Avery, eight, is a transgender girl who teamed up with Equality House, a rainbow home that promotes LGBT visibility and is owned by non-profit Planting Peace, to make sure trans people have a spot just for them.

Once a year Equality House repaints itself with the colors of the transgender flag; blue, pink and white. It was during this time that Avery made a visit to the location.

Seeing the home so openly support trans people gave Avery a sense of pride. After that she began showing herself in pictures, feeling that she would be accepted as she is.

‘I loved the Rainbow House when it was painted like the transgender flag. I felt so happy and proud to be transgender,’ she said.
Avery Jackson, eight, is a transgender girl who teamed up with Equality House to create a center for transgender people in Topeka, Kansas

Moved by how affected Avery was by Equality House’s temporary make over, Planting Peace decided to start the process of purchasing the house next to them – directly across from the Westboro Baptist Church – and permanently painting it the colors of the trans flag.

Not only did Planting Peace plan for the house to bear the colors of the trans flag, but they also wanted the home to become a safe center for trans people in the Topeka, Kansas, community.

Planting Peace, a non-profit that owns Equality House, bought the home next door to them to turn into the new center

Avery got the idea for the center after visiting Equality House, which is across the street from the Westboro Baptist Church

Equality House is a rainbow home that promotes visibility, and once a year the facility is repainted the colors of the transgender flag

But first the non-profit needed to raise the money to purchase the neighboring house. A fundraiser on Planting Peace’s site raised just over $11,000 – about $60,000 short of buying the house. That’s where Martin Dunn stepped in.

Dunn, a New York City developer, fund the $70,000 project after reading about Avery’s fight for a transgender center. ‘The idea was to create something that was a very visible symbol of acceptance and pride. The idea that it would be across from a hate group was also really appealing.’

When Avery visited the home during its stint with the blue, pink and white colors, she was overjoyed that there was such support for people like her

She began showing her face in pictures after the visit. Equality House was so moved by this that they decided to make Avery’s dream of a place for people just like her a reality

Planting Peace began working toward purchasing the house next door to them (pictured, right) so they could paint it

Martin Dunn, a New York City developer, gave Planting Peace $70,000 to build Avery’s dream center next to Equality House

‘I have three children and if I had a kid that was transgender I would want a place that would celebrate them and accept them. That’s just not available in this country and it should be,’ Dunn told the New York Daily News.

Avery said Dunn has made her dream come true.

‘I was worried that having a transgender house was just a dream, but now it’s finally real. I love the transgender flag. It’s beautiful and makes me smile. I’m happy that we will have a house painted like the flag to show that transgender people are beautiful and will make them smile,’ she said.

Equality House and the new transgender center (pictured, prior to painting) are right across the street and in plane view of the Westboro Baptist Chruch

Aaron Jackson, the president of Planting Peace, said if the Westboro Baptist Church (pictured) responds to the new facility with hate, they will be met with even louder love

So far the Westboro Baptist Church, notorious for inflammatory protests of soldiers’ funerals and picketing with signs that boast hateful messages, hasn’t reacted publicly to the house.

Aaron Jackson, the president of Planting Peace, told the Daily News the transgender community will meet every sign and every negative statement with louder love. ‘We need to fight for the right for all people to live freely and love freely without fear,’ said Jackson.

Source link

The Equality House was created by non-profit Planting Peace when it purchased the home and painted it the colors of the rainbow flag in March 2013. Earlier this year, we brought you the news that Planting Peace was attempting to acquire the house next door to The Equality House and paint it the colors of the transgender flag — like The Equality House was painted on the Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2013.

Thanks to a man named Martin Dunn, this dream has become a reality.

When Dunn saw that Planting Peace was attempting to raise money to purchase the house, he stepped up to the plate.

Grace Phelps-Roper/Planting Peace

“I have three kids, and if one of my children were transgender I would want there to be places that accepted and celebrated them,” Dunn, President of Dun Development corp, told The Huffington Post. “I happen to live in a progressive neighborhood and my children go to a school that is open-minded and welcoming of transgender students, but I know that is not the reality for many young people around the country. Like the Equality House before it, a transgender house that makes people feel proud and safe and confident and supported is badly needed. Every city should have one. If an eight-year-old girl can stand up against hate and prejudice, the least we can do is stand behind her.”

Thanks to Dunn, the money to purchase the house next to the original Equality House was donated to Planting Peace, which now owns the property, and volunteers painted it the colors of the transgender flag on Sunday, June 26.

Grace Phelps-Roper/Planting Peace

“Beyond the individual incidents of violence, bullying and hateful messages that the transgender community faces already, we’ve seen a rise in discriminating legislation designed to restrict the basic, fundamental rights and human dignity of our transgender family,” Aaron Jackson, President of Planting Peace, told The Huffington Post. “As allies of the LGBT community, we hear the stories from countless transgender people who express the devastating impact this has on them, making them feel broken or ‘less than’. Repeated messages of hate and intolerance are contributing to shockingly high suicide rates within the transgender community. We have to stand up and be just as loud with messages of love, support and compassion. We need to fight for the right for ALL people to live freely and love freely without fear. We are painting the house today as a permanent reminder of our message to our transgender family: You are loved, valued, supported and beautiful. There is nothing wrong with you, and we will stand with you.”

Over the past several years, The Equality House has held a number of pro-queer initiatives and events — all essentially on the front lawn of the Westboro Baptist Church. One of its earliest efforts involved a child’s lemonade stand for peace. Other events have included a gay wedding, a drag show and a mock wedding between Dumbledore and Gandalf.

Planting Peace has also engaged in large-scale political activism over the past couple of years, including a billboard in North Carolina that called out the state’s anti-LGBT House Bill 2 and a billboard in anti-gay marriage clerk Kim Davis’ hometown calling out her hypocrisy.

Source link

“If you can’t live based on your own convictions, then you are living a lie.”
Daliah Husu

Twenty-two years ago, at the age of fourteen, I gave my life to Christ in a quaint Pentecostal church in an underprivileged Miami, Florida neighborhood. It was an intimate affair, as I recall. The pastor was an elderly Cuban man, who had a limping right leg and a wide gap between his two front teeth. The congregation barely reached a total of ten people, but the “Amen’s” and “Hallelujah’s” within the tiny room echoed like the thunderous voices of a hundred men.

The pastor was charismatic, and he would joyously shout his praises and smile from ear to ear, proudly displaying the wide gap between his teeth as he limped to the pulpit carrying what appeared to be the world’s biggest Bible. It was at that moment that I asked myself: Why am I here?

Like the many residents of that shabby Miami neighborhood, I was poor and my family struggled just to get by on a daily basis. Everyone wanted a better life and an easier and faster way to make money and make ends meet, so we all turned to God for answers during those hard times. But there was something deeper troubling me, something I had kept hidden and locked away in the farthest reaches of my being, something I was so ashamed of that I could not even speak the words out loud—I was attracted to men and I secretly wished to be a girl.

Although I did not understand my gender identity at the time, I assumed that my desire to be “that girl” was just another aspect of being homosexual. Yes, I was ignorant, and it would take me a few years to understand the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity. But as I recall, I was unhappy at the time, and I wanted to rid myself of my “unnatural” desires and my “wicked” ways.

Now at thirty-six, fully transitioned and happily married, I understand what I failed to understand then. I understand why I sat on that cheap, white plastic patio chair in a corner of that church for almost five years. I understand why I spent those years of my life listening to the pastor lecture about God’s love, God’s wrath, his salvation, and eternal damnation.

I understand that I was weak at the time—much weaker than I realized—and that I was too scared to face my own self-hatred head on. I believed that God would fight my battles, as the pastor promised me in his lectures, that God would break the chains that bound me to my sins, and that God would cleanse my body and soul and make me new again. So when the pastor asked the congregation who wanted to turn their lives over to Christ that night, I was among the first broken and emotionally wounded to willingly raise my hands and beg to be saved.

During the years that followed, I prayed, and I prayed hard! I fasted once a week, asking God to cleanse me of my homosexual desires and cross-dressing habits. I became the church treasurer, the youth leader, and the pastor-to-be. I preached fervently behind the squeaky oak pulpit and on many busy street corners during those scorching hot tropical days. I was the first to stand by the church doors waiting for them to swing open every night, and the first to volunteer for every charity event and fundraiser. I gave it my all and my best just to change who I was into who I was told I should be.

As fate would have it, nothing changed within me—at least not in the way I thought it would. My prayers, of course, went unanswered and I eventually broke away from the church. In fact, my natural attraction toward men became stronger, and my uncertainties with my gender identity began clearing up. So could it be that my years of service to God and the church kept me from growing spiritually and from discovering and accepting who I truly was? Well, yes. My blind faith in what my spiritual leaders preached hindered me from knowing myself, because they taught me to hate everything I stood for. They planted hateful and terrifying ideas in my head that kept me latched to that white plastic chair in fear for my soul. I learned to hate LGBT folks, because I was taught to hate myself.

My leaders made me believe that the scriptures were undoubtedly God given words, and that no one should dare question the sacred book. They argued that reasoning and critical thinking were the devil’s way of steering man away from God and from the path of righteousness. After all, Adam and Eve did eat from the tree of knowledge. So let’s think about this for a moment: Isn’t a lack of knowledge called ignorance? Is it logical to think that God intended on creating an ignorant human race? That his or her purpose was to create a multitude of uninformed beings that would wander about the earth for eternity solely to glorify him and nothing more? I think not.

All creation is an expression of love. And whether you believe in the divine or not, creation is a manifestation of some sort and love is at the center of it all. We love our partners, our families, and our pets. Sometimes we even love our cars. Some of us love to write, while others love to read. We all love someone or something at some point, and that is what gives our lives a sense of meaning and fulfillment. Love is at the center of everything we do, hear, say, and think.

We only experience unhappiness when we aren’t in sync with what we love, be it the people we love or our convictions. If we are to believe in the archaic religious myths that continue to teach and spread hatred and intolerance, we are destined to live bound and enslaved for the rest of our lives. There is nothing enslaving about love, since love is liberating. So how could we not love ourselves for who we are as LGBT people? And how could the rest of the so called “religious” world not love us, if God is love?

Here is a thought: God is Love and the opposite of love is fear. When we are truly connected to our inner essence (you know, the ghostly-like thing that lives inside of us), we are connected to the rest of the world. That is what love does. It connects people, rather than divide them. So why is our society, our nation, our world so divided? Could it be that most of us are not living in love? The answer sadly is yes.

We are divided because we constantly live in fear, and because our egos don’t allow us to love. We use “sacred books” to justify our ignorance and our hatred, and as we see too often, to justify murder in the name of God and faith. We use little verses of scripture to point out other people’s faults and wrong doings, and we somehow feel accomplished because we managed to remember the name and the numerical reference to those scriptures. We also find those verses that justify our own despicable actions of judgement and violence against others, making us feel self-righteous when in reality we are deluded.

So I ask you, are you really living in love, or are you living in fear?

At some point in our lives we have heard someone say, “Love your neighbor like you love yourself.” Right? So for once, answer my question with honesty and conviction, because if you are one that persecutes LGBT people, you are living far from love, and you certainly don’t love yourself. If your words when addressing the LGBT community are “Repent for your sins or burn in hell,” you are living in judgment, and therefore not in love.

If you feel gratification in condemning someone’s soul for eternity, you are living in punishment and separate from love. If you believe that the LGBT community deserves no rights, then you are living in greed and selfishness and are not perfected in the way of God’s love.

The current flap in conservative Christian circles about bathroom access is a bit baffling. They shout about God not making mistakes, as if God only works in binaries and anything falling outside of black and white cannot be from him. But we don’t have a black and white God; creation is so full of color and variation that it’s incomprehensible how we Christians struggle to pare him down to the limited palette of our individual expectations.

The worst offenders are the Christian’s who claim to take the Bible literally. Of course they don’t actually do that; they impose their own filters on stories and phrases to fit their particular ideology. If they really did as they claim to do, they would quickly see that Jesus must be, by their own exegetical rules, the first transgender male.

Let’s take a look at what the Bible and Christianity tell us.

The teaching of the church from ancient days through today is that Jesus received his fleshly self from Mary. The church also teaches that Jesus is the new Adam, born of the new Eve.

Now Eve is a fascinating creature for many reasons. The Bible tells us she is the first example of human cloning, which I touched on in this post. But the fun doesn’t stop there. If we take the Genesis account in it’s literal meaning, as conservative Christians demand that we do, she is also the first case of a transgender woman. God reached into Adam, pulled out a bit of rib bone, and grew Eve from that XY DNA into Adam’s companion. She was created genetically male, and yet trans-formed into woman.

Then Along Comes Jesus

Now the whole pattern is both repeated and reversed. The first couple’s refusal to cooperate is turned around by Mary’s yes, and the second act of cloning occurs. The Holy Spirit comes upon the second Eve, and the child takes flesh from her and is born. Born of her flesh. Born with XX chromosome pairing. Born genetically female, and yet trans-formed into man.

States that do not support trans persons’ right to choose the restroom that fits their identity demand that bathroom usage be based on a person’s “biological sex.” One can imagine a future in which state licences require not only a vision test, but also a genetic test so that bouncers proofing at bathroom doors have something tangible to review. And that means that if Jesus and Eve were walking around today, perhaps shopping at the mall for a Father’s Day gift, they’d have to swap restrooms. Now Jesus could surely manage to finesse his way around a woman’s room, but poor Eve…

A quick look at the dictionary for the prefix “trans” tells us that it means “across,” “beyond,” “through,” and “changing thoroughly,” all of which are great terms for the person of Christ. He cuts across all boundaries. He is beyond our understanding. He is through all and in all. He changes us thoroughly into new creations.

In his person, and in his salvific actions, Jesus is truly the first and forever trans man.

Source link