The Church of England’s first openly non-binary priest has explained how they felt they had to choose between their "calling" and “gender identity”.
Bingo Allison, who lives in Norris Green, was invited onto ITV’s This Morning to discuss their journey of self-discovery after the ECHO’s initial article went global.
The 36-year-old, who is gender-queer, attends schools and are visible across West Derby Deanery - where they work - in the hope they can inspire others who find themselves in a similar situation to what they were once in. However, prior to this, Bingo went through years of conflicting thoughts regarding their gender identity and religious beliefs.
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They told Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby: “I had this discovery and I found these non-binary people but then my upbringing would kick in and basically said ‘you now have to choose between this identity and faith’ and I was at vicar college training at the time so I was also choosing between my calling and this identity. Everything about how I had been brought up so far said this was a choice that I had to make.”
Before discovering their true identity, Bingo was a straight man with a wife and three children. As the ECHO previously reported, it was while writing an essay on how God created the earth that Bingo had an epiphany. They said the language which the bible originally used in Genesis 1:27 spoke about “from maleness to femaleness” as opposed to men and women.
They said: “I was sitting there in the middle of the night when I realised I might need to run my life upside down. It was a deepening spiritual experience, I properly felt God was guiding me into this new truth about myself.
“One of the things that has kept with my ministry ever since is that transition and coming out can and should be a spiritual experience, as well as an emotional and social and sometimes physical one. There is something beautiful about growing into who we were created to be and growing into our authentic selves.”
After discovering the vocabulary to describe how they felt on the inside, Bingo came out as genderqueer and in doing so became the UK’s first non-binary priest.
They told the ITV presenters: “Creation is full of variety, that’s what we have loved from creation - that God loved variety. God creates all these different animals and we’re still discovering these new animals. The fact we are still discovering ways to understand gender makes perfect sense for a God who loves variety.”
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