help faith communities transform their congregational culture around “welcome,” difference, the purpose of spiritual community, marginalized experiences (particularly sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, class, and ability), and social justice. We plan to create a program that is:

1. Intersectional. 
   No faith community can claim to be LGBTQ-welcoming if that welcome only extends to LGBTQ people of particular races, classes, abilities, and ages. Rather than treating different aspects of identity and experience separately, we plan to create a program that fully integrates sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, ability, class, age, and more, and is grounded in the experiences and needs of people who have multiple marginalized identities.
    
2. Heart-centered.
   We believe that in order for transformation to happen, we need to reach people’s hearts, not just their minds. A lot of LGBTQ inclusion work focuses on intellectual understandings of what it means to be trans, or what the experiences of gay people are, rather than deeply engaging on a heart level with how oppression keeps us all from being our full authentic selves when it comes to gender and sexuality. We plan to create a program that centers compassion, care, and love.
    
3. Spiritually grounded.
   Practicing radical welcome is a way of practicing Beloved Community. There are deep, spiritual roots to our call to engage with difference differently. We plan to create a program that grounds participants in their faith and gives them concrete tools and spiritual practices for the work of welcome.
    
4. Up-to-date with respect to LGBTQ identity.
   Language and understandings around gender, sexuality, relationships, and families have been shifting and evolving at breathtaking speeds, and many faith communities are decades behind. We plan to create a program that pushes participants to engage with modern understandings of gender and sexuality and stays perpetually up-to-date rather than becoming quickly obsolete.
    
5. Flexible and custom-fit.
   One of the key flaws of curriculum-based programs for faith communities is that they don’t work the same way in congregations of varying sizes, resources, demographics, and geographic locations. We plan to create a program that allows each congregation that engages with it to have a custom-fit experience.
    
6. Transformational.
   Transformation requires much more than a curriculum, which is why we plan to create a program that engages a congregation’s full membership and leadership, as well as engaging every area of congregational life, including worship, religious education, social justice, and more. We also plan to create a program that establishes practices for continued growth in this area, rather than a “one-and-done” approach.

We plan to utilize a grounded and accountable method of creating this program, starting with creating an advisory committee of people representing a diversity of sexualities, genders, races, classes, abilities, ages, congregational experience, leadership roles, etc., then working as a collective to create a pilot program, identifying initial congregations to participate in the pilot, and working closely with those congregations to improve the program before launching it in full.

Ultimately our goal is to help faith communities transform and live into their full potential as places of radical inclusion and forces for justice in the world. We can’t wait to share more as this program develops!

The Clearing Grows Through Community Conversations

The Clearing is growing! In the past year, this emerging spiritual community centering the voices, experiences, and liberation of queer and trans people of color and open to all, has been deepening its work in Durham, NC.

Transforming Hearts Collective co-leaders LeLaina Romero and Rev. Mykal Slack, along with a group of close friends and chosen family in Durham, connected around a common vision for spiritual community that none of them had found in the area, but were longing for. We co-created spaces for rest, renewal, and uplift in the midst of HB2 repeal efforts, facilitated honest and pain-filled dialogue in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, and held visioning sessions to lay the groundwork for a series of community conversations to help identify leaders and continue to cultivate and curate what this new spiritual adventure can and should be.

The first two community conversations took place this spring—the first at the LGBTQ Resource Center at North Carolina Central University and the second at the LGBTQ Center of Durham—to explore people’s hopes for spiritual community. More than thirty people participated—people of color, queer folks, and trans/non-binary folks, ranging in age from 9 months old to 60+. Our time together was filled with the sounds and feels of babies playing and elders sharing; bread being cut, salads getting dressed, soup heating up; gratitude for the openness and the willingness to share what’s real, what’s hard, and what’s good, among new friends.

We learned that, for folks to show up fully, they wanted a multigenerational, nonjudgmental space to share meals and music, be outdoors together, hear cool sermons, learn from sacred texts, and make art. We also learned that, because of past pain in spiritual spaces, understanding how to show up as an anti-oppressive, multi-faith, multi-vocal space will take time and intention.

We visioned and dreamed together, and made a plan for sharing monthly dinners, finding the joy and release of dance and moving our bodies, embracing the power of ritual, and reclaiming public space out in the world, as well as building an evolving team of visionaries and organizers that will continue to breathe life and love and meaning into this community. And we continue to dream about engaging trans/non-binary communities in altar-building in places where we gather and connecting with local artists and musicians about creating art spaces and dance parties as places for healing. Ashe!

National Weekend of Prayer for Transgender Justice

The Transforming Hearts Collective is proud to have collaborated with the Religious Institute in creating and resourcing the National Weekend of Prayer for Transgender Justice, March 24-26, 2017. The weekend of prayer was originally envisioned as a way for people of faith to lend support to Gavin Grimm and his court case against a Virginia county school board for not allowing him to use the boy's bathroom in his high school, which the Supreme Court was planning to hear in late March.

When the Court decided it would no longer hear the case—in response to the executive branch's decision to remove Title IX guidance clarifying protection for transgender students—it became clear that a weekend of prayer was needed even more than before. Day in and day out, the suffering of transgender people, particularly those who are women and femmes, people of color, youth, elders, disabled, and undocumented, goes unnoticed by the mainstream.

So we broadened the focus of the weekend and helped create resources for faith communities to understand the moral imperative of transgender justice, practice guiding principles around working for transgender justice, engage in religious education related to transgender justice, and commit to next steps as faith communities to foster transgender justice both within and outside their congregational walls. Close to thirty different LGBTQ and religious organizations signed on as co-sponsors.

Creating Care at Creating Change

At the annual Creating Change conference hosted by the National LGBTQ Task Force this January, attendees were able to access care and spiritual practice in two brand new ways. Along with other LGBTQ faith leaders, co-leaders of the Transforming Hearts Collective spearheaded the creation of a Spiritual Care Team and a dedicated spirituality room, the Many Paths Gathering Space.

The Spiritual Care Team is a thirty-person multi-faith, multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-generational volunteer team of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two spirit, and queer faith leaders who were "on call" throughout the conference to provide care and support to attendees in many different ways. The team also led a variety of spiritual practices in the Many Paths Gathering Space that were open to all: offerings ranged from Muslim prayer to meditation to queer-inclusive Christian prayer to Earth-centering ritual to Catholic Mass.

A highlight of the conference was an interfaith ritual held during the inauguration on January 21, where more than forty people from more than fifteen different spiritual paths had space to grieve, heal, hope, and sing together in community.