Letter to the Christian Transgender Woman who Just Came Out

On the necessity of seeing with our own eyes

Introduction

First, this is written to and for Christian trans women. If that is not you then you are welcome, invited even, to listen in but know that the further you are from that social location, the less this is written “for you”. I hope that listening in our our conversation might bless you.

Second, please read this extensive footnote (footnote 1) in order to understand the peculiar formatting of this document as well as the sources from which the majority of its contents are drawn.¹ The tl;dr of footnote 1 though is that the texts in italics in this document are direct quotes from James Baldwin’s essay My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation which forms the first chapter of his book The Fire Next Time , while the texts in bold in this document are direct quotes from Julia Serano’s A Trans Woman Manifesto which forms the first chapter of her book Whipping Girl.

Finally, while this is document can be read as a manifesto² of trans femme Christian consciousness, I elected to write it in the form of a letter to a Christian trans woman who has only just come out and resolved to begin transition. I hope that that choice will makes sense as your read.

CW: use of slurs and frank depictions of transphobic and homophobic thinking/beliefs

Dear Cairstine

You are not a tranny. I do not mean by that to restrict your language about yourself or about our transgender sisters, siblings, and brothers. Neither do I mean by it any reification of respectability politics. I am not writing to criticize the language we use to talk about ourselves to ourselves. But words exist in the intersection of meanings and I needed a word which would, in itself, summarize the image of you that now already exists in the mind of the Church: A Tranny. Picture her for a moment, this creature that you are not, she flickers back and forth between two lies: the shemale and the he/she.

Now she is the seductress, the beautiful shemale of so many pastors’ dreams, drawn straight out of their browser histories. She offers these men—and they are nearly always men—an invitation to live, for just a moment and only in their fantasy, the freedom of attraction and sexuality unmoored from the strict gender binary that they bind themselves with. She is all their flesh wants in women “and a little more besides”. She is dear to them because she is not real and because she owns the glory of her own sexuality and the beautiful shock of her body in perfect confidence. She is a woman who knows that she is beautiful, who invites them to imagine themselves too as beautiful. She tells them that they are more than lumpish souls; she tells them that their sex is beautiful. They love her too because she is not real; she makes no demands; and she asks nothing of them. Their sexuality, the meaning of their attraction to her is to go unquestioned—unless they want her to shame them for it. Flicker And they hate her; they hate her for being confident in the rejection of all (or maybe only most) that is dearest to them. They hate her for existing beyond the expectations of their sex. They hate her for her daring and for her pride.

She flickers and now she is not the shemale; she is the he/she; the creature that exists only to be ridiculed. They hate that creature for its failure to please them; for the way its beard shadow makes them think of men when they are turned on; they hate it for failing to be their definition of alluring, of grace, of beauty, of woman. Flicker. And they love the creature. They love it as an object of their scorn. They love it for affirming their fears. They love it for living as an embodiment of all the misery and shame that God must visit upon those who choose to live as who they are and not as what the Church has told them to be. They love her has the object of their disgust.

Flicker-shemale-flicker-he/she-flicker-shemale-flicker-he/she flicker flicker flicker and in the flickering the two lies become one lie: the tranny. And you are not a tranny, and you can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what³ the cis world calls a tranny. They can not make a tranny out of you, but they are already trying; I have never known them to stop. They will preach at you; they will cajole, some may even attempt to negotiate with you. They will offer you inclusion, maybe even tolerance, if you will just wear for them the mantle of being less, a problem, mentally ill, a temptation, a failed man, a tranny.

The cruel ones will be easier to spot. They will call you “tranny; groomer; pervert; apostate; disgusting; abomination; faggot; queer” shout at you to repent, decry your existence, and hint or outright call for your death. Let the banality of their hatred be a refreshment to you—remember “if they hate you, they hated me first”—even while you observe the chains around their hearts, tongues, and minds. It is harder to remember that someone has made themselves a servant of destruction when their words are gentle than it is when they call you slurs and wish you would die.

The kind ones, the merciful ones, the ones who cut their poisons with honey will be more dangerous to you. They will offer you community and they will offer you a sort of kindness, Cairstine⁴, and I need for you to know right now that, for your own soul’s sake, you must not drink of their cup. The price they ask for their kindness? Well the price varies but always, always it includes this one demand: that you commit to seeing yourselves and to seeing all of us, not though your own eyes, or God’s, but through their eyes only. You are to learn to think cis thoughts about to your transness⁵. They will ask you to take yourself out of your heart and wear yourself on your own back like a cold, wet dead thing. From time to time they may ask you to come outside and to be paraded around—their tame little queer—and you will be made to call your transness a burden you carry, a mark of the fall, a struggle, a sin, a disease, a disorder. And you will be expected to thank them, to be grateful to them for associating with you, for not being like the cruel ones.

You see Cairstine, transphobia is an irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against people whose gendered identities, appearances, or behaviors deviate from societal norms⁶. You know, don’t you, that you deviate from societal norms? What a beautiful thing it is. We speak frequently of flowers when we speak of those who stand out, those whose beauty draws remark. It is an apt metaphor only it misses out on the strength. To stand in authenticity against those societal norms is to live, often, in a storm determined to rip you out of your soil. Cairstine, you will have to know who you are; and when you can’t know any longer, you will need queer and transgender sisters, siblings, and brothers to know with you and to know for you who you are. You are a woman; you are beloved of the Most High; you are holy.

I cannot tell you that you yourself will make it. If only I could, but too many of us do not. The hurricane of the normative is harsh and though our roots find one another and dig deep; though we ground ourselves in the Holy Spirit of God and the vocation of authenticity that is so palpably shared among queer people, sometimes we are lost for a time or are taken from this life by their violence. I can not tell you that you will make it but I pray that you will. I pray that you will not succumb to the stick of their cruelty or to the carrot of their conditioned tolerance.

And this is going to be another hard pill to swallow but it is one that will need swallowing; the earlier the better. The church has so much of our blood on its hands. I hope and I pray that you will find a loving congregation full of queer people and allies who love and celebrate you for the phenomenal woman that you are, who see that you too in your beautiful queerness are also Imago Dei. I pray you find people who know their need for you. I hope and I pray that you will be surrounded by Christians who praise our God for the blessing of your trans self. That hope, and that prayer I have for you and for all of our trans sisters, siblings, and brothers. Those churches do exist and I praise God for them. But they are not the norm, nor do they represent the face or power of Christianity in this world.

There is a certain political and social Power that, in mockery of Christ’s Bride, goes by the names “Church” and “Christianity” in this country, and it does not know us. Let us call it the “cis church”. The oppressive hegemonies of normativity of this country are shaped by this cis church, by this cis Christianity. While the oppression, erasure, and opposition we face here cannot be laid at the feet of the cis church alone much of it may be.

You know already what it is like to exist in, and alongside, the cis church. You know how they communicate, subtly when not overtly, their belief in the moral, spiritual, and social superiority of cisness over transness. Since you first attended church you have been bombarded with the message that this beautiful facet of who you are is somehow warped, sinful, broken, or disgusting. The kind ones offer to forgive you for it and to accept you in spite of it. The cruel ones made it known that if they catch even a glimpse of your beauty you will be cut off from them and heaped with scorn. Your friends and family will be confronted with the choice to reject you or to share in your rejection. Believing that transness must be sinful and must therefore lead to misery, they have made it their goal to create that misery so as to make true their misshapen theology.

Let me write a little—do not be afraid to confront this, we know that it is a lie—about what their misshapen theology needs them to believe. They will tell you—they have told us a million times and more—that they begin “from scripture” and that their conclusions are nothing but good faith representations of the truth they find in the Bible. Let us relieve them first of that mask. Their theology is built backwards as often as forward; build for the justification of just those conclusions that will allow them to ignore what they have done and who they are. Their thousand denominations and disputes give the lie already to any simplistic “good faith representation of a truth just found” in the Bible. But see now what they have done to themselves: all their conclusions are glued together so that they dare not reject one for fear of losing them all. If once they admit that their interpretations are interpretations, that no “plain reading” of the text is available to them well then what role must reality and the lived experiences of their neighbors play in trying to interpret reality?

They have built their theologies backwards, working to justify their oppressions—we are not alone in our marginalization Cairstine, you must never forget that; all that is not middle or upper class white, cis, able-bodied, straight, allosexual, male, and masculine they have conceptualized as lesser. Sometimes they are plain with this and other times they will pretend (and insist that you pretend alongside them) that by “different” they do not actually mean “lesser”. The collective performance of false humility is a game they really enjoy. They have built their theologies backwards, starting with the conclusions they need so as not to trouble their consciences in the preservation of their power and worked down to premises that might support them. But notice that the nearer they get to the beginning of their theologies, the more those theologies have in common. And it is this that makes their imagined reality both so strong and so brittle. The lies on which they have built oppression are bound together into a single knot. Thus in living as beloved of God you challenge their transphobic theology, yes, but you also challenge their patriarchy, their colonialism, their racism, and their homophobia, for all of these theologies now rest on the same few roots.

I will say no more here of those roots but let’s look together at the structure they support. And I will keep it as narrow, we are speaking of being a Christian trans woman. They need to believe that women are less than men. Some tell us less in power only but others are more forthright about believing that we are less in dignity as well. this basic sexism is combined with cissexism which is the belief that trans people’s identified genders are inferior to, or less authentic than, those of cisgender people. The most common expression of cissexism occurs when people attempt to deny the trans person the basic privileges that are associated with the trans person’s self-identified gender. Common examples include purposeful misuse of pronouns or insisting that the trans person use a different public restroom.⁷ In church they will forbid participation in activities or spaces that they reserve for one or the other sex only. By insisting that the trans person’s gender is “fake,” they attempt to validate their own gender as “real” or “natural.” this sort of thinking is extraordinarily naive.⁸ They will not countenance the reminder that “in Christ is neither male nor female.”⁹

They need this, you see, because your beloved existence undermines the oppositional sexism which, in turn, supports church patriarchy. Oppositional sexism is the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires. Oppositional sexists attempt to punish or dismiss those of us who fall outside of gender or sexual norms because our existence threatens the idea that women and men are “opposite”¹⁰, and God-ordained, sexes as they have determined them. As much as they hate us, remember that they hate our non-binary siblings as well. All that confuses their settled imagination of humanity as neatly divided into these two mutually exclusive and impermeable categories cannot be processed without radically altering their worlds and so we must be denied and expelled. Our gender queerness is is caustic to the structures of power on which their oppression depends.

Be aware of the threat you pose to the cis church Cairstine. In a male-centered gender hierarchy like the church, where it is assumed that men are better than women and that masculinity is superior to femininity, there is no greater perceived threat than the existence of trans women, who despite being assigned to the category of men and plastered with a simulacrum of male privilege “choose” to be female instead. By embracing our own femaleness and femininity, we, in a sense, cast a shadow of doubt over the supposed supremacy of maleness and masculinity.¹¹ And they will use every tool, every tactic they can think of to dismiss you so as to preserve the illusion of their right to dominance and the fact of their power.

You must not believe the lies of their misshapen theologies Cairstine. Do not, if you can avoid it, think cis thoughts about your glorious transness. Who you are, the astounding alchemy of being and growth that our Creator God made you to be is to be boasted of—we will boast in the work of our Savior for we too are wonderfully made. You see, they need you to see yourself as less than them and in need of their grace. They cannot fathom the truth, that they are in need of yours. Their world is built on the illusion of their holiness and you, being different from them, must be unholy, else they be confronted with the decades and centuries of abuse they have committed against us. To admit the truth of who you are means, for them, to confront the sins of their transphobic past and present. You and I know the love of our Creator but they dare not let themselves see that love—”Light has come into the world but they have loved darkness because their deeds are evil”. And in this, their guilt against you and against your creator is compounded. It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime¹².

Know in your bones, Cairstine, that though the cis Church, though this cis nation, refuse to see you yet you are known, yet you are loved. Those who know, those determined to recognize what is, see the joy that now emanates from you in waves of glory as you step into life as who you are and have always been. Now, as you take your early steps “with unveiled face”, we who would know real persons are basking in your glow. Know who you are. If you know who you are, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what cis people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.¹³

There is no reason for you to try to become like or acceptable to cis people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing my dear is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a religion which they do not understand and until they understand it they cannot be released from it.¹⁴

This is the great injustice, the real burden of our condition as Christian trans women: the cis church’s redemption from the besetting sins of transphobia, transmisogyny, and cissexism depends on our doing the work of calling out to them, of waking them, of ushering them into the Light. They will not, maybe they cannot, wake themselves. And the conditions under which we labor with Christ to bring redemption to these souls are those in which they have all the power. St. Paul offered to become all things to all men so that some might be saved; we too—if the work of redeeming the cis Church is to be our vocation, and until they are redeemed they will, they have no choice, continue to oppress us—must bleed, and dance, and sing, and plead. We must be those who reproved and who exhort, we become the listening and the non-judgmental, and we become prophetesses and co-heirs with Christ. We wear for them the robes of mourning and the robes of glory that we might win a some.

And this is their great tragedy Cairstine, though they will try to make it yours, that in their established fear of our liberation and out of their disgust for our union with them, they have refused communion with God because they refuse to recognize God in you. These “innocents” for whom heaven is the all-justifying goal, have refused to enter by the narrow gate for fear that they might catch a glimpse of you standing on the other side. In their determination to cast you away they have declared their little kingdom outside the gates to be the heaven they seek and they call the beloved community heretics, and the damned. But these cis Christians are you siblings—your lost, younger siblings. And if the word unity means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our siblings to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home dear one do not be driven from it; great people have done great things here and will again, and¹⁵ with the Spirit’s guidance we can make the Church what the Church must become.

What can be hard for you (and harder for them though for very different reasons) to see is that recognizing your reality, your joy, and your validity as a queerly beloved daughter of the Most High, will force them to lose sight of the illusion they have built for who they are. They think themselves righteous, they thing themselves uniquely valid. They have these illusions of “real” women and “real” men and those illusions do not only reject the possibility of our flourishing, they also define the people of the cis Church (and cis society) to themselves. If you are to be real, then the real they see themselves as is destroyed. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the tranny, the faggot, and the dyke have functioned in the cis church’s world as a fixed star, as an immoveable pillar: and as we move out of place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation.¹⁶

Learn to see yourself through your own eyes. Learn to be the woman God has always envisioned you to be Cairstine, a woman of glory, valor, and joy.

1. This document is drawn primarily from two sources in addition to my own thoughts and work. Much of my consciousness as a queer and transgender woman—that is to say as a person whose sexuality and gender identity locate her as a both marginalized and oppressed within the narrative that cisnormative/heteronormative society tells itself about who it is and whom it serves—was formed by and adapted from James Baldwin’s Essay My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation which forms the first chapter of his book The Fire Next Time . “Formed” because this was the text that “taught” me how to imagine myself and my location within a society (religious and secular) which is hostile to who I am and which is shaped by its own mistreatment of me and of people like me. “Adapted” because Baldwin writes as a gay cisgender black man whereas I write as a gay transgender white woman. Our locations and the social imaginaries we occupy are different in significant ways while also sharing certain commonalities of resentment and exclusion. Indeed it is black Americans who have done much to describe and resist the dynamics, forces, and pressures which shape political, religious, social, and other forms of marginalization. Of course (to cite another black American, Kimberle Crenshaw) all oppression is intersectional and all marginalized groups owe some debt to all other marginalized groups as we have learned and developed consciousness together; it must not be denied, however that the debt owed on this count by the queer community to the black community is extensive.

As Baldwin has contributed to the formation of my social, and political consciousness, so Julia Serano has contributed to my understanding of many of the specific oppressions and dynamics faced by trans women in this country and in this moment—that is to say that she provided a significant portion of the theory that informs my understanding of what it means to be trans. While my reading of her work has been extensive (though not comprehensive) a significant portion of the content of this document was learned from her A Trans Woman Manifesto which forms the first chapter of her book Whipping Girl. My project in this document is humbler than hers insofar as it is limited to a focus on the consciousness, rights, and affirmation of transgender women within the Christian Church and, while touching on much of how we exist within larger society, only expands beyond that scope to the extent that I felt was necessary to contextualize the “Christian” experience and existence of Transgender Women

My debt to these authors is so great that I was prevented in properly beginning this work by the conundrum of how to compose it without either making the text unreadable through too many citations or asides, or by functionally plagiarizing two or more of my sources of inspiration. In the end I chose to move forward with the document by following the following conventions. All text in italics is (and is footnoted as) a direct quote from Baldwin’s My Dungeon Shook, while all text in bold is (and is footnoted as) a direct quote from Serano’s Manifesto. All regular text is my own. I hope that this convention, while potentially distracting, nevertheless allow for a text which is readable and meaningful. All other citations, quotes, and conscious paraphrasing of Baldwin, Serano, and other authors is by footnote.

2. A manifesto is nothing more than a public declaration of beliefs, policy, or goals. In the case of this document, the manifesto is a declaration of consciousness as a Christian transgender woman who is beloved of God as the queer woman she is.

3. Baldwin The Fire Next Time

4. Cairstine is a name I used at a time when I was still closeted and trying to decide how to move forward. It was always intended to be a temporary name but has come to represent my own experience of trying to understand transness and myself to me.

5. I have borrowed and adapted the language of this phrase from a quote that I first encountered in Isaac B. Sharp’s Book The Other Evangelicals where Sharp attributes it to William Parnell formulated as “it is one thing for a white Christian to go to Africa thinking white thoughts about black people; it would be quite something else for a non-white Christian to go there thinking white thoughts about black people” (pp. 142-143)

6. Serano Whipping Girl

7. Serano Whipping Girl

8. Serano Whipping Girl

9. Galatians 3:28

10. Serano Whipping Girl

11. Serano Whipping Girl

12. Baldwin The Fire Next Time

13. Baldwin The Fire Next Time

14. Baldwin The Fire Next Time

15. Baldwin The Fire Next Time

16. Baldwin The Fire Next Time