A discovery about another person, a friend of some four years’ standing, has shaken my world view and has provoked in me ongoing spiritual reflection. All during the time of our friendship I never suspected a fact about this woman that inevitably changes my understanding of who she is.

Rachel is the mother of a young adopted son and we have often talked about her experiences in raising him. At other times, I have had occasion to congratulate her on the excellent dishes she cooks and serves to students and graduate members of the organization where she works. I especially love the delicious desserts she concocts, deep dish apple pie above all.

The occasion on which I made the discovery about my friend was a visit to my favorite bookstore. There, on the table of newly published works, was a book with a handsome full-page photo of Rachel and a brief essay written by her about her life. In this account, she reveals a fact that staggered my imagination. That revelation is that she used to be a man.

I had read about other people making the same change but this instance was different. This had happened with a person whom I knew quite well. She has not been among my closest friends but nonetheless we have conversed often, sometimes about serious issues.

Rachel does not allude to her transformation in an indirect way. Rather, in the essay about her experience, she writes openly: “I was going through a transition – from male to female.  .  . I was born male.”

Presumably, many Americans brought up in a religious tradition will find it hard to accept this kind of personal transformation. It may go against the ideas of fixed gender that they learned at home and found confirmed in the Bible, the catechism, or other authoritative teaching. Other people, too, those steeped in the traditions of our culture, may be inclined to look with disdain on those who have changed their gender.

My own religious tradition has great difficulty coping with gender change. With its strict rules about sexuality, the Catholic Church would seem to have little sympathy with what my friend has done. The continuance of the same gender identity, male and female, is such a given in the teachings of the church that it is hard to imagine the institution approving of sex change.

For people raised and schooled as I was, it can require a new flexibility to accept changes that go against the grain of long accepted ideas. Until recent years, it never occurred to me that a person could change genders. Now, however, I am once again confronted with the need to dig deeply into myself and once more change ideas and feelings.

Whatever one’s views of gender change’s legitimacy, Rachel deserves respect and admiration for her courage. It could not have been easy for her to undergo the physical and mental changes necessary for a sex change. Even now, as she understatedly describes it, “I’m in the in-between space. And the in-between space is not always a comfortable thing.”

She has had to overcome misunderstanding and hostility on the part of people associated with her. At least one person, a co-worker, apparently considered it part of his religious duty to oppose what she was doing.

This fact emerges from her reference to problems that forced her to leave her previous job. “I was harassed about all kinds of different things, especially by one man who was a born-again Christian. It was brutal and I was actually frightened.”

Ironically for one who professes belief in Christ, this man’s conduct places him seriously at odds with the example and teaching of Jesus who so often reached out his hands to those people who had been marginalized by others.

For Jesus, human differences were no reason for shunning or looking down upon people pushed to the margins of his society. Though Rachel is not a social outcast, she clearly has suffered from being rejected by some other people.

Besides Jesus, one can take further inspiration from the great-souled people of our lifetime, people like Mother Teresa who accepted others as precious human beings, whatever their circumstances. Hers seems to me a fine model for coping spiritually with unexpected changes that we encounter, especially those that upset the views we have held for much of our lives.

Richard Griffin