Memo: Trans Eye for a Bible Guy

Collegiality, affability, generosity, curiosity: these are qualities we don't associate with most news shows. But Sam Sanders, host of NPR's It's Been a Minute, reviews even the news of a pandemic with optimism and empathy. Today, being an introvert who enjoys living alone, who looked forward to "social distancing," he admitted that he's already missing people.

PHOTO: Sam Sanders, top; Daniel Mallory Ostberg, by Grace Lavery, below.

One of his guests today was Daniel Mallory Ostberg, writer of the "Dear Prudence" column and memoirist. Sanders as gay man queried Ostberg, trans man, about his theory that the Bible is "all about trans people." Both host and guest grew up in evangelical churches; both felt alienated there, but also loved what they heard. Ostberg listed prophets and apostles who "transitioned" from one state to another, not least of all the Word of God who "transitioned" to be a man who dwelt among us, and transitioned again to the resurrected Jesus.

Ostberg noted the same pattern over and over, that the Lord spoke to someone who had been living one way in the world to tell them that they were really someone else. Ostberg and Sanders both could identify. Sanders read aloud from Ostberg's recent memoir a passage imagining the Jacob - who - became - Israel dealing with people who apologize forgetting to use the new name.

It's a new spin on familiar characters that enriches my understanding of them and of trans people in my life.