Who is in the room?

This week, UUWorld, the magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association, published an article that caused harm to transgender (including genderqueer and gender non-binary people) and intersex people.

There are many reasons why this article was harmful (including that it contained a number of serious inaccuracies), and I don't want to spend time going over all of them (my colleague CB Beal does a marvelous job of explaining this in an article they wrote on Medium that is now part of the UUA's official apology).

What I do want to  ask you to think about is the tendency for those of us whose identities are dominant in our society to talk about those with marginalized identities as if they're not in the room, when in fact they are right next to us.

Yesterday, I said to a colleague of color, "How rich would you be if you had a dollar for every time someone proclaimed that we are an all-white religion in your presence?" They would be very rich, I was told. If we pretend that we do not already have people of color in our congregation, we will certainly make that pronouncement come true. No one wants to stay somewhere where they are made invisible and voiceless.

Similarly, cisgender people at UUFNW can't talk about the harm caused by the UUWorld article as if it had been done to people somewhere else. Transgender, genderqueer, and gender non-binary people are part of this congregation.

Part of what we are called to do as Unitarian Universalists is to engage in the work of building relationships. That starts with the people we share a congregation with. Let us do the work necessary to really know who is in the room with us.