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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
National
Celina Ribeiro

‘It has been a gruesome week’: Australia’s first transgender priest on shame, love and identity

Josephine Inkpin
The Rev Josephine Inkpin is the first openly transgender minister to be inducted into a mainstream church in Australia. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

It is raining outside the Pitt Street Uniting Church. The sparse city streets in central Sydney have turned greyer in the morning downpour and the sandstone church sits squat between buildings many times its size. Beneath a banner calling for climate change action hanging between its columns, the Rev Josephine Inkpin creaks open the heavy timber door.

It is a busy morning for the minister. Morning prayer service has just wrapped up, and in an hour she has a Zoom call with her local MP. Next month will mark a year for her at the church, and she has a lot of plans for it – ministering to communities online and in person, social justice work, climate change action, opening the church up to secular recitals – but her attention has been drawn elsewhere.

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