The Bridge-Building Contributions (and Risks) of Queer and Trans College Students in this Polarized Moment
Queer and trans (QT) people routinely take risks when befriending those who are politically (and often religiously) different from them. The costs can be considerable, especially when unlikely friends take positions that undermine the humanity and wholeness of the QT community. The recent New York Times story of the friendship break-up between JD Vance and his Yale Law School colleague, Sofia Nelson, who is transgender, is one painful example. Although the two were politically different upon meeting, their email correspondence over the years illuminates the depth of their exchanges as well as the warmth and goodwill between them. The friendship fell apart when Vance moved to publicly support a ban on gender-affirming health care for minors in Arkansas. It was a step too far for Nelson, whose own well-being had hinged on access to gender-affirming care.
It comes as no surprise that higher education — in this case, Yale Law School — was the setting where Nelson and Vance forged their friendship. Plenty of students have a similar experience, and several features of college life help students cultivate and maintain such interpartisan friendships. According to national data, QT college students are more reluctant to become close friends with someone who is politically different from them (53.5%) relative to their cisgender and heterosexual (cishet) peers (66.9%). The story of Nelson and Vance illustrates why this might be the case. There are significant costs for QT students, namely the burdens of emotional labor and educating their cishet peers, that must be invested to sustain such friendships.
This story of friendship is a microcosm of enduring societal fractures, yet Nelson’s persistence in bridging her experience and Vance’s speaks to an underreported sign of hope in our time. Despite their understandable reservations about interpartisan friendships, QT college students are actively engaged in critical bridge-building work, and in a surprising place: religion.
Even with widespread assumptions about the incompatibility of queerness and faith, QT students are leading interreligious engagement among their peers. Eighty-one percent of QT students (relative to 69.2% of their cishet peers) are pluralists who work with others across religious differences to create social change, express care for others around the world, and convey goodwill toward those who don’t share their religious perspectives. Living out these values in practice, large numbers of QT students reported dining (86.7%) and socializing (92.4%) with people who don’t share their religious or nonreligious perspectives (while cishet peers dined and socialized at rates of 77.4% and 86.5%, respectively). QT students are also passionate advocates for those of all faith traditions; 75.1% reported speaking up in defense of those with different religious beliefs than their own (compared to 63.3% of cishet students).
QT college students of faith have distinctive strengths as interfaith leaders and compassionate bridge-building friends. By a significant margin, they are more likely than their peers to take part in interfaith dialogue, councils, and service on campus and live out their interfaith commitments relationally: 73.1% said they’d had conversations with people of diverse religious or non-religious perspectives about their shared values (compared to 60.8% of their peers) and 57.2% reported having five or more friends of different religious perspectives (compared to 45.4% of their peers).
What explains QT students’ bridge-building abilities? Drawing on our own stories as queer people of faith — as well as our work with QT students as professor and pastor — a word comes to mind: practice. QT young adults are often practiced at engaging deep and complex differences, especially those rooted in religious values, by the time they get to college.
Conversations with self-identified QT students of faith reveal that their experience in navigating fraught relationships with non-affirming family members and friends both deepens their capacity for connecting compassionately across disagreement and emboldens their commitment to others who experience marginalization.
Bridge-building efforts led by QT people can yield beautiful stories of encounter and changed hearts, but they are not without risks to physical and emotional safety. Friendships that cross political and religious lines can be tenuous and unsafe for QT people. Despite these risks, QT people, including QT people of faith, make meaningful contributions to our collective wholeness.
Like Nelson, QT people do this work of bridge-building at a cost, knowing their humanity may not be recognized, nor their communities protected, by the people who call themselves friends. May we all learn to share in the vital work of bridging our religious and political divides, advancing justice for the most marginalized among us and realizing our hoped-for vision of a democratic society where all can thrive and be free.
