Revoice, Side B, and the Transgender Haunting

How will the Side B community orient itself towards transgender people?

I am taking a quick break from my series reviewing and responding to Preston Sprinkle's book Embodied to talk briefly about the Revoice conference, about their approach to transgender people, and about Preston Sprinkle’s presence/influence at Revoice. For me to do that in a way that is at all just I am going to have to talk about Side B and my relationship to “Side B Christianity” because Revoice is the largest and most prominent Side B organization in the country.

Some Background

“Side B” is a term that was popularized in the early days of the Gay Christian Network (GCN)—now rebranded as Q Christian—though I understand that GCN got the terminology from an earlier website focused on facilitating discussions between people who held varying beliefs on the subject of homosexuality. It is important to understand though that Side B as a categorically bound up with Side A and with what came to be called “Side X”. Within GCN sides A and B were intended to designate differing positions on the question of whether or not God sees gay sex as intrinsically sinful. The definitions have evolved and been developed a bit over the years but have survived until now pretty much unchanged in basic meaning. The oldest definition I have been able to find is archived from 2010

Here at GCN, we have two types of gay Christians. On one side are those who are in gay relationships or hope to be someday. On the other side are those who view their same-sex attractions as a temptation, and strive to live celibate lives. We call these views Side A and Side B, and both are well-represented at GCN.

The current version (pulled today from Q Christian) is a little more developed:

[Side A Christians are] LGBTQ+ Christians who fully affirm both LGBTQ+ identity and same-gender sex for various personal and/or theological reasons.  This includes those who have a broad range of sexual ethics.

[Side B Christians are] LGBTQ+ Christians who affirm LGBTQ+ identity and who also are committed to refraining from same-gender sex for various personal and/or theological reasons. This includes single celibate LGBTQ+ Christians as well as those in celibate partnerships and mixed-orientation marriages.

Critically, these terms emerged and were embraced not primarily as a way to set up opposition between the two “sides” but as a way to recognized difference and to create space for cooperation against a church which attacks and rejects us. In recognition that we are joined in opposition to oppression, GCN also sort of unofficially designated people who advocated conversion therapy and who reject “LGBTQ+ identity” as Side X. So Side A /Side B terminology has its origins not in antagonism but in cooperation against Side X.

In 2017 GCN (up until then the largest LGBTQ+ Christian organization online) underwent a change of leadership, shifting away from their founder Justin Lee and, a year later, rebranding as Q Christian fellowship. The change left a good number of Side B people worried that the future Q Christian would leave them behind. Justin Lee is himself Side A but had earned a lot of trust from the Side B community through rigorous insistence on their inclusion and on amplifying their voices. I am not entirely clear that Revoice was formed in reaction to the Q Christian restructuring¹ but it was founded in 2018 as a more or less explicitly Side B conference and several of my Side B friends see it that way.

My Take on Side B

I am Side A. I want to state that up front. My identities (those relevant to this conversation) are those of Christian lesbian and trans woman. My understanding of Revoice is based on some research and on a lot of conversations I have had on and offline with Side B friends.

First I want to say that it is a point of pride, principle, and policy for me to stand up for and alongside my Side B friends. I do not think that their collective theologies about homosexuality are correct and in some cases I think they are harmful but they are arrived at in (in my experience) absolute sincerity and I have the deepest respect for people who are willing to make such significant personal sacrifices in fidelity to Christ. I realized that my situation is not necessarily universal but I have never been made to feel less than or felt judged by any of my Side B identifying friends². I have gotten into “the great debate” with a few of them but those conversations have always had a different tenor than the discussions I have had with non-affirming Christians.

With that said I would like to offer a few personal reflections about the “Side B” position and then bring this essay to its point by raising my concerns about Preston Sprinkle, his influence on Revoice, and his position on the Revoice Advisory Board.

1. Side B is actually about sexuality and has nothing specifically to say about gender identity

Although the current Q Christian definition of Side B does include the phrase “affirm LGBTQ+ identity” that language is probably using “LGBTQ+” in the sort of broad way that too often excludes trans (and several other) identities. It may be the case that in Q Christian’s usage, affirmation of trans identities is a requirement for Side B people but by now the term (Side B) has spread beyond the scope of that organization and groups like Revoice can rightly observe that, in it’s early days, GCN was largely focused on homosexuality and gave little attention to the specifics of trans identities. Certainly the discussions and debates between Side A and Side B have historically concerned themselves with gay sex and have not ventured to comment at all on trans identities.

The term “transgender” does not appear in any of Revoice’s three statements of belief.

To be clear, I don’t think that this is a problem per se. In fact I believe that it is quite useful to have a term to talk about positions on sexuality exclusively. I do think, though, that it needs to be stated clearly. There could very well be trans people out there who identify as Side B because they believe that God affirms them in their gender identities and also believe that they are called to celibacy rather than to a same-sex sexual relationship.

2. Side A, Side B, and Side X are terms to describe people who are attracted to people other than members of the “opposite” sex

Put in a more direct way: If you are straight³, please don’t call yourself Side A,B, or X. This view of mine is not universal among queer Christians and I have know several good allies who will refer to themselves as a “Side A ally” or a Side B ally” in a way that sort of leaves ambiguous whether they are claiming to be Side A or Side B or are just identifying those communities as the ones with which they are allying themselves. However I do think it is important to make the distinction because I, at least, experience a Side B person very differently from the say that I experience a non-affirming straight Christian whose sexual ethics align with those of Side B people. It is a very different thing to say “I am called to celibacy based on my own religious and theological convictions” than it is to say “I believe that you are called to celibacy based on my own religious and theological convictions”. Even for Side X people, I experience “ex-gay” Christians in a significantly different way from how I experience straight Christians who insist that my homosexuality is a form of brokenness which God can and will “heal”. And I think that history is on my side in this; I believe that this is largely how the terms have been used.

So to use myself as an example: I call myself Side A, not because I am transgender but because I am a lesbian. If I were a straight trans woman I wouldn’t use “Side” language to identify my theology.

Revoice has a Preston Sprinkle Problem

So Revoice is a Side B organization. That in itself is not a problem. Unfortunately, in course of their existence they picked up Preston Sprinkle somewhere along the way. That is a problem—at least it is if you are a transgender Christian.

Honestly I want to admit (and not in a snide way) that if you bracket the existence of trans people and certain other questions of intersectionality, Sprinkle looks like a good fit for Revoice. He is the president of the Center for Faith, Sexuality, & Gender (an organizations whose entire raison d’etre seems to be to spread the message “Gay Sex is sinful and Trans people are wrong about who they are but we really need to be nicer about it” which has a certain appeal for a populations which has been systemically historically marginalized and oppressed by the church. Albeit a straight white cis guy, Sprinkle is a national leader and a very reasonable person for a group of men⁴ who are gay and bi/pan celibate Christians to want on their Advisory board.

But only if you keep us firmly bracketed. Per my comments above, Sprinkle is not, himself, Side B if only because he is a straight man. His theology of sexuality does align neatly with what we might call the “mainstream” of protestant Side B thought⁵. But also, Preston Sprinkle’s views on trans people are…I am just going to say “horrendous” albeit they are horrendous with a pleasant icing of irenic welcome.

For a detailed run-down of my critique of Preston Sprinkle’s take on transgender people please check the archive for the The Sweetest Poison series I have been working on in response to his book Embodied: Transgender Identities, The Church & What the Bible Has to Say (HERE is a link to the Introduction). The TL;DR is that Sprinkle’s book peddles in harmful misinformation, is poorly sourced, and utilizes rhetoric which might charitably be described as “sloppy” or more critically characterized as “slippery”; he does not affirm the gender identities of trans people and is willing at most to accept transition related healthcare as a sort of concession of last resort for those of us who suffer from debilitating gender dysphoria only—though through all of this he does insist on the importance of treating us nicely.

If that were all there were I would probably still be writing this piece simply because I find it hurtful for my Side B friends to support an org which platforms someone who is doing harm to my trans community. But Revoice has gone beyond that. At their 2021 conference, Sprinkle was invited to give a talk (I believe it was a special pre-conference session) on the topic of “Faith, Sexuality, & Gender” despite the fact that he has, on multiple occasions, voiced openness to conversion therapy for trans people. Sprinkle also seems to have contributed to or even created the one panel on gender that I am aware of Revoice having ever run. Sprinkle wasn’t on the panel himself but most (all?) of the people who were are people who are affiliated with his center or who have been spotlighted and platformed on his podcast and notably, that does not include a single trans person who holds to the mainstream position of transgender Christians (that trans-ness is a natural, neutral-to-good variation in the diversity of the human gender experience; that transition is licit and blessed by God, that trans men are men, trans women are women, non-binary people are valid, and that harmful psuedoscientific theories like ROGD and AGP have no place in serious discussions of trans-ness).

So yeah, Revoice will be meeting in St. Louis in mid June (I don’t know whether they are hoping to reach out to trans people this conference but if so they might consider a last minute location change—St. Louis is hardly hospitable to transgender people at present). Last I checked, Preston Sprinkle was still on their board and his cohort from the Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender was still being featured. If that doesn’t change I hope that Side B people will avoiding the conference this year.

I want for my Side B siblings in Christ to have a place and a community where they can gather for mutual encouragement and comfort. Is it too much to ask that they do it without harming their trans siblings in Christ?

As of 2022 this was the Revoice Advisory Board.

1. I have also seen Revoice described as the Side B counterpart to Matthew Vines’ Reformation Project

2. The same cannot be said for non-affirming LGBTQ+ Christians generally; I am speaking here very intentionally of my experience with LGBTQ+ Christians who self-identify as Side B.

3. I need to acknowledge that in fact things are more complicated than this for non-binary and intersex people. I am not interested in policing what they designate as straight, gay, queer, etc… that is their choice to make.

4. Christian women (and certainly non-binary Christians) have a somewhat different take on Dr. Sprinkle. See for instance, Dr. Laura Robinson’s March response to one of Sprinkle’s podcast episodes.

5. Catholics and the Orthodox who are Side B often have entirely different theology and reasoning behind their positions and it is nearly always a mistake to make assumptions.