There have been some very disturbing things coming out of various countries around the world aimed at transgender folks. They have always been a vulnerable community, and by all indications it is getting worse.

As an historian I am disturbed by how much our current century is paralleling the 20th century. In the 1920’s there were large queer communities in both Paris and Berlin, as well as other places in Europe, and they were some of the first targeted by the Nazis after political opponents were rounded up and put in the early versions of German concentration camps. Those communities, their literature, and medical advancements for the queer community were all destroyed in the process.

One hundred years later, those of us watching the rhetoric come out of the United States, and the denial of transgender identity in the United Kingdom should be worried. It is history repeating itself, and if cisgender folks stay silent and don’t stand up for the vulnerable in this community, history will keep repeating itself.

An argument that is continuously raised by the Christian right is that trans folks are not acceptable to God and that Jesus was against trans folks.

The only response we can give to that is FALSE.

While modern medical knowledge is part of a wider conversation on observable transgender identity in our modern era, it is naive to think transgender folks are only a phenomena of the 20th and 21st century. People do not change that much.

The fact that the Gospels, and the Bible as a whole, are silent on the conversation of queer folk is all we really need to know to realize for the early Christian community – and by extension the Hebrew community of our origin – did not have a problem with queer folks.

The counter argument often offered at that point is there were no queer folks around at the time. Another argument we can mark at FALSE.

All we have to do is look at the artwork of Pompeii, a community destroyed by a volcanic eruption just ten years after the destruction of the Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem, and thus preserved in a moment in time, to know queer folks have always been a part of society.

I am not a Queer historian, but I am a Christian historian, and there is absolutely no reason to even consider that Jesus was not accepting of everyone.

A considerable number of Christians stood against the destruction of the Nazis. Yes, some of them died, but they still stood for what was right.

We owe everyone in our society as well as those who came before us, and those who will come after us, the honesty of our faith in standing for the vulnerable and not allowing history to repeat.

THAT is what Jesus would do!