Cisgender is not made up

As my words on behalf of Holy Cross professor Tat-siong Benny Liew were characterized by one of your columnists, Michael Graham, as “the idiocy of ideas,” I hope you will permit me a brief response to Mr. Graham.

Being cisgender is not a madeup state of being — it is how the vast majority of the population lives. “Cisgender” is simply the term used to describe how someone’s identity corresponds to the one they were assigned at birth.

Attempting to force people into socially assigned identities often results in negative consequences, from my relatively trivial experience of being naturally left-handed but taught to write right-handed to the far more traumatic experiences of many of my LGBTQ friends being forced to attend conversion therapy in an attempt to make them attracted to people they simply are not attracted to.

It is that sort of denial of people’s identities which does tangible and lasting harm here. The rush to demand that professor Liew recant his work suggesting that LGBTQ people might bring their own life experience to bear when reading the Holy Bible can only exacerbate that harm.

I would remind Mr. Graham of Galileo Galilei’s immortal words when he was made to recant his own work stating that, in contradiction of the church’s official position, the Earth revolves around the sun: eppur si muove. And yet it (the Earth) moves — even if you deny that it does. People are still cisgender and transgender, Mr. Graham, even if you deny that they are.

— the Rev. Eric Atcheson, Vancouver, Wash.