Turning the pages of a large book on the store’s table, I suddenly saw a photo of a woman I had known for the previous four years. This photo was one of a series taken of employees at Harvard University, with which I have been long associated. All of them pictured there had also been interviewed and an edited version of what they said about themselves and their work was also published.

When I glanced at my friend Rachel’s text, I felt the blood rush to my forehead. I could not believe what I was reading. All of a sudden, my world felt turned upside down. She was telling everyone something important that I had never known: she used to be a man.

Yes, she was tall and her voice rather deep. These personal characteristics might have served as clues for me, but that she had ever been a he had never occurred to me. The disorientation that I suddenly experienced made me, for a time, lose my psychic bearings. How could I have been fooled like this, I wondered?

Part of what felt to me like deception came from my knowledge that she was the single mother of a young boy, admittedly adopted, but now become her own son. From time to time she would share with me details of her son’s behavior and problems. Without ever questioning her background as a mother, I just assumed her to have been always maternal.

This marked the first time I had actually known anyone who has changed genders. I had read about Christine Jorgenson and other pioneering people who had made the leap, but never had I actually met a person like them. To me, it seemed almost unbelievable that I had been blind to a matter of such vital moment.

Ironically, in her printed interview Rachel argued that changing genders was a matter of little importance. For her, going from being a man to being a woman counted for hardly anything surprising. Though she admitted having been the object of harassment at earlier workplaces, she felt herself to have carried off the transition rather easily.

For me, however, this transformation amounted to a gigantic event. It went against all my categories, especially those that defined what it was to be a woman and what it was to be a man. My spiritual tradition has always placed great emphasis on the differences between the sexes, starting with Adam and Eve in the garden. Though I have never been fundamentalist in my thinking, I could never slough off this distinction with abandon.

I resolved then and there to continue treating my friend with respect and affection. Admittedly, I had to go against immediate emotions that inclined me to change my approach to her. I felt almost queasy about contact with someone who now looked to me decidedly different.

Fortunately, these feelings had dissipated by the time I next saw her. It was different now, but not so as to harm our friendship. Something in my mental world had changed, but my behavior had not. In fact, my inner world had been enlarged, quite to my amazement.

Before this experience, I had already encountered changes in my notions of family and community. Considerable contact with gay and lesbian people had taught me not only the fact of sexual diversity but, to my surprise, it value. Among other experiences, belonging to a liturgical community where such people worshipped along with my family and me had led to greater understanding and acceptance. Once gay and lesbian weddings became legal in Massachusetts, I would take part as a guest and congratulate the same-sex spouses as I would more conventional partners.

Still, I felt myself changing radically under the pressure of these events. They went against so much of what I had taken as certain. My upbringing had been quite sheltered: until reaching my early twenties, almost incredibly I did not even know that homosexuality existed. Then, after finding out, I had no contact with anyone avowedly gay or lesbian and my theological studies emphasized the sinfulness of that situation.

For a parallel in psychic change, I cite the experience of astronomers. Until the year 1919, those scientists all thought there to be only one galaxy, our Milky Way. Since then, they have come to know that there are some 140 billion other galaxies in the universe! And the roster of their further discoveries goes on without end.

To have discovered their world to have been too small to an almost infinite degree must have come as a tremendous shock. But, they will have admitted, an exciting one as well. In this other sphere, I too now find excitement in discovering how much more diverse the world of human beings is than I ever imagined.

In late life, perhaps I can apply to myself what Hamlet said to his friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Richard Griffin