My Unitarian Universalist faith calls me to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and it also calls me to the work of justice for all, reminding me that we are a part of the vast reality of this intricate cosmos.

Whatever our spiritual leanings, we live in this life in bodies. Bodies that grow and change over time. Bodies that are sometimes strong and sometimes weak. Bodies that miraculously keep us safe from many things and also sometimes overreact to those things or stop working for our safety. Bodies that age and ache and bodies that enjoy touch and connection and pleasure. Bodies that only we know intimately, deeply.

There is so much we can’t control about our own bodies, so much we do not choose. Our genetics, our living situation, disease and infection. So much we do not choose. 

What we do choose, what we can choose, is how we live into these realities, how we live in our bodies, whatever we are given. We can choose to love ourselves and our beautiful, imperfect bodies. We can choose to treat ourselves with care and intention. We have the ability, the right, the responsibility to make decisions about our own bodies and how they are in the world. We can choose to trust that the person who lives in and with and through their body knows best about how that body should be in the world.

This is why I feel anger and anguish at the cruelty and deathly campaigns to restrict and ban medical care for our trans neighbors and kin. In state after state, legislators are proposing and passing laws that make it illegal for doctors and parents to provide life-affirming and life-saving care for trans youth. And they are beginning to propose restrictions and bans on gender-affirming care for trans adults as well—threatening to block medications and treatment that provide so many with quality of life and a life lived in the body they know to be theirs. These laws will have deathly impact. Suicide rates among LGBTQ+ youth are four times what they are among the general youth population. These rates are high not because the youth are LGBTQ+ but because of the stigma, hatred, cruelty, and ignorance of our society.

In the face of so much fear and cruelty, in the face of demands for judging and policing and control of other people’s bodies, I am called to affirm the sacredness of all bodies and to honor each person’s, each body’s, agency and conscience and dignity. For me to do otherwise would be a sin.

In faith and love,

Rev. Ian W. Riddell

Minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of the Desert