Five questions for transgender chaplain Cameron Partridge

Lauren Markoe | Jul 19, 2013


The Rev. Cameron Partridge, religion scholar at Harvard Divinity School and Episcopal chaplain of Boston University. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky/courtesy Boston University Photography

(RNS) She graduated from all-female Bryn Mawr College in 1995, where she came out as gay and also as a woman called to the priesthood. After college, she graduated from Harvard Divinity School, married her girlfriend, became an Episcopal priest, changed her name — and changed her gender.

Today the Rev. Cameron Partridge, a religion scholar at Harvard Divinity School and Episcopal chaplain at Boston University, is living outside Boston with his wife and two young children in what looks, to those who don’t know them, like a typical heterosexual marriage.

We talk to Partridge about his transgender and spiritual journeys, his discomfort with simplistic views of male and female, and feeling at home in Anglicanism. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Can you tell the story of how, transitioning from a woman to a man, you came to choose the name “Cameron” for yourself?