Mark Bratton
Mark Bratton reviews ‘Transformations – Grounding Theology in Trans and Non-Binary Lives’ by Alex Clare Young (SCM Press, 2024)
This book, based on original research conducted at Cambridge University, aims to redress the dearth of theological literature written from the perspectives of transgender and non-binary people and to develop a richer theological anthropology. To that end, the author explores the “lived experiences” of ten trans and non-binary interviewees, particularly concerning their gender identity, faith, and personal development. The book’s organisation and methodology reveal its academic origins, although to ensure that their ‘voices’ are properly heard, the author employs the unusual but quite effective device of interspersing extensive extracts from the interviews of each between the main chapters. These contributions provide the primary material for the author’s concept formation and theoretic elaboration. The author, who describes themselves (pronouns: they/them) as “transmasculine, non-binary” derives ‘their’ theoretic approaches from feminist standpoint, queer and critical race theory. Accordingly, the author stresses the inherent subjectivity of all knowledge claims, the ineluctably political and oppressive nature of the sex binary, and the existential threat objectivist claims about sex represent to trans and non-binary people, which have served to conceal their existence and silence their voices, historically and into the present day.
the author states explicitly “I do not believe there is any such thing as a male body or a female body”
Indeed, the author declares that trans and non-conforming people have been “systematically, socially and epistemically oppressed” (p 46). The examples given though are not instances of violence and harassment (unsurprisingly because there is scant empirical evidence that trans and non-binary people are especially vulnerable or marginalised) but current restrictions on legal self-identification and trans access to their preferred public spaces (e.g. toilets). The author therefore implies that trans and non-binary people are victimised because they are currently denied the fulfilment of their social and political aspirations. No mention anywhere is made of women’s rights to privacy and their own safe spaces in the face of the incontrovertible male monopoly on almost all violence and sexual assault. The sexual distinction on which such an analysis would turn is to be disrupted or ‘queered’ as an oppressive binary. Indeed, the author states explicitly “I do not believe there is any such thing as a male body or a female body” (p 198)
the author construes the sex binary as a defection from God’s original and ultimate purposes for humankind, and transgender and non-binary people as eschatological anticipations of transformed existence in the Kingdom of God
Not only is the sex binary an oppressive social and political construct it can also be understood theologically as a consequence of ‘the Fall’, responsible for systemic ‘kyriarchal’ oppression in the form of patriarchy, gendered violence, toxic masculinity, gender stereotypes and inequality. Adducing texts positing humanity’s putatively primordial non-binary or androgynous state (Genesis, Galatians) and angelic, non-sexed existence at the eschaton (Matthew), the author construes the sex binary as a defection from God’s original and ultimate purposes for humankind, and transgender and non-binary people as eschatological anticipations of transformed existence in the Kingdom of God. However, this construction rather overlooks the prelapsarian context of humanity’s sexual differentiation and, amongst other things, lends itself to the somewhat docetic tendency to idealise sexlessness and erase present realities, including the hardly inclusive sidelining of those who identify strongly with their sexed selves.
The author’s use of critical identity theories grants decisive significance to the lived experiences and self-perceptions of trans and non-binary individuals. According to the author, the failure in faith communities, or other social contexts, to represent the self-perceptions of trans and non-binary people back to them accurately constitutes harmful or bad ‘mirroring’ (cf pp 119-127) entrenching feelings of alienation, dysphoria, and marginalisation, and, in many cases, subverting healthy gender transition. Nothing is conceded to the nature of ‘identity’ as something subjectively and socially constructed, or that the perceptions, in which ‘lived experience’ is embedded, can sometimes be distorted. For the author, their gender identity is a metaphysical ‘fact’: “There is simply a true-ness about me being non-binary. I cannot explain it and shouldn’t have to defend it. I am” (p 199). This adamantine statement epitomises the current dominant culture of expressive individualism – the belief that each person has a unique core of feelings, desires, and identity that should be discovered, expressed, and fulfilled to achieve authenticity and personal freedom.
The characterisation of the phenomenon of ‘detransitioning’ as ‘Transitioning (Again)’ is disingenuous and potentially offensive, especially to detransitioners many of whom have concluded they have made a terrible mistake rather than simply taken one more step on the road of gender discovery.
The book exhibits many of the hallmarks of genderist philosophy with which members of LGB Christians will be all too familiar. Sex is assigned at birth, not, as it is, established at conception and observed at birth. The definitions of trans and non-binary are circular and seem to be indistinguishable from the broader notion of gender incongruence. These features make it difficult to distinguish between distinctively trans and non-binary experience, and ‘plain’ experience, and thus to identify a distinctively trans and non-binary contribution to theology and theological anthropology. The characterisation of the phenomenon of ‘detransitioning’ as ‘Transitioning (Again)’ (p 213) is disingenuous and potentially offensive, especially to detransitioners many of whom have concluded they have made a terrible mistake rather than simply taken one more step on the road of gender discovery. Most concerning of all is the near-ubiquitous experience of trauma, especially childhood trauma, disclosed by the interviewees, with the associated mental health comorbidities, raising fresh questions about the connection between abuse and gender dysphoria.
Reading this book – which is not without academic merit – deepened my conviction that the ship of genderism will ultimately founder on the rocks of reality and be refuted thus.
Mark Bratton