Miranda's Mailbox, Part 1: A Trans Woman's Advent Letter to the Church

I’ve written a few open letters on my blog before, and now I’ve decided to make it a regular feature. I’ll share letters I write to organizations and notable people.

I’m working on setting up options on ko-fi.com/thepoetmiranda for you to financially support these efforts, including mailing these letters to the title recipients. There’s just a basic framework over there right now, but you can click and donate that way. You can also support my work via direct payments of any amount CashApp or Venmo ($thepoetmiranda).

The first letter I’m sharing in this series is to the Church, not a specific denomination, but to the entire body of Christ. Pastors, ministers, priests, and other church leaders, feel free to share this with your congregations or Sunday School classes or Bible study groups. If you decide to read this letter (and poem) to your congregation, and your church does video of its services, I would appreciate you sending me the link.

I’ll record videos of me reading the letter and poem and post them to YouTube.com/thepoetmiranda and will share those specific links when I have them ready.

Dear Church,

Advent is here, the season when the Church anticipates G-d coming into our world as a humble baby in a manger, meeting us where we are with a radical act of love. Advent used to be my favorite season in the Church calendar. It was time I spent reflecting on hope, anticipation, peace, and love. But now my Advent reflections are shrouded by grief and pain.

Before I get into that, let me tell you about myself.  My name is Miranda. I’m a wife,  a mom, a daughter, and  a sister.

I grew up going to my great grandma Lucy’s Baptist Church. She was a generous and faithful woman who I always looked up to. She made sure people were fed when they were hungry and cared for when they were sick. She sang in the church choir. She taught Sunday School. She always donated money for kids to attend summer camp, even after Papaw passed and she was scraping by on Social Security.

Her faith very much influenced mine. I attended a Christian university and went on to serve the Church in various lay leadership roles for many years, always trying to make the focus of my ministry the two commandments Jesus gave us: love G-d and love my neighbor. I always tried to see (and still try to see) the image of G-d in all people, especially in those our society discards as the least of these.

Unfortunately, my grief this Advent season is from the Church breaking my heart. For the first time in the 18 years I’ve been married, I won’t wake up on Christmas morning at my in-laws’ home. Our kids won’t wake up to stockings lovingly filled by their grandparents and aunts and uncles. We won’t have our Christmas traditions and time with our beloved family because last time we made that 10-hour road trip, a Christian man threatened to murder me in a gas station because, in addition to the descriptors above, I’m also a transgender woman. Going home is a safety risk.

I don’t blame all Christians for what that man did, but it’s a sad reality that the vast majority of threats I’ve received since coming out have been from Christians. It’s also a reality that most of the people who bear false witness against people like me by suggesting that who we are is a sexual fetish or perversion – or worse, that we are sexual predators – are Christians. Another reality is that many of the people who have called me slurs, both online and in-person, are Christians.

In the public sphere, Christian media figures, politicians, and pastors have mocked people like me, have scapegoated people like me, have called people like me “demonic.” Some have even gone so far as to say that people like me are demons, literal demons. They say that people like me shouldn’t be allowed near children or in public spaces at all, shouldn’t have access to healthcare, shouldn’t serve in our armed forces or government, shouldn’t be allowed in the workplace, and shouldn’t have access to housing. In September 2025, two Members of Congress went so far as to say that all transgender people should be imprisoned.

The Church’s response to this campaign of dehumanization has largely been to either remain silent or to rally around the people sinning against people like me. Seeing people I’ve prayed with and broken bread with for most of my life decide that I am exempt from G-d’s love is a knife in my heart.

Get to know transgender people, not through the lens of media and politics but through the eyes of Christ. Listen to our hearts. Listen to us talk about the paths we’ve walked. Rejoice with us when we rejoice, and mourn with us when we mourn. We aren’t demons. We don’t have a nefarious agenda. We’re people. We’re children of G-d, just like you.

I hope you can find a place in your faith for a G-d who’s creative enough to mold jars of clay like me.

With love,

Miranda Weiss
www.thepoetmiranda.com

p.s. I've also included a poem I wrote last year after getting home from our Christmas road trip. In it, I talk about a few specific instances of Christians threatening me. The reference to 41% is from an old study that said that 41% of trans people have attempted suicide. That figure drops dramatically when trans people affirm their gender and have social supports. Sadly, many Christians weaponize high suicide rates among trans people and try to bully more of us into making that choice.

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This year, as I listen to the timber
of my father-in-law reading Luke 2–
the Christmas story—before the donkey

delivers Joseph and pregnant Mary
to that full inn in Bethlehem, to be
rejected, I go to the fields and wait

with the shepherds. I have questions to ask
that coming angel, and I need to hear
the chorus sing peace that night. Their voices

don’t tell me join the 41%
like the megachurch worship leader did.
I want to walk with the faithful shepherds

when they see the lowly child, but angel
still hasn’t answered whether the deacon
at the coffee shop was right: will he watch

from Heaven as G-d heaps coal onto freaks
like me? I think about all those pastors
(I don’t even know how many so far)

who’ve threatened to ram their staffs into my…
Excuse me, I refuse to illustrate
their unholy sermons any further,

but I still beg to know why I—lowly
trans woman—am the one declared demon.
Angel, can you ask the baby laying

in the manger’s gold straw? Can he speak, yet?
After 2,000 years, is he ready
to tell them the person I am is not

the sin he was born to save the world from?