Why cannot Religous Groups accept Transexuals ?
Why are they so blinkered that they do not understand the difficulties transgender folks have to combat during their life to try and overcome such prejudice and bigotry against them. Without a doubt homosexuality and transgender facts of life should be involved within the school curriculum all folks must be educated on the subject. This is why funding should not go to religous schools to be educated with prejudice towards gay and transgender folks. If the church and the bible cannot come to terms with the 21st century then funding should cease to these schools.

Well... given my rather vociferous history here..I guess I should make a comment.

Julie..

It depends. If a person has the basic physiology and homonal situation of one of opposite gender....then one is more sympathetic. But unless medical grounds for the desire to 'be' what one was otherwise not born to 'be'.. raises other questions.

So..I think its a case by case situation. I have no problem at all accepting a person who was born with both types of hardware.. and where one type has been (or will be) removed to allow a fullness of life as one or the other.

But if a person is born a man..or a woman..and just thinks they should be the other ? hmmm..I think therapy needed and possibly repentance.

So please don't say 'the church' we are many and varied.

Perhaps the best way is to ask "Would God accept a sex change for any reason other than a dual sexual biology at birth" ?

Julie,

Because, fundamentally, the Christian church can't get away from "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable." (Leviticus 18:22) They're agin homosexuality, and many people confuse transexuality with homosexuality on some level.

Of course it's cherry-picked - in Deuteronomy the death penalty is prescribed for disobeying your parents and drunkenness - so it's interesting that so many Christians love to hate gay people. (Did you see that the "God hates fags" brigade came out to protest at Heath Ledger's funeral?) I guess it forms part of their tribal, us v. them thinking. Christians are also often obsessed with the sex lives of others. Lord knows why.

Not all Christians agree, of course, so as Boazy says you can't taint all with the same filthy brush.

Fortunately the Christian churches don't follow the teachings of
Leviticus to the letter for certainly all gays and transexuals would be stoned to death.

Religions often talk about having compassion.
Yet in practice they often deny it to those who need it most.

How sad that those who claim to have a higher moral ground than others actually project a severely lower form of understanding and appreciation of those different from themselves.

As a colleague I worked with told me," After 35 years of therapy I can safely assume my condition isn't curable no matter how much I continue to pray."

Foxy (and everyone),

Do you ever listen to BBC Radio 4 on the internet? You can listen to many podcasts through iTunes - they're excellent. I was just listening to a fascinating interview with Desmond Tutu and other Christians called "From Calvary to Lambeth". It's about homosexuality. Archbishop Tutu has much sympathy with gay people and says he is far less concerned with "personal sin" than he is with "structural sin" - how we letting whole countries starve and destroy themselves is possibly worse than concerning oneself with private behaviours in a gentleperson's boudoir. You would have loved it.

Kids don't care about gayness unless someone teaches them to despise it.

VANILLA and FOXY

Leviticus nevertheless shows the attitude of God toward "sin".

The specific punishments in those days, in my view were due to the tribal nature of Israel. The attitude remains the same.

You should look 'very' closely at the bit about the disobedient child... there is much more to it than you shared here.

"GOD HATES FAGS" is not quite right. "God hates homosexual behavior, adultery, fornication, theft, lying, deception, greed etc etc"... quite true...but we are ALL guilty of those things to one degree or another, whether physically or in the mind. SIN is what God hates, and he provided a solution not only to its 'penalty' but also its 'power'..in Christ's sacrificial death on the cross for us.

Remember how Jesus treated the woman caught in adultery, brought to him by the Pharisees? "The LAW says she must be stoned" they raved through gnashing teeth ('nowwww we've gotcha' they thought) But Jesus did 2 things.

1/ He turned it back on THEM....
2/ He exhorted the woman "go..and sin NO MORE"

Now.. given that 'I and the Father are one' and 'if you have seen me, you have seen the Father' means that our Lord was fully cognicent of, if not the actual author of the rules of Leviticus.. here we see the real compassionate nature of those commands.

They were not given so that self righteous hypocrites could gleefully hurl rocks at sinners they had busted in the act... but at providing a framework for a healthy happy community.

Maybe we can learn something from it ?