The entry below is an excerpt from my upcoming book Holding on to Hope: Help for friends and family of transgender people. It's a similar title to Reaching for Hope: Strategies and support for the partners of transgender people and re-presents some of the content, but has a wider scope. In the early days of processing the truth about your loved one’s gender identity, your thoughts and emotions may be wide ranging and contradictory. You might even have trouble believing what t

I once dreamt I was standing on the bank of a wide, smooth river, and fully formed babies floated and bobbed along the surface, all of them dead. It was a surreal, horrific, and startlingly vibrant experience, and I've never forgotten it. For years I assumed the dream was related to abortion. I had two abortions in my teen years, and as an adult held jobs related to abortion-reduction efforts. It seemed logical to think the dream was a reflection of my emotion about the issue

The entry below is an excerpt from TRANSFIGURED. When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. (Genesis 5:1-2 NIV) Today we look to the Jewish roots of our faith. The Talmud is an ancient collection of 63 tractates which instructed Jews on how to live. One of the tractates talks about the intersection of biological sex and gender performance, and lists these four categories in addition to male and female: Andr