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Among M.Div. graduates, a new crop of transgender students

DURHAM, N.C. (RNS) – Like other graduates of Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity, Adam Plant walked onstage earlier this month to accept a diploma and a hug from Dean Gail O’Day.

Unlike them, his journey to the Master of Divinity degree took a significant detour.

Three years ago when he began his studies, Adam was a North Carolina woman with a desire to plumb the intersection of faith and sexuality. By the time of the graduation ceremony, Plant had found acceptance and peace as a man.

“Coming out to myself was, I think, one of the hardest things I ever did,” he said. “I think I was most afraid of being wrong. What if I am crazy? What if this is wrong?”

As he explains in a video shown during graduation, “Those voices no longer rule my head. Now I hear one clear voice ring out: You are whole. You are beautiful. You are loved.”

Seminary is often the place where students come to terms with their identities, and gender is among them. No surprise, a small, but growing number of transgender students seek out divinity school precisely because it is a place where they can wrestle with questions about their place and purpose in the universe.

Plant is not the first transgender student at Wake Forest. Liam Hooper, a transgender man, graduated a year ahead of him. And 85 miles to the east, Duke Divinity School awarded a Master of Theological Studies degree to a transgender man this month; it has admitted a transgender woman to its incoming class of 2019.

Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee; Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut, and Union Theological Seminary in New York City have all admitted transgender students. Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, has a large transgender population and has helped to convene a nationwide leadership development program called the Trans*Seminarians Cohort.

An administrator at Wake Forest said the divinity school celebrates diverse gender and sexual identities and does not actively inquire about applicants’ gender identity. Duke has a similar statement.

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