The latest step toward full inclusion in communities of faith is a focus on the transgender community.

Recently, churches and synagogues have started to pay close attention to transgender issues, with positive and negative effects, said Justin Tanis, program manager of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

“Rather than individual conservative leaders perhaps coming to their own reflection and accepting people, there’s been more of a party line of reframing the issue of gender identity and expression as a moral issue,” Tanis said.

“My impression is we’re just at the beginning of a real revolution in seminary education with regard to not only transgender issues but transgender people in [ministry] formation,” said Bernard Schlager, interim deputy director and director of national programs at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry.

In January, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley joined with the National Center for Transgender Equality, for the second annual Transgender Religious Summit, with the goal of “freeing faith communities from gender conformity.”

The collaboration of national policy leaders, transgender and transgender supporting religious leaders, and academic experts on GLBT studies and religion, focused on how to change the policies of Christian and Jewish denominations to support transgender members and employees. The group addressed denominational policy, outreach to the transgender community, and transgender leadership in order to break down the religious barriers to full inclusion of transgender and gender non-conforming people.

Treatment of transgender people in religious communities varies significantly by the experiences of individual communities of faith, according to Tanis.

“There are people who come from extremely conservative religious traditions who’ve been very accepted as transgender people within their religious communities; and people who’ve been shunned or thrown out of their religious traditions,” Schlager said. “Surprisingly, the same was true for people from progressive communities of faith.”