I know that there are many members of the LGBTQ community that have difficulty merging their faith and their sexual orientation. I think that Eva-Genevieve's story is quite inspirational and can lend some hope to those struggling.
I believe that God loves us all and that Eva-Genevieve is simply existing as herself. I commend her for her bravery and strength.
Eva-Genevieve Scarborough, a member of the Safe Haven Community Christian Church, at her West Covina home on July 22. She bridges the Christian and transgender communities. (Watchara Phomicinda / Staff Photographer)
Eva-Genevieve Scarborough of West Covina, a member of the Safe Haven Community Christian Church, bridges the Christian and transgender communities. Pictured here when she was still living her life as a man named Evan. (Courtesy photo)
Rather than paraphrase her story I am going to post here the news article that was posted in her home town newspaper.
West Covina resident finds faith at gender crossroads
Eva-Genevieve Scarborough's story of how she accepted Jesus Christ into her life on May 4, 1980, is relatively undramatic.Until the day someone with a booklet from Campus Crusade for Christ knocked on her door in Van Nuys, Scarborough had an unchurched upbringing. That day, she read through the booklets that the group left her. A few weeks later, on May 4, she attended her first church service and that was that: She was unchurched no more.
But Scarborough's road-to-Damascus experience, the moment when Saul became Paul - or in this case when Evan became Eva - would come much later. Scarborough's dark night of the soul - the years when she would first be kicked out of her church, then her marriage and finally her job; the years when she would begin living her life full time as a transgender woman - would come more than two decades after she first made her commitment to Jesus.
Scarborough, 54, has made a new life for herself, another new life, and she's out all the way.
"I am so done with hiding," she says. "I am out of the closet. The closet is broken down, burned up and gone. The world is now my closet. I am not going to hide."
In her new life, Scarborough is out but she still calls herself God's girl. She wears a cross on the outside of her blouse everyday and goes to church every Sunday, sometimes twice. She has found a home, both spiritually and literally, in a small but close-knit community of people that she never imagined existed: transgender Christians. She rents out a room in West Covina
A transfiguration
After that first church service in 1980, Scarborough's life took the traditional route of a devout, Christian man. Evan, as she was known then, settled down with a woman that she met at church. They had two boys together and attended a Baptist church in Los Angeles. Scarborough earned a living making circuit boards but in her spare time she went out into the streets and door-to-door to bring Christ's message to the public.
When Scarborough explains how her life's course veered, she speaks with a preacher's cadence. She used to dress up in a black suit and pound on a black Bible as she preached to patrons at sex shops and gay clubs. She says she was putting both the "fun" and the "damn" back in fundamentalism - there's the Sunday morning joke - and then her voice drops to a whisper when she describes her nagging conscience: "But I would feel in my heart: `You're hurting people."'
Despite her involvement in the church, prayer and counseling, she couldn't shake the feeling: "I'm not a man. This is a sham. I can't live this way. It's living a lie. It's not who I am, and it's not working."
The feeling didn't go away but her troubles began.
"All of the foundations that I thought my faith and my life were based on all just became like quicksand," Scarborough said. "None of them held me up, none of them held water."
Her wife left their church and later Scarborough was excommunicated. Soon after, her marriage fell apart and her wife moved to Ohio with her two sons. She moved to Riverside to continue designing circuit boards, but in 2002 her job was outsourced and she was unemployed. She started taking drugs and gradually stopped going to church.
"Yet all through it I knew God was with me, because I knew that I had trusted him and that mustard seed of faith was still here," Scarborough said.
Only when she had lost everything and had hit rock bottom did she start her transition, though she said she didn't know that that's what she was doing at the time. She had cross-dressed before - Evan with some people and Eva with others - but she said the switching made her feel psychotic. She said her transition started as a quest to integrate the feminine into her life but she never expected that she would end up living as a woman full-time. She didn't expect that she would change her name and gender on her driver's license, start taking hormones and seek a sex-change operation. She had never even met another transgender person until the first time she attended a transgender support group meeting.
"I knew I had to start being true to who I am and true to God, and this is the only way I can worship in spirit and in truth and be sane because, you know, it was totally insane to try to live [that way]," Scarborough said. "I held on to God and let everything else go to the four winds and the result has been good. It was scary finally in desperation stepping out in faith."
Now she says that when she looks back at pictures of Evan, a name she hasn't answered to in years, it's like looking at a different person, maybe a brother.
Theology of inclusion
It was only when she started living her life as a woman that Scarborough finally felt like she was living the way God wanted her to. Even though her transition to becoming a woman went against everything she'd heard from the pulpit, that nagging feeling was gone.
In her Sunday morning voice, Scarborough describes the prayer she offered to God at that time: "If you haven't taken this away from me after 35 years of praying and having the demons cast out [...] then maybe what you said is true. You formed me in the womb wonderfully. You made me the way I'm supposed to be, and if that's the case, then you're okay with this and this is my problem. Maybe I need to get with your program for my life."
Though Scarborough continued believing in God, she didn't know that she could find a Christian church that accepted born-again transsexuals.
But then she met Painter and started attending Safe Haven, a church that preached the gospel of Jesus but also the gospel of radical inclusion.
The Bible famously tackles gender roles but it doesn't directly address transsexualism. Painter likes to point to books where eunuchs fare well, like Acts, where a eunuch is successfully baptized, or Isaiah, where Yahweh promises eunuchs an everlasting name.
But both Scarborough and Painter say that their theology is less about arguing whether a certain verse means transsexuality is a sin or not and more about including all sorts of people that have been traditionally marginalized - even in church communities.
Painter likes to preach that John 3:16, one of the most oft-quoted verses in Christianity, makes no disclaimers for transsexuals or any other group: "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life."
Scarborough said that when she meets Bible-quoting Christians who believe that her transsexualism is a sin, she fires back with Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
God doesn't care who you are, Scarborough says - it's what you do with what he's given you.
Certain moments in the gospel do take on new meaning through transgender eyes.
Painter said that her dream is to build a cathedral dedicated to Jesus' Transfiguration - a moment in the gospels when Jesus reveals his divine nature to his apostles. She says that everyone can relate to the idea of transfiguration and transformation in their lives, although this is especially true for transgender people, whose identities and appearances undergo a small "t" transfiguration.
For right now, Safe Haven Community Christian Church is housed at the First Congregational Church in Riverside.
Scarborough goes to two services at the same church. In the morning, Scarborough attends the United Church of Christ service. The congregation is large and politically active. Though its emphasis is not gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) politics, it is liberal-leaning and many members count themselves as members or at least welcoming to the GLBT community. Scarborough started going to the First Congregational Church for the noontime service put on by Painter but she started coming earlier and earlier every week until she was catching both services. The two churches operate separately though they share the same building on Sundays and Scarborough said the transition between the two services feels seamless.
"I think the fundamentalists got that stuck in my head that church is the little bit of heaven you're going to be spending your life in one day," Scarborough said.
Most of Safe Haven's members are transsexuals and their partners. The church's worship service isn't that different from other Christian services. The liturgy, the songs and even the order of the readings are familiar to anyone who has ever been to a Catholic service. The flock is just enough to fill a single row of pews but they drive from Riverside, Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties every Sunday morning to attend the service.
The service might not seem unusual except that when its congregants say their prayers during intercessions, many pray aloud that their families - brothers, sisters, children, ex-wives - will start talking to them again.
Both Safe Haven and Painter have spiritual roots in the New American Christian Church that formed in 1998, a small church of transsexuals and their partners that was based out of El Segundo. At the time Painter first encountered the church, she said she had been working for nearly a decade as a prostitute. Of all the churches that came to preach to her, she said the New American Christian Church was the only one that had a message and a messenger - another transgender woman - that she responded to.
Painter said she turned her life around and in 1998, she began to study to become ordained as a reverend within the New American Christian Church. The church sent her to Riverside in 2005 to minister to a group of transsexuals worshiping in a park. Before the year was out, the church had collapsed but they had a venue at First Congregational Church. Painter stuck with the Riverside group, and she helped form the new, independent church that became Safe Haven.
New Life
Things didn't get easier for Scarborough in her new life. Today she is still chipping away at debts from her past life, her years of unemployment and the child support she owes.
But she has found a niche as an activist, and she is working to create bridges between GLBT and religious communities at a time when debate between the groups has reached a feverish pitch.
A few years ago, she spoke to the Gay Straight Alliance at her alma mater Cleveland High School in Reseda and someone asked her how she could be transgender and still be Christian. She said she's been working with an evangelist's zeal the last few years to make that seem like a silly question.
The last year has been particularly active for Scarborough - like many in both Christian and GLBT communities. She joined a political coalition to fight against Proposition 8 on the state ballot, which passed last November.
She helped form the nascent regional group Equality Inland Empire (EQIE) after Proposition 8 passed this November.
On the religious side, she's been working to create a directory of religious groups that accept gay and transgender people.
Scarborough started a blog last December called "Living Transgender in American Society Today" (http://livingtransgender.blogspot.com). In early posts, there are videos of her covering GLBT rallies with a mic in hand. She blogs about everything from how the state budget crisis will affect funding for HIV/AIDS care to an exegesis on the word "love" in different translations of the Bible.
And she makes it personal. On her blog you'll find pictures of her shopping on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena on an outing of sorts with other transgender women. She encourages transgender people to come out, shop, go to Denny's and do average, middle-America things in public.
"All I can say to people is just come out and be yourself, that's the only way you're going to have a place in the world," Scarborough said. "Come out and make it."
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