Hi. Welcome to queer the church.
This project started because while there are a lot of Christian voices talking about transgender people, I found the informational landscape difficult to navigate as a Christian trans girl. It’s become unfashionable in the last few decades, broadly speaking, to just outright say that entire groups of people are inherently bad. But for transgender people, the questions that are public policy to most are intensely personal and immediately practical questions of identity, and from that perspective it’s much easier to see when someone is calling you an inherently bad person by way of “public policy questions”. To the point that it can be frustrating that other people can’t when that happens. When you’re seeking guidance, only for that source of guidance to declare your very personhood to be a grave evil, it hits even harder than encountering hatred in the wild.
In order to make it easier for transgender Christians to navigate this confusing and treacherous arena, I want to map out the landscape of Christian theologies and perspectives about transness, both positive and negative. Those perspectives can’t be considered in isolation - they’re heavily tied in to the societal trends and influenced by historical events, which I’ll also be covering as they relate to the topics covered. With that in mind, I’ll also be looking at adjacent literature from Christian and/or queer circles in addition to theologies of transness, as it is tied into concepts of embodiedness, gender, and sex, and bringing in additional perspectives. We’re also going to go the other direction and read some queer theory through a Christian lens. I also have a passion for stories and narrative media and believe that stories can be as or more effective than direct argumentation, and there have been some very excellent and relatively high-profile releases of queer Christian media in the past few years that we’ll use as platforms to queer Christian ideas. I won’t really be writing to convince anti-trans readers directly; while I’ll engage with anti-trans arguments as they appear in materials we cover, my priority is going to be the promotion of understandings of transness rooted in respect for the experiences & essential personhood of transgender people, scripture, evidence, and reason. I am trans myself, and I believe that I am created in the image of God, and my transness is part of that.
I’ll mostly be working by covering books here, because they are well-aligned with how I like to work, but will occasionally cover other forms of media as well. Whether you’re trans, have a trans family member, or just want to follow along, subscribe to my email newsletter!