On 4 March, the BBC broadcast the first of its Lent Talks on Radio 4 in which opposition to transgenderism was compared with the temptation of Jesus. The talk was given by a male Church of England priest, who presents as a woman.
Rachel Mann began her talk by criticising an intolerant 1970’s generation who had assigned her a male at birth, and had then forced her to grow up as a normal little boy.
Mann then proposed that Lent was really ‘all about being exposed to and facing reality in all its knots and wrinkles – about trying to get a grip on who we really are and who we might become’. Mann’s costly identity search was subsequently parallelled with Jesus’ costly search for his identity in the wilderness – a growing sense that one day he might ruffle some feathers and then eventually accept who he truly was.
