TDoV 2026
Today is Trans Day of Visibility, and it is the second day of Holy Week.
Holy Week is a journey into truth. Not the tidy truth of slogans or certainty, but the unsettling, liberating truth that Jesus embodies - truth that disrupts binaries, breaks open narrow categories, and invites us into deeper, riskier love. Each year, Holy Week asks us to look honestly at our world and our hearts. This year, as a trans theologian and minister, I feel that ask so strongly. This isn’t academic to me - it’s embodied. It’s about what I, personally, am carrying every day.
I am carrying pain - from exclusion, from public rhetoric, from policies that treat trans lives as problems to limit or remove rather than people to embrace and love.
And I am carrying hope—because every year Holy Week reminds me that resurrection is not dependent on public approval. It is the act of God who brings life where death thinks it has the final word.
Beyond Binaries
Science reminds us that the natural world resists tidy binaries: variations in sex development, diverse chromosomal patterns, and hormone profiles that exist on spectrums rather than polar opposites. Body-minds that resist categorisation. Scripture tells the same story through different language: creation is expressed in poetic pairs—day and night, land and sea, male and female—but these name the edges, not the whole. Between them lie dawn, wetlands, and myriad ways of being human. God delights in the in‑between places. Thresholds are holy ground. Our bodies are thin places.
Jesus continually meets people at the edges and the risen Christ returns in a body that is familiar yet transformed, continuous yet changed, us and them stitched together in one flesh. Christ’s body is a body that lives beyond binaries. This is the body we call the Body of Christ. A body made of many members, not identical, not interchangeable, but necessary to one another.
Holy Week and the UK’s Current Climate
Holy Week is not abstract. It speaks to what is happening right now.
In the UK, public discourse increasingly frames trans people and women as if we are locked in some inevitable conflict. Yet this “trans vs women” narrative is being driven less by community experience and more by those with power and money. In the wake of the widely misunderstood Supreme Court ruling, multiple organisations—including Labour’s Women’s Conference, the Women’s Institute, and Girlguiding—have restricted trans women’s participation or membership based on birth sex rather than lived identity. The ruling did not mandate this, but celebrity wealth has been piled into funding anti-trans cases, and organisations are afraid. (This is your regular reminder that buying wizarding merchandise actively funds direct harm to trans people).
Meanwhile, the EHRC’s interim and draft guidance on single‑sex spaces has caused deep confusion and, in practice, exclusion. Although the High Court ruled that service providers may lawfully include trans women in women’s spaces, it also broadly upheld the EHRC’s contested interim guidance—guidance widely interpreted as grounds for exclusion, despite being withdrawn later. Many organisations and workplaces have already acted as though a ban is required, leaving trans people encountering sudden new barriers to facilities they have used for years.
Trans healthcare, too, is increasingly shaped not only by clinical evidence but by public perception, with NHS England now reviewing the effectiveness of HRT for trans adults amid a climate of media hostility and misinformation. That review will likely be rooted not in clinical expertise but in a survey of public opinion. Your opinion could affect my healthcare. A recent survey found that 99% of trans people report that hostile or negative media coverage has harmed their mental health and influenced how they are treated in everyday life. Both murder and suicide rates effecting trans people have risen.
This is the world in which we enter Holy Week.
Pain and Hope in the Same Breath
As a trans person, this landscape hurts. Travelling it seeds fatigue and fear deep into my body.
But Holy Week refuses to let pain be the end of the story.
Holy Week insists that truth can overturn oppressive narratives.
Holy Week insists that community is stronger than fear.
Holy Week insists that the Body of Christ is already beyond the binaries society tries to impose.
Every time the Church recognises our diversity as gift, we live more fully into Christ’s resurrected life. Every time we choose solidarity over suspicion, justice over control, compassion over fear, we roll away another stone.
Steps Toward a More Christ‑Like Society
A Christ‑like direction looks like this:
Listening deeply to trans stories rather than debating our existence.
Refusing exclusionary binaries, especially where “women’s safety” is used as a weapon rather than actual care or listening.
Creating policy from evidence and compassion, not fear or media pressure.
Expanding access to healthcare, not restricting it based on climate or controversy.
Ensuring churches model radical welcome, embodying the Body of Christ where every member is needed and honoured.
Speaking out when laws or guidance misrepresent what justice requires.
The Body of Christ is not threatened by trans liberation.
The Body of Christ is resurrected once more through our breath.
A Holy Week Prayer for Trans Day of Visibility
God of the threshold and the tomb,
God of the in‑between places,
God who meets us where binaries break open—
Show us your wounds.
For all who feel unseen today,
For all who feel unsafe,
For all who carry both pain and hope—
Journey with us.
Make your Church a body beyond binaries:
diverse, interdependent,
ever‑expanding in love.
Amen.
