Emily McGinley is a pastor at Urban Village Church, a multisite United Methodist Church in the Chicago area with an outreach ministry to transgender people.

Gender Spectrum is a national organization that advocates for and supports transgender youth, their families, educators and health providers. It maintains a “topics” page on its website about transgender and faith traditions and faith leaders and publishes a resource guide for faith communities. Lisa Kenney is executive director. Gender Spectrum is based in the San Francisco […]

Patrick S. Cheng is an associate professor of historical and systematic theology at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., and an ordained minister. He is the author of several books on queer theology, including Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology.

Joy Ladin is the author of Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, which documents her spiritual and physical journey from male to female. She is an English professor at Yeshiva University in New York City. Contact via the office of public affairs at Yeshiva.

Alma Lopez is a Los Angeles-based artist whose works frequently feature female Catholic saints as Chicana women with a gender twist. Her “Our Lady,” a rendition of the Virgin of Guadalupe as seminude Chicana boxer, prompted worldwide controversy when it was displayed in New Mexico in 2001. Her most recent show is “Queer Santas: Holy […]

David E. Weekley is a United Methodist Church pastor who described his life as a transgender man in In From the Wilderness: Sherman: She-r-man. He blogs about his life in the church at Sherman’s Wilderness. He is the pastor of St. Nicholas United Methodist Church in Hull, Mass.

Noach Dzmura manages Jewish Transitions, an educational resource for transgender and gender-variant individuals and faith communities that want to become more welcoming of the transgender community. He is the editor of Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in the Jewish Community.  

Peterson Toscano is an actor who performs several one-person shows on LGBT issues and religion, including “Transfigurations,” about transgender and the Bible, which he performs in churches around the country. He is based in Sunbury, Pa.

While nearly 1 in four people identify as Muslim across the globe, a Pew Research survey in 2019 found that only six-in-ten U.S. adults know that Ramadan is an Islamic holy month and that Mecca is Islam’s holiest city and a place of pilgrimage for Muslims.  Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Muslim […]