Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in Iraq and welcome to part two of my ongoing series called The Diversity of Trans.

My guest today is a person who I have recently met, Renee and I go back a few months, she has helped me think through the transgender conversation by looking at some stuff I've written and editing it and just gave such amazing feedback

on some things that I was working on last fall that I decided, hey, I have to have you all on the podcast. In fact, you have to be part of this ongoing series because Renee has a, again, Renee is part of that large umbrella of diversity and I am so excited for you to listen to this conversation.

Renee is, she's a theology student, she's super smart, pursuing a PhD in theology and has a really kind of different journey. And I'm not going to spoil it, I'll let Renee talk about her own journey. We end up talking about all kinds of interesting things that stem from her journey, including gender stereotypes, why she, you know, experiences gender dysphoria.

But it does not like identify as trans. Now she, there are certain contexts where she's fine with that label, but she is suspicious of some of the philosophical and theological assumptions that oftentimes go into, you know, people or world, you know, people that would identify as trans. So again, we, we, we're going to get into that at great length in the upcoming conversation.

So if you would like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash the origin of raw and also next week, my book embodied transgender identities of church and what the Bible has to say releases. So you have one more week to take advantage of some of the, the pre release pre order.

Incentives, I guess is what they're called. So if you pre order the book before it comes out of February 1st, and you get some extra perks like a webinar with yours truly and lengthy video that kind of explains the back story that's involved with that was involved with writing the book and some commentary on each of the chapters. So you can look at a show notes for details on how to take advantage of that pre order package of incentive.

So without further ado, let's get to know this wonderful, wonderful, beautiful human being, my new friend, the one and only Renee.

Alright, welcome to the origin of raw for the first time, my new friend, Renee, Renee, how are you doing on this afternoon? I am doing wonderful. This is fun.

Well, thanks so much for being part of this conversation. In fact, I don't even, we may have corresponded through, I'm not sure if I told you this, but this is part of a three week series I'm doing called the diversity of trans. And I'm just trying to interview a whole wide spectrum of different people who would be somehow under this large umbrella of this thing called trans, whether they identify as trans or experience dysphoria or used to.

I don't find no longer, I mean, just a whole wide interesting spectrum. It's going to give me a lot of emails. So, so you're part of a really interesting conversation.

Why don't you begin by just telling us your story, your background and would love to hear your, you know, how gender dysphoria fits into that and would love to hear your theological journey up until present day.

Just the little bits.

Yeah, so I was born to wonderful Christian parents.

Absolutely nothing bad to say whatsoever. I have no stories, no horror stories from childhood. I had a wonderful upbringing.

I was their little girl and I still am and I always will be.

And I was not a particularly introspective kid, not terribly impressed with logical fallacies or anything like that. And so I just, I just lived my life and did me up until a certain age.

I grew up with brothers and I had this intellectual comprehension that I was a girl. But at the same time, I didn't have any sense that that was different from being a boy. I just, you know, this intellectual detail of being a girl didn't at all impede the fact that I was just one of the guys and could be anything.

I wanted to be and do anything I wanted to do.

So little incongruence there.

Just wore whatever clothes my folks gave me. I was just busy living my life.

I, I would say around the age of like six or seven, I remember getting really tomboyish. I was really into cowboys, really into horses.

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