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

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.

Inkpin is the first transgender priest to be inducted into a mainstream church in Australia. And, as she speaks to Guardian Australia in a small, neat office to the side the church entrance, elsewhere in the country politicians and pundits are debating the religious discrimination bill and the point of whether and when religious people and institutions may be able to exclude or ridicule people like her.

Later, after the proposed legislation was shelved, she will say: "It has been a gruesome week. It's like you're in a war, really, and there's a little ceasefire at the moment, but there's a promise of a new battle to come."

The religious discrimination bill has loomed large over Inkpin's rookie year in the church, a year in which she also dealt with the disruption of Covid and death of her parents. Aside from the traditional work of a priest, it has meant, says Inkpin, a lot of extra work. She has been writing submissions, lobbying politicians, forming coalitions, and all the while taking calls from transgender and gay individuals and their families looking for advice, solace and recognition.

While she believes there is a gap in the law in recognising religious identity, which is important to address and fix, the bill is "giving people powers to oppress other people, that's just not right". She laughs, as though the statement is so obvious it's absurd. "And it makes our lives more difficult.

"It's damaging, I think, for maybe religion as a whole but certainly for a lot of Christian churches because people start to doubt whether or not places which actually are very gentle and kind aren't, actually, interested in discrimination."