Introduction

What possesses a cisgender woman to attempt a constructive theology of gender variance? The fact I have used the term ‘cisgender’ already marks me out for some readers as someone who accepts the reality and legitimacy of the concept of gender and holds that ‘normative’ and ‘unmarked’ modes of sex, gender, and sexuality are themselves contested and in doubt. For some ‘gender-critical’ readers, including gender-critical radical feminists,Footnote ¹ my use of the term ‘cisgender’ renders me a ‘handmaid’: someone in thrall to an agenda being imposed by trans people, particularly trans women, to the detriment of those who have lived as women and girls since birth. For some conservative Christian readers,Footnote ² ‘cisgender’ strikes a note of caution of a slightly different kind: it suggests that I do not accept that gender must, to be a licit reflection of the orders of creation, supervene on physiological sex only in certain ways. ‘Cisgender’ is not an unproblematic term by any means,Footnote ³ but it has the advantage of making clear that trans people are not the only ones to have a gender and that there is no such thing as an unmarked default when it comes to sex and gender identity.Footnote ⁴

Undoubtedly plenty of trans and gender-variant people will ask whether this project would not have been better left to them, adjuring me to stay in my lane, not to presume to speak on their behalf, and suspecting what bell hooks communicates so effectively: that scholars who write about communities that are not their own do so in order to colonize, to wrest authority from those to whom it more legitimately belongs:

There is something odd about cis people talking about trans people, cis people seeking to make assessments of trans people’s realities, as if trans people were just hanging on cis people’s every word and judgement.

But that is not my expectation here. As a cis person writing about trans identity, I do not think that trans people need or want my permission, my endorsement, or my approval. The book is not an apologia for gender variance, not least because I am in sympathy with Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2016, p. 29) that entering into debates of that kind itself sets up an expectation that trans people’s existence is something up for argument. Nor do I think that my readers should read this book instead of the many existing and emerging works by trans authors, including trans theologians and biblical scholars, on a lot of which I draw.

I recognize the dangers of my approach, and I am open to criticisms of it, particularly from trans people. I have no desire to decentre or diminish the voices or agency of those whose experiences are not my own. I am grateful to the many critical trans readers who have given feedback and comment on this work as it has developed, and I hope that even if I have not been able to implement all of their remarks, they see that what has resulted is a much better piece of work thanks to their input. I have also drawn extensively on trans scholars’ writings, yet I am keenly aware that this does not get me off hooks’ hook, since the way I have framed, glossed, and interpreted their work is, inescapably, in the service of my own agenda, and what I have concluded is perhaps not what they would have concluded themselves. I have kept keenly in mind Singh, Richmond, and Burnes’ reminder that

Yet while I anticipate various criticisms of my approach, I also resist the notion that a cisgender (and heterosexual) person may not be deeply invested in what Christian theologies and social structures say and do about diverse gender. After all, what we say and do about ‘variant’ gender stems from and influences what we say and do about ‘normative’ and ‘unmarked’ gender too. I will show across this book that social anxieties about ‘limit’ situations are rarely, at root, anxieties about the ostensibly presenting issue: they are often ciphers for anxieties about quite other things, including the stability of our own identities, beliefs, and the theologies built upon them. If straight and cisgender people, particularly theologians, appear disproportionately interested and invested in the bodies and activities of those who are ‘other’ sexually and in gendered terms, this is because such interest is often a displacement activity to put off uncomfortable self-reflection about our own identities and desires. When I write about trans people, therefore, I am writing about cis people too; when I am writing about what some call ‘deviation’, I am provoked to examine what some call ‘norm’.

Furthermore, the sense that only trans people should think or write about trans concerns or the broader webs of sex and gender within which we all exist can set up a problematic dynamic whereby the rest of us are able to operate as if these are no concern of ours. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak commented many years ago on the difficulties posed when well-meaning White and Western scholars simply step back from conversations about race and colonialism on the grounds that it is not their place to contribute. This impulse, hints Spivak, leads to a disavowal of the responsibility we all have to interrogate the systems whose continued existence our own choices and behaviours might shore up. A desire not to step on others’ toes can lead to a petrified quietism that leads to the maintenance of the status quo (Spivak Reference Spivak1990, p. 121).

There are also other ways in which broader cultural and social talk about trans people and gender variance in general is absolutely my concern. It is my concern as a straight and cis woman when I am told by some of my feminist sisters that trans recognition and rights are actually a Trojan horse designed to erode and erase the safety and specificity of women and girls and that anyone who suggests otherwise is deluded at best and a traitor to all women at worst. It is my concern as a Christian theologian when I am told by certain colleagues that gender transition is nothing but a cynical commodification of something that should not be commodified: a rejection of a divine gift and a refusal to accept God’s sovereignty over the licit limits of human bodies and technological activity. It is my concern as a British taxpayer when I am told by other British taxpayers (and keen observers from other jurisdictions) that it is completely unacceptable that the National Health Service (NHS), which my taxes fund, is in thrall to shrill, demanding trans activists and is prioritizing cosmetic interventions for them over life-saving core medical care for others. It is my concern when any of these groups tell me that I must have misunderstood what trans people are really up to, that I am sleepwalking toward calamity, that my compassion and sense of justice have been misdirected and I have surely had the wool pulled over my eyes.

I emphatically resist the oppositional, combative nature of these constructions and hope to show that goods for trans people and for others need not be understood as attempts to scrabble after finite pieces of a smaller and smaller pie. After all, binaries in contexts of gender and sexuality perpetuate harm even when they are rooted in a desire to protect; resistance to binary identity politics is about not just the juxtaposition between what one is and what one is not, but also about how far we recognize the multiplicities and contradictions in our own subjectivities. Thus, writes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: ‘Realistically, what brings me to this work can hardly be that I am a woman, or a feminist, but that I am this particular one’ (Sedgwick Reference Sedgwick1991, p. 59, emphasis in original). Sedgwick famously appeals to the recalcitrant nature of what has come to be understood as queerness: that is, ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’ (Sedgwick Reference Sedgwick1993, p. 8, emphasis in original). Similarly, here I resist the insistence by certain others that to uphold and embrace trans people’s legitimacy means betraying cis people. After all, as Ramzi Fawaz remarks, what characterizes Sedgwick’s work so distinctively is her insistence on cross-identification, those identifications across borders that connect us to others as others. Where we hold too tightly to our putative divisions and distinctions is also where we lack empathy and dehumanize others (Fawaz Reference Fawaz and Berlant2019, p. 20). It is precisely because we identify beyond and across borders that we can share appeal to a common good.

Conservative theologies of gender variance, and of gender more broadly, almost universally hold binary gender, rooted in binary sex, to be non-negotiable and the ‘denial’ of this ‘truth’ to be arrogant rejection of God-givenness at worst, sad delusion at best. Yet in this book I hold that our non-negotiables as humans are fewer than we might assume and suggest that this notion troubles us largely because we are still wedded to an account of humans as elevated above other creatures. Drawing on recent work in constructive theology influenced by animal studies and race theory, I explore what of the image of God in humans might be lost if we could give somewhat less weight to the sex–gender binary. Sex makes us like other mammals, not unlike them – yet Christian theological understandings of sex, particularly White European ones, also seem to perpetuate a hierarchical account of power that is part of what has led to our exploitation of the other animals, as well as of people of colour. A refusal to recognize that gender can be fluid is also a refusal to recognize the arbitrary nature of the way we have allowed powerful people to dominate and go unchallenged.

Building on the work in my 2017 book Un/familiar Theology: Reconceiving Sex, Reproduction and Generativity, I show here that the putative losses of continuity with the theological tradition often attributed to acceptance of gender variance and transition are both overstated and themselves a gateway to fuller and richer accounts of creaturely existence in relation to God. For example, a potential loss of continuity with some ways in which our theological forebears have understood human sex and gender is also an occasion for the interrogation of the injustices some such accounts have perpetuated: just as Christians continue to have to re-examine older ‘orthodoxies’ about ethnicity and race, so sex and gender bear new scrutiny. An apparent loss of the symbolism of male and female as image for the relationship between God and creation is sometimes invoked as a shortcoming of trans-inclusive theologies and fluid accounts of sex, yet this loss is hard to mourn where it has sanctified and justified hierarchy and exploitation, including of non-White humans. A diminishment of the close relationship between sex, gender, and reproduction also means a more thoroughgoing appraisal of the always-already non-universality of this state of affairs and the reality that trans people can and do frequently reproduce biologically themselves.

As such, in this book, I develop a constructive theology encompassing accounts of:

• Theological anthropology (the truths gender tells us about ourselves, individually and collectively; our sexuate and animal statuses; the hints that as humans we tend to embrace order and give a high place to social and psychological systems that allow us to manage our expectations and minimize danger; the concomitant fact that we often create and cling to arbitrary and over-solidified delimitations in order to exercise power);

• Creation (with particular reference to the question of the imago dei and implications for the licit limits, if any, of human technologies);

• Christology (here I show that Christ signifies a way but not the sole way to be a human, much less a creature, and does not tell the full story of what it means to be a sexed and gendered person);

• Eschatology (drawing on queer and feminist critical scholarship on orientation, notably that by Sara Ahmed, showing that our creaturely ends include those here and now, not just those ‘ahead’ of us).

The volume’s subtitle, Transformative Creatures, distils several of my key themes and claims. It communicates that being creaturely is profoundly formative of being human, yet not to the extent that we are not also partners in our own becoming. It suggests that what has formed and continues to form us as creatures is itself multiple, mixed, and boundary-crossing. It shows that as formative creatures humans have peculiar power to set agendas for non-human creatures and, concomitantly, a peculiar responsibility to exercise this power responsibly. It proposes that, to be truly formative of humans, including trans and gender-variant people (who are no more than anyone else empty vessels just waiting to be filled), Christian constructive theology must take into account multiplicities of human embodied experience. I am suggesting that gender must be figured according to a proleptic and provisional way, as something that we receive but also shape and hone. If we understand gender variance via the lens of euphoria rather than dysphoria, there is more scope to celebrate the variety of its manifestations without apotheosizing it. It is in this way that this theology is transformative.

Humans are animals with embodied creaturely limits. That does not mean that they may not contribute to shaping and directing their own bodies and identities and negotiating their limits. That humans are sexed is theologically pertinent in all sorts of ways: it matters with regard to how we understand ourselves as shapers and creators; our physical sexual desires; our desires to reproduce. These are all common (that is, frequent and familiar) human experiences/desires, but not universal (or universalizable) ones; likewise, congruence between sex and gender is also common but neither universal nor universalizable.

Trans people, some of whom experience gender dysphoria, are as much the experts on and agents of their own lives and identities as cis people are of their own lives and identities (perhaps even more so, given the additional need for trans people’s attention to and reflection on aspects of identity and personhood that often go unexamined elsewhere); that is, to a great extent, yet not absolutely. Existing theological treatments of transgender often assume that gender ‘variance’ is a problem, yet many, many trans people themselves do not understand it in this way. The theme of trans self-identification and first-person authority will recur throughout the book as we consider conflicting accounts of trans testimonies’ ‘trustability’ (and even as I remain dubious about how far to engage at all with voices that suppose that trans people’s reality is up for debate).Footnote ⁵ But here I will say simply that the starting point for a constructive theological anthropology of gender variance need not be one that assumes absence, pathology, or lack. It is clear on the basis of the diverse accounts across Christian theological history that the theological significance of human gender is non-absolute and does not persist in the same way after death. Yet gender continues to be a good that many people – including many trans people – perceive as irreducible, and a too-absolute rejection of gender as a category does not do justice to this experience. It also risks drawing too sharp a distinction between creaturely life in relation to God as we have known it and the life of the world to come. But if we can come to understand gender theologically as something we shape and hone as well as inherit – a locus of euphoria rather than dysphoria – then we may celebrate it and its multiple manifestations without apotheosizing its solely binary expressions.

In this respect, I submit that much theological discussion of trans people and gender transition to date has been done on the basis of deficit discourse. In other words, it has taken for granted that gender variance itself – whether or not it is accompanied by dysphoria – represents an absence, lack, or failure. ‘Incongruence’ between physical sex and gender identity is often understood by Christian commentators as inherently problematic, inevitably troubling both to trans individuals and to their intimates, and somehow failing to live up to the divine intention for souls and bodies. Yet scholarship on deficit discourse emphasizes the fact that negative assumptions and talk about a group of people reinforce stereotypes and actually themselves contribute to worse outcomes (Fogarty et al. Reference Fogarty, Lovell, Langenberg and Heron2018, p. vi). In contrast, strengths-based or assets-based approaches locate problems in structural injustices rather than in individuals or caricatured communities and do not start by assuming that identification with a particular identity renders someone inherently less trustworthy, less credible, or more lacking than anyone else.

It is partly for this reason that, within this book, I sometimes use the term ‘gender of affirmation’ for the gender in which trans people choose to present. ‘Gender of affirmation’ captures the sense that, through transition, a person is able to express their gender publicly in alignment with their inner sense of self, which has remained constant. Additionally, ‘gender of affirmation’ better expresses the proactive nature of all gender avowal, whether someone’s lived gender aligns with that assigned at birth or not. After all, although (per Butler Reference Butler1990) we are all caught in social webs that mean we do not act entirely freely, there are also frequently ludic performative elements to gender expression, and we may understand these positively too. Furthermore, ‘gender of affirmation’ is not just to do with internal self-understanding but also with external recognition and validation. When I use someone’s preferred name and pronouns, for example, I affirm their right to be known in the way they want to be known, part of which, though not all, involves gender messages.

Opponents to queer theory have frequently pushed back at the idea that gender is something in which we should have volition at all. From a conservative Christian perspective, this often manifests in a conviction that gender must map in clear, predetermined ways onto dimorphic sex, so that there are more and less appropriate ways to express identity as male or female. From a gender-critical feminist side, the point more frequently concerns socialization: namely the fact that, whether we like it or not, history of upbringing as a boy or girl sets up internal and external understandings of ourselves (like the expectation of being taken seriously) that we are likely to carry forward through our lives regardless of whether we continue to live in the gender assigned at birth. I resist both sets of objections (from certain conservative Christians and from gender-critical feminists) and maintain the usefulness of the concept of ‘gender of affirmation’ for reasons that I unpack in more detail in Chapter 4.

Social Changes

There has been rising visibility of trans people since the mid-twentieth century, with a concentrated upsurge (and subsequent backlash) since the 2010s, a recent rapid acceleration in the numbers of people undergoing social transition, and some changes in legal and social recognition, including moves toward self-determination in several jurisdictions (which I discuss in more depth in Chapter 4 on autonomy and trans people – but see Pearce et al. (Reference Pearce, Erikainen and Vincent2020) for a recent overview of social and legal shifts and the gender-critical backlash against trans self-identification). Trans identity is understood in some quarters as a predominantly medical phenomenon (variously as a mental health issue or as a condition with an underlying physical cause of some kind) and in others as a predominantly social identity-based phenomenon (though it is important to note the broad medical consensus, as in the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care version 7, that trans identity is a fundamentally non-pathological variation of human experience; World Professional Association for Transgender Health Reference McNeil, Bailey, Ellis, Morton and Regan2012). There are both trans and cis people in each camp.

The concept of a gender identity distinct from a physical sex is recent, though not as recent or as much of a departure as ‘common-sense’ gender-critical radical feminists and other trans-suspicious commentators might like to hold. It is significant that the psychological and sexological work done on gender identity in the 1950s and 1960s often occurred as concomitant to broader work on sex and gender variance, notably intersex traits and ‘transsexuality’. In other words, the phenomenon of ‘gender identity’ as a thing to be described was, from the start, to do with exceptionalism: the gender identity of what would now be called cisgender and gender-conforming people did not need to be described, as it was not (assumed to be) in question. John Money’s work at the Psychohormonal Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, was widely opposed even before his death in 2006 and has been increasingly rejected since in light of critiques from intersex rights activists, including many patients who had undergone early corrective surgery following Money’s protocols.Footnote ⁶ Yet Money’s then-idiosyncratic belief that gender identity was plastic in early childhood and that it was affected by nurture as much as nature has become a commonplace among those who criticize the ‘trans agenda’ precisely on the grounds that it seems to endorse narrow modes of gender expression. Money believed that gender identity solidified because of socialization, and it was for precisely this reason that he held that the early ‘ambiguity’ of intersex children’s sex should be kept secret from them, and sometimes from their parents: if parents knew their child’s sex had been in doubt, they would not be able to communicate unambiguous messages about gender of the kind Money believed were necessary to make normal, happy girls and boys. Many feminist critics of gender transition, whether they realize it or not, are following Money’s assumption that gender identity and expression are socially inflected and highly variable. It is precisely because there are many ways to be a girl rather than one stereotypical mode of expression of ‘femininity’ that some feminist critics fear the ‘transing’ of young gender-nonconforming girls who are told that if they do not like ‘girly’ things they must really be boys (Brunskell-Evans and Moore Reference Brunskell-Evans and Moore2018a). Money understood (or believed he understood) how effective such social stereotyping was in producing gender conformity.

So the idea of ‘gender identity’ is recent. Theologians before the late twentieth century did not think or speak in these terms. Despite acknowledgement across all times and cultures of what would now be called gender-nonconforming people, it would have been fairly uncontroversial in most of them to say that such people were exceptions to a rule. Prior to the advent of safe and reliable contraception and in agricultural societies where work tended to be more segregated along gendered lines, gender identity was less relevant because biological sex (that is, assumed biological sex) largely determined one’s lot. Yet just because we might have come to understand something in a new way – or to be in the midst of developing a new set of linguistic and conceptual signifiers for a range of phenomena that we would not have articulated in quite this way in the past – this does not mean that the present emergent situation cannot orientate us to some wider questions and truths about our potentials as humans and creatures.

Many or most of those who come to this book will do so because they are already invested in and informed about recent conversations about gender transition, within the theological community and beyond. There are many excellent summaries available of the social and cultural developments around transition since the early twentieth century: Eddy and Beilby (Reference Beilby and Eddy2019) give a particularly helpful and even-handed overview of some significant developments in social responses to trans people in the last half-century, and I commend their work to those seeking a concise introduction to the area rather than attempting to replicate it myself.

One important area that I do want to highlight here is the growing opposition by self-identified gender-critical radical feminists (sometimes called trans-exclusionary radical feminists by their trans-affirming detractors, though this term, and especially its abbreviation TERF, is argued by this group to function as a slur) to what they consider the invasion of female-only spaces by predatory males. Some gender-critical feminists view all trans women in these terms; others hold that their fear is rather that more widespread acceptance of transition, and especially self-affirmation of gender, will lead to less protection of women and girls from violent men whether or not they are trans (Reilly-Cooper Reference Reilly-Cooper2016).

Many gender-critical feminists today continue to be guided by Sheila Jeffreys, a radical lesbian feminist scholar who has been influential since the 1980s. In her more recent work (Jeffreys Reference Jeffreys2014) she continues to hold that the notion that gender is based on identity rather than biology is a way to deflect attention from the sex-based violence and exploitation perpetuated (disproportionately) on women (disproportionately) by men. She believes that trans people’s appeals to an innate gender identity attempt to undercut the constructed nature of gender and distract attention from the fact that gender-based oppressions actually rest in sex (and specifically male exploitation of females). She is sceptical about the reality of gender variance and believes that it is an affectation inhabited by self-loathing gay men and ‘autogynaephilic’ straight men (that is, men sexually aroused by seeing or imagining themselves as women) in order to continue their control of women (Jeffreys Reference Jeffreys2014, p. 22; for a critical analysis of the concept of autogynaephilia see Serano Reference Serano2020). Trans men barely exist in Jeffreys’ account but can, within her logic, only be women who have internalized male misogyny and are selling their sisters down the river in order to try to annex some of patriarchy’s power and privilege. For Jeffreys and her supporters, attention given to trans people is nothing but a distraction from women’s rights and a re-inscription of male control over them.

However, the ‘TERF wars’ are not just bad for trans women but bad for feminism itself. They have led to ever more trenchant ideological divides between those who consider equality and protection for all women who identify as such a key issue and those who consider trans rights a sinister, deliberate distraction from and undermining of the well-being of ‘born’ girls and women. This major fault line is becoming more of a chasm with extensive time and energy tumbling into it such that feminists have less bandwidth to spend on resisting common enemies. As Beth Moore argues:

It is also worth remembering that while ‘protecting women and girls’ seems like a no-brainer, historically it has been used to justify things as diverse as: denying women the vote; not allowing women financial independence and autonomy; opposing women undertaking paid work outside the home; limiting access to contraception and safe legal abortion; criminalizing sex workers; preventing women undertaking church leadership roles; the persecution of ethnic minorities painted as sexually predatory; and much more. This is not to deny or dispute the real and horrific sex-based and gender-based violence that continues across the world. Indeed, it is precisely because this remains such a real and pressing problem that it is important to resist the scapegoating of trans women that becomes such a distraction from the broader work necessary to combat it.

The Emergence and Development of ‘Trans’ in Academia and Critical Theory

Major recent works focused on trans have appeared in diverse areas such as education (Bartholomaeus and Riggs Reference Bartholomaeus and Riggs2017; Sullivan and Urraro Reference Sullivan and Urraro2019); psychology and social work (Riggs Reference Riggs2019 on social and clinical work with trans young people and their families; Messinger and Guadalupe-Diaz Reference Messinger and Guadalupe-Diaz2020 on intimate partner violence in trans people’s relationships); Sino-Chinese cultural studies (Chiang Reference Chiang2012); social and cultural geographies (Camminga Reference Camminga2019); film, art, and performance studies (e.g. Phillips Reference Phillips2006; Horlacher Reference Halberstam and Horlacher2016); law (Levi and Monnin-Browder Reference Levi and Monnin-Browder2012; Scherpe Reference Beardsley and Scherpe2015 – the latter including a chapter by Duncan Dormor Reference Dormor and Scherpe2015 on the legal situation for trans people in the church); and more. These works vary in approach, with some preferring older language such as ‘transgenderism’ and taking a sympathetic but unwittingly exoticizing view of trans people and others centring trans experience and agency from the start.

Trans studies as an interdisciplinary field has its own important specificity that goes beyond merely ‘talking about transgender as a theoretical phenomenon’ (or ‘talking about trans people’). As Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah note, trans studies ‘does not merely investigate transgender phenomena as its proper object; it also treats as its archive and object of study the very practices of power/knowledge over gender-variant bodies that construct transgender people as deviant’ (Stryker and Currah Reference Stryker and Currah2014, p. 4). Trans studies contests framings of trans primarily through medical, psychiatric, or legal lenses; it re-examines not just variant gender but all gender and seeks to ask how and why terms like ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ themselves ‘can function (sometimes simultaneously) as a pathway of resistance or liberation, as a mechanism for surveillance and control, or as a neutrally descriptive technical term in an analytics of emergent cultural phenomena’ (Stryker and Currah Reference Stryker and Currah2014, p. 6).

Is what I am doing in this book trans studies? Yes and no. The book converses with and draws on material by trans studies scholars. It shares trans studies’ conviction that it is impossible to interrogate ‘exception’ without also interrogating ‘norm’. It seeks to uphold trans people as subjects of knowledge, not just objects. Yet it also operates in simultaneous conversation with another set of convictions and a wider tradition: that of constructive Christian theology. I take trans self-narration seriously, but I also take seriously the conviction that it is possible for all humans, cis and trans alike, to be mistaken about ourselves, self-absorbed, in thrall to our own agendas – and that truths about human identity and worth go far beyond the truths that our genders and sexes tell about us and our ontology. Crucially, however, and emphatically: I do not think that trans people are any more likely to be wrong about their self-narration than anyone else is, nor that trans people’s self-narration should be subjected to any more scrutiny than anyone else’s is.

Within academic discourse and some way beyond, trans has become a standalone term, a prefix floating free from the thing it once qualified. Trans, as a term, has had to emerge, to develop, to come to be, much as trans people themselves do (Halberstam Reference Halberstam2018, p. 2ff; Pearce et al. Reference Pearce, Steinberg and Moon2018; Davy Reference Davy2019; Escalante Reference Escalante2019). In professional contexts, notably medical and psychiatric associations, reference still tends to be made to ‘transgender’ rather than ‘trans’ (as illustrated by the full name of WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health), and only in 2020 did a leading scholarly journal in this field rebrand as The International Journal of Transgender Health from The International Journal of Transgenderism. In activist contexts, ‘trans’ rather than ‘transgender’ is becoming increasingly common. In the language of standalone trans, there is less sense than there was in ‘transsexual’ or even ‘transgender’ of moving from one ‘side’ to another, or even of repeated movement between two stable poles. It is less associated with identity than with affect (Moon Reference Moon2018); less associated with sex and gender alone and more with a mix of intersectional identities (even if trans experience still varies greatly depending on race, class, and socioeconomic location; Pearce et al. Reference Pearce, Steinberg and Moon2018, p. 5). Scholars including Zowie Davy have effectively critiqued the notion that only material commitment to transition as expressed by self-identified transsexuals is ‘really’ real, but they have also expressed caution about the tendency of self-identified genderqueer and nonbinary people to hold that they alone are ‘properly’ exercising agency in resisting binaries. The latter claims are, holds Davy, too voluntarist, and take too little account of the webs and social pressures within which even ‘gender radicals’ are caught (Davy Reference Davy2019). Rather than paring away ever more layers, hints Davy, why not understand trans people’s selfhood as something that accretes: rather than pitting trans subgroups against one another, why not understand their negotiations of the world as, commonly, ‘assemblages’ (Davy Reference Davy2019, p. 93)?

Jack Halberstam argues in favour of using ‘trans*’ rather than ‘trans’ as a catch-all term. Trans without an asterisk, suggests Halberstam, implies something finite and contentful, a destination in its own right; trans* with an asterisk implies more openness and possibility: ‘The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis’ (Halberstam Reference Halberstam2018, p. 4). When conducting online searches, an asterisk functions as a wildcard, returning hits for terms with common beginnings but a wide range of endings. Asterisks signify emphasis, multiplicity: so trans* with an asterisk ‘[connects] the linguistic sign to a different kind of body with a different relation to signification, symbolization, metaphor, and emphasis’ (Halberstam Reference Halberstam2018, p. 52). Trans*, rather like queer, also seeks to move beyond vectors of difference grounded solely in gender or sexuality. It is therefore destabilizing and uncertain – and this carries with it all the same pros and cons as does queer’s own slipperiness and recalcitrance. If, as Halberstam suspects, the concept of transgender is about transition from one gender to another, trans* is more disruptive of the whole idea. Trans* is less about individual trans people and more about ‘a politics of transitivity’ (Halberstam Reference Halberstam2018, p. xiii). Critical analysis of such naming and classificatory norms is essential, not least because all taxonomic projects continue to have colonial and speciesist undertones (a discussion to which I return in Chapter 10).Footnote ⁷ Furthermore, even among transgender activists, at times only some kinds of trans bodies and stories have been considered ‘real’ or ‘true’, often because of classed and raced vectors (Halberstam Reference Halberstam2018, p. 34). Following J. R. Latham’s work (Reference Latham2016), Halberstam appeals instead to a trans*ness that refuses to privilege ‘reality’ or ‘common sense realism’ (Halberstam Reference Halberstam2018, p. 34) and insists on telling trans* stories that do not represent only monied, well-connected, White experience (Halberstam Reference Halberstam2018, p. 38). One critique of trans* is that the asterisk should simply not be necessary – that trans without an asterisk should be able to do the same work of openness and possibility and need not be understood in solely binary terms. Another is that it gives the impression of being more open than it actually is, whereas there are plenty of people who still find that their identities are inadequately recognized within the broad constellation of possibilities that trans* ‘should’ point to (Tompkins Reference Tompkins2014, p. 27). In this book I have chosen not to use trans* as my common term, not least because I want to highlight the ways in which the term trans-with-no-asterisk itself continues – like queer – to be contentious and a site of competition over naming and defining.

Some extensive growth areas in academic work on trans and gender variance have been the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and gender medicine, particularly analysis of the categorizations of gender variance and the implications for professional and clinical practice. Trans and gender-variant people appear to have higher rates of mental health distress than cis people do, and this is sometimes attributed to the same kind of minority stress that Ilan H. Meyer argues is experienced by lesbian, gay, and bisexual people (Meyer Reference Meyer2003; see also Ehrensaft Reference Ehrensaft2016 on minority stress in trans and gender-variant young people): in other words, it is unsurprising that a population frequently stigmatized and discriminated against should also experience stress, depression, and anxiety. However, trans identity has, in the last two decades, itself ceased to be classified as a mental pathology. For example, the Endocrine Society maintains that trans identity is not a mental health disorder, that treatment for what it calls gender incongruence is ‘medically necessary and should be covered by insurance’ (Endocrine Society Reference Doward2020), and that interventions for gender incongruence are ‘both safe and efficacious’ (Endocrine Society Reference Doward2020). Similarly, the Royal College of Psychiatrists holds that trans identity is not a mental health disorder (Royal College of Psychiatrists 2018). These affirmations from influential professional bodies echo shifts in formally recognized classification documents: notably, in the 2018 revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) – the World Health Organization’s standards used globally in the diagnosis, coding, and analysis of statistics on disease – ‘gender incongruence’ is moved to the section on sexual health rather than that on mental disorder. Likewise, the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), released in 2013, abandoned DSM-IV’s language of ‘gender identity disorder’, classified as a sexual disorder, and replaced it with ‘gender dysphoria’, not classified as a disorder or an issue of sexuality. These changes mirror other shifts in the classification of disorder and disease, such as the declassification as such of homosexuality. While the shifts might have taken place in slightly different directions – in the ICD, moving trans identity from a matter of mental health to sexual health, and in the DSM, moving trans identity from sexual health to mental health – the key is that in both cases it is no longer inherently pathologized.

Of course, such manuals and standards are no less ideological or politically influenced than other taxonomic systems pronouncing on pathology and health, and as social attitudes toward minority sexual and gender identity shift, so do the perspectives of experts working in the areas. But it is not as though publications such as the DSM have abandoned notions of pathology and health altogether: rather, the shift has been from an emphasis on identity or behaviour as such to an emphasis on whether a given identity or behaviour creates distress for an individual. ICD-11’s use of the term ‘gender incongruence’ positively makes clear that not every gender-variant person is distressed about it (though of course it is an imperfect term in some respects, notably that it implies that some gender is ‘congruent’; this has normative undertones and tacitly repeats the idea that some gender identities are more appropriate for some bodies than others). However, most conservative Christian accounts of transgender remain in an ICD-10-type model, assuming gender variance is always or almost always afflicting, so that there seems to be a more compelling case for holding that it is pathological.

Part of the backlash against trans people in the last decade has been on the basis of (sometimes less than ingenuous) ‘common-sense’ appeals to apparent irrefutables, particularly in opposition to what are presented as grandiloquent and obscurantist queer-theory-inflected accounts of gender as fluid and fictive. Such appeals are gender-critical radical feminist mainstays, yet while they are often understood as politically reactionary when used to oppose trans self-identification, there is an important lacuna between this and self-identification in terms of other aspects of identity, notably race. In his discussion of Nkechi Amare Diallo,Footnote ⁸ Rogers Brubaker notes that left-leaning commentators who were happy to understand sex/gender identity as voluntarist were far less willing to understand race in the same way. This, he remarks, is odd, given that sex is, while contested, based on a far more solid biological basis than race is, yet it is gender that has come to be understood as something one may identify oneself into whilst – as the Dolezal/Diallo case shows – race is decidedly not. He concludes that this is because the sex of an embryo and, eventually, a human being is determined ‘in a manner that does not involve history, lineage, or intergenerational continuity … The sex of the offspring does not depend on any properties of the parents … Sex determination begins anew with each generation’ (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2016, p. 138). This, he notes, has made it ‘possible to construe gender identity as a subjective individual property that is uncoupled from the body … [and] thus make changing sex or gender much more thinkable than changing race’ (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2016, p. 6).

There has been a particular upsurge in attention to nonbinary and genderqueer identity (McNabb Reference McNabb2017; Richards et al. Reference Richards, Bouman and Barker2017; Hegarty et al. Reference Hegarty, Ansara, Barker, Dess, Marecek and Bell2018; Monro Reference Monro2019; International Journal of Transgenderism 20.2–3, 2019), but this has not yet received particular attention from Christian theologians, who are more likely to focus on a transition from one binary gender to another and to assume that all trans people have the same preoccupation. The notable exception is Alex Clare-Young, the first openly trans person ordained to ministry in the United Reformed Church. Clare-Young powerfully discusses their nonbinary identity in the context of vocation and openness to possibility, noting: ‘Non-binary trans people aren’t confused or messed up. We are simply continually open to being called somewhere else’ (Clare-Young Reference Clare-Young2019, p. 89). Clare-Young aside, most theologians do not give due credence to the possibility of nonbinary identity. In actual fact, nonbinary people may be strikingly uninterested in a monodirectional move from one binary gender to another (Roen Reference Roen2001). Some nonbinary people choose to undergo only partial intervention not necessarily because of pragmatic resignation about the likely outcomes of such surgeries but sometimes because they actively prefer a more ‘ambiguous’ appearance (Hage and Karim Reference Hage and Karim2000; Beek et al. Reference Beek, Kreukels, Cohen-Kettenis and Steensma2015). Even jurisdictions that legally recognize trans people do not tend to recognize nonbinary ones (Monro and Van Der Ros Reference Braggs, Renold, Ringrose and Jackson2018), perhaps because of a medicalization narrative in which all ‘real’ trans people must have received external intervention (Vipond Reference Vipond2015). Nonbinary people report difficulties accessing appropriate care even in a gender medicine context since some providers believe that only binary identities and presentations are legitimate (Vincent Reference Vincent2016; Ashley and Ells Reference Ashley and Ells2018), though this experience varies (Taylor et al. Reference Taylor, Zalewska, Joan Gates and Millon2018). Nonbinary people may be understood as ‘hedging their bets’, insufficiently committed to ‘full’ transition, perhaps not ‘really’ trans at all, and as particularly or peculiarly threatening to gender norms (Taylor et al. Reference Taylor, Zalewska, Joan Gates and Millon2018). Yet nonbinary people are not necessarily any more queer, subversive, or resistant of normativity than binary-identified ‘full’ transitioners are; nor are binary trans people somehow more in thrall to social and cultural boxes (Davy Reference Davy2019).

Young people often seem more comfortable with gender diversity and nonbinary identity than their elders do (Braggs et al. Reference Braggs, Renold, Ringrose and Jackson2018). Some prefer not to pursue medical intervention; those who do are less likely to see it as goal-orientated but are more likely to be dynamic and non-linear (Taylor et al. Reference Taylor, Zalewska, Joan Gates and Millon2018). Nonbinary identity among young people may be a ‘trend’ in that its increasing ubiquity is snowballing and making such an identity seem more possible. This does not mean that it is sinister or ‘unreal’. Rather, this might point to specific shifting relationships to power and increasing impatience with the inequality and hierarchy (and potential for abuse and exploitation) perpetuated within some accounts of gender. Young nonbinary people are sometimes accused of being snowflakes, self-absorbed crybabies too delicate to bumble along within a binary system just like everyone else has to. Yet this kind of name-calling is frequently a tactic to deflect attention from the real problem and to shut down these young people’s incisive impatience with injustice lest the edifice of so much unexamined power should begin to crumble.

Conclusion: A Health Warning

There are discussions within this book that some readers, trans and otherwise, might find difficult or distressing. There are mentions of genital surgery, suicidality, self-harm, abuse, and more. Readers for whom these subjects are especially difficult should proceed with care and only with their own structures for support in place.

That said, this book certainly does not intend to set gender variance in the key of tragedy. After all, intensive dysphoria is one kind of trans experience, but by no means the only one. Likewise, not all trans people seek surgery to alter their bodies; of those who do, not all feel it is necessary or that they would die without it. Trans surgery is sometimes dismissed as being ‘just’ a form of cosmetic surgery, but Cressida Heyes and J. R. Latham (Reference Heyes and Latham2018) trouble both strong analogy and strong disanalogy between the two and show that holding suffering as an essential constituent of or precondition for transness reinforces unjustified medical gatekeeping. They also show that narratives that insist on medicalization for trans people and frame the only ‘good’ surgery as medically necessary surgery reinforce retrogressive gender conformity.

I examine these narratives in more detail in Chapters 8 and 9, but I will say here that it seems to me that such constructions of trans identity as necessarily resting in suffering, dysphoria, and ‘trouble’ recur in conservative evangelical accounts of trans people too (as we will see in Chapter 3). I wonder whether it is more threatening to conservative Christians to conceive of trans people who are not conflicted about their identity and not seeking tools to resolve dysphoria – since, if they are not, this may undermine the stability and self-evident nature of the goodness of cisnormative theologies.

Any narration of the significance of trans people’s lives, bodies, and experiences undertaken by non-trans people – like the one I am attempting here – must be mindful of its limits. It must be acutely aware that any attempt to appeal to universals, to say anything along the lines of ‘we’re all in this together, cis and trans people alike’, is still and always a claim that takes place in the context of unequal power. Of course all human identity is provisional and non-absolute, as Robert Song stresses; of course what we know of ourselves and one another now is not all that there is to know:

Yet, as I argue across this book, there will continue to be far more at stake for those whose bodies and identities are frequently objects of scrutiny, anxiety, and others’ concern than for those who do not have such ontological doubt projected onto them. Incorporation into Christ, as the ‘crisis of all human identities’ (Song Reference Song2013, p. 503), is a risky and costly thing: and the risk and cost are not equally spread.

Here it is worth engaging with Gaile Pohlhaus Jr’s conception of wilful hermeneutical ignorance. Pohlhaus explains that those who wish to be truthful knowers should draw on systems of knowledge constructed so as to take into account standpoints developed at and from the margins. Why? Because ‘when one genuinely cares to know something about the world as experienced from social positions other than one’s own, one must use epistemic resources suited to (and so developed from) those situations’ (Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2012, p. 731). This necessitates both honesty and humility, putting oneself in a position where one is genuinely willing to learn from and put one’s trust in such resources. Where one is a ‘dominantly situated knower’ who has recourse to such resources but refuses to learn from them, one engages in wilful ignorance. This goes beyond simply not having known: it is having chosen not to know; it is ‘a systematic and coordinated misinterpretation of the world’ (Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2012, p. 732). It takes choice and will, as Pohlhaus explains, not to ‘step outside one’s social position’ (Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2012, p. 733), for such is not possible, but to deliberately ‘acquire epistemic resources that reveal what is not already obvious from where one is situated’ (Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2012, p. 732). The risk is that those who choose not to engage in experiments of trust will ‘[afford] one the privilege of coordinated ignorance with others who have similar investments in willful ignorance’ (Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2012, p. 732). But this takes dominantly situated knowers’ realizing that they are dependent on knowledge from beyond themselves, thus ‘forging truly cooperative interdependent relations with marginally situated knowers’ (Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2012, p. 733).

Conservative Christian knowers might believe that they have already put themselves in the way of and under the submission of an authority and way of knowing beyond themselves: that is, the story of human identity as revealed and intended by God, as fixed, binary, and with gender contingent on and supervening on biological sex. Yet this story is not morally innocent or immaculate: it has not come down unredacted or untouched by ideology and power.

Some trans people are not, understandably, willing to continually put themselves in the way of those for whom their very existence is a signal of brokenness and illegitimacy. I know some trans readers will find it difficult that I even discuss material that suggests their reality is up for debate, and I respect those who make the decision, at this point, for their own safety, to disengage. Yet I hope it will be clear to all readers that no theological talk about gender diversity and gender transition can or should take place as though trans people were not listening – or as though trans people had not already contributed to and continue to contribute to the conversation. Trans and gender-diverse people are human beings, transformative creatures whose self-understanding and perception of their own and other realities is no more inherently flawed or unreliable than anyone else’s.

Describing her experience of being present for a session at the Church of England’s General Synod in February Reference Davies2019 at which trans people were discussed in the context of guidance on using a renewal of baptismal vows liturgy as a means of welcoming trans people, the priest and General Synod member Rachel Mann says:

And, reflecting on a presentation on the episcopal teaching document Living in Love and Faith (Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England 2020) at General Synod that Mann attended:

Despite the fact that I am not a trans person, I have tried my best to ensure that trans people are ‘in the room’ throughout this book: as scholars, as readers, as critical friends. Where I have failed to do so adequately, these failings are of course mine and not theirs.