Cathedral Shocker: ‘Jesus Was Trans’

cross on a hill at sunset — Photo: Paul shuang / Shutterstock

An Episcopal priest told worshippers at one of America’s most famous cathedrals that Jesus Christ was transgender, and that his mother Mary got his gender wrong at birth.

Story Snapshot

The Reverend Flourish Klink preached the claim during a Trans Day of Visibility service at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York.
Klink’s own website posts the sermon, stating plainly that “God is trans” and that Mary misjudged the baby’s true identity.
Presiding Bishop Matthew F. Heyd hosted the March 21 service, according to the cathedral’s own printed program.
Critics, including Christian commentators and media outlets, say the Gospels describe Jesus as male and call the claim a break from historic church teaching.

What The Sermon Actually Said

The sermon is not a rumor pieced together from secondhand quotes. Klink published the full text on a personal website under the title “Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience 2026.” The homily states: “When God, who is non-binary, was born in human form as our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary said ‘Oh, look! A baby boy!’ But God isn’t a boy.”

The cathedral’s own program document confirms the setting. It names Klink as the preacher for a noonday prayer service on March 21, presided over by Bishop Heyd, one of the most senior clergy in the Episcopal Diocese of New York. This was not a fringe gathering in a side chapel. It happened inside one of the largest cathedrals in the world, under official church sponsorship, with a bishop’s blessing on the program.

Why Critics Say This Breaks With Scripture

Traditional Christian commentators reject the claim outright. One piece notes that across centuries of church writing, “there is not a single writer who claims Jesus was anything other than anatomically and psychologically male in his humanity.” That argument leans on a simple point: the Gospels never hint at ambiguity about Jesus’s sex, and the earliest Christian writers treated his manhood as settled fact, not a debate.

A separate rebuttal quoted by a Christian news outlet makes the same case using the biblical text itself. The former Bishop of Rochester argued that “it is quite clear from the Gospels that the identity of Jesus is male, his ‘mum’ is Mary, and he always refers to God as ‘Father,'” concluding that a transgender reading runs contrary to Christian teaching. Reporting on Klink’s sermon summarized the pushback bluntly: “Mary did not assign a gender to Jesus. Mary was told before his birth that Jesus would be a male.”

A Decades-Long Fight Inside The Episcopal Church

This sermon did not appear out of nowhere. The Episcopal Church has debated LGBTQ inclusion since at least 1976, when its General Convention formally declared gay members entitled to “full and equal claim” on the church’s pastoral care. That commitment led to a 1996 heresy trial for a bishop who ordained a non-celibate gay deacon, and later fights over performing same-sex marriages inside Episcopal parishes.

The speaker is the Rev. Flourish Klink, an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church (Diocese of New York), currently serving as curate at Christ & St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. They are non-binary, use they/them pronouns, and the video matches a 2026 homily posted on their site. https://t.co/pvGhQMFuyf

— Adu Paul Ife (@PORLDOM) September 24, 2026

Seen against that history, the Klink sermon looks less like an isolated incident and more like the latest step in a long institutional drift. What started decades ago as a debate over ordaining gay clergy has now reached the point of reinterpreting Christ’s own body and identity. For millions of Christians who hold to the plain reading of scripture, that is not progress. It is a denomination redefining its core doctrine to match a modern political movement, one sermon at a time.