Arbah, a PhD Theology student at the University of Cambridge, interviews the Reverend Dr Alex Clare Young, a trans non-binary United Reformed Church minister and theologian. They discuss the challenges and assumptions affecting intersectionality and inclusivity in interfaith futures.

Dr Clare Young emphasizes the importance of queer theology, their doctoral research and book “Trans Formations,” and the need for LGBTQIA+ voices in theological discussions. They share personal experiences of overcoming discrimination, fostering allyship, and the transformative power of joy in their work.

The interview also covers the importance of moving from tolerance to celebration of diversity in public spaces and educational systems, and the need for policy adaptations to support these changes.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

01:07 Understanding Interfaith Futures

01:49 Challenges in Queer Theology

02:56 Personal Motivations and Experiences

04:32 Transformative Conversations

05:51 Identity and Interfaith Work

08:26 Joy in Leadership

09:49 Future of Interfaith and Inclusive Spaces

12:08 Policy and Planning for Diversity

14:52 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Resources mentioned

• Joy Laddin
• Alex Clare Young (2024) Trans Formations: Grounding Theology in Trans and Non-Binary Lives

Welcome everyone. My name is Arbah, my pronouns are she, her, and I'm a PhD Theology student at the University of Cambridge. I'm pleased to welcome my guest today, the Reverend Dr Alex Clare Young.

Thank you.

The Reverend Dr Alex Clare Young is a United Reformed Church minister and theologian based at Westminster College, Cambridge. As a trans non- binary advocate, they focus on queer theology and the intersection of faith and identity, promoting inclusivity for LGBTQIA+ individuals within the church.

Through pastoral care, teaching, and public speaking, Dr Clare Young encourages a compassionate, justice-centered approach to faith. So today we are talking about interfaith futures, but let's look at that a bit more specifically. My first question is, when thinking about interfaith futures, what is the most pressing concern in terms of discrimination and inclusion?

I think the most pressing concern is assumptions, and the way that assumptions affect intersectionality. So the way in which people are often seen as only one thing and assumptions are made about our faiths. That make policy makers think that we are nothing but our religion. Making things like LGBTQ + identities, disabilities, and so many more aspects of inclusion unseen.

To expand on that then, how does your work, in particular, in queer theology and advocacy for LGBTQIA+ people address these challenges, and what role do you think interfaith collaboration plays in this?

So one of the things that's been really important for me in queer theology is allowing LGBTQIA+ people to speak about theology on their own terms.

Often we're asked to defend our identities theologically and not able to speak about theology more widely. So my doctoral research and the book that came out of that, Trans Formations, was about enabling trans people to speak about Christian theology more openly and not just about why they felt it was okay to be trans.

And I would like to see that work happening firstly across faiths, but then in an interfaith way because LGBTQIA+ folks are often open to different religions and being able to have conversations about faith and experience transformation of faith in a novel way. And I'd like to see those conversations and that work happening.

It'd be great to hear the motivations for this work. I've had a bit of a look and it's really interesting.

Thank you. Part of it is that I'm a trans person myself and I realized when I was in theology college that I wasn't reading anything by people like me.

There wasn't a single text by a trans person in my course and when I asked for more texts, I was given some texts that were basically trans people explaining why it was okay to be trans and they were often quite limited as well in theologically what topics they would be able to explore.

I then experienced the work of Joy Ladin, who's a Jewish theologian who works on trans identities, and she writes about Job and trans identities, and that was really exciting for me. And from there onwards, I thought how can we have more of a voice?

And when I began chatting with trans people about theology, it broadened my theology massively.

And it really helped my spiritual journey, to be able to talk with people. And actually people of a range of faiths who had the common experience of being trans. And then in my role as a minister and a Christian, I wanted to be able to create more voices for trans people in theology so that it's not constantly me.

And that actually we can hear some other voices because intersectionality matters as well, and there are lots of ways in which I'm quite privileged and would like to hear the voices of other folks.

Yeah, perfect. Thank you for that. I know when it comes to lived experience research stuff, as a lived experience researcher myself I know there are certain things that come to my mind “Oh that was a really transformative conversation”.

And it'd be great to just hear something that really spoke to you whether or not that does relate to an interfaith conversation or not. It would be great to hear a bit more about that.

So I think one of the most transformative conversations during my PhD research was when I spoke with someone who was speaking about euphoria.

And there's now this big discussion in trans studies about euphoria versus dysphoria. So euphoria being the joy that we find inhabiting our bodies and dysphoria being the discomfort of being in a body that doesn't necessarily work so well with your gender. And this was before the discussion about euphoria was really very public and I'd done so much training people about trans stuff and I'd always told my story from the kind of difficult perspective and wanted to get empathy by sharing how hard it was.

And this person just said “For me, God is scattering breadcrumbs of delight and transition is all about following those breadcrumbs of delight”. And it completely challenged the perspective that I'd both talked about myself, but actually also the perspective which I'd experienced myself and my attitude to religion, which was very defensive in a way to be able to say, actually, this can be about joy.

And I think that in some ways transformed everything for me because that was the moment when I stopped apologizing for who I was and started to think let's just have these conversations about where is God bringing joy into our lives.

Yeah, that's a wonderful answer. Thank you for sharing that.

It would be great to talk more about your own identity as well. So my next question is like, how does your identity as a trans non binary minister in the United Reformed Church shape your vision for interfaith work? And what unique insights does it bring to the concept of interfaith futures?

So I think as a trans minister in the United Reformed Church, I have experienced quite a lot of discrimination, and that is one of the things that I bring, but I also bring experience of allyship and how people can work together to have better conversations. So because I'm trans, and because there are not very many trans ministers in the URC, and I was probably the first out trans minister in the URC that meant that I was invited to be part of conversations really early on that I might not have been.

So when I was in my undergrad theology degree, I was invited by someone in the URC to speak at this conference on multiple religious belonging, which is what happens when people either might have a background of two different religions, so like parents of two different religions, or they might practice two different faiths, two or more themselves.

And I was invited to that and to speak, not because I had experiences of multiple religious belonging, but because I was queer, and because as a queer person, I was marginalized in the church, and the person wanted to see what sorts of conversations we could have together across those boundaries. And I think that kind of intersectional work on what it means to be on the edge has been something that I've experienced ever since I started training for ministry in the local, national, and international work.

And most recently, I've been able, as a URC minister, to be part of preparing worship for the General Assembly of the World Communion of Reformed Churches in Thailand. And one of the things that I'm expected to do about that is to work with Thai people to ensure that the worship that we lead there, which will have thousands of people attending, feels genuinely Thai.

Now one of the problems with that is that Christianity in Thailand is massively Western, and that Thailand is a country that has five religions. And so immediately the question I wanted to ask is how can we actually engage together as people of different faiths? And I don't think I'd ever have got to the point of being able to have those conversations as a Christian minister in the URC if it wasn't for the fact that I'm trans.

So actually the ways in which our differences help us to navigate other differences and maybe challenge norms that are problematic, I think it's quite important.

I just want to return to what you said about joy and I guess your own leadership experience and your own lived experience. It'd be great to hear about a moment of joy in doing this kind of work. Especially bringing your own lived experience to this, to leadership again, whether that's an interfaith context or not.

Absolutely. So when I was a student, I was invited to be a minister for a week in a house at a place called Keld, and basically it's a place where very few people live, but a lot of people walk through. And when I was invited to be there for a week, I drew up a programme of events and a description of myself that included talking about being trans.

And the person who was in charge of the program said maybe you should leave that bit out. And I thought about it and wrestled with it and decided to leave it in. And the second day there, someone came and approached me and they were walking and they were trans. And they'd never met a trans person of faith before.

And we were able to just sit in the garden of the house attached to this ancient church and have conversations about transness and faith and the fact that it was okay for those intersections to be there in that person's life. And they ended up coming back every day of the week that I was there and we were just able to have these deep conversations.

And it was just really moving and really joyful because it made me realize that I was where I was meant to be. I'd said the things that I was meant to say. And that had given me the space to be able to listen to this other person, and I just, I loved it. The whole week was fabulous.

Yeah, wonderful.

I guess when considering interfaith and inclusive spaces over the next 5, 10, or even 20 years, what shifts do you anticipate in the way public spaces and education systems approach diversity?

So I hope that we'll move from tolerance to celebration.

And I think that's the case in a lot of different discussions about diversity, not just those about faith that often we tolerate diversity and we call that inclusion, but it doesn't actually mean that we're celebrating the differences. And I think a really clear example of that to me is that recently— so I'm a wheelchair user, which means I now have to use the larger changing space toilets in public service stations. And I was going to the toilet in this service station and realized that the multi faith prayer room was this tiny room that was basically a cupboard right next to the toilet. That felt like they put in a prayer room because they thought they had to, but there was no celebration, it was something that was hidden away next to the toilets and it was, dirty, not nice space for people to be in.

And I thought, what if this was something? Prayer was something that was actually celebrated and made use of in public space. Because we're moving towards a time, I think, where whilst religions are, in some places in the West, shrinking —but not always— prayer and meditation and mindfulness and all of these things are actually things people are really interested in.

So why aren't we celebrating those things publicly in ways that aren't trying to convert people but are actually about celebrating our faiths together? Can we move to interfaith spaces being beautiful and purposeful? And can we move to a space where no one faith is assumed to be the norm? Because certainly in the West and in the UK it's still assumed that people are Christian and actually the majority of people aren't and maybe that's a really good thing.

Maybe that's something we can celebrate. Maybe we can have more diverse, exciting conversations about prayer. And I would love to see interfaith dialogue developing to the point where some people across multiple faiths could genuinely worship together in ways that respected and represented all of the faiths present and weren't just symbolic.

Thank you for that. So I just have a final question for you. How might policy or planning adapt to support these changes?

So a lot of the work that I do is around EDI, equality, diversity and inclusion work with various organizations, including faith organizations.

And one of the things that I'm really passionate about is that equality legislation needs reform. Equality legislation pushes people to do the bare minimum. And leaves it at that. It is also based on very limited protected characteristics that are not well understood. And for example, “ belief ”which is a protected characteristic under that, is often used to mean any personal opinion rather than to mean faith, which is what it was intended for.

So we lack a diverse and realistic understanding of faith in our equality legislation.

I also think that interfaith work needs to not be based solely on existing institutions. So I've done a lot of work that's not necessarily very public or very seen with, for example, LGBTQIA+ Muslim groups and when local interfaith discussions are always based at the religious institutions that exist in a place, such as mosques and churches and so on, that are already there, then that means that people of any given religion who are excluded from those spaces won't be a part of our interfaith conversations. So I think we need to change where we're starting the conversations so that we have a broader range of people there.

I was really struck at a recent interfaith meeting in church in Cambridge where the majority of people there were over 60 and I knew that was representative of where the conversation had started. And I think that's problematic.

And then finally, I think protections around belief need to actually mean belief, and we need to re- examine what belief means, what religious belonging means, and how we talk about those things in public life, and to actually take religions really seriously.

So for example, at the moment, as people will know, the Assisted Dying bill is being talked about in government.

But when people talk about belief perspectives on that, the kind of level of debate is people saying why are you telling me that it's God's choice when I die? It's not going beneath that to the broader conversation contributions that religions could make, thinking about palliative care, chaplaincy, dignity, what our benefits system looks like.

There's so many different areas in which faiths could seriously contribute to public life. But we're limited to being seen as rule based systems, which I think really reduces and flattens the positive work that interfaith futures can bring.

Thank you for that.

Thank you so much for contributing. It would be nice to have this conversation at a later time as well. Thank you so much.

Absolutely. Thank you.