Sunday morning at Calvary United Church, a simple white building hard against the sidewalk in a neglected part of Kingston. The rummage sale in the hall is semi-permanent. Doughnuts are ready for after-church visiting. A poster on the wall reads: “You and I are OK. God doesn’t make junk.”

The congregation assembles in the sanctuary and, counting the organist, the pianist and the minister’s spouse, it numbers eight.

The sermon on the Easter story of Jesus meeting his disciples on the road to Emmaus holds layers of meaning for the minister, Ruth Wood, and her congregation.

The powerful moment comes when the astonished disciples realize they did not recognize the resurrected Christ, who had been walking with them. But then, “Their eyes were opened and they knew him.”

This theme of seeing but not knowing is a parable of Wood’s own life. One year ago, she asked her congregation to make a leap of understanding and acceptance.

They had until then known Wood as a man, Terry, a competent, likable minister who did his own renovations and had built his own house. They saw him as a sensitive, caring father of an adult son and daughter, and as a grandfather. His wife, Anne, was gentle and empathetic.

“I am transgender or ‘gender different,’ ” Wood explained in a letter to his parishioners. He described “the stress caused by the difference between who I feel I am and what my body says I am. This stress is with me every waking minute.”

Toward the end of his sermon last Sunday, Wood — wearing a long, linen-coloured alb and stole, light makeup and small silver earrings — urged her congregants not to “fear” male or female descriptions of God. She named several Biblical metaphors for God as a midwife or a mother giving birth.

The 57-year-old concluded the service saying, “We need to be mindful, to open our hearts and our minds and our eyes.”

The congregants at Calvary have not found Wood’s transition from male to female easy to understand. But despite some discomfort and confusion, most of them have stood by her — even if they haven’t yet switched from the male to female pronoun.

“It’s not only that he needs our support,” says 88-year-old Jessie Deschamps, a former telephone operator who came to Canada as a war bride. “I believe he will be fulfilled.”

A 71-year-old woman says, “I think the world of Terry as a minister. He’s very kind and understanding. But I did wonder, was the devil getting him mixed up in this?”

Society has generally become more tolerant of gender shifting, and the United Church of Canada has been at the vanguard of mainline churches in grappling with it. The country’s largest Protestant denomination has welcomed congregants and clergy who identify with a whole rainbow of sexual and gender identities, most recently those who are transgender.

In 2008, the church’s governing body, the General Council, asked members to encourage the participation of transgender clergy and laity in the life of the church. A motion approved by the council’s executive began: “God has brought forth human beings as creatures who are male, female, and sometimes dramatically or subtly a complex mix of male and female in their bodies.”

A year ago, Moderator Mardi Tindal preached at the ordination of the church’s first known transgender minister, Rev. Cindy Bourgeois, who — after graduating with a Master of Divinity — was appointed to Central United Church in Stratford. “Not only is it no problem,” says Tindal, “it was a day of great celebration.”

Wood is the first in Canada to transition while a United Church minister (a second, in Ontario, has recently come out as transgender). There was no protocol in the church on how best to do that, and that would prove to be a problem.

On a pleasant Monday morning last April, Wood rode the ferry and prepared what he would say to leaders of the church community of just 60 families. He thought about the previous day’s service. “I remembered wondering if that would be the last normal Sunday. It was really quite hard, not knowing what the following Sunday would bring.”

The plan was to visit three couples, explain the changes he felt compelled to make, and ask them to take copies of the letter he had written to 10 or so other families and thereby spread the news. Because of the numbers he felt he couldn’t visit each family individually.

“I was prepared that some or all would not be very receptive to the news,” Wood says. “I just hoped I would not be hated.”

He first went to see a retired farm couple. They sat in the living room and served tea as Wood launched into his story, telling them he had felt “different” for a long time and wanted to live as a woman. “They were quite shocked by the way they looked,” he recalls. “But no one said, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s terrible.’ ”

There were a few questions, and one comment left Wood feeling the future might not be as dire as he feared. “I hope this means we will not lose you as a minister,” he recalls the wife saying. “The basic feeling was of hopefulness — perhaps this would work and it would not result in my having to leave.”

As he said goodbye, he thought: “That was pretty much better than it might have been.”

In fact, he never preached at Wolfe Island again.

The island is still mostly a rural community and, according to a female passenger on the ferry, people tend to be clannish. It has become a haven for retirees, and tourists find it an appealing place for cycling in the summer months. From the ferry, the island’s 86 windmills turn like idling prehistoric birds above the soft, greening landscape.

On a recent Sunday, there are 25 people attending the service, led by a young, newly ordained minister. Cushions in the pews indicate where the regulars sit — mostly at the back. The older men are wearing suit jackets and ties. The congregants follow the English cleric John Wesley’s instruction, printed in the hymn book, “to sing lustily and with good courage.”

Most decline to discuss their former pastor. “It’s our business and we’ve moved on,” one woman says. “We’re over it.”

Two members of the congregation say they were upset with the process, the way Wood told them about his change. They were disappointed and hurt that leaders in the Kingston presbytery, which oversees 54 local congregations, knew about Wood’s plans before his parishioners did. They felt, as one said, “short-circuited.”

Keith Walton, a former Air Force major, says: “After we understood how the politics came down, it was doubtful it was possible for him to stay. It seemed simplest to make a complete break.”

“Terry was really loved by everyone in the congregation,” says an elderly woman, a retired teacher who asked not to be named. “I’m still speaking to him, but many have never seen him since he left.

“The letter, to me, was a way of getting it out without facing people directly. Many said it would have made quite a difference. Instead of coming out and discussing it, he went to three people and handed them a bunch of letters, and it was their job to do his job.”

Wood informed his Kingston parishioners by letter, too, but also made personal visits.

The minister decided it would be best to not preach on Wolfe Island the Sunday after he told the congregation the news. Instead, two Kingston-area United Church officials went to the church to answer questions and concluded that the trust between Wood and the parishioners had been broken.

“It was obvious I couldn’t carry on as their minister,” Wood says. His letter of resignation was accepted.

She is 5-foot-10 and slender. Her face is smooth, the effect of two years of electrolysis, but the voice is masculine, which she tries to soften. She wears a bra fitted with prosthetic breasts. It is her hope that she looks like a woman, not a man dressing as a woman.

Later at dinner in a Greek restaurant, the waitress greets Ruth and two women with her saying, “Hello, ladies. Can I get you something to drink?”

The sense of womanhood that she feels is subtle and difficult to express. “I would not say I feel like a woman,” Ruth reflects. “I feel I am a woman. It’s not so much a feeling, it’s an inner sense. I am a woman. Most people have never questioned it. They have bodies that go with who they are.”

The writer and former soldier Jan Morris, a father of five who, as a journalist, accompanied the first British expedition to climb Everest, transitioned surgically in 1972. In her memoir, Conundrum, she wrote that gender is insubstantial, not physical at all. “It is soul, perhaps . . . it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries, and hormones. It is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity.”

“It was a mystery,” she concluded, “even to me.”

Gender dysphoria is just as inexplicable to Ruth. “How does someone get to be that way? I still don’t know, and nobody has specifically said this is how it happens. For me, it just is. Some are trans and some not. I simply am.”

The United Church, a thread in her life since childhood, is also deeply ingrained. It was unthinkable to not go to church.

Terry Wood was raised in Kirkland Lake, his father a prospector and surveyor, his mother a former schoolteacher. He has an older sister.

They moved to Ottawa when Terry was 9. One day the boy saw a man with a large port-wine birthmark on his face in church. “I was staring and I asked my mother, ‘If he looks like that, why doesn’t he just stay home?’ ” His mother replied, “That wouldn’t be much of a life, would it?”

“It was not his disfigurement that stayed with me,” Wood says, “but what she said.”

Terry and Anne met in a church youth group when they were about 16. “She was a tender person, fairly quiet, and seemed to me to be a deep person,” Wood says.

After high school, Wood studied mechanical technology at Algonquin College and then joined Nortel in 1974. Despite the later misfortunes of the communications company, he was never without work for about 25 years.

Terry and Anne married in 1975. “I couldn’t think of anything better than to spend the rest of my life with her,” Wood recalls. Anne worked in a research lab for 17 years, though now she has a job in financial services. Wood says proudly that they have been together four decades.

Family life was filled with love and activity. There was camping, Nordic skiing, father and son downhill skiing, paddling the canoe Terry’s father had built. The parents ferried the kids to jazz dance, baseball and soccer.

Terry grew a bushy red beard and built a large, passive-solar brick house in the country near Harrowsmith that, because he worked virtually on his own and rarely relied on the trades, took years to finish.

He was aware, as many others who are transgender have said, that he felt a vague sense of being different. But as a goal-centred engineering technologist looking for solutions to problems, he rarely looked inward.

Since he was always active in the church, he was often asked if he would consider ministry. “I never thought I would be the kind of person who would make a good minister. I didn’t think I was interested enough to do a good job.”

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By 2001 he spent a year in what the church calls “discernment,” meeting and talking with church members to figure out if he was called to be a minister. And in 2003 he began working as a lay minister, one who is not ordained. He found a church that would accept him —Wolfe island — and for did a sort of apprenticeship, also taking on Calvary United. Wood was “recognized” as a lay minister in 2006. He was so nervous the first time he preached that he knocked over the water glass on the pulpit.

Training for the ministry, Wood took some courses that required self-reflection, the principle being you can’t help others until you know yourself. It was during these periods that he addressed a wispy thought that had hovered on the margins of his life — that he might be a woman.

“It seemed too crazy to think about,” Ruth now says.

Terry had read about famous transgender people, including tennis player Renée Richards. “I was fascinated but I didn’t relate to them. It was a pretty scary idea to contemplate.”

He spoke to his spiritual adviser, who urged him to investigate the feelings instead of trying to push them away. He researched the subject and then: “I had a wonderful experience, a glimpse into my subconscious — that’s why I’ve always felt different. This is who you are.”

It became impossible to continue as a man, preaching a gospel of love and acceptance each Sunday while hiding something as essential as her sense of self, Wood says. “My feeling is I would no longer exist if I wasn’t true to who I am. . .

“It was a very emotional high, followed by a profound low” — his second thought was: “Think of what this means to Anne.”

Terry told Anne about his gender dilemma in 2007 as they sat together in their living room, with its rocker (where he would sit), colonial-style furniture and ticking clock. “She didn’t run screaming from the room but she was obviously in great pain.”

They went for a walk to a secluded spot on the waterfront, and Anne said: “I don’t know what this will mean in our relationship, but I’m willing to take it one step at a time.”

Anne, who’s 56, is nearly as tall as Ruth and has a sweet, oval face, like women in Victorian portraits, and a calm, comforting presence. She recalls that her first thought was that this was the end of the marriage, that it was impossible for them to stay together.

“Then I came to realize we could stay together, but things couldn’t stay the same. I have no map or guideline about where I am supposed to be, but most of the time, things work out. But certainly there are times I wish it had never happened.

“The easiest times for me are when I can forget all this and think it doesn’t matter. We can still do the same things.”

Terry started on psychotherapy right away. “I was really coming to grips,” Ruth recalls. “It took about a year for my head to accept what my heart understood.”

He started dressing as a woman at home, when Anne wasn’t around. Gradually, he put on female garb when she was there, and rarely he ventured into Kingston as a female, avoiding areas where he might meet people he knew.

By the time he first attended the gender identity clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in 2009, he was more at ease going out as a female and shopping in women’s stores, albeit in Toronto.

Throughout the process, the couple has had to stop the busy-ness in family life that inhibits deep conversation, and they have talked and talked. They don’t know if they will spend the rest of their lives together, but, says Anne, “There’s more certainty now than a year ago and the year before that.”

“Still, it’s a grieving process,” notes Ruth.

“It’s losing your husband, but still having him in the room. I’m still here, but not really her husband, and I don’t look like the person she’s comfortable with and remembers.”

Friends have been supportive, she says, though they found the idea the couple would stay together “pretty baffling.”

Son Ryan says that in the early days, he asked why his father “had to do this.” Couldn’t he go on living the way he had before?” But then he realized that if the roles were reversed, his father would definitely support him “100 per cent.”

Ruth says she and Anne continue to be in love with one another. Ruth’s sexual orientation hasn’t changed. “It goes far beyond sexual preference. It’s the love we have for each other.”

Anything more, Ruth says, is “pretty personal.” Hormone therapy is allowed after living for one year as a woman; sex reassignment surgery after two years. Ruth does not elaborate on her plans.

She still calls Anne her wife.

Ruth says her interests have not changed, nor has she dampened down the skills she developed as a man. She likes woodworking and last weekend was renovating their basement apartment, tearing apart the bathroom, hauling out the sink and toilet.

With son Ryan, who works in financial services (their daughter, Laura, is a teacher), she still attends Toastmasters meetings. Someone recently told Ruth she looked similar to a male Toastmaster and asked Ruth if she had a brother who was a member of the club.

Ruth’s commitment to church endures, though one or two Calvary members left after she came out as a woman. She has a one-year appointment there that comes up for renewal in July.

The parishioners’ needs are many — some are in hospital, some recently released, some developmentally challenged and on disability. “Ruth is wonderful with them,” says Calvary member Jessie Deschamps. “That to me is Christianity. It is outreach.”

The United Church, in turn, has reached out, providing interim work (which ended in April) for Ruth and arranging for a local couple to be a support for her and Anne. Ruth was formally introduced as a woman to the monthly presbytery meeting last May, attended by about 90, and welcomed with a standing ovation.

Church women also held an earring party for her at the end of last summer. One of the first things Ruth did as a woman was to get her ears pierced.

Each of the partiers brought earrings and a story of why her gift was meaningful. “It was lovely to be included as a woman with other women,” Ruth remembers. Anne was there, too, with two sets of earrings.

Ruth says she’s fascinated by colourful, dangly ones. To her, they are symbolic of femininity, and freedom.

But some people at Calvary have made it clear they don’t want their minister wearing showy jewelry. So on Sundays, Ruth puts on the discreet Celtic knot earrings that were given to her by Anne.