Jane Doe

Trans Day of Visibility • Richmond Hill • March 31, 2026

Last Trans Day of Visibility I preached a sermon to a group of people that was mostly white and mostly not queer. It felt very vulnerable, especially because I have the strong feeling that most people in this group consider themselves quite progressive. Ironically, this has been one of the more conservative places that I’ve spoken since coming out. Knowing the composition of the people and my apprehension to even speak led to this sermon. I wanted to share this with the rest of you because I will be referring to it quite a lot.

I would love feedback, my biggest struggle is that as someone with autism, many of these topic are my special interests. Which also means that I don’t often hear feedback on the core propositions. But part of my worldview is that my brain should be open source, i.e. it should be open to revisions, new versions, and a communal effort of improvement.

If you prefer to watch it:

OPENING

Early in my transition there was one day that I felt particularly feminine. I just woke up that way and I was feeling it. I put on my make up, sprayed perfume, had cute shorts on and slid on my wedges. My confidence was noticeable because when I later went to the grocery store with my kids I was greeted left and right. A nice “how you’re doing ma’am” here or a “you look amazing” there. It didn’t feel like the day could get any better but then I noticed a guy moving in the same patterns as me. I was at the produce aisle and he kept on creeping closer. I figured we were just looking at the same vegetables. But when I was at the frozen food aisle, the same guy was there and when I moved to the bread aisle, he was there to. This guy was following me! I quickly walked to the checkout line and figured he’d give up but he b-lined towards me and I could feel his breath on my neck. I quickly checked out and basically ran to the car. Remember, my kids were there.

When I arrived home I explained the whole story to Kim and she just held me and let me cry. I remember this moment so vividly because it was the first time I got targeted by someone. I felt disgusted and defiled.

Later that week I took my son on a playdate at Lewis Ginter and the other mom asked me how I was doing. I told her my experience and how horrible it was. Her response was not what I expected. She covered her mouth and let a small squeak out. I kinda felt like a small laugh. I asked her “what’s going on” and she looked at me with kind and concerned eyes and said “I’m so so sorry that you had to go through this Lana, and also, Welcome to womanhood”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Both, actually.

Our text today is Mark 7, verse 24.

The Syrophoenician woman asked Jesus to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27 He said to her, “Let the children be satisfied first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and to throw it to the dogs.” 28 She answered, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29Then he said to her, “Because you said this, you may go. The demon has left your daughter.” 30 She went home and found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Coming out taught me something I was not prepared for.

I had spent forty years in the world as a man. An intersectional man, yes, with all the complications there in, but a man. I thought I had some sense of what women’s lives were like.

I was embarrassingly wrong.

MOVEMENT 1: ABOUT WOMANHOOD

The grocery store was just the beginning.

One day, I was teaching about Intersectionality. I explained who Kimberly Crenshaw was, the woman who coined the term first, and made a point to explain to people that women face injustice and black women face injustice squared because their social location is on the intersection of blackness and womanhood. One white trans woman said, “I feel too much. I feel like I can’t make my voice heard because I’m white,” I explained to her that a. She’s a trans woman and she has been dismissed too much, and that women, even white women, have a disproportionate amount of scrutiny to go through every single day. She too, was facing injustice squared

One man in the group halted me there and said, “No, white women need to be quiet and then went on to explain that the term intersectionality was actually coined by a black legal scholar, and went further to explain to the group what intersectionality means.

You know, the thing I just taught. In the class I was teaching.

When I shared this story with Kim, I explained that I felt very uncomfortable during that exchange and that there was a sense of injustice I couldn’t explain. Kim said, “You’ve been mansplained.”

Oh my everything… THAT’S HOW IT FEELS?

Or how about the time that I watched my son swim at the Y and a guy sat behind me on the bleachers with legs on either side of me. I looked in panic at my wife and she told me to “go get water” and explained later to me that he was manspreading.

But not just in public spaces. Here at Richmond Hill as well. One day at work, a clergied retreatant came in and he, Sam, Tom, and I all went up the elevator. He introduced himself joyfully to the rest of the group but gave me a side handshake without even looking my way.

My point is

I thought I had understood. But I had never once felt a man’s breath on the back of my neck. Even women with significant privilege navigate a world that was not designed for them. Coming out didn’t just change my gender. It changed my reality.

So here’s what that means.

I spent years advocating for women. And I still couldn’t feel the texture of their lives until I lived it myself.

So I want to ask, gently, of the men in the room: if a closeted trans woman still couldn’t imagine it... How could you?

MOVEMENT 2: ABOUT TRANSNESS

Trans women carry something that most cis folks don’t.

I spent forty years being expected to fulfill male roles. And every single time I fulfilled one of those roles, something in me died.

By the time I came out, I was — and this is not an exaggeration — basically on life support.

And my body knew it.

But my body was also trying to find its way home long before I had language for it. There were glimpses: The day my grandmother let me wear a dress. The girls in my foster home who did my makeup. My best friend Anne, who just treated me like one of the girls. Every one of those moments was a crumb from a table I wasn’t supposed to be sitting at yet.

However, now that I’m seated my Instagram fills up with messages. Some are just vomit emojis. Some are religious: “What an abomination. You were never a pastor, but a deceitful jackal in disguise to blaspheme scripture and to mislead those whose are still on milk.” And some — I am not making this up — say: “Make the world a safer place for children they don’t need to be involved in the trans community bring back Hitler.”

And it is not just strangers behind screens. In Kansas, presenting a driver’s license with the wrong gender marker can lead to imprisonment. In Idaho, using the wrong bathroom can too. The current Attorney General has directed that organizations holding what she calls a “radical gender ideology” be labeled domestic terrorist organizations.

This is what trans visibility costs.

Most cis folks don’t know what it is to have spent a lifetime grieving a self they were never allowed to be. Or to carry that grief stored in your actual body. Or to open Instagram and find someone invoking Hitler because you exist.

I am not asking cis folks to feel guilty. I am asking the same thing I asked men: pause before assuming you know my story.

Because the path to this pulpit ran through forty years of dying. And that is not a path most people have walked.

Which brings me back to the text. Because there’s a moment in Mark 7 that most of us rush past.

MOVEMENT 3: ABOUT JESUS

Jesus is exhausted. He’s just come from controversy — debates about purity, tradition, and what defiles a person. He slips across the border into Tyre, looking for rest.

And then she shows up.

A Greek woman. Syrophoenician. Gentile, female, foreign — she is carrying every strike against her that first-century Palestine could offer.

She asks for help. And Jesus says —, and I want us to really sit with this:

It is not right to take the children’s bread and to throw it to the dogs

He called her a dog.

There are centuries of theological gymnastics trying to soften this moment. Maybe he was testing her. Maybe it was a cultural idiom.

But I think the most honest reading — and the most beautiful — is the simplest one: Jesus didn’t see her. Not fully. Not yet. He approached her, shaped by his own social location: Jewish, male, with religious authority.

And notice: the text doesn’t even give her a name. She will change the direction of Jesus’s ministry, and we don’t even know what to call her.

She doesn’t leave. She says:

Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs

She teaches him. And Jesus — and this is what I love most about this story — listens.

The Son of God had his understanding of his own mission expanded by a woman whose name we were never given.

ENDING

I don’t have a solution tonight. I wish I did.

But I think the path forward looks something like what happened in that house in Tyre.

It looks like someone being willing to stop and say: “I haven’t fully seen you. Tell me your story.” And then actually listening.

Tonight marks the last day of Women’s History Month. It is also Trans Day of Visibility. And what I want to say to this community is this:

Visibility is not only about being seen. It is about doing the seeing. It is about letting the unnamed woman not yet at the table correct you. About letting the crumbs teach you something about the feast.

Not because it’s simple. But because Jesus did it.

For those who are allies, let this Trans Day of Visibility mark the beginning of the journey where you choose to see us.

And for those who are queer like me. Hold on a little more; this is not the end.

Amen.

After my sermon but before communion, we sang this song.