Transgender Identity:

Toward Healthy and Holistic Relationship

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

© R.E. Slater

A Companion Essay to "Disturbing the Theological

Certainties of Anti-LGBTQ Biblical Literalism"

A Twofold Preface

Quantum Humanitarian Outreach & Theological Witness

Across the world, transgender people are facing escalating discrimination, state-sanctioned intolerance, and the weaponization of identity. Behind these injustices are not abstractions but human lives — lives capable of joy, creativity, and contribution, yet too often met with rejection and fear.

This essay emerges as an act of quantum humanitarian outreach — recognizing that human dignity is not a zero-sum game, but a shared field of becoming. Just as a single movement at the quantum level can ripple through an entire system, so too can a single gesture of respect, solidarity, or courage reshape communities.
Transgender dignity is not a “special interest.” It is a measure of the moral health of a society. Where intolerance is permitted against one, the ground weakens beneath us all. Where compassion expands, so too does the possibility of a future in which diversity is understood not as a threat but as a source of shared strength. This essay, therefore, is both an analysis and an invitation: to listen, to learn, and to help build a world capacious enough for every person to live openly and without fear.
Bridging these worlds - the humanitarian and the theological - matters. For if human dignity is indivisible, it is also sacred. Every encounter with another person is not just a social fact but a moral moment, a threshold where we either expand or diminish the common good.
For people of faith, the call is even deeper. The heart of every living religious tradition contains some version of this truth: the sacred is revealed in the dignity of the other. Transgender people are not outside that sacred story — they are part of it.
To speak of their dignity is to bear witness to the God who is found not in fear or control, but in relationship, incarnation, and love. It is to proclaim, against centuries of misused scripture and weaponized doctrine, that faith is not a tool of domination but a summons to solidarity.
In a Whiteheadian process framework, the divine is not static or distant, but present and evolving within the fabric of creation — luring us toward greater love, wider community, and deeper care. To deny the dignity of any person is to resist that divine lure. To affirm it is to join in God’s ongoing work of creative transformation.
This essay, then, is also a theological act: a refusal to let intolerance and hate speak in the name of the sacred, and a declaration that God’s presence is found wherever human dignity is upheld. To affirm transgender people is not to stray from faith — it is to fulfill its truest calling.

I. Introduction: Meeting Others in Our Shared Humanity

There is something profoundly human about meeting someone where they are — not as an idea, not as a category, but as a person. To speak of transgender identity is not to speak of an abstract debate or a medical code, but of real people whose lives, loves, and longings are as deep and complex as anyone’s.

Transgender people have always existed. They have lived quietly in some cultures, openly in others, and too often have borne the weight of misunderstanding or hostility. In recent decades, language and frameworks — legal, medical, cultural, and theological — have begun to catch up to lived reality.

This essay expands upon three core frameworks, each progressively replacing the other:

(March 2018) DSM-5-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), which currently uses the category “Gender Dysphoria.”
(May 2019) ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases), which uses “Gender Incongruence” and removes transgender identity from the category of mental disorders.
(September 2022) WPATH SOC-8 (World Professional Association for Trans-gender Health: Standards of Care), which sets forth a human rights–based, informed-consent model of transgender identity acceptance and care.

But beyond frameworks, the heart of this essay is about relationship — how we as individuals, families, communities, and societies can cultivate healthy, holistic, and enduring bonds with transgender people. To do so is to practice human decency; to do so well is to practice love.

II. Understanding Transgender Identity

A. Defining the Terms

(Biological) Sex refers to biological characteristics (e.g., chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormonal profiles) assigned at birth.
(Psychological, Neurocognitive) Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt inner sense of their gender self-awareness — whether man, woman, both, neither, or somewhere in between.
(Psychological, Social, Cultural) Gender expression refers to the outward ways people communicate their gender self-awareness (e.g., clothing, voice, mannerisms, names, pronouns).

Someone is transgender when their gender identity differs from their assigned sex at birth. Someone is cisgender when it aligns. Neither identity is pathological. Both are simply part of the human spectrum of embodiment and experience via their neurocognitive development and the complex interactions between their biology, psyche, and the received environment.

B. Historical and Cultural Continuity

1. “Gender diversity” has existed throughout human history

Many societies — across continents and eras — have recognized more than just two genders (male and female) or have allowed gender roles to be more fluid than what we often see in modern Western contexts. Examples include:

Two-Spirit identities in many pre-colonial Indigenous North American cultures.
Hijra communities in South Asia (recognized for centuries, with legal standing in some pre-colonial kingdoms).
Kathoey in Thailand, Bakla in the Philippines, Fa’afafine in Samoa.
Galli priesthoods in ancient Rome dedicated to Cybele, where gender-variant people held religious authority.
Androgynous or third-gender deities in Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman traditions.

🧭 These examples show that gender variance was normal, acknowledged, and often socially integrated long before the modern West came to dominate global discourse.

2. “Western colonial modernity” refers to a specific historical project

From roughly the 16th to 20th centuries, European colonialism spread not only economic and political control but also social and cultural frameworks — including very rigid ideas about binary gender and heterosexual norms.

This happened through:

Christian missionary work that condemned gender variance as “sinful” or “unnatural.”
European legal systems imposed on colonized peoples, criminalizing trans and queer lives.
Medicalization and pathologization of gender variance in 19th–20th century Western science.
Cultural erasure: Indigenous languages, cosmologies, and gender categories were suppressed or outlawed.

👉 In other words: the strict “male vs. female only” binary that we often treat as “normal” today is not ancient or universal — it is largely a modern Western colonial export.

3. “Historically anomalous” means “the exception, not the rule”

The sentence is saying:

It’s not gender diversity that is unusual or new — it’s the Western binary system that is historically abnormal compared to the rest of human history.

For most of the world’s cultures and most of human time, gender diversity was present in some form.

What’s exceptional — and damaging — is how modern Western systems suppressed that diversity through law, religion, and social norms.

4. Why this context matters

When people claim “transgender identity is new,” “invented,” or “a modern fad,” this history shows the opposite:

Transgender and gender-diverse people have existed across time and culture.
What’s “new” is the Western enforcement of binary gender and the colonial erasure of other systems.
So affirming gender diversity today isn’t introducing something alien — it’s recovering something ancient and human.

This is especially relevant for faith communities, governments, and social movements: it reframes the narrative from “this is something we’re being forced to accept now” to “this is something our ancestors accepted long before colonialism narrowed our imagination.”

✅ In short:

Transgender and gender-diverse identities are old.

The strict gender binary is what’s new.

And it was spread globally through Western colonial power,
not through some timeless moral law.

III. Medical Frameworks: From Pathology to Affirmation

Medical frameworks shape legal rights, insurance access, and social perception. It is crucial to understand how they’ve changed.

A. (March 2018) DSM-5-TR: Gender Dysphoria

In older DSM editions, transgender people were labeled as having “Gender Identity Disorder” (GID), pathologizing their very existence. DSM-5 (2013) and DSM-5-TR (2022) replaced GID with “Gender Dysphoria.”

The new framing:

Does not consider being transgender a mental disorder.
Focuses on the distress some may experience when gender identity and assigned sex do not align.
Allows for medical access when distress is present.

Not all transgender people experience distress, and not all need or want medical intervention. For those who do, this diagnostic language is often a gateway to care, not a judgment of identity.

B. (May 2019) ICD-11: Gender Incongruence

The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 (2022) goes further:

Removes transgender identity from the mental disorders chapter.
Places “Gender Incongruence” in the sexual health section.
Does not require distress for classification.

This reflects a global consensus: being transgender is not a disease. The ICD aims to facilitate access to affirming care while depathologizing identity.

C. (September 2022) WPATH SOC-8: Standards of Care

The WPATH SOC-8 (2022) is a cornerstone document for clinicians worldwide. It:

Affirms gender diversity as part of human diversity.
Grounds care in human rights and informed consent.
Recognizes that transition is individual, not one-size-fits-all.
Removes unnecessary gatekeeping for adults seeking care.
Includes pathways for social, hormonal, and surgical transition, but does not prescribe them as universal.
Expands protections and care for adolescents and nonbinary individuals.

WPATH does not define who transgender people are; it defines how the world should treat them ethically and competently.

IV. The Relational Turn: Seeing the Person, Not the Category

Policies and classifications may set conditions, but relationship is where dignity is either sustained or denied. For most transgender people, their most significant experiences are not in hospitals or government offices but in families, friend groups, workplaces, and communities.

Healthy, holistic relationship begins with:

Recognition: They are who they say they are.
Respect: Their name, pronouns, and dignity are honored.
Relational presence: They are treated not as problems to be solved but as people to be loved.

V. Family as the First Community

For transgender individuals, family acceptance is one of the strongest protective factors against depression, self-harm, and suicide. Conversely, rejection from family is one of the strongest predictors of harm.

A. Principles of Family Affirmation

Listen first. Let your loved one define their experience, not your expectations.
Use chosen names and pronouns consistently.
Support access to gender-affirming care if desired.
Respect privacy. Not everyone is “out” to everyone.
Celebrate identity, do not hide it.

This is not about “agreeing with everything.” It’s about loving your child, sibling, parent, or relative for who they are, fully and without fear.

B. Spiritual and Cultural Tensions

Many families face faith or cultural conflicts around gender identity. Here, it’s helpful to distinguish between:

Core love (non-negotiable dignity of your family member), and
Doctrinal interpretation (which evolves over time).

Transgender identity does not destroy family bonds. Rejection does.

VI. Friendship and Social Belonging

Friends often provide the first safe spaces for transgender individuals to be known and experienced. Friendships do not require expertise — they require presence.

A. Practices of Good Friendship

Normalize, don’t exoticize. A transgender friend is not your “trans friend.” They are your friend.
Be a learner. If you don’t understand something, ask respectfully or educate yourself.
Show up. Attend events, support transitions, defend their dignity in absentia.
Hold space for change. Transition can involve evolving language, pronouns, or identities over time.

Good friendship is a practice of steady solidarity, not performance.

VII. Strangers, Institutions, and Public Life

Not all interactions are intimate. Many occur in schools, workplaces, churches, clinics, and civic spaces. Transgender people frequently navigate these spaces with vigilance because of past harm.

A. Everyday Respect from Strangers

Use inclusive language (“they” if unsure).
Don’t ask invasive questions (e.g., about surgeries or body parts).
Don’t out people.
Respect bathroom use and other rights.
Step up if you see harassment.

B. Institutional Responsibility

Workplaces, schools, and faith communities should:

Adopt non-discrimination policies.
Offer gender-neutral facilities where possible.
Provide training on pronouns, language, and respect.
Allow name and gender marker changes on forms.
Create cultures of belonging, not mere tolerance.

An institution that respects transgender dignity helps everyone breathe more freely.

VIII. Emotional and Cultural Intelligence

Healthy relationships require emotional maturity and cultural awareness.

Emotional Skill	Practice	Impact
Empathy	Listening to lived experience	Builds trust
Humility	Admitting what you don’t know	Opens learning
Reflexivity	Examining your biases	Reduces harm
Allyship	Using your voice for equity	Shares social power

Transgender people are not obligated to educate everyone they meet. Those around them can learn to carry some of that work themselves.

IX. Faith, Philosophy, and Ethics: Expanding the Moral Imagination

Many people encounter transgender identity through the lens of their own brand of religious or moral tradition. This can often create tension, misrepresentation, and outright rejection. However, learn to see healthy possibility against these unhelpful projections:

Firstly, across faith traditions, there is a common moral thread that endures:

Love your neighbor as yourself.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Honor the dignity of every person.

Transgender identity invites communities to expand their moral imagination — to see that human diversity is not a threat but a gift. Theology, philosophy, and ethics are not static; they are living conversations, as capable of growing as the people who hold them.

X. Legal Rights and Social Structures

Personal relationships can thrive in just social structures. Transgender dignity is easier to recognize and sustain when protected legally.

Key areas include:

Legal recognition of gender identity (name and marker changes).
Access to healthcare, including gender-affirming care.
Employment and housing protections.
Safe public accommodations (e.g., restrooms).
Freedom from harassment and violence.

WPATH SOC-8 and ICD-11 both underpin pertinent legal reforms in many countries, turning depathologization into policy and protection.

XI. A Holistic Vision of Community

Healthy communities are not built on sameness but on shared dignity across difference.

A holistic vision for communities engaging transgender persons includes:

Education — dismantling myths and misinformation.
Cultural fluency — understanding how gender varies globally and historically.
Legal protections — creating safe civic ground.
Relational hospitality — welcoming, not merely tolerating.
Narrative participation — allowing transgender voices to shape the story of the community.

Where people feel safe to be themselves, positive communal trust and flourishing can grow.

XII. Intersections: Race, Disability, Class, and Trans Experience

Transgender experiences are not monolithic. They are shaped by other factors, including race, ethnicity, disability, class, and migration status.

Trans women of color face some of the highest rates of violence globally.
Economic marginalization compounds healthcare inequities.
Disabled transgender individuals often encounter both ableism and transphobia in healthcare systems.
Ableism is a system of beliefs, practices, and structures that discriminate against, devalue, or exclude people with disabilities — whether physical, sensory, cognitive, mental, or developmental.
Confronting ableism means building a society that values and includes every body and every mind as fully human.

Healthy, holistic relationship requires awareness of these intersecting forces. To support transgender people well is to see them fully.

XIII. Embodiment, Transition, and the Right to Change

Not every transgender person transitions, and not every transition looks the same. Some pursue social transition (names, pronouns, clothing), others medical transition (hormones, surgery), others both or neither.

The right to self-determination over one’s body is a core human right.

Respecting someone’s embodiment journey means:

Not questioning their choices.
Not measuring their “validity” by appearance or conformity.
Honoring their bodily autonomy as you would your own.

XIV. The Transformative Power of Encounter

Healthy relationships with transgender people are not only good for them — personal interactions often change those who offer respect.

Encountering transgender friends, family, or strangers:

Expands our understanding of what it means to be human.
Challenges rigid binaries that limit everyone.
Teaches us to live more gently with difference.
Builds a more just and imaginative moral community.

Transgender identity is not merely something to tolerate; it is a gift of perspective that reveals the depth and complexity of human becoming.

XV. Bridge Section: For Trans and Non-Trans Readers Alike

This essay has sought to speak not to one group alone, but to all of us who share this human landscape together. For transgender readers, may these words affirm your dignity, your right to live openly, and your worth as participants in shaping our collective future. For non-transgender readers, may these same words open your ears to listen, your hands to welcome, and your hearts to grow wide enough to hold difference without fear.

This is not a one-way conversation. Transgender and cisgender people alike are both subjects of the story and authors of what comes next. If anything enduring is to be built, it will be built together — in families that listen, friendships that hold, communities that learn, and institutions that dare to affirm.

Healthy, holistic relationship is not an ideal for the few. It is an invitation to us all.

XVI. Conclusion: Seeing with New Eyes

To live well with transgender people is to choose love over fear, dignity over debate, listening over silencing, and relationship over ideology.

“Affirming someone’s identity does not diminish yours — it enlarges the space where both can belong.”

DSM, ICD, and WPATH frameworks have ethically evolved to reflect what transgender people have always known: their identity is real, valid, and deeply human. But the truest transformation happens not on paper, but in relationship — in families who listen, friends who stand alongside, communities who learn to see, and strangers who choose kindness over contempt.

Healthy, holistic relationship is an act of hope: A hope that we can live together, not in spite of our differences, but because of them.

Appendix

Reader Guidance for Transgender and Non-Transgender Communities

I. To Transgender Readers

You are not a diagnosis.
You are not a debate.
You are not alone.

Your identity is part of the living human tapestry, ancient and enduring. The systems of medicine and law are catching up to truths you already know in your bones: that you deserve to live fully, freely, and safely. This essay affirms:

Your identity is valid — whether or not you transition, and whatever shape that transition takes.
Your right to dignity does not depend on convincing others of your worth.
Your story belongs to you, and you can offer it — or withhold it — as you choose.
Healthy communities exist and can be built around you.

May these words strengthen your sense of belonging, and remind you that your presence is not conditional, but intrinsic to the shared story of humanity.

II. To Non-Transgender Readers

The world you have inherited is already more diverse than the one you were taught to imagine. Transgender people are not “arriving” into your world — they’ve always been here. What is shifting is our collective willingness to see.

This essay is not meant to shame or accuse but to invite:

To learn without defensiveness, even when it unsettles you.
To honor names and pronouns, not as political statements but as acts of human respect.
To stand beside rather than over, practicing solidarity rather than silent neutrality.
To hold your faith, philosophy, or culture with enough elasticity to love more widely than you once thought possible.

The future of belonging depends on what we choose to do with what we now know.

III. Shared Ground

Although this appendix speaks to two audiences, its message is one:

That dignity belongs to everyone.
That relationships thrive in trust, not fear.
That no one must lose for others to be free.
That love is made visible in how we live with those who are different from ourselves.

There are no “sides” in human dignity. Only people. Only stories. Only the shared work of learning to live well together.

IV. Reflection & Discussion Prompts

These prompts can be used in personal journaling, group discussions, classrooms, faith settings, or community dialogues.

For Transgender Readers

What kinds of spaces make you feel most affirmed, and why?
How has your sense of belonging evolved over time?
Where do you most wish to see change in your immediate circles?

For Non-Transgender Readers

What assumptions about gender did you inherit, and how might they be reconsidered?
How can you use your position to reduce harm or increase safety for trans people?
Where might you need to listen more and speak less?

Shared

How might communities be transformed if every person were received as a full participant in human dignity?
What does mutual respect look like in your specific context — home, faith, school, workplace?

V. Final Words

This appendix is not an afterthought. It is a place of encounter — where understanding turns into practice, and practice turns into belonging.

Whether transgender or not, each of us has a role to play in this unfolding story.

To the transgender reader: Your being is not up for debate. You are already home in the human family.

To the non-transgender reader: Your openness can turn that truth from hope into reality.

“Where dignity is shared, community grows. Where fear is unlearned, friendship begins.”

📚 References & Further Reading

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). 2022.
World Health Organization. International Classification of Diseases, Eleventh Revision (ICD-11). 2022.
World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8. 2022.
PFLAG: https://pflag.org
National Center for Transgender Equality: https://transequality.org
WPATH: https://wpath.org
Julia Serano, *Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism

Sunday, October 12, 2025

Transgender Identity: Toward Healthy and Holistic Relationship