Putting it all together – finally some gender definitions!

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Probably the most polarizing thing in transgender discourse has been the debate about the definition of a woman (strangely never couched in terms of the definition of a man!). The basis for exclusion of trans women from such definitions is supposedly based on incontrovertible biological facts, though, as posted previously, sexual biology is highly complex and not entirely binary. The basis for inclusion of trans women is social and thus relates to gender. These two perspectives seem to lack any connecting ground: either it’s all biological and binary or it is entirely based on self-identification of desired social role. However, we can and must do better than this. Therefore, I have developed definitions which are kind to, and inclusive of, trans people whilst not disregarding sexual biology, and which I hope represent a good practical starting point for further discussion. They build the connecting ground.

Though I have shared most of what follows with several folk (cis and trans) individually over the last 2-3 years (who generally found it lucid) I decided not to share it more widely whilst self-declaration of gender (which I broadly support[1], with some caveats) was still a realistic possibility in the UK. However, the UK Supreme Court ruling on Weds 16th April has abruptly changed the landscape and I view the ideas that I share below as now being ripe to provide a framework or foundation to build back most of what trans folk currently appear to be losing.

However please be clear that I am not writing about legal definitions here, though the definitions I provide could be deployed to develop clearer, fairer and more inclusive legal definitions which are surely now needed.

A necessary concept at this point is that of intention. The intention (whether of nature, i.e. that of the human organism or maybe even society, or whether of God) is what is often in mind when trying to allocate ambiguous cases to a sex or gender and is the (normally implicit) basis of much anti-trans argumentation: people thinking they know the intention of some higher authority and then using it to curtail other peoples’ freedom and sense of self. However, the intention of the human organism clearly continues developing after birth, including the ‘self’, and is honoured when we recognise bodily autonomy. Recognition and honouring of such organismic intention is key to understanding and including trans people.

My answers to the questions ‘What is a man?’ and ‘What is a woman?’ are as follows:

A man (boy) is a human person who demonstrates consistent organismic intention to maintain or adopt a set of gender characteristics that best correlate with male biological sex.

A woman (girl) is a human person who demonstrates consistent organismic intention to maintain or adopt a set of gender characteristics that best correlate with female biological sex.

These definitions have the following benefits:

  1. they are trans friendly – a person of female biological sex can be a man, and a person of male biological sex can be a woman, if they adopt appropriate characteristics which contains the recognition that gender and sex are imperfectly correlated[2]
  2. they retain the idea of biological sex
  3. they don’t require the difficult task of biological sex being precisely pinned down since, however it might be defined, e.g. by chromosomes or by birth genitalia, the distribution of gender (social) characteristics associated with it will be very similar.
  4. unlike the pure self-identification model they do not (seem to) float free from biology but they do contain self-identification inherently through the idea of intention and could include ‘identifying as a woman (man)’ as part of any set of gender characteristics

Naturally I recognise that these definitions are more complicated than either the attempt to use biological sex only or the attempt to use self-identification. However, given the complexity of the field of human sex and gender, they are still remarkably succinct.

Socially it may be difficult to evaluate consistent intention and, as is frequently the case in practice, we assess or extrapolate this from a necessarily more momentary evaluation. Note also that consistent intention could be useful legally and that intention (to adopt gender characteristics) should generally be honoured even if the individual does not ‘pass’ as their intended gender.

A non-binary person (perhaps including bi-gendered or significantly genderfluid individuals) could then be defined by either:

A non-binary person is a human person who demonstrates consistent organismic intention to maintain or adopt a set of gender characteristics that do not strongly correlate overall with either male or female biological sex.

OR

A non-binary person is a human person who does not demonstrate consistent organismic intention to maintain or adopt a set of gender characteristics that strongly correlate with either male or female biological sex.

The need for both of these definitions arises as some non-binary people are more drawn to the middle ground and some are more repelled by the poles.

Please note that an intersex person could be gendered as a man, a woman or non-binary under this framework. Whether such a person would view themselves as transgender or not would very much depend on the individual’s circumstances (including perhaps the degree of transition undertaken).

Whether an endosex (non-intersex) non-binary person would additionally view themselves to be transgender or not would also very much depend on the individual’s circumstances (including perhaps the degree of transition undertaken).

[1] Support shared by the 2022 UK Unitarian General Assembly in a landmark trans rights resolution.

[2] As indicated in my previous post I recognise that such gender changes may also change some aspects of sex. Some transgender people would view them as changing their sex whilst gender critical folk would not. The beauty of these definitions is that this does not need to be resolved.

Sex and Gender are Imperfectly Correlated

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Let us be clear that, regardless of any philosophical theory or statements by any political or legal body (including the UK Supreme Court), there is no widescale consensus about what sex and gender are and how they relate to each other.[1] In the absence of consensus, I am primarily going to present my own framework. As it makes something of an appeal to common ground, and could perhaps even be seen as a golden mean of different positions, it has plenty of claims on legitimacy. Nevertheless, I am sure that some will see it as contentious.

I contend that sex and its classification is fundamentally about physicality. This means we need a word for things that are correlated (imperfectly) with sex i.e. social roles and so forth and the word gender is used to capture that. However, if the scope of gender is restricted to that, then it is unable to encompass those aspects of physicality that provide indication of the individual’s likely social role. Thus, gender necessarily extends into those aspects of physicality (visible secondary sex characteristics) which are definitely also part of our understanding of sex, as well as into borderline things that are physical and social such as clothing, voice, mannerisms, and deportment.

Recognising the limits of normal social interaction we thus have a conservative estimate of the bounds of gender. However, it is not unreasonable, considering the desire for living as full a human life as possible, to extend the idea of the social into the intimate domain, and thus to include what could be observed by a sexual partner or by a relatively cursory medical examination. This would then include the primary sex characteristics, particularly the visible sex organs.

Thinking along these lines it is clear that it is impossible to define a boundary between sex and gender. Consequently, a typical resolution of other thinkers is either to extend gender ‘all the way in’ so that drills down into the biology or alternatively to extend sex ‘all the way out’ beyond my assumed physical definition to include the social aspects that (imperfectly) correlate with the physical. This leads to a situation where gender and sex can then be superficially viewed as being identical in their coverage though springing from entirely different paradigms! To be clear I do not take this approach as the potential for confusion in terms of communication and understanding is enormous. Yet another approach that has been taken is to use the boundary definition for sex as physical but to then disregard all non-physical aspects and leave them unclaimed, with the word gender either abolished or, perhaps if used at all, as a synonym for sex. However, for as long as we are an embodied and social species, we will always observe the (imperfect) correlations that exist between sex and social behaviour.[2] Consequently the social idea of gender will always re-assert itself if the attempt made to abolish it.

Meanwhile my own conception of sex and gender does not attempt to completely disentangle them and instead leaves them to overlap but with different emphases and imperfect correlation.

I contend it is then possible to change gender by adopting another social role and changing physical gender cues as much as possible. This potentially also changes some aspects of sex (e.g. hormones, secondary and maybe primary sex characteristics) but leaves open the possibility that, for example if you (unlike me) define sex by chromosomes or by gonadal tissue or by genitalia at birth, that you will not view sex as fundamentally changed. From a trans perspective, and for the definitions I will ultimately present, this actually doesn’t matter as long as gender as a bio-social idea is respected as the commonality typically desired by trans people and is viewed as a meaningful idea by society at large. It does however matter from an intersex perspective: as previously posted actually defining biological sex is more complex than simply sex chromosomes or gonads/birth genitalia.

However, the gender critical position is that of bio-essentialism i.e. only biology matters in terms of making a judgment of sex and that gender is either meaningless (in the social sense) or is simply another word for sex. Therefore we see that the gender critical position is to completely deny the very commonality (gender) that trans people identify with and yearn for. When looked at clearly it is an attempt at erasing trans people by removing the foundation of our identity.

Having said that, an expressed concern in much gender critical thinking seems to be that the concept of gender was supposedly being used to erase the concept of biological sex, with the definition of a man/woman becoming ‘whoever identifies as one’. The fact that such self-identification seemingly floats free of biology would be problematic if it were the totality of such definitions. In reality, it is simply an operational definition (given an implicit understanding of what a man/woman is) but this does still mean that explicit definitions that reference biological roots could be very helpful and will be introduced in my next post. Please note then that I continue to use biological sex as part of my own framework despite the other glaring difficulty that we approach, and have already mentioned in the previous post: namely that there is no single characteristic that uniquely and unerringly determines biological sex. There is no characteristic that is both necessary and sufficient. This applies even before we admit trans people into consideration or consider those properties that can be changed by human means. As previously posted it is most obviously demonstrated through various intersex conditions. Given these difficulties it could well seem strange to some readers that I do retain the idea of biological sex. However, it does not need to be precisely defined if deployed in the fashion that I will do in my next post.

[1] For this reason ‘common sense’ is sometimes a tempting recourse. However, this is not at all satisfactory, as we may most obviously discover now that our society starts to grapple with how we include (or, sadly, exclude) trans people who ‘pass’ extremely well.

[2] Unless of course no one could know anyone else’s sex or, alternatively but frighteningly (as it feels a logical extrapolation of the current anti-trans sentiment), absolute gender conformity was ruthlessly enforced.

Biological Sex is not Simple: Intersex people exist and Deserve Dignity and Respect

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It is not my intention to go into great detail critiquing the UK Supreme Court judgement of Weds 16th April 2025 on sex/gender. I do not intend to fight a legal battle that I lack the resources, or skill, to even begin but rather, given the now increasingly muddled and discriminatory nature of the law resulting from this ‘clarification’ I hope to lay the ground for a better attempt at getting trans rights properly established in UK law next time (whenever that is!) by attending to the underlying philosophical issues in as even-handed a way as I can (whilst acknowledging my strong investment in the issues).

Having said that there are certain aspects of the judgment which are clearly highly problematic and the one that is most obviously so regards biological sex and the decision to treat it as entirely binary. To be fair to the Supreme Court they were mainly trying to make laws work that were/are themselves quite binary but I am not sure that completely justifies their approach.

Specifically, it is important to note that human sex is bimodal and not binary. This means that there are two highly common sets of sex characteristics and then a number of much rarer conditions that do not neatly fit. We should recall that these conditions are experienced by people of worth and dignity who should not be treated as collateral damage in society’s seemingly growing desire to curtail and control transgender people. Intersex people are often overlooked, even by trans people, but however inconvenient it might be for some, their existence is clearly indicating that we have not got our sex (and thus gender) classification right, as a society, and that justice demands greater flexibility. The existence of intersex people has been perhaps most visible in the sporting arena but I am pretty repelled by a culture that tries to make villains of Imane Khelif and Caster Semenya who have clearly been raised as women.

The bio-essentialism that underpins the Supreme Court’s approach is highly problematic as there is no single characteristic that uniquely and unerringly determines biological sex. There is no characteristic that is both necessary and sufficient. This applies even before we admit trans people into consideration or consider those properties that can be changed by human means. This is obviously demonstrated through intersex conditions. To understand this firstly note that the kinds of things that we typically might wish to consider to indicate biological sex include both genotype (i.e. genes and specifically chromosomes) and phenotype (which simply means the physical characteristics of the organism that can be observed). The latter can be further broken down into sub-categories (sex organs, secondary characteristics e.g. breasts or facial hair, and sex hormone production and response) and all of these have more than two different human instantiations.

There is a body of opinion that is keen to make chromosomes the arbiter of sex. However in going down that route consider firstly, without making any cross-gender/sex claims, that not everyone has XX or XY chromosomes. For example, people with Klinefelter syndrome have XXY chromosomes, those with Jacob’s syndrome has XYY chromosomes and that there are also people with three or more X chromosomes (trisomy). Still there is only one gene on the Y chromosome (called the sex determining region of the Y chromosome or SRY gene) that is relevant to sex. Having one of these could cause one to be view oneself as genetically male. But a Y chromosome can lack the SRY gene which would mean that physically (phenotype-wise) the individual is female but chromosomally they are male and genetically (as no SRY) arguably female!

Also some women (including some contentious sportswomen) are likely to have XY chromosomes (the Y presumably with SRY gene intact) and naturally elevated testosterone levels due to internal testes, but will generally be viewed as being a woman due to secondary and primary sex characteristics. This is likely to be caused by androgen insensitivity syndrome (i.e. her body has not responded to the androgens it produces). Then there is the case of the Guevedoces (meaning ‘penis at twelve’), mainly originating from a small town in the Dominican Republic where there have been multiple cases of children seemingly born as girls (having no visible penis or testes) and being brought up as such, then developing a penis and having testicles descend at puberty. It seems these children have XY chromosomes who due to an enzyme deficiency did not respond to the pre-birth testosterone surge but do so with the second surge at puberty. Most of these go on to live as males but some have an operation to remain female. Nature is messy!

In thinking about sex hormone quantities it is also worth noting that some females have more male hormones than some males, and some males have more female hormones than some females!

And in the search for a definitive biological sex we can delve ever deeper or wider and still not find one that perfectly matches our social needs, perceptions and prejudices, meaning that decisions become necessary (for those who really must classify – though I ask do we really have to?) for ambiguous cases.

Trans Folk are Real and Not Mad, Bad or Sad

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Before I really dive in, as promised in my previous post, I have some foundational ideas to mention.

What I mean by saying that trans people are real is that there are people (for whatever reason, and there are several reasons – all valid – that could combine to contribute) who feel consistently alienated from the physicality and/or social expectations hitherto typically associated with their birth genitalia and/or who feel consistently more comfortable with the physicality and/or social expectations hitherto associated with different genitalia,[1] and who are not able to resolve this purely through the lens of sexual orientation.[2] In support of the idea that trans people are real are thousands of years of observations from different cultures. For example the Jewish legal tradition (the Talmud), notwithstanding the use of the biblical book of Genesis by biblical literalists to support a binary gender system, actually recognises between six and eight different genders.[3] Meanwhile the indigenous American peoples had at least four and maybe five genders and the case of at least a third gender is well illustrated by the hijras of India. Gender variation is clearly ancient and its expression in its current Western form is surely a phenomenon that is as old as the binary conceptualisation it rebels against.[4] It is most certainly not a new phenomenon, though clearly modern medical science has provided new routes for treatment. While the availability of those treatment routes will have had an impact on the way that trans people have pursued solutions to their difficulties they are not the root cause of our transness.

With this in mind I would also ask readers to appreciate, that in this essential transness, that trans people are not deluded – we are not mad.[5] We are very aware that our feelings and/or our behaviours do not conform to social expectation (or wouldn’t if we expressed ourselves as we ideally would like) and we have a very distinct awareness of what we have actually been dealt biologically. We might choose to work around our situation, or directly to change it in some way, which are potentially rational responses to it, though how we do so may seem drastic to someone who does not have our circumstances. But rest assured we know our situation only too well.

It might be possible to conclude that on average trans people perceive and think about the world differently in general. Certainly there is growing support for the observation that many trans people are neurodivergent, though by no means all (and of course not all neurodivergent people are trans). But, even if this observation could be applied to trans people universally, it would simply substantiate an area where we differ from the majority, and either way surely such difference itself should not be pathologized but celebrated.[6]

Continuing to focus on our essential transness I hope most people, aside from some religious zealots, will also recognise that trans people are not evil – we are not bad because of our transness (though we of course have our fair share of character defects, just like everyone else). Those who find evil in the transness of trans people are mostly bringing that perception with themselves due to their own baggage and dogma. We have not ‘become trans’ in order to be disruptive and cause problems with the current structure of society. However, our essential transness does cause us (and others) to question that society so of course trans people do have the potential to be disruptive as our very existence causes people who are attached to certainty to feel uncomfortable. But the problem for that lies firmly with those inflexible people who cannot, or refuse to, admit this issue as a valid consideration for how we organise society.

One thing that is axiomatic for me as a Unitarian is the inherent worth and dignity of each human person. Trans people, simply by being, possess this no more and no less than anyone else. We are not intrinsically pathetic or ‘sad’ individuals. We could get into a long philosophical tangent as to where this worth and dignity comes from. We may even see it as aspirational because it is clear society does still treat some people far better than others based upon certain characteristics. Whilst trans people have inherent worth and dignity it is entirely possible, in fact let’s be clear that it happens, due to the behaviour of individuals and/or human social systems, for us to be ridiculed and marginalised just for our essential transness (if we dare to name it or to take the teensiest steps towards expressing it).

[1] Please note that I view the alienation described to be relative i.e. while the definition most naturally lends itself to interpretation as gender dysphoria it equally applies to trans people who prefer to talk in terms of the gender euphoria they experience when transitioning (or cross-living, or taking steps towards these things) by virtue of the fact that their apparent starting or default position is not now the one they wish to be in.

[2] Clearly transgender and sexuality issues have overlaps and connections, and it is unsurprising that common cause is found, but being trans and being LGB are not the same thing (i.e. I reject the idea that someone claiming to be trans is simply finding a different way of saying that they are LGB (though they may be both) and equally, of course, I would make no claim that someone who is LGB should necessarily be claimed as trans).

[3] We might also dispute the binary perspective of biblical literalists noting that Genesis 1:27 including “male and female he created them” could actually indicate a range in the same way that “near and far” does not exclude an intermediate distance and “old and young” does not exclude the middle aged. Though, as I am not a biblical literalist, I am untroubled if detailed analysis of the text “proves” me wrong here.

[4] And even in the West it can be argued that we have not always been quite so binary in how we handle sex/gender as our current system is.

[5] Our mental health is, however, far from perfect: family and social rejection are rife and it is difficult to engage on trans matters online without getting a sense of the hatred that has been kindled against us and which sometimes spills out into day-to-day life. Trans suicide rates are considerably higher than those of non-trans people.

[6] It would be nice to be celebrated – the only ‘pity’ we consistently seek for our situation is not for the condition itself but for how we are still treated by too much of society.

Hello Again: An Update on a Big Change!

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I have the intention to make a more detailed (and less personal) post later but, in order for that to make sense for some readers, I need to make this update as it has been such a long time since I last posted on here. Not only has Covid come and (partly) gone but a very significant personal change has also taken place: I have socially transitioned gender! After a few years of gradually telling friends and family I came out publicly as nonbinary and transgender (albeit with my own personal slant on the terminology!) in the summer/autumn of 2021, writing the following:

“I write with a mixture of hope, a little trepidation, and significant relief at finally feeling able to speak publicly and tell you (with circumstances meaning you include many dear ones who I’d rather have told personally) that I am nonbinary and transgender. I am currently transitioning to nonbinary i.e. I am moving from (seemingly) male to somewhere in between male and female, quite possibly much nearer the female. This may seem confusing but I hope that you will be patient with me. For me “nonbinary” is a shorthand for the crossroads I have reached. Though I got here along the path of seeming to be conventionally male (my deep feminine undercurrents largely unseen), nonbinary applies to whichever path I might take from here:

  1. a life of swapping between gender roles (“genderfluidity”)
  2. as full a gender transition to female as our healthcare technology currently permits (still nonbinary as recognising my male past)
  3. continuing long term to mainly seem male but known to have gender issues

All the paths are nonbinary but with different emphases. From here it might seem like nothing is happening for a while – I might still be at the crossroads! – but I really need to open up about this part of my life and I’d like to take any further steps more in the open but with less fanfare.”

Since writing the above I have socially transitioned (January 2023) and have lived expressing a feminine gender presentation (essentially pursuing option ii above). I currently identify as a “nonbinary trans woman” and would appreciate the kind use of she/they pronouns when being referred to. I am honoured to remain Minister at Upper Chapel (Unitarian) in Sheffield and am grateful to all those there, and elsewhere, who have adapted to my changes, to the extent they have felt able to in all conscience (and am grateful also to those who have found ways of politely working round them, when they couldn’t adapt). I am also proud that the UK Unitarian national organisation (the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches) passed a trans rights resolution in 2022 (amongst other things affirming that trans rights are human rights).

Still I have taken an incremental and cautious approach relative to some of my trans contemporaries. I think those who have experienced my ministry recognize that I have not routinely centred preaching on gender issues, though of course I understand the value of my visibility to other trans and gender non-conforming individuals. With the decision today (16th April 2025) of the UK Supreme Court regarding the definition of a woman I recognise that I will need to be more outspoken. While my previous approach is certainly open to criticism I have had very few outright failures of friendships as a consequence and that, at least, is a win. I hope anyone for whom the perspectives I subsequently express diverge from their own will at least give a fair hearing to what I say.

Today the crossroads I alluded to earlier are still present in that, for all my trans feminine identification, I continue to own the nonbinary heading* as I refuse to reject, or dismiss the validity of, the person I once was. I see myself as an organic continuation of that person into the feminine. I hope you will continue to travel alongside me.

*I recognise that I may be using terminology differently from some other trans or enby folk, and indeed it is under review due to my own attempts to bring some rigour into thinking about such matters. More of that in due course.

Anniversary Matters

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On April 17th in Birmingham I had the honour of being the worship leader at the Anniversary Service of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches. I have no doubt – not least as I am currently still a ‘Probationary Minister’ – that I owe this honour particularly to the Rev Dr Maria Curtis who had in turn been chosen to preach the Anniversary Service. It proved to be a highly enjoyable collaboration, albeit one focused on matters of the utmost importance – thank you Maria.

A video of the service has been provided by UK Unitarian TV and you can find it on YouTube here. Thank you to everyone who took part.

Maria’s sermon is the focal point of the service and can be found in text form here.

The music, provided predominantly by Rev Cody Coyne and Catherine Coyne, and the GA Anniversary Scratch Band was marvellous and inventive and thank you to all who played and sang as part of that effort.

There was a fantastic re-visioning of an old myth ‘The Oak King and the Holly King’, adapted by Maria and told by Rev Lindy Latham with assistance from the GA kids and Youth Officer Gavin Howell. This can be found on the video at the 17m10s point.

The reading was given by Sue MacFarlane, sometime Green candidate for elections in Derbyshire, and a member of Belper Unitarian Chapel, my ‘home’ Chapel. It is from a book called The Universe Story in Science and Myth by Greg Morter and Niamh Brennan, published by GreenSpirit, and, as a text that guided much of our thinking about the service, I thoroughly recommend it.

My own contributions were the ‘glue’, though I would strongly urge Unitarian worship leaders (and perhaps those of other faith traditions too) to at least consider the suggestion I make regarding incorporating a regular ritual ‘Tending the Earth‘ into their worship. The idea is free to use and adapt once the basic principle is grasped.

Reboot! And the Kingdom…

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It was my intention to post during my Ministerial Training. However, once I fully engaged with that process, I realized that I lacked both the time and the mental energy to do so. So it is only now, qualified (excepting some academic i dotting and t crossing of the sort I was once very familiar with) and (joyfully and gratefully!) appointed as the Minister of Upper Chapel in the centre of Sheffield, that I can contemplate using this blog as I originally intended. Too much has happened in that training period for me to make a captivating blog post that in any real sense captures it so I’ll cut to 18th November 2017 and my Induction Service in my new role. It is perhaps the first time I have surprised a large congregation with (relative) brevity but, partly to give the flavour of the event, I would like to share with you the words I shared with that congregation towards the end of the service:

I feel truly blessed to have been welcomed as the Minister of such a lovely congregation. I am both honoured and humbled to join that band of individuals who have been Ministers of Upper Chapel. While I hope I prove to be even fractionally worthy of the role and of my illustrious predecessors, many of whom faced challenges different – and arguably sharper – than those that confront us today, my truer hope is that the Chapel flourishes in my time and I will count myself further blessed if I am but a catalyst in that process.

The reading from Gibran’s The Prophet On Reason and Passion is particularly important to me. It represents an integration within myself that will likely be a work in progress throughout my life and that is a process that underpins much of my faith and spirituality. It is the same reading that I used when first conducting Sunday worship over sixteen years ago in Cross Street Chapel Manchester under the close scrutiny of a certain Rev. John Midgley. The image of the rudder and sails of the boat on the ocean has stuck with me through that time, as has another maritime quote that John used as a wayside pulpit at Cross Street: the late Ralph Helverson, an American Unitarian Universalist who said “A ship is safe in harbour but that is not what a ship is for”. And going back even earlier in the process the early twentieth century French writer and aviator, Antoine de Saint Exupery, said “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”.

Individually and collectively, in all our varied endeavours, at Upper Chapel and in the Unitarian movement and beyond, we are all at different points in this process of longing, of building, of leaving harbour for the open seas, of steering towards and, with the wind of the Spirit in our sails, of passionately heading for the goal. A goal that was expressed in the ministry of Jesus as the Kingdom of God, and which, despite the undeniable horrors of his time, he undoubtedly if seemingly paradoxically implied was so close you could almost touch it.

And the prayers which followed those words…

Let us approach that Mysterious Presence that many of us name as God in the fellowship of prayer…

And so, on this occasion, we pray that this Chapel, through both the hearts and minds, and ministries of all its members and leaders, designated and otherwise, and how they interrelate in cooperation within the whole, fully recognises its potential and consistently takes those steps it can to be a vibrant and loving presence within both this Sheffield city community and within our national Unitarian movement.

We pray further for the local life of this great city and of our nation. We pray for those public servants in office and for the difficult decisions that often need to be made on our behalf. May love, wisdom and integrity be ever their watchwords. And may each of us be a light wherever we find ourselves in our communities, may each of us contribute to their good functioning and witness, whether religious or secular, a witness that there is often something higher, deeper, broader and more worthy in our togetherness than there is in our insular concerns, however much we still must inhabit our specific roles and life situations with engagement and even gusto.

We pray for our bruised and hurting world. We know that prayer from our lips whilst sitting on our hands is often futile but the global system is so complex, with both its social and physical aspects, that it is easy to despair at the apparent difficulty of an individual making a difference. Help us instead to take heart and to do what we know does need to be done, and to know that it shall be done, because we will do it together.

And yet in praying all the foregoing…

Universal Presence, Source of Being, both in us and around us always,

We know that our hearts are known

Even before our hopes and fears,

Our prayers and meditations, have found mental voice.

We know that we have been given the freedom

To choose our path towards the light, or to run and hide

To align our will with the Divine will for all creation, or to act selfishly

And that our choosing has consequences.

Today we have prayed “Thy Kingdom Come, thy Will Be Done”

May this not only spring from our lips, in chapel, in ritual unison

But may our hearts truly desire it, our wills truly choose it

As our eyes witness its, and our, gradual, eternal, unfolding.

Amen

Finally, after the service I offered the following during the buffet reception in Upper Chapel’s Channing Hall:

Along with the Upper Chapel Congregation I am extremely grateful to you all for being here, Lord Mayor and Consort, representatives from other churches and other faiths, Friends of the Congregation and of neighbouring congregations, my family and my friends, Unitarian and otherwise. And I make a particular mention to those from the Belper Unitarian Chapel where I long had the freedom to experiment as a lay person before finally embarking on ministerial training. We are particularly grateful to those that have travelled significant distances or who have put considerable effort into making this event happen, and to all involved with the planning, catering and the service itself.

It would take some time to name everyone who has been of assistance organisationally – of course significantly from the Trustees Steering Group and Congregational Committee and the staff of this Chapel – and everyone who spoke in the service – but I really must express my gratitude to Rev. Ernest Baker for taking the service and to Revs. John Midgley and Sue Woolley for their splendid Charges, and to Phil Croft for his consummate musicianship.

This is my first ministry and it follows immediately after a period of intense preparation. I have a wider gratitude to many individuals, to Harris Manchester College Oxford, and ministry tutor Rev Dr Arthur Stewart, and to the Unitarian movement as a whole, for my successful emergence from that process. But I must, last but most definitely not least, particularly thank my wife Gill, and our children Daniel and Joshua, for their patience and understanding during the diminution of, and unpredictability of, my domestic time and energy over the last couple of years.

 

Responding to the “Singularity”

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One of several drivers for my stepping towards ministry (and thus also at least partly away from my higher education career in engineering and communications) is my growing sense that technology is going to present increasing social and psychological issues, and that the rate of change is faster than most of us can manage to track. Some futurists refer to this increasing rate of change as leading to a technological “singularity”. And I wish to speak to that in a balanced and life affirming way. As an avid science fiction reader since childhood, and having had a strongly technologically based career, I do of course feel very excited about some of the things that we might be able to do in the (perhaps not too distant) future. Technology can be a wonderful enabler. However this excitement has to be balanced by other factors. The first for me is intensely personal and I have to navigate around this psychological issue so that I do not occasionally have kneejerk anti-technology reactions. Specifically, no amount of critical and informed reading of the Bible, helpful though it is, has been able to completely remove the crude and fearful residue of my teenage exposure to apocalyptically oriented Christianity. This has led to me being highly sensitive to the prospect of any technological and/or social system that might lead to controlling whether we might “buy or sell” (as per Revelation 13:17). Yet we move ever closer to this territory with advances in mobile communications technology and bio-electronic interfacing (coupled with the likely desire of elites to exert such control) and sometimes I feel that, if it happens incrementally enough, even my wariness may be bypassed. I do not, by the way, regard this wariness as entirely negative – there are many genuine arguments that can be made in this territory without recourse to Revelation or even the Bible, of course. No, I am simply owning my own baggage. Aside from this personal issue there are, of course, significant balancing philosophical and ethical considerations. I have expressed these recently elsewhere, mainly as questions, and so I include below the text of my short article* from the Unitarian publication The Inquirer (The Inquirer, no. 7882, 16 January 2016, p. 11 inquirer@btinternet.com ):

My gratitude to the Rev Dr Maria Curtis for her article “Is ‘Artificial Intelligence’ an oxymoron?” (Inquirer, 21 November 2015). I appreciate her defence of humanity in the face of simulations that might superficially represent humanity and/or intelligence. I will not add to the arguments on this front but instead point out that, whilst robots and AI represent an extreme case that can be identified and dismissed in the way Maria does, in due course we will face something much more ambiguous, namely significantly augmented humans. Augmentation may be through electronic hardware, software and/or biological systems and, with such people increasingly being termed transhuman, we might wonder if they will remain human at core.

This is the stuff of science fiction increasingly being made real. It represents enormous opportunity but also significant problems. Philosophically how much of our bodies (and body processes) can be engineered/replaced while we remain human? Already use of smartphones is changing how we think. As we increasingly hand over our thinking an intrinsic part of what seems to be our person will actually be our augmentations at work. Will the beating human heart (if not replaced…) become a much less significant aspect of who we are? Furthermore access to augmentation is likely to be highly unequal. The world’s mega-rich may covet such augmentation but how likely is it to be made available to humanity as a whole? How long before humanity experiences a technologically mediated bifurcation? And further yet, at what point will it become impossible to not have the government mandated augmentations that permit control and access to life’s necessities?

I may sound fatalistic – I strongly suspect that we will “progress” in this way, i.e. if augmentation can be done we will be unable (and maybe unwilling) to make an opposing case sufficiently clear to prevent someone somewhere following through on our collective curiosity and species wide actualization urge.

So what’s a Unitarian to do? Well we can at least campaign for equality of resource distribution and access. We might also begin to consider how we could campaign for protection of homo sapiens 1.0 without denying the urge to upgrade and the love for the transhuman. So our love and reason are required, including what James Luther Adams called “epochal thinking”. Arguably we are collectively just dipping our toes in the water in this area with the increased visibility and acceptance of transgender individuals (not that the humanity of transgender individuals is in any way in question but identity issues are clearly at stake) but this may seem quite straightforward compared to what could lie ahead!

*The article has been headlined “More to fear than Artificial Intelligence” as it referred to a previous article on that subject. However I wish to reiterate that I have a balanced attitude between openness to technology’s opportunity and reservation about risks and problems.

Unfolding

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At a recent gathering that, at least psychologically, marks the start of my transition into ministerial training I was asked (thank you Michael!) to read out the second half of the poem “I am too alone in the world” by Rainer Maria Rilke. The lines which follow speak directly to a major part of why I have decided to blog:

“I want to unfold
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.”

And it feels like I have been holding this stuff back, waiting, waiting for ever. Delaying gratification perhaps, as M. Scott Peck might have put it. But there is also the hope, trust even, that it is not pure self indulgence, that even that which, echoing Carl Rogers, feels most personal has its universal aspect, and that you may from time to time resonate with something that is written here. Maybe even the poetry!

I certainly make no great claims to insight but nevertheless let us hope for serendipity…