<p><img alt= src=/sites/default/files/Mateo_0.png style=float:right; height:162px; margin:5px; width:150px />By Mateo Williamson</p> <p>Here in mid-winter in Northern New Jersey it is below freezing and has been raining for weeks. Having grown up in Arizona as I walked this morning to the homeless shelter where I work I was surprised to see ice on the ground. The cold wind chilled my face and numbed my toes straight through the winter boots I was encouraged to buy. However as I write this I am sitting at my desk in a room that is 70F with no need for a jacket. My face and fingers are warm; my room is private and safe. I have clean clothes a bathroom and food in the fridge. I have the time to reflect on my situation in life and the means to advocate for my wellbeing. As I get into bed at night I think of the young people who have been denied this as they search for shelter from the elements and expend their every effort trying to survive. This includes the millions of youth who are on the streets around the world because they were cast away from their homes and communities for their sexual orientation or gender identity. Approximately half of the youth who come through our shelter doors are lesbian gay bisexual or transgender. Where I work this is our daily realitya ceaseless increasing epidemic of LGBT youth homelessness with no apparent end in sight.</p> <p>My friend Marco is 18 years old. Born in Nicaragua he is of slight stature like myself with a childlike face that looks decades older when he has been working long days with little sleep. Tonight he is huddled somewhere in Newark Penn Station. I know this because I accompanied him there today as he carried the entirety of his belongings in a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. We walked in relative silence through the rain. I had not seen Marco for several weeks since his transition from our shelter. During that time I worried he would become sick or even die in the cold on the streets. Making contact with Marco again today I spent hours calling shelters in an attempt to find an emergency bed available for him. Every site I contacted was full to capacity on this cold night and each call brought a sense of increasing desperation. When it became clear that my efforts proved fruitless I asked Marco where he had been staying over the previous several nights. He responded in Spanish in the train station. I asked about the conditions he experienced there. It is cold he sighed quickly changing the subject when he noticed the concern in my eyes. Marco went on to show me the jacket and shoes he had received as a donation. He jokingly noted that while he was grateful the rugged steel-toed boots did not quite match his style. Marco values his appearance and always manages to be impeccably dresseda trait that forms part of his dignity and identity despite the circumstances he experiences. A plastic rosary dangles from his neck though not merely for aesthetics. I often see him instinctively reach for the cross and turn it over in his hand as he ponders his next step in life.</p> <p>As the last trains pull into the station at night Marco will join the many others who take shelter there. Those who pass by him will see that he is homeless but they will not know why. Since he speaks little English he will struggle to communicate with those around him. Like the others who huddle in the corners of the station it would be easy to walk right by him leaving his story untold. Marco left Nicaragua at age 17 to escape the violence in his country. However he fled in particular from the abuse that he faced back home for his gender presentation. He tells me that he did not fit his familys expectations. Feeling increasingly unsafe at home Marco began his journey on the streets at age 13. As a gender-diverse&nbsp;person he feared for his life in Nicaraguan shelters so he rode on top of trains through Central America and Mexico to make the perilous journey across the U.S. border with several other children. Still struggling with his gender identity at the time Marco did not want to seek help from LGBT organizations in the U.S. At the doors to the train station we pray the Lords Prayer together before we part ways. Marco promises me he will try to return to our shelter soon.</p> <p>Sharlyn is 19 years old. Last week I accompanied her to a shelter that serves LGBT youth a safer option for her than others in the area. She showed me the small room where she had been sleeping with two other homeless youth splitting the cost of $110 a week. It is a room with no furniture or beds but slightly more privacy and quiet than the shelters. Blankets and pillows laid out on the floor indicate where these young people sleep side by side. Each day Sharlyn walks about 15 miles between her work site and community resources. When she arrives at the shelter she has trouble eating because it has been so long since she has had food readily available.</p> <p>Sharlyn left home when she was 16 and dropped out of school shortly after because she faced constant harassment by peers and DignityUSAistrators. Assigned the male sex at birth she identifies as female. Every step in the process to embracing herself has taken much longer without financial security and as a transgender woman of color she faces threats of violence and discrimination while looking for a steady job. Like Marco Sharlyn was raised in the Catholic Church. She explains that her parents are very religious; the differences between her lived reality and their cherished beliefs have estranged them. Sharlyn tells me that the breaking point came when her parents consulted the parish priest and attempted to send her to a therapist to amend her gender identity. She confesses that she misses her parents and tried hard to be what they wanted her to be. But I would not have survived much longer at home she tells me. I was dying inside.</p> <p>The shelter where I work can provide only temporary assistance. I have no lack of gratitude for what I know is a lifeline to so many young people who come through our doors. We have dedicated staff who don emotional armor every day as they prepare to confront the suffering and injustice our clients experience. We also witness great moments of joy and new beginnings. The young people we serve are resilient intelligent caring and independent. Several are musically and artistically talented most attend high school and go on to college and many engage in community organizing and leadership. I have no doubt they have the potential to change the world; their efforts will help ensure that the deficits in compassion within society that led them to our shelter will not affect children of the future. Still nothing can replace the support systems that these young people themselves have lost.</p> <p>While there is great hope in the work we do our shelter only exists because expected social resources in families and communities have failed to care for these children in their midst. We cannot erase the damage of neglect and isolation so many LGBT children have faced. We can only hope to offer them our continuing presence and assure them that we will not turn away. We must strive to promise them that we as a Christian community are committed to honoring their lives and listening openly to their stories so that we may learn from them how to offer life-giving support. At the moment I am not certain that the Catholic Church leadership in the U.S. is prepared to be a part of this change. Still I believe that with determination and Gods grace we can one day achieve a level of true compassion and kinship that mirrors the love that Jesus himself demonstrated through his own humility vulnerability and closeness to his people.</p> <p>By the end of this year I will have met over a thousand young people who have been displaced from their homesa large proportion of them LGBT. When these young people are unable to fulfill their greatest potential as reflected in the desires that God has placed in their hearts we are all at a loss as One Body in Christ. In my office I have placed a rainbow flag and a Christian prayer side-by-side knowing how much these identities mean to many of the youth we serve. The shelter where I work is funded largely by the Catholic Church. The irony of thisat times too painful to bearis that I frequently speak with&nbsp; young people who have been&nbsp;rejected by their family and from their homes in part resulting from interpretations of Catholic doctrine and&nbsp; heated rhetoric regarding homosexuality from their official religious leaders. Can you imagine what our shelter would look like if every LGBT child were accepted by their families in all of their inherent beauty? Nearly half of the beds in our building would be empty.</p> <p>During political campaign seasons many dioceses devote considerable funds to materials that delineate Catholic beliefs on homosexuality even attempting to defeat laws aimed to protect LGBT people from employment and housing discrimination. And yet these same dioceses will seek donations for Catholic shelters that house LGBT youth who face the resulting social and economic oppression. The Knights of Columbus have spent over $15.8 million since 2005 on these same initiatives and every year the local KOC chapter comes to serve a Christmas meal to our LGBT youth who are not home celebrating Christmas with their families. I wonder do our Church leaders fully understand how their messages have fed a culture that would dehumanize a child to the point where they could spend Christmas out in the cold?</p> <p>Through my privilege I have been fortunate in my journey. Like many of the youth I work with I am gender-diverse but my path has not been fraught with quite as many obstacles. Assigned the biological sex of female at birth I identify as male and have been living my life accordingly for four years. Looking back on my life I realize now that there was never a moment when I did not have a fairly acute sense of who I was on the inside. I believe we are born with an inherent nature and sparkle if you will and this is surely one of Gods important gifts to each one of us. We also come to understand with time that essential to making the most of this promise is a willingness to be open to discerning Gods voice from within and through the world around us. Still until the age of 20 it seems&nbsp;that I tried to conform to a very different reality. It has taken me some time to learn what it means to be fully human and fully alive in the presence of God but that journey itself has been part of the blessing.</p> <p>I was raised in an immensely loving and encouraging home along with my hardworking mother and five siblings; I had everything I needed to grow and develop in an emotionally healthy way including frequent praise from my mom who constantly reminded me in my despair that I was smart capable and loved. But something always felt terribly heavy on my shoulders and throughout my childhood my mother would embrace me during times of self-doubt and say to me: I wish you could see yourself the way I see you. I wish I could give that to you. As I struggled to understand myself in the face of the rigid gender roles of my church and community over time I became withdrawn and began to isolate myself. The severe repression of my identity manifested as depression and social anxiety. Nothing I did was good enough because deep down I felt like I had failed on a fundamental level as a human. I became obsessive over my schoolwork because it was the only aspect of my life that I felt I could control. I determined that if I became a successful doctor I might one day be happy. And perhaps I could also figure out what was wrong with me.</p> <p>When I finally came out something incredible was happening inside me. For the first time in years I began to feel that I was becoming part of the human community in an authentic way. Through my vulnerability fear and suffering I was finding God in a way I had never known. At the same time I was still dealing with the sense that I was unworthy of God as a transgender person because of the messages my church had sent me from a young age. Catholic Church doctrine has taught that as a transgender person who has transitioned physically I live in a state of grave sin. Still I know that I hold a different truth in the relationship between myself and my God. The strength and grace that God provided me in order to eventually inhabit my truth was not the result of sin and certainly not a product of the Fall. My understanding of sin is that it draws us away from God but being transgender has drawn me ever closer to my Creator in a way I could never have imagined.</p> <p>Something Ive realized in coming back to the church during a significant spiritual transformation is that even though this church does not currently acknowledge my existence as a transgender person and though one might infer that it has hurt me quite a bit this rather flawed church is my church too. The church belongs to every single person that God ministers toin particular the doubters the downtrodden the forgotten and the sufferers. It belongs to those who stand up for justice and face oppression when they resolve to become a voice for the voiceless. Gods church belongs to those who see a brighter future for all of his childrenone in which all people will someday be able to recognize the beauty in the complexity and diversity of creation. The Catholic hierarchy has a long history of difficulty in valuing the blessing of the existence of transgender people. But even as Church leaders possess great power to denounce or erase me from their community I am comforted to know that I too am the churchwe all are.</p> <p>Throughout this struggle I pray for church leaders and those in ministry. I understand that these times in the church are difficult. Faithful Catholics have many and diverse expectations of the church and some worry that the church will become too influenced by modern ideologies. But the existence of transgender people is not new. Just as God made night and day dusk has also existed since the beginning of time. My presence does not challenge the fact that God made humans male and female but rather speaks to a truth that perhaps we have allowed ourselves to define Gods creation in a way that would reduce Gods capacity to the standards of the human mind.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>I continue to hope that our church will someday acknowledge the beauty in how God created menot a mistake or a deviance but an intentional gift. I look forward to the day that I will be accepted by my church fully for who I am but until then I will try to rest in knowing that the experience of generations to follow promises a picture of compassion ever greater than what we know today.</p>