Emerging as Affirmative Pastoral Caregivers Beyond Gender Binaries: Gender Creative Promise (Emerging Perspectives in Pastoral Theology and Care) 1666934011, 9781666934014

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Illustrations
Part I: A Place on Earth
Chapter 1: Getting Started
An Instrumental Authorial “I” for Pastoral Theology
The Instrumental “I” as Investigator
Going Forward
Notes
Chapter 2: LGBTQ+: Terminologies and Histories
Transgender Emergence
Gender Creativity
Part One Coda
Notes
Part II: Transgender Survey, Components of Gender, and Knowing the “True Gender Self”
Chapter 3: The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS) Report
Notes
Chapter 4: Exploring Four Components of Gender: The Genderbread Person Redux
Anatomical Sex
Gender Identity
Gender Expression
Attraction
All Together Now
Notes
Chapter 5: “Where Do the Mermaids Stand?”
From Diagnoses to Advocacy
The “True Gender Self”
Part Two Coda
Notes
Part III: Strategies of Resilience
Chapter 6: Gender Creative Resilience
Common Resilience Strategies for Transgender Persons
Pastoral Practice
Notes
Chapter 7: Psychology of Religion: Ally to Gender-Affirmative Pastoral Theology
The “Missions” of Religious Belonging
Two Sociobiological Missions of Religion and Their Fruits
The Sociocultural “Mission” of Religion and Its Fruits
Notes
Chapter 8: Beyond Empathy in Pastoral Theology
The Field of Pastoral Theology
Opening Doors
Part Three Coda
Notes
Part IV: “Yet I Say Unto You”
Chapter 9: Toward a Gender Creative Lens on Biblical Interpretation
The Imaging of God
Finding One’s Self in Biblical Interpretation
Notes
Chapter 10: Principles for Delivering Affirmative Pastoral Caregiving Beyond Gender Binaries
Principle 1: God Creates Gender Variance as Part of God’s Creation (Genesis 1:26–28a)
Principle 2: Bodies and Lives are Cocurated with God Over Time (Genesis 2:7, 18–24)
Principle 3: Callings May Lead Outside of Gender Roles and Norms (Matthew 19:3–6; 10–12)
Principle 4: All Belong to God (Galatians 3:24–29)
An Excursus on “Male” and “Female”
Principle 5: Words Cannot Contain God (Apophatic Theology)
Gender Creative Pastoral Principles and Strategies of Resilience
Notes
Chapter 11: Gender Creative Pastoral Caregiving: Skills of the Canaanite Woman
Part Four Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Emerging as Affirmative Pastoral Caregivers Beyond Gender Binaries

Emerging Perspectives in Pastoral Theology and Care Series Editor: Phillis Isabella Sheppard, Vanderbilt University The field of pastoral care and counseling, and by extension pastoral theology, is presently at a crossroads, in urgent need of redefining itself for the age of postmodernity or even post-postmodernity. While there is, to be sure, a rich historical foundation upon which the field can build, it remains for contemporary scholars, educators, and practitioners to chart new directions for the present day and age. Emerging Perspectives in Pastoral Theology and Care seeks to meet this pressing need by inviting researchers in the field to address timely issues, such as the findings of contemplative neuroscience, the impact of technology on human development and wellness, mindfulness meditation practice for reducing anxiety, trauma viewed through the lens of positive psychology and resilience theory, clergy health and wellness, postmodern and multicultural pastoral care and counseling, and issues of race and class. The series will therefore serve as an important and foundational resource for years to come, guiding scholars and educators in the field in developing more contemporary models of theory and practice.

Titles in the Series Emerging as Affirmative Pastoral Caregivers Beyond Gender Binaries: Gender Creative Promise by Craig A. Rubano The Paradox of Trauma and Growth in Pastoral and Spiritual Care: Night Blooming, by Mary Beth Werdel A Womanist Holistic Soteriology: Stitching Fabrics with Fine Thread, by Lahronda Welch Little The Speed Method, Awareness in Four Steps: Lonergan’s Approach for Pastoral and Spiritual Counseling, by Barbara Marchica A Postcolonial Political Theology of Care and Praxis in Ethiopia’s Era of Identity Politics: Reframing Hegemonic and Fragmented Identities through Subjective In-Betweenness, by Rode Molla Pastoral Care in the Anthropocene Age: Facing a Dire Future Now, by Ryan LaMothe Pastoral Virtues for Artificial Intelligence: Care and the Algorithms that Guide Our Lives, by Jaco J. Hamman Religious Trauma: Queer Stories in Estrangement and Return, by Brooke Petersen Tilling Sacred Ground: Interiority, Black Women, ad Religious Experience, by Phillis I. Sheppard Christianity, LGBTQ Suicide, and the Souls of Queer Folk, by Cody J. Sanders Warriors Between Worlds: Moral Injury and Identities in Crisis, by Zachary Moon

Emerging as Affirmative Pastoral Caregivers Beyond Gender Binaries Gender Creative Promise

Craig A. Rubano

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 9781666934014 (cloth) ISBN 9781666934021 (ebook) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Illustrations

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PART I: A PLACE ON EARTH: INTRODUCING LGBTQ+ HETEROGENEITY 1 1 Getting Started

3

2 LGBTQ+: Terminologies and Histories PART II: TRANSGENDER SURVEY, COMPONENTS OF GENDER, AND KNOWING THE “TRUE GENDER SELF”

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3 The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS) Report

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4 Exploring Four Components of Gender: The Genderbread Person Redux

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5 “Where Do the Mermaids Stand?”

61

PART III: STRATEGIES OF RESILIENCE: OPENING DOORS TO A GENDER-AFFIRMATIVE PASTORAL THEOLOGY 77 6 Gender Creative Resilience

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7 Psychology of Religion: Ally to Gender-Affirmative Pastoral Theology

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8 Beyond Empathy in Pastoral Theology

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115

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Contents

PART IV: “YET I SAY UNTO YOU”: GENDER CREATIVE BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION AS AFFIRMATIVE PASTORAL ACTION

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9 Toward a Gender Creative Lens on Biblical Interpretation

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10 Principles for Delivering Affirmative Pastoral Caregiving Beyond Gender Binaries

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11 Gender Creative Pastoral Caregiving: Skills of the Canaanite Woman

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Bibliography191 Index 209 About the Author

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List of Illustrations

Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6

Genderbread Person-Ness Model, Version 4 Anatomical Sex Continua Gender Identity Continua Gender Expression Continua Attraction Continua The Gender Unicorn

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43 46 47 49 52 53

Part I

A PLACE ON EARTH INTRODUCING LGBTQ+ HETEROGENEITY

Chapter 1

Getting Started

Early in Meredith Russo’s young adult novel If I Was Your Girl, high school senior Amanda Hardy accepts an invitation to join a classmate’s family for church at the local Southern Baptist congregation, but she is hesitant.1 She knows that the denomination is socially conservative, and she hasn’t stepped foot in a church since before her transition, “male” to “female.”2 Amanda had lived as “Andrew” until three years before, when the pressure of her gender identity’s colliding with her assigned birth gender became too much for her to bear: an overdose of pills landed her in the hospital, setting her on a course toward embodying, in the parlance of child developmental psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, who specializes in counseling and advocating for “gender creative” youth, her “true gender self.”3 This is a path that, for Amanda, has involved hormone therapies and surgical interventions. Now at a new school and living with her previously estranged father, Amanda is determined to live her life to the fullest, which had always included her faith. “Sometimes,” however, she thinks, “it didn’t feel like God walked with me any more. I remembered waking up in the hospital after my suicide attempt and feeling a hollow place in my heart where my faith had been. Transitioning had reawakened it a little, but it was hard to place too much hope in a God so many people said hated me.”4 Sitting in the pew, Amanda hears the King James translation of the beginning of 2 Corinthians, chapter 4: Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not; But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.5

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The preacher rails against the pressures of the world: We’re too concerned with the external, with our appearances, with what others think of us, when we should be concerned with the internal, with our hearts, and with what God thinks of us. Radical honesty and radical faith are the heart of Christianity. . . . The Apostles knew . . . so long as they were honest and true and walked with the Lord, then the Lord walked with them . . . A dishonest life is a life half-lived.6

Amanda feels torn, as she initially feels the pastor’s words to be an indictment of her: “Would my friendships and relationships always be dishonest if I was forever hiding my past?”7 If she isn’t “out” as a transgender young woman, is she only half alive . . . is her existence one of dishonesty?8 She experiences conflicting messages upon hearing what, on the surface, sounds to be an urging to live as closely as possible to one’s “true self,” while she knows, on a visceral level, that the congregation and this preacher would not be hospitable to the trajectory of Amanda’s life. Then, she centers her thoughts on a small wooden cross hanging above an abstract stained-glass window through which light streams and hears God’s words to her on that Sunday morning: I decided that the people who had said God didn’t love me, who said that I didn’t have a place on Earth—they were wrong. God wanted me to live, and this was the only way I knew how to survive, so this is what God wanted. This was what I wanted. I had chosen to live, and it seemed like, finally, I was doing just that.9

I include an extended portion of Amanda’s experience in a Southern Baptist church, first, because I am moved by the way that, despite the outward signs of denominational aspersion,10 she can hear God’s affirmation of her through the words of the preacher who, after all, is interested in certain kinds of authenticity, and Amanda longs to live a life of honesty and pride. Confronted with a biblical text and Sunday sermon not specifically addressed to her life, she is able to hear God’s words to her in ways that allow her to re-experience what she had known before her transition: what she had enjoyed as “God walking with me.” In chapter 10, I will seek to enhance all persons’ “walks with God” by hearing God’s affirmation of gender identities in the very biblical passages often used to exclude transgender individuals from Christian communions. A primary action that Christian ministers, pastoral theologians, teachers, and caregivers can take to welcome and affirm transgender and gender-nonconforming persons, and to enter with them into mutual relationships of accountability, is to apply a gender creative lens to biblical interpretation.

Getting Started

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Second, Amanda’s story is, unfortunately, a rare example in gender creative literature, both fictional11 and scholarly alike, depicting or describing a transgender person wrestling with their faith and finding in it an affirmation of embodying the creative achievement of their “true gender self.” The relative absence of positive faith journeys in the first-person accounts of gender-nonconforming persons, along with a lack of data on transgender persons’ use of religious bodies as affirmative resources, has led to a dearth of pastoral guides for ministers, teachers, and caregivers in addressing a population yearning for, as Amanda thinks to herself, “a place on Earth.” In chapters 5, 6, and 8, I seek to move beyond mere tolerance to an open, affirmative pastoral stance toward transgender and gender-nonconforming persons, a position informed by the recent emergence of gender-affirmative psychotherapeutic modalities. Third, I see emerging young adult literature such as If I Was Your Girl making explicit the gains from wider acceptance and affirmation not only for transgender individuals but also for all persons. In opening imaginations to the realities of transgender and gender-nonconforming lives, Amanda gives persons in her orbit and, in turn, readers, access to freer, less constraining boundaries of personal gender expression. Despite right-wing cultural warriors using transgender and gender-nonconforming lives as bait to incite a political base, not only is it vitally important for more and more gender creative stories to emerge for all ages in order that gender creative persons themselves might see their lives bravely unfolding, but all persons, regardless of gender identity, affectional or sexual orientation, or political party, need to attend to what the fictional character of Amanda makes clear: all draw closer to the “abundant life” promised by Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of John12 when invited to live into gender creative promise. Hearing gender creative life stories and including gender creative perspectives in interpretative strategies unlock that promise. As Vanessa Sheridan, one of the pioneers in describing a specifically Christian personal transgender faith journey, wrote in 2003, “Gender-variant persons are society’s mirrors, reflecting and often helping to precipitate change in the culture’s gender-based expectations and social mores. We are the pioneers who demonstrate and embody elements of what is possible for human beings as we journey to and then beyond the frontiers of traditional gendering.”13 The spiritual boon from religious affiliation to persons transgender and “cisgender”14 alike—to persons of all genders— will be taken up in chapter 7 to inform, in chapter 8, an affirmative field of pastoral theology beyond gender binaries. Finally, I see myself in Amanda’s fictional vignette in its portrait of a young person attempting to reconcile their identity with a scriptural witness that can be deployed in ways that constrict life, rather than open it. I hope my authorial position as a “gay”-identified15 man can illustrate my pastoral interest in this subject in an instrumental way, but without losing sight of the role my

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cisgender voice plays in this dialog, for it is imperative that transgender and gender-nonconforming voices be heard firsthand. Belonging to a culturally constituted “LGBTQ community,” however, has spurred my allied desire to extend to gender creative persons the power that a sexual orientationinformed lens on biblical interpretation has had for gay men and lesbians.

AN INSTRUMENTAL AUTHORIAL “I” FOR PASTORAL THEOLOGY I began a personal study of gender identity because of what I came to see as a dislocation between gender nonconformance and religious faith community. Deficits of knowledge have contributed to a lack of proactive welcome to transgender and gender-nonconforming persons in churches and seminaries. Young people in my ministerial care who were questioning their gender awakened me both to institutional and individual ignorance, including my own. Expanding my personal sense of gender wasn’t as easy as I would have hoped. Perhaps not unlike many men, and perhaps even more trenchantly in gay-identified men, I encountered an internal defensiveness, a lingering woundedness from being admonished for gender-coded “infractions” in my youth. I saw that there was work to be done in me to offer affirmative care to those more gender creative than I, and that this necessary caregiving work extended to congregations, to classrooms, and to the field of pastoral theology. At issue is a basic question of lived authenticity for individual congregants, religious communities, and academic programs in pastoral leadership and care. Is the unfettered living out of God’s creation in one another encouraged .  .  . or not? Only gradually did I come to realize I wanted to devote myself to a search for gender creative promise and to share my journey in the hope that other caregivers, ministers, teachers, and pastoral theologians might emerge alongside me on an affirmative path beyond gender binaries. The courage of gender creative persons who struggle to maintain their faith in the face of, often, hostile reactions from faith communities continues to inspire me to more courage in opening myself to genuine relationship with them and in discovering mutual affirmation from the encounter. In writing about an emerging authentic selfhood among a population to which I can only tangentially be said to belong, it is important to identify layers of privilege that may blind me to the experiences of gender creative persons. At the same time, I have acknowledged that my own experiences of nonnormative gender attraction propelled me into the kinds of interesting conversations with other LGBTQ+16 lives that undergird my writing. Engaging in this project has activated a certain liberation from the vestiges of gender-coded strictures I previously imposed on myself around sexual

Getting Started

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orientation, allowing me greater ease in living in my own body, greater comfort in embracing a wider range of affect in the pulpit, in the classroom, and in my caregiving. In exposing my own growing edges as a learner and ally, I hope to encourage others daunted by the complexities of gender creativity. Going forward, the voices and unique perspectives of gender creative persons themselves must be heard and considered more directly. Every voice is its own, nontransferable to the experience of others, yet each person’s experience has points of contact with the lives of others. Perhaps most important, by including my self—the “I” of this project—in my writing, I honor one task of the field of pastoral theology more generally, that of exploring the emergence of an “authorial I” in academic discourse, what pastoral theologian James E. Dittes called “the rediscovery of ‘I’ on [the] typewriter” and the emergence of a postmodern “identity crisis in which one needs to pay more constructive attention to how the investigator can be a part of [their] investigation in a way that makes its results both more meaningful and more reliable.”17 Dittes began by exploring the contours of his own lived reality in order to posit varying ways that the investigatory self might interact with the subject matter of its inquiry.

THE INSTRUMENTAL “I” AS INVESTIGATOR Dittes locates his own origins within a legacy of Calvinist Puritanism that would be uncomfortable with too much attention paid to oneself, warning playfully that “as the Puritans discovered periodically all too well, in such places as Salem and the Connecticut valley, bound passions once unleashed burst out in excesses that only seem to prove the wisdom of the binding.”18 But Dittes is also interested in the vitality and transparency that an instrumental authorial “I” would require. In an essay entitled “The Investigator as an Instrument of Investigation,” Dittes identifies four primary ways the author’s or investigator’s self-experience factors in the investigation, playfully using words beginning with the letter “I” to identify them: Incongruent, Inflated, Introductory, and Instrumental. What Dittes deems an “Incongruent” sense of the use of the “I” is most like the prudish heritage of his upbringing, one that would eschew altogether the inclusion of an author’s person during their investigation. This is a position Dittes is writing against. Here, the investigator vanishes into a nebulous and protected “we,” authoritative yet antiseptic. Dittes also warns against excessive preoccupations with self as an “Inflated” mode that would, in the service of “full-disclosure,” blur the distinction between investigator and subject, resulting in the substitution for, rather than supplementation of, the immediate experience of the investigator with that of the subject.19 Here, the very

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thing Reformed propriety would seem to guard against would ensue, like a dinner guest who monopolizes the evening’s conversation with tales of their own adventures but with no regard to the stories of others around the table. Dittes likewise eschews a modality of “I” incursions that in merely “Introductory” ways add unneeded local color, doing nothing to illustrate the subject of inquiry. Here, the investigator’s “I” is implemented only cursorily, in a perfunctory way, with no connection drawn between authorial contours and the nuances of the investigatory target. Dittes advocates instead for an “Instrumental” mode, “a way of correcting the puritan super-rational bias and of admitting more of the investigator’s legitimate personal involvement into the explicit work of [their] investigation, without repudiating the conventional canons of ‘objective’ research.”20 In Dittes’s search for ways in which “the investigator can carefully use [their] personal involvements and reactions, not simply to repudiate or flout conventional scientific canons but in service to them,” I hear a call to pastoral theologians to “move beyond excessive restrictions and beyond protest against excessive restrictions .  .  . to accept the whole involvement of the investigator,”21 or at least those portions of one’s self in potential instrumental service of, and/or potentially working against, the investigation. The emergence of an Instrumental “I” in pastoral theological discourse would signal more to me than the importance of identifying the particularities of my own voice. Rather, as I have suggested, it will help in addressing the potential blind spots attendant to my own cultural realities as I write about transgender and gender-nonconforming persons from my position as a cisgender, gay-identified man. The easiest thing to do—to assume the neutrality of my own perspective—could inadvertently contribute to marginalizing other voices. Owning my nonnormative affectional orientation in print both contextualizes the idiosyncratic reality of my worldview and provides a gender-related entryway into my subject matter. My experiences with affectional orientation marginality give me at least partial imaginative access into lives that ultimately, of course, I cannot live myself. This is not to say that my writing here is, somehow, about me. Rather, I open outlines of my personal experience in service to learning about and strengthening the resilience of transgender persons, to entering relationships of mutual accountability and growth. The “I” is always ensconced in culture, in personal history, and in the various strategies by which one copes with systemic powers that stand in the way of vibrant personal development. I intend to use my selfhood as an instrument of the investigation at hand. This approach reminds me that I am a learner in this and in many things and that my access to expertise lies in allowing myself to be taught. Especially in chapters 9 and 10, I seek to align my gay-identified, cisgender, male self with

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scripture to “try on” a gender creative interpretative lens, surfacing principles for opening doors to gender-affirmative pastoral caregiving. As a man marginalizable for my sexual/affectional orientation, I enter this project aware that a liberative theology and biblical interpretative lens can be essential for a Christian identity lived out with integrity. But I am also aware that my social location has its own interpretative biases, and I seek to avoid “speaking for” a group to which I do not belong. Alongside the decided dearth of firsthand accounts of gender creative persons wrestling with their faith, pastoral theology has made only tentative steps toward addressing this subject, so I step into the breach knowing that my words are preliminary,22 to be followed and supplanted by an insider perspective, because it is important that the voices of persons marginalized for their gender identity be heard from directly. Nevertheless, my passion for the subject propels me forward, joining even the supposed “experts” in the field on a shared learning curve, as Diane Ehrensaft herself discloses at the beginning of her book, The Gender Creative Child: “The progression toward gender creativity and gender expansiveness is an evolving journey with infinite pathways where the expert becomes the student and the student becomes the teacher.”23 Importantly, I also want to destabilize the notion that gender identities and/ or affectional orientations define a person in ways that supersede all other variegated aspects of identity. Being “gay” is only one part of who I am, often not at the forefront of my daily life. Likewise, gender creativity is but one constellation of personal attributes informing transgender and gendernonconforming persons, who vary one from another in far more diverse ways than participation in gender variance might otherwise seem to identify them as members of a discrete group. Indeed, the self isn’t pin-downable but is ever in flux, developing in lived conversation with varied others by additions and subtractions—by paths taken and paths forsaken, paths available and paths inaccessible over time. This speaks with special clarity to the journey toward selfhood that many gender-nonconforming persons experience, with sometimes several identity moniker changes along the way. Some gender creative persons, for instance, experience an identity as one sex before shifting to identifying as another sex—in the process, they may also have moved from a “gay” identity to a “straight” one: Many transgender people make changes as they grow older. A person who would be defined . . . as a postoperative transsexual was quoted as follows: “I thought I was a homosexual at one time; then I got married and had a child so I figured I was a heterosexual; then because of crossdressing I thought I was a transvestite. Now (postoperatively) I see myself as bisexual.”24

Gender here is experienced as having an essential fluidity, with shifting self-identifying terms, alighting one place before transfiguring to another.

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These shifts can land the person in a developmental trajectory often very different from a “standard” model. Gender creative persons must come perforce to a more unified sense of self without benefit of cultural bulwarking afforded more often (but not always and not evenly) to cisgender persons. My project is to contribute to carving out safeguarded spaces in spiritual communities, environments particularly ripe for supporting the gradual unfolding of life cycles. As their leaders become aware of the particular needs of gender creative persons, congregations and classrooms can emerge as matrices of resilience-building.

GOING FORWARD Part I concludes with an introduction in chapter 2 to a gender creative population, whose nomenclature is as diverse and expansive as its membership. In Part II, chapter 3 introduces the daunting statistical odds that transgender and gender-nonconforming persons face in the United States today. Then, to embrace a wider understanding of an expansive gender landscape, in chapter 4, I discuss four broad cultural components relating to gender: sex, identity, expression, and attraction. In locating oneself on shared gender component continua, one discovers a close siblinghood to all persons, however gender creative their path. Finding cisgender alliance with transgender persons aids in confronting preconceptions about gender. Doing so allows a less defensive examination of theological proscriptions that seem to disallow embracing an affirmative religious stance toward gender creative persons. As Sheridan writes, specifically about children and adolescents beginning their journeys of gender discovery, “Sex- and gender-variant young people are hurting, and many of them are dying because we (adults, parents, friends, the church, society) aren’t doing anything to help them,”25 and, one might add, often actively harming them. Since the gender travails of children in churches where I have worked as a minister to youth have spurred my own need to understand what I have come to know as “gender creativity,” I focus in chapter 5 primarily on the work of Diane Ehrensaft, one of the leading advocates for child and youth genderaffirmative psychotherapy, and who coined the phrase “gender creativity” to describe persons in her care. Ehrensaft’s developmental model utilizes object relations psychology pioneered by British child psychologist Donald Woods Winnicott to delineate the creative interplay between a child’s “true” and “false” gender selves. Ehrensaft urges an alliance with children that can lead to what she describes as “gender health”: “the opportunity for children to live in the gender that feels most real and/or comfortable . . . [and] the ability for children to express gender without experiencing restriction, criticism, or

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ostracism.”26 Parts I and II serve as a unit to inform Parts III and IV, where I engage pastoral theology and biblical interpretation to bulwark the resilience strategies of transgender persons through affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries. In Part III, I begin in chapter 6 the work of pastoral theology in earnest by detailing common themes found by psychologist Anneliese A. Singh and her colleagues in an influential study of transgender resilience strategies.27 Each strategy will be illustrated by a diversity of gender creative voices taken from published ethnographic collections of interviews. In chapter 7, I then pair the identified resilience strategies with benefits from religious belonging and affiliation that emerge from the findings of psychology of religion, a field allied to that of pastoral theology, here specifically in the work of psychiatrist James L. Griffith. Griffith became interested in integrating the religious faith of his patients with their psychological healing, distinguishing between those aspects of religion that he sees as consistently enhancing his clients’ personal resilience from those functions of religion associated with group affiliation and exclusion.28 He explores how the psychic gifts of personal spirituality can assuage the pain derived from cultural marginalization. Parsing out what can be healing about religious affiliation from what can be hurtful allows religious belonging to bolster resilience needs. Both chapters 6 and 7 are in the service of chapter 8’s addressing pastoral theology as a field, historically concerned as it is with dialogue across difference and with approximations of empathic connection. Rather than attempting adequately to fathom the experience of the other exclusively through empathy, however, I suggest that pastoral theologians, ministers, teachers, and caregivers might best admit how little they know, how ill-equipped they are to understand the gender creative experience of another individual. The transgender and gender-nonconforming “community” is comprised of a vast variety of individuals, each person unique in the ways they summon courage and personal authenticity to achieve gender selfhood. Rather than assuming an ability to move into a true understanding or into an accurate “feeling what the other feels,” one should proceed by listening and believing what one is told while acknowledging the vulnerability and provisionality of selfdescription that characterizes everyone.29 By putting into play a humble moral imagination that begins with a desire to learn, caregivers might better be prepared to welcome and affirm as entrée to mutually enriching relationship. Through a “more than empathy” process, they can become more effective allies and provide better theologically supportive environments for gender creative thriving on the part of all persons. Using the Lukan parable of the importunate friend (Luke 11:5–8), I end the chapter by developing a metaphor for pastoral theology, that of “opening doors” to a newfound humility of

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curiosity and wonder, persistently working against the fear that can disallow courageous encounter. In Part IV, I move to bolster pastoral theological investigations of resilience and religious affiliation with scriptural warrant for gender creative pastoral caregiving. In chapter 9, I enlist theologian Robert E. Shore-Goss’s 1990s manifesto for a biblical interpretative lens that served gay and lesbian liberation30 to deploy a gender creative interpretive lens on those passages in the Bible often taken to suggest that the so-called gender transgression is a departure from God’s desires. In chapter 10, through a biblical survey of the appearances of “male and female” in scripture, I surface principles for being in relationships of affirmative care that undergird the transgender resilience strategies identified in chapter 6. Developing gender-affirming exegetical muscles for reading biblical texts may inform care of persons who lack access to spiritual nourishment from scripture. Although I write in the context of Christian ministry, many of my positive experiences of gender creative inclusion have happened in the context of Unitarian Universalist congregations, whose congregants include Christians and also Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, and earth-centered people of faith.31 Following in the footsteps of Jesus often requires stepping off a traditional path, to understand what it means to minister to persons seen as outcasts. Alliances among diverse persons of many faiths highlight the creative strength that religious affiliation offers. Alliances of learning and mutual accountability begin and continue with self-inventory. In chapter 11, I interweave the visit of the Canaanite woman to Jesus in Matthew 15:21–29 with Erhensaft’s developmental charge to the parents of gender creative children, modeling self-aware caregiving alliance. I extend the gender creative biblical interpretation developed in chapter 10 to a pericope outside the “canon” of scripture passages typically tied to gender identity proscription. The Canaanite woman models the persistent “knocking at the door” sometimes required for true dialogue, and Jesus himself becomes a model of gradual trial and error, of learning that leads to transformation. This concluding chapter emphasizes reflexivity, a necessary connecting theme throughout anyone’s emergence as an affirmative caregiver beyond gender binaries. In this book, I address five constellations of inquiry: (1) examining the historical emergence of a complex diversity among persons under the “transgender” umbrella, along with persons whose identities undermine the centrality of “sex” and “gender” in personal taxonomies; (2) understanding the components of gender more broadly and seeing in the emergence of gender-affirmative psychotherapies (spurred in large part by transitioning transgender children and adolescents who are changing the psychosocial developmental landscape) a template for affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries; (3)

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understanding common resilience strategies of transgender persons, harnessing assets of religious affiliation that bolster resilience and, in this, complexifying the field of pastoral theology so as to open doors to gender creative welcome, affirmation, and relationship; (4) surfacing principles for a liberative gender creative interpretative lens on texts traditionally used by Christians against gender creative persons, assisting Christian churches in finding “ears to hear” God’s word to gender creative persons bolstered by a principled biblical warrant;32 and (5) stressing that working toward gender creative promise begins with each caregiver’s wrestling with the contours of their own gender complexity. In sum, engaging emergent affirmative Christian pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries requires knowledge of gender creative lives and an awareness of one’s own social location, models for gender-affirmative welcome, a willingness to open doors for religious and academic learning, gender creative scriptural support, and personal awareness of one’s own gendered self. I seek to (re)introduce faith to what has been to this point largely a conversation about transgender concerns in the social sciences.33 In theory, gender creative persons can derive the same benefits from personal spirituality as cisgender persons, but the journeys of transgender and gendernonconforming persons in the face of cultural opprobrium undergirded by exclusionary biblical interpretation make the proactive affirmative role for ministers, teachers, pastoral theologians, and caregivers potentially life-transforming. My writing here is not ethnography, although some representative gender creative voices will be sourced along the way. My work points toward the interdisciplinary emergence of gender creative voices in many academic fields. I seek to connect pastoral theology and biblical interpretation with gender creative promise and affirmative caregiving beyond gender binaries. All can live more fully into perceived awareness of God’s purposes for individual lives with integrity when gender strictures are relaxed, defenses are lowered, and persons are allowed to pursue their “true gender selves,” finding a place on earth to “walk with God.” NOTES 1. Meredith Russo, If I Was Your Girl (London: Usborne Publishing, 2016). Carrie Doehring paved the way for pastoral theology to use vignettes from fictional work as “case studies” in academic writing (a practice now adopted by many) with her book on power differentials and sexual boundaries in pastoral ministry, Taking Care: Monitoring Power Dynamics and Relational Boundaries in Pastoral Care and Counseling (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), in which Doehring uses interrelationships between and among characters in the novels of such authors as John Updike, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Iris Murdoch to provide illustration of the ministerial dynamics she describes. The voices of transgender and gender-nonconforming

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persons themselves are emerging to tell their stories, and the young adult market has been particularly rich in its offerings; see, e.g., Brian Katcher, Almost Perfect (New York: Delacorte Press, 2009); Cris Beam, I am J (New York: Little, Brown, 2011); Ilike Merey, A and E 4ever (Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2011); Ivan E. Coyote, One in Every Crowd (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012); Rae Spoon, First Spring Grass Fire (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012); Ami Polonsky, Gracefully Grayson (New York: Hyperion, 2014); Arin Andrews, Some Assembly Required: The NotSo-Secret Life of a Transgender Teen (New York: Simon and Schuster BFYR, 2014); Alex Gino, George (New York: Scholastic, 2015); Donna Gephart, Lily and Dunkin (New York: Yearling, 2016); and Jeff Garvin, Symptoms of Being Human (New York: Balzer and Bray, 2016). 2. The quotation marks here indicate that what constitute “male” and “female” are culturally defined and malleable over time, as will be seen especially in chapters 4 and 10. “Transition” refers to the lived period when some transgender and gendernonconforming persons gradually make changes toward embodying their “true gender identities.” Transitions can proceed through social, legal, and medical realms, to which this writing would encourage adding an evolving personal spirituality. Transgender persons like Amanda can experience a falling away from religious connections and spiritual practices during their transition processes exactly when those sources of resilience could help them to persevere. 3. See Diane Ehrensaft, Gender Born, Gender Made: Raising Healthy Gendernonconforming Children (New York: The Experiment, 2011). As I will describe in chapter 2, Ehrensaft is the coiner of the term “gender creative” as an umbrella designation more encompassing even than “transgender,” although all terminology regarding gender is constantly and necessarily in flux. While terms will be fleshed out in the course of this writing, for now I understand Amanda as yearning for congruence between her “true” and lived gender identities. 4. Russo, Your Girl, 98 (emphasis added). 5. Russo, 96 (2 Cor. 4:1–2). 6. Russo, 97, 98. 7. Russo, 98. 8. As in sexual and affectional orientation identity disclosure decisions, “coming out” for a transgender person refers to the process of revealing to select portions of one’s world details of the journey, in the latter, away from solidly identifying with the sex assigned at one’s birth. While many transgender persons do not choose to transition to a sex other than that assigned them at birth, in the case of transsexual transgender persons (typically those having undergone often medical, hormonal, and/or surgical lasting changes from one binary gender status to “the other”), there emerges a quandary regarding whether, and in what ways, to disclose past history. Since transsexual persons’ gender expression and presentation are now aligned with their gender identity, their “transgender” status can be invisible to the outside world and, for many, the history of their transition isn’t a necessary disclosure for authentic living. Medical histories, regardless of transgender status, are not and should not be subject to mandatory declaration; some transgender persons, however, even those who do inhabit a different sex than the one assigned them at birth, feel it important

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to live declaratively as transgender, providing examples of integrity to others seeking gender confirmatory procedures (previously, and inaccurately, referred to as “sex change operations”), medical interventions meant to confirm the “true gender self” of a person in visible, physical ways. 9. Russo, Your Girl, 99 (first emphasis added). 10. The Southern Baptist Convention is particularly inhospitable to affirmation of transgender identity, vowing to “oppose steadfastly all efforts by any governing official or body to validate transgender persons as morally praiseworthy” and to “oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity.” Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), “On Transgender Identity (Baltimore, MD—2014),” 2014, SBC Resolutions, http://www​.sbc​.net​/resolutions​/2250​/on​-transgender​-identity. 11. Other than in reference to persons who have declared their correct pronouns, I will consistently use the singular “they” as a referring pronoun. Many gender fluid (a gender identity of in between, or encompassing and/or beyond, “male and female”) and agender (a gender identity of having none) persons use the singular “they” as their correct pronoun; others eschew the use of pronouns altogether, in favor of using their names. Affirmative caregiving beyond gender binaries must, at the very least, refer to persons in the way they ask to be addressed (understanding, however, that another person’s gender identity is only one’s business when it is made so by them). The singular “they” confounds a linguistic expectation of gendering in speech and writing, but I find using it to be a spiritual practice of humility; it helps expand both others’ and my own awareness of gender complexity, and it explicitly welcomes transgender and gender-nonconforming, as well as intersex (those born into anatomical matrices not consistent with traditional binary sex determinations), readers into my narrative. Another way that referring designations have adapted to a beyond-thebinary reality is the emergence of gender-neutral titles such as “Mx” (with no period) in lieu of “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Ms.” “Mx” is pronounced either “Muhks” or “Mix”; see “Wits University Adds Gender-Neutral Gender Designation ‘Mx’ to List of Options for Students,” News24, July 25, 2018, https://www​.news24​.com​/SouthAfrica​/News​ /wits​-university​-adds​-gender​-neutral​-designation​-mx​-to​-list​-of​-options​-for​-students​ -20180725. For nine additional non-gender-specific titular options, see “HSBC Adds New Transgender Titles including M and Misc,” BBC News, March 30, 2017, https:// www​.bbc​.com​/news​/business​-39444432. 12. “I came that they might have life and might have it in abundance” (John 10:10). David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 193. 13. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott and Vanessa Sheridan, Transgender Journeys (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003), 7; the authors split the chapters between them, but I quote exclusively from Sheridan’s portions throughout. 14. “Cis” is a Latin prefix for “on this side of.” “Cisgender,” then, serves as a description of non-transgender persons (“trans” is a Latin prefix meaning “on the other side of”) to indicate persons whose sex assigned at birth coincides with their lived gender identity. In explicitly acknowledging my cisgender status, I am put in touch with the privileges that automatically accrue to cisgender persons, thereby expanding my awareness of the cultural struggles of persons without such privileges.

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15. I will use my own history of reconciling what were more rigid sexual orientation categories in the 1990s with a Christian identity (also more circumscribed then in its seeming impregnability to self-described “gay” and “lesbian” persons) to guide an imaginative foray into biblical interpretation from a gender creative perspective. So, while using a label like “gay” to self-describe one’s affectional palette can appear, as will be seen, almost quaint in twenty-first-century identity terms, it informed my own coming to selfhood and my purposes here. 16. In the next chapter, I will discuss this widely used acronym to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender and/or queer persons, and beyond. 17. James E. Dittes, “The Investigator as an Instrument of Investigation: Some Exploratory Observations on the Complete Researcher,” in Encounter with Erikson: Historical Interpretation and Religious Biography, eds. Donald Capps, Walter H. Capps, and M. Gerald Bradford (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977), 350, 351. 18. Dittes, 349. 19. Dittes, 361. 20. Dittes, 364. 21. Dittes, 352. 22. Of note to date is a dissertation by Jason D. Hays exploring theological responses to gender and sexual orientation fluidities, “Ambiguous Embodiment: Constructing Poststructuralist Theologies of Gender and Sexual Fluidity” (PhD diss., Brite Divinity School, 2013). See also a dedicated volume, guest edited by Cody J. Sanders, on “LGBTQ Pastoral Counseling” of Sacred Spaces: The E-Journal of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors 8 (2016), https://cdn​.ymaws​.com​ /aapc​.site​-ym​.com​/resource​/resmgr​/files​/SacredSpaces​/Vol.​_8​.SacredSpaces​.2016​ .GLB​.pdf. 23. Diane Ehrensaft, The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes (New York: The Experiment, 2016), 10. 24. Quoted in Pat Conover, Transgender Good News (Silver Spring, MD: New Wineskins Press, 2002), 11. For psychologist Erik Erikson’s notion of a self-conscious selfhood accreted and “located” over time, what he coins a “composite self,” see Erik H. Erikson, “Theoretical Interlude,” in Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968). 25. Mollenkott and Sheridan, Transgender Journeys, 12. 26. Ehrensaft, Gender Creative Child, 16. 27. Anneliese A. Singh, Danica G. Hays, and Laurel S. Watson, “Strength in the Face of Adversity: Resilience Strategies of Transgender Individuals,” Journal of Counseling and Development 89, no. 1 (Winter 2011). 28. James L. Griffith, Religion that Heals, Religion that Harms: A Guide for Clinical Practice (New York: Guilford Press, 2010). 29. On the limitations of personal perspective in intercultural encounters, see Melinda A. McGarrah Sharp, Misunderstanding Stories: Toward a Postcolonial Pastoral Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013). 30. Robert E. Goss, Jesus ACTED UP: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993).

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31. Even in a religious movement at the leading edge of transgender welcome and inclusion, however, much work remains to be done. A 2018 survey of trans Unitarian Universalists (UUs) showed that only 44% of respondents “feel spiritually connected and nourished at their UU congregation—and only 15% feel strongly connected. Of trans UUs who have a UU minister, only about half (55%) feel comfortable seeking pastoral care from them, and of trans UUs who have a congregation, a majority (60%) feel responsible for educating the leaders and/or membership on trans identity or concerns.” TRUUsT (Transgender Religious professional UUs Together), “Experiences of Trans Unitarian Universalists: Report on the 2018 Survey of Trans UUs,” January, 2019, https://truust​.files​.wordpress​.com​/2019​/01​/trans​-uu​-experience​ -survey​-report​.pdf. 32. Having “ears to hear” (and variations), suggesting an openness to perhaps difficult spiritual truth, is urged upon his listeners by Jesus throughout the synoptic gospel accounts, beginning with Matthew 11:15. 33. See, e.g., Mildred L. Brown and Chloe Ann Rounsley, True Selves: Understanding Transsexualism—for Families, Friends, Coworkers, and Helping Professionals (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003; 1996); Arlene Istar Lev, Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and Their Families (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

Chapter 2

LGBTQ+ Terminologies and Histories

Cisgender persons may be tempted to pinpoint transgender experience in the perhaps self-evident way they experience their own gender, so the fuzziness of “transgender” as a population designation can be disconcerting to a cisgender learner. The widely seen and used LGBTQ acronym itself suffers from discontinuity of meaning, suggesting as it does that each initial stands for an identity group separable from the others. Yet “transgender”—the “T”—persons, of course, can, among other things, variously also identify as “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual,” or, indeed, as “straight” and, so, not separable or inherently separate from the “LGB” in the same way that the “L,” “G,” and “B” might represent distinct communities.1 I also want to accentuate the degree to which LGB persons, in owning sexual object choices that swerve from the norms of gender expression for their gender identity populations, have already strayed into territory seemingly the province of the “T.” As it is increasingly understood how everyone participates in the various continua of sex, gender identity, behavioral expression, and sexuality, it will be more easily imagined how the various initials within the acronym can meld into one another if pressed. Among those who fall under, or claim as their own, the umbrella category of “transgender” have been not only persons who take measures to live part-time, sometimes all the time, with a gender and/or sex other than that assigned at birth, but also crossdressers, drag performers, and many other persons who expand the parameters of what persons of their assigned sex can be or do, often within the “L,” “G,” and “B” categories. Some transgender persons undergo hormone therapies or surgical interventions to align their physical presentation with their core gender identity (this tends to be what comes to mind when headlines refer to a “transgender” person), yet many do not, and, of those who do, most do not choose to align their genitalia. There 19

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is no way to “know” what persons being referred to as “transgender” have done, or are planning to do, about altering their bodies, if anything—and it isn’t anyone else’s right to know. Generally, however, “transgender” persons “have been shown to have the chromosomal makeup expected based on their sex assigned at birth,”2 which has led to the attempt by many different strands of society (anatomists, physiologists, endocrinologists, and brain scientists) to find out why a person with biological markers habitually assigned to a discrete sex would feel a disconnect between that sex and their inner sense of gender identity. There are no conclusive studies indicating varying brain structure or function between transgender persons and the rest of the population, nor is there any discernible correlation of a transgender person’s brain with “typical” brains of persons sharing their identified sex. Further, “men’s and women’s brains are virtually identical and . . . there is greater variability within brains of one gender than between those of men and women.”3 Science would appear to offer one of the few reliable means of seeing beyond cultural distortion if one were fearless about rooting out bias. Unfortunately, as Rebecca Jordan-Young details in her canvassing of “scientific” studies of “sex differences,” much of the evidence marshaled to prop up the idea that there are “male” and “female” ways of doing things—male and female brains—is a pastiche of just such cultural bias: “The reliance on cognitive schemas about gender to label behavior not only affects how we perceive people and their specific actions, it loops back to reinforce belief of fundamental gender differences.”4 Notions of what are the natural outcomes of so-called “male” or “female” brains become the looked-for parameters of studies purportedly searching for biological sex differences. The jury is out regarding the “causes” for trans-identification—among scientists and even among transgender persons themselves: While some in trans communities believe that transness is biological and the foundation of their true selves, others feel that they have come to their trans identity out of an ongoing exploration of gender and that their understandings of themselves have been influenced by culture and gender norms.5

In fact, more and more persons seem to be locating their gender identities in an essential fluidity, outside of, or in between, binary sex and gender categories as previously conceptualized in the popular imagination; such persons often refer to themselves broadly as “nonbinary” or “gender fluid.” A paper in Pediatrics that drew its data from a 2016 Minnesota Student Survey reports that almost 3% of the nearly 81,000 teenagers canvased self-reported their gender as falling under an expanded category of “transgender and gender nonconforming,”6 whereas a study one year earlier from UCLA had estimated only 0.7% of teens identifying as the less fluid designation of “transgender.”7

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Anecdotally at least, and perhaps the result of internet connectivity leading to marginalized persons achieving at least online group cohesion, I have seen increased diversity of gender expression among young persons of all gender identities in my care as a minister, teacher, and caregiver. Among “nonbinary” identified persons are those who are opting out of gender altogether—“agender” identified; as well as those who are claiming both—“bigender” identified; or those claiming all genders—“pangender” or “polygender” identified individuals. The result can be a sequential, sporadic, or even an event-by-event shift in gender expression or presentation. It is not uncommon in congregations where I have worked for a single individual to have more than one nametag, at least for a time, to accommodate the oscillating nature of their palette of gender identification. Some nonbinary persons specifically reject the “transgender” umbrella altogether, seeing it as rooted in a prescribed moving from one to another predetermined category. Others identify as “genderqueer,” allying their beyond-the-binary gender identification with the queer movement that emerged in the 1990s, “developed by theorists who questioned both the universality of ‘women’ as a category and ‘race’ categories as collective descriptions of many diverse cultures’ experiences. Queer theory did not arrive as the next wave of gay and lesbian activism or feminism; instead, these movements coexisted and reacted to one another’s ideas.”8 Soon, the queer movement began to attach itself to all ideologies that would undermine the cultural hegemonic powers required to prop up identity constants. As with all identity monikers that gain political traction, “queer” itself has become an identity that is subject to the deconstructive impulses that dismantled more binary concepts, but “queer theorists typically agree that identity politics are flawed .  .  . because they don’t consider a ‘self’ something static or even necessarily real.”9 As a result, Queer is broadly defined as anything other than heteronormative. In a more specific way, queer is used as a gender and/or sexual identity suggestive of such metaphors as crossing, blurring, turning upside-down, and/or contrary to the dominant binary constructions of gender and sexuality. In other words, it is an identity that disrupts binary categories.10

Because lesbian, gay, and bisexual population designations can be based in a binary world of “same” and “opposite” sex attraction (and there can be strong resistance in these populations to wearing a label that deconstructs these categories or the cultural histories developed by its members), queer-identified persons often feel more comfortable with the addition of a “Q” to the LGBT acronym, a practice I will follow, that is, LGBTQ. It must be acknowledged that the “T” and the “Q” have often been tacked onto the “LGB” in organizational programming, without subject matter additions or sometimes even language that specifically addresses gender identity

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and expression concerns. Many so-called “LGBTQ welcoming initiatives” in congregations and academies were designed for receiving persons marginalized for their affectional and sexual orientations, not for their gender identities and expressions. It is also certainly true that much of the opprobrium doled out to lesbians, gay men, and bisexual persons is based in large part upon the idea that they violate gendered norms of attraction: “some researchers in gender and sexuality studies believe that a significant portion of homophobia is predicated upon discomfort with gender nonconformity rather than with differing sexuality.”11 The LGBTQ acronym, then, perhaps can be seen as designating populations that share an experience of cultural vitriol rather than any uniform coherence among those who are assigned to, or who claim membership under, its aegis, and it is important to note the internal contradictions and debates that arise in the face of the acronymic positing of a single community. And yet, many additional letters have been and continue to be proposed for the growing right end of the acronym as persons find comfort, alliance, and dignity in seeing themselves being named and acknowledged.12 To be intentionally inclusive and embracing even of those who may specifically not, nor want to, identify with letters that may feel constricting, I will follow a practice of adding a “plus sign” at the end, that is, LGBTQ+, so as proactively to be embracing of all who experience marginalization as a result of their gender identities and/or affectional/sexual orientations. The plus sign need not be officially “defined,” which is part of the point.13 TRANSGENDER EMERGENCE From its beginnings, “transgender” as an appellation reflected the divisions and prejudices among its users. Authorship of the term “transgender,” or, in its origins, “transgenderist,” is often ascribed to Virginia Prince, who began her activism as a cross-dressing heterosexual man before living full-time as a woman beginning in 1968.14 Following the heavily publicized transsexual transition of Christine Jorgensen in 1952,15 Prince coined the term “transgenderist” to “relabel” the heterosexual cross-dressing men who comprised Prince’s community in order to distinguish themselves from those persons who pursued medical and surgical intervention to assist their transitioning to a sex other than that assigned at birth. So, “transgender,” a term that today is associated in persons’ minds perhaps primarily with medical sex transition, was originally meant to draw a conceptual line away from that population. Historically, “transgender” has often not been the terminology of choice for those whom it would seem most adequate to fit. David Valentine wrote an ethnography of the term “transgender,” a study that emerged from his own work as an HIV advocate for largely African

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American and Latinx16 populations in New York City in the late 1990s. He writes that “the category transgender has come to be understood as a collective category of identity which incorporates a diverse array of male- and female-bodied gender variant people who had previously been understood as distinct kinds of persons, including self-identified transexuals and transvestites,”17 but also people of color born male, living as feminine, but who variously identify as “girls, sometimes as fem queens, every now and then as women, but also very often as gay.”18 Valentine demonstrates in his study the degree to which the distinctions made in academic social theory between sex (body), gender (social culture), and sexuality (attraction) are, themselves, often socially located in predominantly white, learned discourse, and both unavailable to, and inadequate for, populations of color with demographically specific ways of understanding gender’s valences with sexual/affectional orientations. Funding that underwrote the safer sex education and medical treatment Valentine and his colleagues were providing in the field was specifically targeted to the “transgender community.” However, due to systemic racism and classism in the United States, poverty among gender-variant persons disproportionately affects people of color, so the “transgender” persons most in need of the monies, it turned out, were not in the habit of referring to themselves with that term.19 There was often no taxonomical difference made by members of these populations between their “sexual orientation” and their “gendered” identities. As a result, the HIV prevention and treatment materials, because of their attendant advertisement and literature targeting “transgender” urban populations, could not easily be delivered by Valentine’s team because of the self-identificatory disconnect in the populations with the most need. In the urban populations of color Valentine sought to assist, gender fluidities fell under a self-referential moniker of “gay,” a term reserved in academic discourse for considerations of “sexual orientation” and distinguished from “gender.” The slippery area between cultural determinations of orientation and gender was, however, nothing new. Until “the early 1970s, homosexuality was popularly imagined as a gendered inversion, and those who are understood as transgender today were frequently classified as part of a ‘gay community.’”20 The recent history of separating out sexual object choice from gender-coded behavior is a politically motivated civil rights discourse that has intersected with religious bodies to advance the fortunes of “gay” persons, whose sexual object choice has been increasingly seen as “not chosen” and therefore “God-created,” especially if “gay men,” “lesbians,” and “bisexual” persons carefully self patrol behavioral modalities associated with normative gender expression so that their lives largely mimic “straight” culture (“We are just like you except for the sex of our love interests”). As David Valentine discovered, “these

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categories do not simply describe discrete histories but rather are productive of the very phenomena they seem to describe.”21 But as gender creative persons increasingly inhabit bodies with gender conceived in novel ways and/or disavow gendered bodies altogether, a view that “sexuality” and “gender” are separable things—or “sex” and “gender,” for that matter—will continue to be disrupted. Terms can become dislocated from their original referents, even shifting to designate things quite contrary to their original purposes without anyone necessarily intending to accomplish such definitional migration. That gender might encompass more than sex and gender identity expression and extend to attraction (or that “attraction” includes gender) unsettles the idea that sexual orientation is categorically isolatable from gender. Further, the idea that gender identities and affectional/sexual orientations can shift and/or change flies in the face of the essentialist understandings that “have also dominated the theological arguments of .  .  . inclusion and affirming movements within Christian congregations, arguing that sexual orientation is immutable, unchangeable, not a choice, and persons are ‘born this way.’”22 Fluidities and variability pose challenges to the way the public has been educated to understand that persons are once and for all a “certain way,” as well as to the liberation movements advocating legal protections for static, inborn modalities of sex, gender, and sexuality presentation. A baseline principle of gender-affirmative psychotherapy (and a template for genderaffirmative pastoral theology and caregiving beyond gender binaries) is that whether or not a person experiences their gender identity (and/or sexual or affectional orientation, for that matter) to be a choice or something about which they have no choice, the validity of any person’s narrative should not be in question. Without arguing for indefeasible self-narration, everyone certainly should be granted more expertise on their own story than others, even while acknowledging that life stories can, and often do, change over time.

GENDER CREATIVITY The heterogeneity of the gender-variant population can be vertiginous, and the shifts in the meanings of self-descriptive terms over a very short period of time can disabuse cisgender persons from even attempting to address issues of inclusion, lest they say the wrong thing and inadvertently behave in ways that the very persons they desire to include and welcome can experience as microaggressions.23 What one thinks are the most current terms of address can very easily be received as hostile or hopelessly out-of-date, especially by persons other than those from whom one learned the terms in the first place. It can be intimidating for a white, male-identified, gayidentified writer like me to “discover” that the population for which I am

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drawn to providing care is an amorphously defined collection of persons with shifting categories of identity. Fear of saying the “wrong” thing, using the “wrong” language, and/or engaging the “wrong” cultural narrative is real. Further, my struggles to define (or even understand) my own sexual orientation are complicated in what can be uncomfortable ways by bringing gender identity to the table. But it isn’t my job, because it isn’t in my ability, to understand the experience, or even the oppression, of another in any comprehensive way. It is, however, important to have some idea of the complexities involved in the lives of those whose human particularities can be singularly ignored by churches or in pastoral care courses, or whose own self-identifications, like Valentine’s target audience, fly under the radar of culturally sanctioned population markers. The complexities of sex, gender identity, behavioral expression, and sexuality are overwhelming—there is no standard way to “be gay,” much less to “be transgender.” Even concerned advocates will make mistakes on the way to a more inclusive communion. I have found in doing this research that my own identity contours have shifted in ways that surprise, embolden, discomfit, and liberate me. Staying in relationship as a learner is paramount. And being in relationships of accountability with persons more at the center of gender creative striving is an important commitment—congregational and student life are environments suitable for such covenanted community. Given the “bedrock” of variability in gender identifications, I adopt the expression “gender creative.” As noted, this terminology emerges from the work of psychologist Diane Ehrensaft with transgender and gendernonconforming children and their parents. It has a wide inclusivity that can encompass the broad swath of gender in all its facets. Ehrensaft’s work is centered on the fact that there is something new under the sun when it comes to lived gender identity, as she bluntly declares: “It’s a newfangled notion for chemical interventions to be administered in childhood to alter the course of a child’s physical gender development.”24 Until relatively recently, negotiating gender creativity was devoted to contending with the often irreversible secondary sex characteristics that puberty had brought to a transgender-identified individual. Now, a child with gender-affirming care can experience solely the puberty that corresponds to that child’s core gender identity. Of course, this intervention is subject to various sectors of societal approval, beginning with the child’s own parents, but this is a dynamic new era in terms of options for gender-variant young persons. Despite the cultural firebomb that gender creative medical care can be, used as it is to incite political bases, it is nevertheless true, as Edgardo Menvielle writes in the foreword to Ehrensaft’s field-defining Gender Born, Gender Made: Raising Healthy Gender-nonconforming Children, that “A person’s gender is no more than and no less than a creative individual achievement.”25

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The expansiveness of gender creativity emerging in child development is leading the way for persons of all ages to be able publicly to claim their gender achievement. This can result in a more visible transgender and gender-nonconforming presence in congregations and seminaries. This forward momentum, however, is not moving quickly enough for many. In a New York Times opinion piece, Jennifer Finney Boylan expresses the swelling need and frustration among gender creative persons: How much longer must transgender people continue to participate in public conversations about whether or not we know our own souls? How many clever “think pieces” must we endure in which our humanity is held up for debate, as if the question of our own selfhood is part of an argument which even now we might win or lose? What will it take for people on the right—and yes, some on the left as well—to understand that we are here, that we have been part of humanity for centuries and that what we want above all is to be left alone, just like anyone else, so that we may live our lives according to the dictates of our own hearts?26

It is time to attend to the voices of transgender and gender-nonconforming persons. I seek here to explore a biblical and pastoral theological vision for caregivers, ministers, and teachers emerging to provide safe and loving places of learning, sanctuary, and pastoral presence for, and with, gender creative persons. PART ONE CODA Ultimately, I seek to minister pastorally and provide caregiving alongside persons like Amanda, the character in If I Was Your Girl whose story began Part I. Early in the novel, as she leaves a party in the new school she is attending for her senior year, reeling from taunting by fellow classmates, Amanda looks up into the night sky at the Milky Way: I wished I could walk up into the sky and live on some distant planet, far away from the things I was afraid of. I wondered if joy could ever be felt by itself without being tainted with fear and confusion, or if some level of misery was a universal constant, like the speed of light. . . . Pain radiated through my body. I didn’t mind it; pain reminded me I was alive. For years I had been so numb, desperate to feel anything at all.27

Instead of equipping “othered” persons with ways to dodge the “theological or doctrinal ball,” what would happen if congregations and seminaries just stopped “playing dodge ball?” Maybe “smear the queer” should just be declared “out of (Christian) order.” I envision congregations and seminaries

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as environments where persons are known, where they are allowed to introduce themselves to the larger Body, where their stories are sought after to approximate a greater whole, and where the palpable presence of God is experienced anew as gender creative promise. There, young women like Amanda could separate joy from fear and begin to experience God’s love through the love shown to her by God’s people. One way forward is to find oneself in the gender matrices. It is to this project I turn in Part II, finding in the therapeutic strategies espoused by Diane Ehrensaft and others a useful foundation for emerging as affirmative pastoral caregivers beyond gender binaries.

NOTES 1. Even within the “L,” “G,” and “B,” however, there are movements internally to diversify. In the case of the “bisexual” population in particular, the “B” has been expanded by some to “BMNOPPQ,” which would stand for “Bisexual, Multisexual, No label, Omnisexual, Pansexual, Polysexual, and ‘experientially bisexual folks who primarily identify as Queer.’” Julia Serano, “Bisexuality and Binaries Revisited,” in Julia Serano, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2013), 83; see also Serrano’s Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism (Oakland, CA: Switch Hitter Press, 2016). 2. Laura Erickson-Schroth and Laura A. Jacobs, “You’re in the Wrong Bathroom!” And 20 Other Myths and Misconceptions about Transgender and GenderNonconforming People (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 29. 3. Erickson-Schroth and Jacobs, Wrong Bathroom, 29–30 (emphasis added). 4. Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 251; see also Deborah Rudacille, The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights (New York: Anchor Books, 2006) and Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). For another view, less critical of the idea of sex differences in brains, see Melissa Hines, Brain Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 5. Erickson-Schroth and Jacobs, Wrong Bathroom, 30. 6. G. Nicole Rider et al., “Health and Care Utilization of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Youth: A Population-Based Study,” Pediatrics 141, no. 3 (March 2018), https://doi​.org​/10​.1542​/peds​.2017​-1683. 7. Mercedes Leguizamon and Brandon Griggs, “More US Teens Are Rejecting ‘Boy’ or ‘Girl’ Gender Identities, a Study Finds,” the website of CNN; CNN online, February 2, 2018, https://www​.cnn​.com​/2018​/02​/06​/health​/teens​-gender​-nonconforming​-study​-trnd​/index​.html. 8. Jaimee Garbacik, Gender and Sexuality for Beginners (Danbury, CT: For Beginners Books, 2013), 147. For accounts and descriptions of the intersections of gay and lesbian, feminist, racial, and gender politics in various iterations of queer

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theory, see Riki Wilchins, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer (Bronx, NY: Magnus Books, 2014; Alyson Books, 2004). 9. Garbacik, Gender and Sexuality, 149. 10. Jason D. Hays, “Pastoral Counseling and Queer Identities,” in Understanding Pastoral Counseling, eds. Elizabeth A. Maynard and Jill L. Snodgrass (New York: Springer Publishing, 2015), 329. 11. Erickson-Schroth and Jacobs, Wrong Bathroom, 35. 12. The acronym varies in its lettering, and even “LGBTQ” is sometimes not seen as being inclusive of various strands of who can be considered part of this gender and affectional/sexual orientational “community.” As a result, various additional letters are regularly added, extending nuanced identities into the expanding compound population designation. Persons who are in varying stages of finding their place among the acronym’s letters can see themselves represented by the “Q,” although many advocate for the inclusion of a second “Q” for those Questioning their gender identities and/ or affectional orientations (see Liz Owen, “About the Q,” PFLAG​.org​, https://www​ .pflag​.org​/resource​/about​-the-q) and/or a “C” for those perhaps not yet fully questioning but Curious. Intersex individuals, whose at-birth physiological and/or genetic makeup does not fall into one of two binary sex options, represent a population that is of various minds in terms of being allied with the groups represented by the various letters in the LGBTQ acronym because the others aren’t stigmatized over anatomical variances to culturally understood sex determinations; sometimes, however, an “I” is added to include Intersex persons (see Katy Steinmetz, “This Is What Intersex Means,” the website of Time; Time online, November 21, 2014, http://time​.com​ /3599950​/intersex​-meaning/). Asexual persons, sometimes self-described as “ace,” those who experience no attraction as their orientation, advocate for the inclusion of an “A” (see the work of The Asexual Visibility and Education Network, https:// www​.asexuality​.org/), though “asexuality” is itself a spectrum, with the identificatory ground between asexuality and sexuality a “graysexuality” zone—or greysexuality outside of the United States (see Bri Griffith, “Everything You Need to Know about Graysexuality and Asexuality: Navigating the Differences between Sex, Love, Attraction and Orientation,” StudyBreaks, October 20, 2016, https://studybreaks​.com​ /culture​/everything​-you​-need​-to​-know​-about​-asexuality​-and​-graysexuality/)—where self-described “gray-A” persons, under certain circumstances, might experience sexual attraction (self-described “demisexual” persons, for instance, experience sexual attraction only after becoming emotionally connected). Agender individuals, those whose gender identity is having no gender designation (see Vera Papisova, “What It Means to Identify as Agender,” the website of Teen Vogue; Teen Vogue online, January 20, 2016, https://www​.teenvogue​.com​/story​/what​-is​-agender) also can desire an acronymic “A”—sometimes “asexual” and “agender” designations “share” an “A,” sometimes not. In addition, some straight persons seek to be included in the acronym as Allies, which can result in an additional “A” being added to the one or two already in the list; sometimes, “SA,” for Straight Allies, is preferred, and/or an “F” for Friends and Family. For those whose attractions extend to all genders, above and beyond the binary options expressed in the “B,” a “P” for Pansexual or Polysexual persons has been suggested as an addition (see Mary Bowerman, “Pansexual: Where Does

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It Fall on the LGBTQ Spectrum?,” the website of USA Today; USA Today online, October 14, 2016, https://www​.usatoday​.com​/story​/news​/nation​-now​/2016​/10​/14​/ where​-does​-pansexuality​-fall​-lgbtq​-spectrum​/92052244/). For Native American and/ or First Nations persons whose gender identities blur the binary, a “2” (or “2S”) has been seen among the letters of the acronym to stand for “Two-Spirit” (see Lumen Learning, “Two-Spirit,” in Lumen Learning, Cultural Anthropology, https://courses​ .lumenlearning​.com​/cul​tura​lant​hropology​/chapter​/two​-spirit/), although issues of cultural appropriation can come into play when non-Native peoples employ the term (see Beja, “A Letter to White People Using the Term ‘Two Spirit,’” the website of the White Noise Collective, May 18, 2015, https://www​.conspireforchange​.org/​?p​ =2283). Perhaps, the latest would-be entry to the acronym is a “K” to represent those persons whose sexual fantasies fall under the designation of Kink, often including BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, and Sadomasochism) practices; this is especially controversial because of the perceived lack of legal or structural discrimination toward those with perhaps more outré sexual repertoires (see Bradford Richardson, “K Is for ‘Kink’: Some Gay-rights Activists Push to Add Letter to Expanding LGBTQ Acronym,” the website of the Washington Post; Washington Post online, February 1, 2018, https://www​.washingtontimes​.com​/news​/2018​/feb​/1​/k​-kink​-new​-letter​-added​ -gay​-rights​-activists​-lgbtq/). 13. See Anjali Sareen Nowakowski, “What Does the + in LGBTQ+ Stand For?” Elite Daily, June 8, 2017, https://www​.elitedaily​.com​/life​/culture​/what​-is​-plus​-in​ -lgbtq​/1986910. 14. Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2017; 2008), 64. For a more academic take on the emergence of a transgender movement, see Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 15. Jorgensen, an American G.I., became the first widely known person to successfully undergo gender confirmation surgery, a procedure she had in Denmark beginning in 1951; see Christine Jorgensen, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). 16. “Latinx” is a term that moves a designation of Latin American heritage away from the gender neutral/masculine “o” in Spanish and Portuguese, and away from the either/or binary of “o” or ”a” as “Latin-” suffixes. Latinx is pronounced “La-teen-ex” or “La-teen-ex” (see Tanisha Love Ramirez and Zeba Blay, “Why People Are Using the Term ‘Latinx,’” Huffington Post, October 17, 2017; July 5, 2016, https://www​.huffingtonpost​.com​/entry​/why​-people​-are​-using​-the​-term​-latinx​ _us​_577​5332​8e4b​0cc0​fa136a159). There is, it should be no surprise, some controversy over using an “x,” a letter relatively nonindigenous to the languages of the communities “Latinx” would brand (see Gilbert Guerra and Gilbert Orbea, “The Argument against the Use of the Term ‘Latinx,’” the website of The Phoenix; The Phoenix online, November 19, 2015, https://swarthmorephoenix​.com​/2015​/11​/19​ /the​-argument​-against​-the​-use​-of​-the​-term​-latinx/). Many Latin Americans prefer a label that is arguably more ethnically apposite, such as “Latin@,” with the “at sign” used to symbolize a binary composite of “o” and “a,” but its critics point out

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that it still partakes of the binary from which “Latinx” would attempt to escape. Latin@ is pronounced either “La-teen-oh-ah” or “La-teen-ah-oh,” depending often on the generation of Latin@ user (the general movement being from the former to the latter pronunciation). Others are moving to substituting a more gender-neutral “e” to the end of the label—“Latine” (pronounced “La-teen-eh”), pointing toward the increased use of the “e” ending for gender-neutral adjectival formulations in the Spanish language. Some Spanish speakers “still use the written ‘-x,’ but rather than pronounce it as ‘latin-ex’ /latineks/, they use ‘lah-ti-ness’ /latines/.” Andrea Merodeadora, “Latino, Latinx, Latine: The Grammatical Gender Neutral in Spanish,” Medium, August 7, 2017, https://medium​.com/​@puentera​/latino​-latinx​-latine​ -a3b19e0dbc1c. 17. David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 4 (second emphasis added). The word “transexual” can also (and most frequently) be spelled “transsexual,” with a double “s.” The term generally refers to persons who transition in physically transformational ways from “one sex” to “the other.” Until recently, a person was required to receive a psychiatric diagnosis—historically, “transsexualism”—to secure access to medical and surgical sex confirmatory technologies; this stigmatizing psychiatric labeling gave an institutional connotation to the word “transsexual.” As a result, one trend has been away from using the word “transsexual” at all (in ways analogous to the eschewing of using “homosexual” as a designating term). Some, however, continue to use the word as a self-definition, and some of them, in turn, have intentionally dropped an “s” from the double-“ss”ed spelling (i.e., “transexual”) in order to reclaim the word from its unsettling history, Valentine intentionally spells the word with one “s” to honor the “usage of activist informants who employed this spelling to resist the pathologizing implications of the medicalized two ‘s’ ‘transsexual.’ However, [he makes] no claims to the value of either spelling” (25). Jackson Wright Shultz also has deliberately chosen to use a one “s” spelling, claiming that “the removal of the second s pulls the term away from the medical and Latin connotation of ‘crossing’ sex and returns it to the hands of trans folk who might not wish to medically or surgically transition but who still identify as transexual.” Jackson Wright Shultz, Trans/Portraits: Voices from Transgender Communities (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), xi. 18. Valentine, Imagining Transgender, 3. 19. For a description of the ways that the “transgender movement” has failed proportionately to represent the interests of Native persons and people of color, see b. binaohan, Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101 (Toronto: Biyuti Publishing, 2014); on this count in particular, binaohan critiques a widely-read introductory volume on transgender life: Nicholas M. Teich, Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 20. Valentine, Imagining Transgender, 15. 21. Valentine, Imagining Transgender, 30. 22. Hays, “Pastoral Counseling,” 335. 23. Diane Ehrensaft defines “microaggressions” as “not the dramatic violent and sometimes fatal atrocities waged against minority groups, but the everyday oversights, innuendos, slights, disrespectful comments, or actions that a person might

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endure, based on another’s lack of understanding, antipathy, or fear of difference.” Ehrensaft, Gender Creative Child, 131. 24. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 140. 25. Edgardo Menvielle, foreword to Gender Born, Gender Made: Raising Healthy Gender-nonconforming Children, by Diane Ehrensaft (New York: The Experiment, 2011), xi (emphasis added). 26. Jennifer Finney Boylan, “It’s Not a Disaster Movie. It’s Reality,” the website of the New York Times, the New York Times online, February 27, 2018, https://www​ .nytimes​.com​/2018​/02​/27​/opinion​/transgender​-rights​.html. 27. Russo, Your Girl, 73, 78 (emphasis added).

Part II

TRANSGENDER SURVEY, COMPONENTS OF GENDER, AND KNOWING THE “TRUE GENDER SELF”

Chapter 3

The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS) Report

In Part I, I explored a way of thinking about the diverse collection of persons falling, either by self-identification or various methods of societal classification, under the umbrella designation “transgender.” I discussed the importance in culturally sensitive writing of disclosing the authorial “I,” seeking, in the words of pastoral theologian James Dittes, to use my own location in an “instrumental” way for caregiving ministry with gender creative persons. In doing so, I acknowledged the extent to which my “expertise” regarding gender creative expansiveness depends on accepting my status as a learner. My identification as a gay man and, therefore, as part of the LGBTQ+ designated population, may in fact present more challenges than natural alliances, given gender “infractions” in the histories of persons with marginalized sexual and affectional orientations. Whatever “transgender” is, it exists as a taxonomic term associated with gender. Part II delves into definitions of gender, parsing its elements of anatomy, identity, expression, and attraction, further complexifying a population that can seem inaccessible to an “outsider.” In fleshing out the various continua associated with gender, I hope that readers will find places of contact where they can intuit some of the aspersion experienced by those who do not identify as cisgender or straight. Seen in its complexities, gender is a category that draws all in on multiple levels. In the face of cultural gender policing, often self-imposed, obtaining a better understanding of the various permutations of lived gender realities gives all persons room to grow, and increased freedom to exist undeterred in perceived gender “border crossings.” Seeing the arbitrary lines of gender borders and discovering the various ways one has already “crossed” those permeable boundaries provide more freedom to loosen the reins on one’s own gender conceptualizations and presentation. Approximations toward gender expansiveness on the part of all siblings in 35

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humanity can open spaces of possibility for the safety and affirmation of gender creative persons. Gender fluidity on the part of some can be experienced as a marker of increased freedom for all. I first look at some of the daunting cultural realities confronting transgender and gender-nonconforming persons in the United States. I next move to a model for understanding gender popularized by stand-up comic and activist Sam Killermann. Then, I introduce the work of child psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, the coiner of “gender creativity” as a term wide enough to include persons of all genders. Ehrensaft’s career has advanced genderaffirmative psychotherapy, and models alliances with gender creative persons more broadly, by focusing on the parents of gender creative young persons navigating the developmental stages of childhood. In turn, new developmental models for children’s gender transition are opening cultural spaces for persons of all ages to journey toward embodying and living into their more authentic selves. Borrowing some concepts from British child psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, Ehrensaft sketches a compelling narrative for the emergence of an individual’s “true gender self,” one in keeping with a gender identity not necessarily “in line” with gender expectations based on the sex assigned at their birth.1 With the accumulated awareness of gender creativity generated by Killermann and Ehrensaft, I focus in Parts III and IV on gender-affirmative pastoral caregiving. With an interpretative lens on scripture focused on gender possibility, I hope to make the spiritual gains sought by persons of faith more accessible to gender creative persons to bolster their resilience. First, the realities of transgender life today. The largest survey to date examining the lived experiences of transgender persons in the United States was conducted in the summer of 2015 by the National Center for Transgender Equality, surveying anonymous online entries from nearly 28,000 respondents.2 Overall, in the year preceding the survey, 46% of respondents had been verbally harassed and 9% physically attacked over their transgender identities; 10% had been sexually assaulted, with 47% having been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives.3 “Severe economic hardship and instability” were seen across the transgender sample, with 29% of respondents living in poverty (compared to 12% of the U.S. population), 15% unemployed (three times the U.S. rate), and 30% having experienced being unhoused in their lifetimes.4 This level of violence and instability understandably leads to “harmful effects on physical and mental health,” with 40% of respondents having attempted suicide (nine times the U.S. rate), and 23% not seeking needed healthcare because of fear of being mistreated or harassed in health provider care environments (33% had already experienced negative treatment, including outright refusal of service in some cases).5 All of the statistics showed “the compounding impact of other forms of discrimination,” a severe statistical

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skewing of experienced hardship among transgender populations of color, among undocumented respondents, and among respondents with disabilities.6 The study’s executive summary headings are dire in their implications, beginning with “pervasive mistreatment and violence,”7 and the survey’s full-text report makes it evident that transgender and gender-nonconforming persons experience hardships in nearly every juncture: family life, identity documentation, health care, schooling, income levels, employment and the workplace, a prevalent sex work/underground economy, military, housing, police interaction, experience of harassment and violence, places of public accommodation, restrooms, civic participatory life—and faith communities.8 The growing emergence of gender creative persons as an identifiable population was evident in this study, with the number of respondents to the survey more than four times that of the previous such survey conducted in 2008–2009.9 Additionally, the diversity within the transgender community was evident, with nonbinary persons (not exclusively male or female, of no gender, of other gender, or of more than one gender) representing over onethird (35%) of the sample.10 Of great positive significance, there was evidence of experienced support for those respondents who were “out” to their immediate families (60%), coworkers (68%), and classmates (56%).11 Of significance for my writing, 63% of respondents reported that they had a spiritual or religious identity,12 21% of whom identified as Christian.13 Of the 66% of respondents who reported having been a part of a faith community at some point in their lives, 39% had left due to fear of being rejected and 19% had left because of enacted rejection.14 However, of the latter, 42% had found new, welcoming communities; inherent in that reported felt sense of welcome were a specific acceptance of them by religious community leaders and/or members (94%), and being told that their religion or faith itself accepted them (80%).15 A positive takeaway is to note the high level of resilience transgender persons employed in the face of rejection. In an essay on the state of “transgender people in the United States,” minister, theologian, and Assistant Professor and Director of the Social Transformation program at United Theological Seminary Justin Sabia-Tanis, whose work will be considered further in chapter 10, writes, “While the rejection of nearly 1 in 5 of those who were religiously active is appalling, these numbers also show that transgender persons are often able to locate affirming communities where they are receiving positive messages about both their gender identity and their faith.”16 Sabia-Tanis continues with the sobering truth that “much of the [overall cultural] energy opposing transgender rights comes from religious groups and individuals, particularly Christians.”17 It is clear from many studies that gender creative children, adolescents, and adults are at “risk for developing a downward cascade of psychosocial adversities including depressive symptoms, low life satisfaction, self-harm,

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isolation, homelessness, incarceration, posttraumatic stress, and suicide ideation and attempts.”18 In response to this need, Diane Ehrensaft, along with seven other psychotherapists representing four sites nationwide specializing in gender variance in children, issued a 2013 state of the field report in the journal Human Development. Their Gender Affirmative Model has five major premises: (a) gender variations are not disorders; (b) gender presentations are diverse and varied across cultures, therefore requiring our cultural sensitivity; (c) to the best of our knowledge at present, gender involves an interweaving of biology, development and socialization, and culture and context, with all three bearing on any individual’s gender self; (d) gender may be fluid, and is not binary, both at a particular time and if and when it changes within an individual across time; (e) if there is pathology, it more often stems from cultural reactions (e.g., transphobia, homophobia, sexism) rather than from within the child.19

These basic contentions of a gender-affirmative model of psychotherapeutic intervention are a good place to start for any affirmative pastoral stance toward gender variance. If pastoral caregivers, ministers, and teachers can understand more fully the variations and diversities present in the gender creative population and more fully appreciate the interwoven nature of the components of gender creativity, then at the very least they can cease to be a part of the cultural opprobrium that is the true pathology at work in the lives of transgender and gender-nonconforming persons. Even better, all pastoral ministries and theologies can be enhanced by affirming a vision of God’s creation that includes lives beyond gender binaries, allowing caregivers and care receivers to move toward embodying mutual, affirmative co-curation of God’s love.

NOTES 1. See Diane Ehrensaft, “From Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Identity Creativity: True Gender Self Child Therapy,” Journal of Homosexuality 59, no. 3 (March 2012). 2. See United States Transgender Survey (USTS), 2015, http://www​ .ustranssurvey​.org; respondents were comprised of adults (18 and over) from all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and various U.S. territories and military bases around the world. The results of a new 2022 United States Trans Survey, billed to be the largest in history, were to have been released sometime in 2023. 3. Sandy E. James et al., The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS) (Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality), https://transequality​ .org​/sites​/default​/files​/docs​/usts​/USTS​-Full​-Report​-Dec17​.pdf, 5 (see also 139–146).

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4. James et al., USTS, 5. 5. James et al., 5 (see also 92–129). 6. James et al., 6. There is an extensive literature documenting the disproportionate ways that societal opprobrium is refracted and intensified along intersectional lines of marginalization; see especially David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and b. binaoham, Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101 (Toronto: Biyuti Publishing, 2014). 7. James et al., USTS, 4 (see also 197–211). 8. See James et al., “Table of Contents,” iv. 9. James et al., 6. The previous report (The National Transgender Discrimination Survey [NTDS]) was issued in 2011; Jamie M. Grant, et al., Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality, 2011). 10. James et al., 7 (see also 43–63). In the 2011 report, participants did not use the term “nonbinary”; 14%, however, identified as “gender nonconforming” (see Grant et al., Injustice at Every Turn, 24). 11. James et al., 7 (see also 64–76). 12. James et al., 76–77. 13. James et al., 54–55. 14. James et al., 77–78. 15. James et al., 78. 16. Justin Tanis, “Transgender People in the United States,” in Chris Dowd and Christina Beardsley with Justin Tanis, Transfaith: A Transgender Pastoral Resource (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2018), 158. 17. Tanis, “Transgender People,” 158. 18. As reported in Marco A. Hidalgo et al., “The Gender Affirmative Model: What We Know and What We Aim to Learn,” Human Development 56, no. 5 (October 2013), https://doi​.org​/10​.1159​/000355235: 286. 19. Hidalgo et al., “Gender Affirmative Model,” 285.

Chapter 4

Exploring Four Components of Gender The Genderbread Person Redux

Sam Killermann writes about contemporary gender culture in very accessible prose (along with graphs, humorous cartoons, and inset text boxes). A self-described “author, doodler, and social justice comedian,”1 Killermann has devoted his work to LGBTQ+ advocacy and allyship trainings—and this despite his being a white, straight, cisgender man, for which he has encountered vocal suspicion from constituencies on both the ideological right and left.2 Many know Killermann as a popularizer of the “Genderbread Person” illustration, where a gingerbread person cookie represents Identity (in its head), Attraction (in its heart), Sex (between its legs), and Expression (all over).3 What I especially like about his model (and its biggest challenge to my own thinking) is that Killermann includes attraction as one of the allied components of gender. While attraction is itself separable from gender, conceptually, the whole reason to engage in Genderbread Person learning in the first place is that persons (including persons identifying as LGB) are in many ways mistreated, frowned upon, misunderstood, discriminated against, and harmed because of having “transgressed” a normatively enforced rulebook for gender. Coming perhaps first and foremost in “the” gender rulebook is that men are attracted to women and vice versa. But, attraction models until now have created a certain misunderstanding because perhaps their theorists have not been willing, or even able, to allow visualization of the degree to which everyone participates in some gender “rule-breaking”; nor have they addressed the incoherence in conceptualizing attraction (“same”/“opposite” sex) that emerges when gender ceases to adhere to binary options. Killermann used to imagine spectra existing for each of his four sex- and gender-related concepts (anatomical sex, gender identity, gender expression, and attraction), with normative polarities and gradations in between binary 41

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ends. However, spectral polarities left persons who identified with neither end of gender nor attraction scales—for example, persons self-identifying as agender and/or asexual—with nowhere to place themselves; they were literally “off the maps” because the models either pressed persons onto one or another extreme of gender and attraction poles or allowed only for movement that was simultaneously toward and away from those poles. In a similar fashion, genderqueer and nonbinary persons had no way to gradate the complexities of their identifications within the categories on a single specific gender-identity spectrum. In the second edition of his A Guide to Gender, Killermann moves, therefore, from a Spectra Genderbread Person to a “-Ness” Genderbread Person.4 Now, each gender component he identifies has two continua, starting from an “absence” on one end and expanding indefinitely in one direction. Killermann acknowledges that having the two continua participates in a certain binary way of thinking but by allowing persons to imagine themselves simultaneously on both—or pointedly, on neither—continua, the model opens a field for discussion that is more inclusive than that inspired by spectral models.5 Indeed, all models will tend to reproduce the binary even as they attempt to dismantle it. Yet, my use of Killermann and my words more generally throughout are intended as onboards for emerging affirmative pastoral caregivers beyond gender binaries, first steps on the road to unlocking gender creative promise. ​ As can be seen in the “-Ness” Genderbread Person model (see Figure 4.1),6 beginning at the top, Gender Identity has both Woman-ness and Man-ness continua; Gender Expression extends on Femininity and Masculinity continua; Anatomical Sex has both Female-ness and Male-ness continua; and Attraction (both sexual and romantic) moves along continua from being attracted to Nobody at one end to being attracted to varying degrees of both “Women and/ or Feminine and/or Female People” and “Men and/or Masculine and/or Male People.” A person can now place themselves anywhere on both scales within each category. Increasing the felt identification with and/or along any one of the continua does not represent a decrease in the felt identification with and/ or along its paired continuum. This was not true in the spectral models, where a move in one direction toward one pole was, by definition, a simultaneous move away from the other pole. To understand the complexities available (and possible), I use Killermann’s conceptualization to explore these four interrelated components of gender. Important to Killermann’s model is that though “people tend to assume that someone will consistently experience these different concepts (i.e., that if you see where someone is on one, you can predict where they’ll show up in another),” the fact is that “gender identity, gender expression, anatomical sex, and sexual orientation are interrelated, but they are not interconnected (i.e.,

Exploring Four Components of Gender

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Figure 4.1  Genderbread Person-Ness Model, Version 4. Source: Sam Killermann.

one concept is not inherently tied to another).”7 The interrelations between these concepts can be heavily influenced by the fluid parameters of one’s experienced “culture,” one’s “generation,” and by all the intersectional ways that one experiences belonging in various identity cohorts.8 Each concept is tangled in webs of privilege and culturally delivered deficits in the access any given person has to political power, to ascribed dignity, and often to life itself. One might wonder why a thing like gender identity, why gender itself, came to exist at all. Killermann proposes that, at their heart, conceptions of gender emerged from societies’ need to survive: Creating children and fostering their growth to self-sufficiency are the foundational needs that gender roles were created to meet. In modern societies, these needs are met more and more by a variety of specialized roles that exist outside of gender roles, yet we still perpetuate and reinforce gender roles in observance of tradition.9

Prescribed gender roles have been used to define persons and to determine what they are societally assigned to do. The correspondence problem between reproduction and gender roles is that, while the underlying human ability to reproduce is measurable (in that a person is either capable of contributing to reproduction or not), gender roles themselves are not measurable because

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they exist relative to the culture in which they are embedded. All of this is a preamble to seeing that each person’s gender profile captures how they align with their culture’s conception of what gender is. A primal urge toward reproduction is overlain with gender concepts that have developed as part of the human ability to conceptualize. Gender can appear to line up with reproductive capacity, whether or not any given person is willing and/or biologically able to fulfill a reproductive role. The reality is that a person’s imagined reproductive potential is socially analogized to produce the cultural parameters of how their gender “ought” to be performed. Therefore, one is led to imagine that a “female” anatomy will yield all the personality permutations of “woman,” and that a “male” anatomy will yield those of “man,” whereas “woman” and “man” are social constructions permeable across cultures and eras—as are, indeed, “female” and “male.” Today, however, the attempt to line up a manifold humanity with two options can no longer hold. As Ehrensaft writes, “As long as penis=male and vagina=female, we will induce gender dysphoria, particularly body dysphoria, in our gender creative children. When we can move the social order to think in terms of a penis-bodied or vagina-bodied person, the boy with the vagina and the girl with the penis will be less of a socially startling phenomenon.”10 While the United States may be behind what other, more homogenous, countries like Sweden are doing to make gender expansiveness a real option for gender creative persons11—indeed for all persons—congregations are uniquely poised in this country to become sanctuaries for mutually aided expansive living, even as seminaries can become places where the expansiveness of gender is made an integral part of ministerial learning.

ANATOMICAL SEX Anatomical sex perhaps would appear to be the clearest cut aspect of the Genderbread Person, but where, exactly, to draw the line between “male” and “female” is rather complicated. Much of how anatomical sex is understood is based on the gender assigned at birth rather than on any determinative investigation of the various factors that go into how sex is evidenced: internal organs (testes, ovaries, Cowper’s gland, uterus, seminal vesicles, and vagina), outer organs (penis, clitoris, scrotum, and vulva), chromosomal karyotype (46 XY and 46 XX), hormone preponderance (testosterone and estrogen), or socalled “secondary sex characteristics” (thick body and facial hair, fine body and fine or no facial hair; wide shoulders, wide hips, hips to shoulder ratio; deep- or high-pitched voice; and breast size).12 The most common gender alignment surgery has happened without children’s, or even sometimes their parents’, consent, for at birth, it is sometimes

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not clear from the visual evidence of external genitalia what sex to assign a child. Historically, a lack of visually unambiguous anatomical genital data has been thought to constitute a medical emergency. Ironically, given the desire for fixed gender answers, the “solution” to this “crisis” has been performed with an implicitly fluid sense of gender performativity. Physicians have made a judgment call about the gender coding toward which the child should be reared and then have surgically manipulated the external evidence to conform to what becomes the “official story” told about and to the child. Implicit in the idea that these experiments can be successful is precisely a sense of the malleability of gender often instead held to be fixed, for parents and doctors collude in raising children to embody genders that may well be “at odds” with their chromosomal makeup or internal organs. Doctors’ decisions have often come down to the length of the penis/clitoris at birth: doctors express “concern about a phallus of 2.0 centimeters, while one less than 1.5 centimeters long and 0.7 centimeters wide results in a female gender assignment.”13 This happens more frequently than most know. Intersex babies represent 1.7% of all births worldwide (although certain populations have higher incidences of one or more causes of intersex results).14 The “Disorders of Sex Development (DSD)” that are said to characterize intersex persons include a range of conditions, from persons born with the presence of both male and female genitals or internal organs that “conflict” with those external (varying degrees of so-called “hermaphrodism”), to persons with chromosomal karyotypes other than the XX and XY that typify “female” and “male” infants (such as Turner’s syndrome with only one X chromosome or Klinefelter’s syndrome with one Y and two X chromosomes). Other “intersex conditions” can emanate from altered genetic states causing persons to have insensitivities to testosterone (androgen insensitivity syndrome) or to experience malfunctions in the enzymes involved in steroid production (congenital adrenal hyperplasia). The causes for many intersex matrices are unknown or can proceed from any number of varying influences that can result in a person’s gonads not developing fully (gonadal dysgenesis) or lead to a person having hypospadias, nonsymmetrically located urethral openings.15 While some intersex persons feel themselves to be among the “transgender” population, many do not, as “transgender” persons typically do not have the experience of “disordered” genetic or genital features. There is a surging intersex political movement that advocates primarily for a waiting period before surgical “fixes” are performed on infants without consent. The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA)16 was founded in 1993 by Cheryl Chase: “Chase had been assigned male at birth, but a few years later doctors reversed their decision, told her parents to raise her as a girl, and performed surgery to reduce what they had formerly considered a very small penis to an ‘appropriate’ size for what they now considered a too-big

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clitoris.”17 Chase became determined to prevent what happened to her from befalling other children going forward, joining her story with other cases of “wrong” guesses of surgical manipulation that resulted in severe dysphoric conditions later on, especially after individuals went through a puberty that corresponded to a gender other than the one assigned to them.18 The point is that even “sex,” apart from or seemingly prior to gender, is itself a “performed” state sometimes requiring surgery, hormonal replacement treatments, and intentionally redirected gender-coded parenting. Chase sees infant or child genital “normalizing” surgery as a forcible shadow cousin to gender affirmation surgeries of transsexual persons, for it is “a visceral example of the idea that beliefs about gender actually produced the sex of the body, rather than the other way around.”19 Culturally sanctioned notions of gender become retrojected to inform ideas of how the sexes differ; in reality, however, narratives of what constitutes “male” and what constitutes “female,” and how they are different one from the other, have radically changed over the course of history and so can themselves be seen as cultural artifacts of time and place.20 Assigning binary sex at birth based often solely on the presence or absence of what can be defined as a “penis” leads to children being raised to embody matched binary gender identities and to perform matching gender expressions, but the determination of “sex” is likewise cultural. The fact is that all persons, not merely intersex individuals, possess differing degrees of maleness and femaleness (see Figure 4.2).21 ​

Figure 4.2  Anatomical Sex Continua. Source: Created by author.

Not all assigned-at-birth males have wide shoulders, coarse body hair, or lowpitched voices; neither do all assigned-at-birth females have wide hips, fine body hair, or high-pitched voices. Children almost by definition have no secondary sex characteristics. Infertile or postmenopausal persons, or those having undergone medically necessary hysterectomies, are “missing” markers of “sex.” The way that a body responds to varying levels of hormones over a lifetime is its own type of fingerprint, and “male” and “female” “secondary sex” characteristics associated with anatomical sex are embodied by persons with varied external genitalia. In the past two decades, scientists have gained access to the DNA of individual human cells, and it is now clear that the so-called sex chromosomal makeup in individual’s cells isn’t necessarily concordant throughout the body. At the cellular level, “the common assumption that every cell contains the same set of genes is untrue. Some people have mosaicism: they develop

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from a single fertilized egg but become a patchwork of cells with different genetic make-ups,”22 sometimes with differently configured karyotypes. Other people can exhibit degrees of chimerism, the result of combinations of cells having been derived from the mash-up of what originally had been separate fertilized eggs later merged in the womb. Widespread is a kind of “microchimerism” that “happens when stem cells from a fetus cross the placenta into the mother’s body and vice versa,”23 resulting in a preponderance of “males” carrying cells originally belonging to their mothers and likely differently “sexed” than the majority of their own. What is thought of as “sex” is as socially constructed as the matrices of gender culturally attached to anatomy. When asked how to determine what the “sex” of a given individual is (anatomy, hormones, chromosomes, cells?), Eric Vilain, Director of the Center for Genetic Medicine Research at Children’s National Health System, replied, “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter . . . If you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.”24 If one does so, one may well hear, more and more, answers like that of blogger Sara C: “I am a woman, so I have a woman’s body. My penis is a woman’s penis. My voice is a woman’s deep voice. My body hair is a woman’s body hair. Sex assignment at birth based on a genital inspection is nothing more than a social construction that takes the complicated bodily experience of humans and reduces it into just two categories.”25 The liberating thing about social constructions is that they can be deconstructed and reconstructed: “we can remake this system to include the wide, natural variation of all human bodies and minds.”26 GENDER IDENTITY Killermann’s continua for gender identity are as follows:27 ​

Figure 4.3  Gender Identity Continua. Source: Created by author.

“Gender identity is our internal response to a social construction that attempts to make the connection between a person’s biological makeup and their eventual role in society”:28 gender identity exists in the mind. To find oneself on these continua—and what is key is to do so on both—one begins by imagining all of the personality traits and social roles one associates with one’s culture’s ideas of “woman-ness,” and then of “man-ness”: occupations, family

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structures, group-individual relationships, attitudes, predispositions. A person may find themselves as a single point along either or both lines but may also select several points, or even a segment of the line(s). Genderqueer and gender nonbinary persons can finally “find” themselves on a map by shading in various combinations of woman-ness and man-ness or, indeed, by claiming full ownership of both or nonplacement on either. The novelty of having two continua rather than one spectrum invites the man-ness and woman-ness of each person to be identified, bringing into relief the reality that almost everyone has some attributes, dispositions, or role occupations associated with both scales. No “map” can ever be fully inclusive, just as no gender matrices can fully encapsulate a person’s gender creative will to be true to their lived experience. However, seeing the range of possibilities embodied by one’s siblings in humanity hopefully compels a sense of wonder at the gender multiplicity present in creation. Of course, many persons may imagine themselves to be completely aligned with one gender or the other and so would indicate themselves as all the way to the right on one scale and all the way to the left on the other. The popular imagination does allow, at least to solidify the targets of its disdain, a complete reversal of the polarities for a transsexual transgender person. A widely held but erroneous perception about “transgender” persons is that their goal is to subsume themselves most seamlessly into gender polarities by “passing” as the gender of identification, which is the case for some, as in my example of Amanda at the beginning of Part I. For some transgender persons, alignment of anatomy, identity, expression, and attraction allows them the most complete sense of selfhood. Transsexual persons, typically those who have transitioned, usually medically, from one sex to another, represent but a fraction, however, of the population under the transgender umbrella. Understanding each of the components of gender and considering them separately allows imagining the infinite permutations both available to and occupied by fellow human beings. Pastoral caregivers, ministers, teachers, and theologians may not be able to understand completely the story of each person they encounter, but having a general sense of the vastness of the possibilities allows them, perhaps, to forego the need to try fully to understand. Theologically sound and compassionate ways forward involve the ability to be affirmative of any given person’s “true gender self.” There can be some understandable resistance, at least initially, to this notion, and disapproval of transgender and gender-nonconforming persons living in gender integrity can be found even in otherwise compassionate individuals.29 Many persons, however, may not yet have been given the chance to think through gender possibilities, to find themselves on the same maps as more gender creative individuals, and to reconsider theological premises when seen through a gender creative interpretative lens.

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GENDER EXPRESSION Closely related to gender identity is gender expression, that is, how one presents one’s gender: clothing, mannerisms, gait, speech patterns, grooming habits, personal tastes, language choices, posture, social interaction, style, and demeanor. In Killermann’s words, “gender expression is a way of labeling how much someone does or does not present in ways that are traditionally gendered. We usually describe someone’s expression as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine,’ and when neither is particularly salient, we have androgyny.”30 Here, the gender expression continua belie the either/or and “in-between” spectral way of seeing things in favor, again, of a complexity of expression along two lines of possibilities:​

Figure 4.4  Gender Expression Continua. Source: Created by author.

Of Killermann’s four gender components, gender expression is the most culturally variable, and able to shift in relatively rapid periods of change. The “pink and blue” phenomenon that currently characterizes many baby showers across the United States is in diametrical opposition to how the same colors were conceived a hundred years ago: For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”31

Gender expression is highly dependent on the intersectional ways each person is socialized within their complex societies, since codes of normative expression vary depending on ethnically, racially, and culturally delineated mores. Gender expression encompasses nearly everything one does or says, and how one does or says it, and so is a relatively easy thing from which to deviate on some level. It also provides the first clues that lead to assuming one easily can identify a person’s gender identity and/or attraction orientation and/or anatomical sex. Thus, gender expressions’ parameters tend to be carefully policed and can be enforced with aggressive violence. For most cisgender persons (those whose gender identity, expression, and anatomy are aligned with their assigned sex at birth), there is some “give” allowable to the rules of gender roles, even though persons can still exercise microaggressivity (often unconscious) when presented with role transgressions.

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When one refers, for example, to a “lady doctor,” the “lady” prefix can suggest discomfort with an assigned female taking on the traditionally prescribed assigned male role of a doctor. In transferring one’s discomfort to the person herself, attenuating a woman’s doctor status with an adjectival qualifier, one can inadvertently scold the woman for having expanded the parameters for what had previously been understood as a male area of endeavor, even if this attribution feels like it comes from a place of admiration for a woman’s having pursued medicine in the face of cultural roadblocks. We are all potentially in the grip of aspirations, assumptions, and impulses not yet avowed, that evade our understanding, or that may contradict each other, so it is best to receive feedback on microaggressivity with humility and curiosity. Each cultural step away from traditionally enforced gender roles requires a skirmish with policing rules, followed by an adjustment period, and finally a reorganization of that culture’s gender role schemata. Take the example of women wearing trousers. In one of the first widespread outbreaks of women wearing pants, in the Victorian era, a scandal emerged when it became widely known that women working at English coal mines were wearing trousers to facilitate their physical movement. Their job was to stand at the top of the coal shaft (the “brow” of the “pit”) and remove stones from the loads of coal hauled to the surface. As a result of their gender code transgression, these so-called “pit brow lasses” were thereafter required to wear skirts over the top of the trousers in order to keep up appearances, even though the women rolled their skirts up to their waists in order to keep them out of the way of the coal sifting that was their work.32 In the World Wars era, it became commonplace and situationally allowed for women taking on traditionally male work to wear the civilian clothing of men, who were often away at battlefronts. It was only in the 1960s, however, that trousers were promoted as a fashion item for women, leading to the gradual acceptance in many communities of female trouser use in everyday activity.33 Now, of course, at least in the United States, there is hardly a memory of pants not being “acceptable” women’s wear, while men have in recent years begun to breach the walls against male skirt wear.34 Gender expression transgressions inform the censure exacted not only upon transgender and gender-nonconforming persons, or on affectionally other-than-heterosexual identified persons, but also, indeed, on all persons as they grow and are crafted by the rigid gender codes around them. Altering gender expression is one of the easiest ways to play with gender, but it can get a person in a lot of trouble. Likewise, continual adherence to gender codes can cause distress: “giving into pressure to express in a way other than how you’re comfortable leads to identity dissonance—a gap between your inner self and the self you are presenting to the world—that can lead to anxiety and depression”35 or worse.36 All aspects of gender expression are, in themselves, objectively neutral, but isolating gender constrictions from

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cultural embeddedness requires intentional work. To separate aspects of what is thought of as gender expression from the traits themselves, however, is to begin to understand that the connections between expression and gender’s other components are not determinative but rather fluid.

ATTRACTION At the “heart” of the Genderbread Person is attraction—a notion rendered particularly complicated here because when the gender categories cease to cohere, affectional and sexual orientations, widely understood to be tied to those gender designations, begin to lose their meaning: “trans phenomena renders the dichotomy of a male and female binary deeply troubled. If your gender can be fluid or has the potential to change, then narrow definitions about sexuality become almost meaningless.”37 How, for instance, is a person who identifies as agender (having no gender as their gender identity) to categorize their affectional attraction?38 In turn, absent the policing effect of heteronormativity, notions of gender are revealed as essentially fluid. As Judith Butler asks in her seminal treatise on the performativity of gender, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, “What happens to the subject and to the stability of gender categories when the epistemic regime of presumptive heterosexuality is unmasked as that which produces and reifies these ostensible categories of ontology?”39 Human beings are attracted to collections of characteristics (social expressions, physical markers, and role habitation styles) that might casually be referred to as “one’s type,” yet many, if not most, of those characteristics tend to be conceptualized as “belonging” to the gender associated with that “type.” In actuality, the attributes, considered separately, are easily imaginable apart from any one gender—“attraction is the result of your subconscious interpretation of hormonal influences on your brain chemistry, and your ability to make sense of attraction is a result of your socialization and self-awareness”40—but one doesn’t really stop to understand consciously why one is attracted to one person and not to another. There is even an internal incoherence in the ways of referring to attraction patterns. While whom one is attracted to is based on one’s perception of the object of attraction, and not on one’s own characteristics, the most available categories of attraction assume correspondence, direct or inverse, between the objects of one’s attraction and one’s own gender identities: homosexuality is the attraction to a like person, a person with the same gender identity as one’s own; heterosexuality is the attraction between unlikes. Once gender identity is revealed as internally variable, these attraction categories no longer make sense. In fact, many gender-affirmative activists are arguing that persons should begin self-identifying romantic and sexual

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orientations from a nonbinary neutrality point of view, distinguishing among “androsexual”41 (“being primarily sexually, romantically and/or emotionally attracted to some men, males, and/or masculinity”42), “gynesexual”43 (“being primarily sexually, romantically and/or emotionally attracted to some woman [sic], females, and/or femininity”44), and “skoliosexual”45 (“being primarily sexually, romantically and/or emotionally attracted to some genderqueer, transgender, transsexual, and/or non-binary people”46) orientations. ​

Figure 4.5  Attraction Continua. Source: Created by author.

Given the two attraction continua in Killermann’s model (see Figure 4.5), a nonbinary person could locate their attraction based on where they feel themselves to be on both scales. Further to the right on the women/feminine/female continua, and they might refer to themselves as gynesexual or gynephilic; further to the right on the men/masculine/male continua, as androsexual or androphilic; and if they are attracted to a combination of things on both scales, there is the classification of having a skoliosexual or skoliophilic attraction orientation. In fact, a person might find labels such as “pansexual” or “polysexual” more appropriate if they are attracted to persons of all or many genders, regardless of anatomy, gender identity, or expression; or “asexual,” if they experience no sexual attraction. Especially in the case of attraction, the “Gender Unicorn” model of the Trans Student Educational Resources collective (see Figure 4.6)47 makes sense in proposing that a third continuum be added to those continua delineating physical and emotional attractions to Women and Men. Here, attraction is liberated from being either a combination of the first two continua or else off the scales completely, and new genders perhaps yet to be contemplated or conceptualized can be the potential object of one’s attraction. In addition, of course, attraction is larger than sexual, encompassing romantic, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. One can imagine a person having a slightly different orientation for each of the various modalities of attraction: One could be sexually androphilic but romantically skoliophilic, for instance, or emotionally skoliophilic but spiritually drawn to genders specifically conceived as lying outside of binary-based choices. Attraction emerges over time and can change over time as well. As pastoral theologian Cody J. Sanders writes in his primer for ministering to “LGBTQIA

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Figure 4.6  The Gender Unicorn. Source: Anna Moore, Landyn Pan, and Eli Erlick.

youth,” “Rather than a once-and-for-all static fixity of sexual and affectional orientation, we should expect that some people may experience a fluidity of sexual and affectional desire that changes slightly over time or with variation in life situations.”48 Visualizing a more complex, multilevel conception of attraction may complicate ideas of fixed self-identificatory taxonomies, but it allows points of shared response with persons who otherwise would seem more “other” than need be. And, while classifications based on attraction, just as those based on other gender components, tend to be reductive, they do provide ways of relating to one another, allowing for political strategies that have increased the life possibilities available to individuals. I don’t so much advocate for eliminating all labels (although those labels that particularly constrict can and perhaps should be discarded), but rather for encouraging an awareness of the vastness of possibilities that fall under gender components’ endless permutations. ALL TOGETHER NOW Demographic statistics, though imperfect (as they rely on self-reporting), report that 1.7% of all persons in the United States begin life “in between” sexes, another 0.6% identify as transgender, and 3.5% consistently identify as gay,

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lesbian, and/or bisexual.49 Thus, the group of persons that veers away from the normative, prescribed gender component strictures conservatively totals over 6% of humanity. Separating out by age, the number of persons falling under the LGBTQ+ umbrella starts to escalate relative to the youth of respondents. In a 2015 polling of the U.S. population, which asked “how they would identify on the Kinsey Scale—a six-point rating spanning from ‘exclusively homosexual’ to ‘exclusively heterosexual’—about a third of millennials pointed somewhere in the ‘non-binary’ middle, compared to about 8% of people over the age of 45.”50 And in a 2017 GLAAD51 “Accelerating Acceptance” survey of 2,037 U.S. adults, a stunning 20% of 18- to 34-year-olds identified as “LGBTQ” (with 12% of 35- to 51-year-olds, 7% of 52- to 71-year-olds, and 5% of persons 72 years old and older so identifying), perhaps a testament to the broadness of “Q” as a categorical option.52 Compare any of these figures to, say, the world population of Jewish persons at 0.2%, and one begins to get a sense of the number of individuals living well outside of normatively prescribed gender strictures. Overall, the complexity of gender in its various components means that there is no standard way to approach members of variously defined groups of persons who differ in their gender components and in the degree to which they stretch cultural norms.53 Killerman’s model is useful not only because it is more encompassing than some more “scholarly” treatments, but because of the sense of humor with which the activist comic offers his “-Ness” Genderbread Person. Most persons need to be coaxed into this conversation, and finding places of shared experience, even shared anxiety, can help invite interlocutors to the table. In any given opportunity for relationship, one might not arrive at anyone’s idea of an adequate “understanding” of a person’s gender complexities, but if some degree of awareness can be inculcated, one is on the path toward being able to affirm and welcome an expansiveness both in another and in oneself, and to live into those possibilities in mutually accountable community. In my own work in church congregations, I have felt drawn to hearing the stories of gender creative persons, young and old alike. Being in relationship with them has compelled me to find ways to move forward in welcoming and affirming them, in learning from their example, and in embracing mutually enriching gender complexities. But my interest in fostering gender creative promise was initially inspired by the gender-variant children in my ministerial care. I now turn to the pioneering work of child psychologist Diane Ehrensaft with younger persons living into their “true gender selves.” NOTES 1. Sam Killermann, It’s Pronounced Metrosexual, http://its​pron​ounc​edme​trosexual​.com​/about​-sam​-killermann/.

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2. Kira Brekke, “How This Straight, Cisgender Man Deals with Aggression against His LGBT Advocacy,” Huffington Post, January 29, 2015, https://www​.huffingtonpost​.com​/2015​/01​/29​/caring​-about​-lgbt​-issues​_n​_6565676​.html. 3. Sam Killermann, A Guide to Gender: The Social Justice Advocate’s Handbook, 2nd ed. (Austin, TX: Impetus Books, 2017; 2013). Killermann acknowledges the decades-long history of the Genderbread Person as a conceptual tool and the attendant attributional reasons for which he uncopyrighted all his own contributions to the model, noting the healthy truth that “everything I know, and everything I create, is built upon centuries of learning and thought” (67). 4. Killermann, Guide to Gender, 94–100. 5. Another model proposed by Trans Student Educational Resources (TSER) incorporates three continua for each of gender identity, gender expression, and attraction, with the third continuum incorporating “Other gender(s)” for identity and attraction, and “Other” for expression. For anatomical sex, this model lists three distinct options: “Sex Assigned at Birth”: “Female,” “Male,” and “Other/Intersex”; see Anna Moore, Landyn Pan, and Eli Erlick, “The Gender Unicorn,” Trans Student Educational Resources, 2015, http://www​.transstudent​.org​/gender/, included here as Figure 4.6. 6. Sam Killermann, “Genderbread Person -Ness Model, Version 4,” Guide to Gender (March 2017), http://www​.guidetogender​.com​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2017​/03​/ Genderbread​-Person​-Ness​-V4​.pdf; Killermann has placed this illustration in the public domain. 7. Killermann, Guide to Gender, 72. 8. “Intersectionality” refers to the way the oppressive impact of multiple marginalized identities adds up to more than a sum of each identity’s effects. The term emerges from the work of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw on the experiences of African American women: “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.” Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, no. 1, art. 8 (1989): 140. For a pastoral theology perspective on intersectionality, see Nancy J. Ramsay, “Intersectionality: A Model for Addressing the Complexity of Oppression and Privilege,” Pastoral Psychology 63, no. 4 (August 2014). 9. Killermann, Guide to Gender, 104 (emphasis added). 10. Ehrensaft, Gender Creative Child, 180. 11. See John Tagliabue, “Swedish School’s Big Lesson Begins with Dropping Personal Pronouns,” the website of the New York Times; the New York Times online, November 14, 2012, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2012​/11​/14​/world​/europe​/swedish​ -school​-de​-emphasizes​-gender​-lines​.html; and Ellen Barry, “In Sweden’s Preschools, Boys Learn to Dance and Girls Learn to Yell,” the website of the New York Times; the New York Times online, March 24, 2018, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2018​/03​/24​/ world​/europe​/sweden​-gender​-neutral​-preschools​.html. 12. Separate sexes are not the rule across species. Biologist Joan Roughgarden provides two definitions of “male” and “female” in the animal kingdom: (1) “‘Male’

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means producing small gametes and ‘female’ means producing large gametes.  .  .  . Species in which the gametes are the same size do not possess a male/female distinction even though they reproduce sexually” (Joan Roughgarden, The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009], 91); and (2) “If a single body makes only sperm during its life span, it is ‘male,’ and if only eggs, it is ‘female.’ If a single body produces both eggs and sperm during its life span, it is called a ‘hermaphrodite’ . . . with a figure of 1/3 hermaphrodite species among all animal species excluding insects” (Roughgarden, Genial Gene, 105–6). 13. Anne Fausto Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2020; 2000), 60–61; see also Sterling’s Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World (New York: Routledge, 2012). On the anatomical possibilities for humankind, see a range of historical responses: John Money and Patricia Tucker, Sexual Signatures: On Being a Man or a Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975); Phyllis Burke, Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female (New York: Anchor Books, 1996); Olive Skene Johnson, The Sexual Spectrum: Exploring Human Diversity (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2004); and Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, 10th ann. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013; 2009; 2004). 14. Sterling, 54–56. 15. Sterling, 53–57. 16. See Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), http://www​.isna​.org/. 17. Stryker, Transgender History, 172. 18. For an account of particularly tragic circumstances that befell one intersex human being, beginning with “corrective” infant surgery, see John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). See also a collection of essays concerning the doctor who made his reputation on the Colapinto case: Lisa Downing, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan, Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For a compelling fictional account of intersex life, see Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (New York: Picador, 2002). 19. Stryker, Transgender History, 173. 20. As we will see in chapter 10, the words “male” and “female” have had a history of meanings leading to a discontinuity in the interpretation of biblical texts that seem to “say” certain things very different from what their original authors and audiences would have understood; see Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault suggested that the idea intersex individuals ought to have a “single” determinable sex over a lifetime is a product of the modern nation state: “In the Middle Ages . . . the designation ‘hermaphrodite’ was given to those in whom . . . sexes were juxtaposed. . . . In these cases, it was the role of . . . those who ‘named’ the child . . . to determine at the time of baptism which sex was going to be retained. . . . But later, on the threshold of adulthood, when the time came for them to marry, hermaphrodites were free to decide for themselves if

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they wished to go on being of the sex which had been assigned to them. . . . The only imperative was that they should not change it again.” Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, vii– viii). For a historical survey of cultural reaction to intersex persons, see Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 178–196. 21. Another way to conceptualize anatomical sex is to remove it from continua altogether and merely reference the sex assigned at one’s birth: Female, Male, or Other/Intersex; see Moore et al., “The Gender Unicorn,” Figure 4.6. What I like about Killermann’s model, however, binary its options, is that it encourages especially cisgender persons to grapple with the anatomical complexities that all persons possess underneath the surface of what historically have informed sex assignments. 22. Claire Ainsworth, “Sex Redefined: The Idea of Two Sexes is Simplistic. Biologists Now Think There is a Wider Spectrum than That,” the website for Nature; Nature online, February 18, 2015, https://www​.nature​.com​/news​/sex​-redefined​-1​ .16943#​/spectrum. 23. Ainsworth. 24. Ainsworth. 25. Sara C, “The XX and XY Lie: Our Social Construction of a Sex and Gender Binary,” Medium, October 20, 2017, https://medium​.com/​@QSE​/the​-xx​-xy​-lie​-our​ -social​-construction​-of​-a​-sex​-and​-gender​-binary​-4eed1e60e615. 26. Sara C, “The XX and XY Lie.” 27. TSER’s model employs three continua: “Female/Woman/Girl,” “Male/Man/ Boy,” and “Other Gender(s)”; see Moore et al., “The Gender Unicorn,” Figure 4.6. Since so many persons are now defining themselves as having a gender “other” than the two most conventionally ascribed, there is great merit in a model that doesn’t force a person to “find” themselves in some mixture of prescribed binary options. 28. Killermann, Guide to Gender, 107. 29. See Mark A. Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), for a prominent example. Yarhouse is able, through mining the positive elements of what he identifies as a “disability framework” on gender creativity, to allow for compassion toward persons who are suffering what he considers to be the disfiguring results of “the fall” from God’s grace symbolized in the banishment of Adam and Eve from Eden. His own proffered framework is one of “integrity,” its name referring to what he understands as the inviolable strength of complementarian gender role borders. What makes the softening of binaries so threatening, psychologically and theologically, is a question that surely is slightly different for each person, but the strength of cultural pressures toward conformity combined with a deep-seated human penchant for binary thinking makes changes in conceptions of gender uphill battles. Factoring in historical biblical readings yielding “divine intention” regarding separable genders and gender roles only further compounds conceptualization inertia. 30. Killermann, Guide to Gender, 110. TSER’s model, with a third continua of “Other” as a realm of possibility for gender expression outside of “Feminine” and

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“Masculine” allows for newly conceived genders to emerge; see Moore et al., “The Gender Unicorn,” Figure 4.6. 31. Jeanne Maglaty, “When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?,” the website for Smithsonian; Smithsonian online, April 7, 2011, https://www​.smithsonianmag​.com​/ arts​-culture​/when​-did​-girls​-start​-wearing​-pink​-1370097/. 32. Natasha Frost, “The Women Miners in Pants Who Shocked Victorian Britain,” Atlas Obscura, September 21, 2017, https://www​.atlasobscura​.com​/articles​/pit​-brow​ -lasses​-women​-miners​-victorian​-britain​-pants. 33. Namanpal Singh, “Fashion History: 1960’s,” Medium, November 24, 2017, https://medium​.com/​@namanpalsingh​/fashion​-history​-1960s​-bdd87361c505. 34. Benna Crawford, “Men Wearing Skirts and Dresses,” Love to Know, http:// mens​-fashion​.lovetoknow​.com​/Men​_Wearing​_Skirts​_and​_Dresses. 35. Killermann, Guide to Gender, 114. 36. On the toxic effects of adhering to “masculine” gender expression codes for all men and boys, see Jacey Fortin, “Traditional Masculinity Can Hurt Boys, Say New A.P.A. Guidelines,” the website of the New York Times, the New York Times online, January 10, 2019, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/01​/10​/science​/apa​-traditional​-masculinity​-harmful​.html; for the complete text of the APA report, see American Psychiatric Association, APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2018), https://www​.apa​.org​/ about​/policy​/boys​-men​-practice​-guidelines​.pdf. 37. Jaimee Garbacik, Gender and Sexuality for Beginners (Danbury, CT: For Beginners Books, 2013), 177. 38. For an academic discussion of descriptive categories of subjectivity melding sexuality and gender, and of crossing boundaries of “sex” to create autobiographical “bodies,” see Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 39. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge Classics ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006; 1999; 1990), xxx. 40. Killermann, Guide to Gender, 128. 41. “Andro” is a Greek prefix referring to “man,” “male,” and/or “masculine.” 42. Killermann, Guide to Gender, 258. 43. “Gyne” is a Greek prefix referring to “woman,” “female,” and/or “feminine.” 44. Killermann, Guide to Gender, 264. 45. “Skolio” is a Greek prefix referring to something “bent,” or “from the side.” 46. Killermann, Guide to Gender, 270. 47. Moore et al., “The Gender Unicorn,” Figure 4.6; the illustration has been placed in the public domain. 48. Cody J. Sanders, A Brief Guide to Ministering with LGBTQIA Youth (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 37. 49. Andrew R. Flores et al., How Many Adults Identify as Transgender in the United States? (Los Angeles: The Williams Institute, 2016), http://williamsinstitute​ .law​.ucla​.edu​/wp​-content​/uploads​/How​-Many​-Adults​-Identify​-as​-Transgender​-in​-the​ -United​-States​.pdf.

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50. Katy Steinmetz, “How Many Americans Are Gay?,” the website for Time, Time online, May 18, 2016, http://time​.com​/lgbt​-stats/ (emphasis added). 51. GLAAD, the name of a monitoring organization that tries to ensure equitable LGBTQ+ media coverage, until 2013 formed an acronym for “Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation”; the organization removed the acronym’s explanation so as to be more inclusive of “B,” “T,” and “Q” concerns; see https://www​.glaad​.org/. 52. See Catalina Gonella, “Survey: 20 Percent of Millennials Identify as LGBTQ,” the website of NBC News; NBC News online, March 31, 2017, https://www​.nbcnews​.com​/feature​/nbc​-out​/survey​-20​-percent​-millennials​-identify​-lgbtq​-n740791; for complete survey results, see GLAAD, Accelerating Acceptance 2017: A Harris Poll Survey of Americans’ Acceptance of LGBTQ People, https://www​.glaad​.org​/files​/aa​ /2017​_GLAAD​_Accelerating​_Acceptance​.pdf. 53. In fact, there is a subgenre of transgender publications of “do-it-yourself” gender workbooks for persons of all ages to get perspective on the contours of their gender components; see Kate Bornstein, My New Gender Workbook: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013; 1998); Rylan Jay Testa, Deborah Coolhart, and Jayme Peta, The Gender Quest Workbook: A Guide for Teens and Young Adults Exploring Gender Identity (Oakland, CA: Instant Help Books, 2015); and Dara Hoffman-Fox, You and Your Gender Identity: A Guide to Discovery (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2017).

Chapter 5

“Where Do the Mermaids Stand?”

Minister and best-selling author Robert Fulghum recounts being left in charge of eighty children, aged ten and below, at a church function and engaging them in a game of “Giants, Wizards, and Elves.”1 The game is a “Rock, Paper, Scissors” activity writ large, with children performing one of the three identities for a series of face-offs in which Giants beat Elves, Elves beat Wizards, and Wizards beat Giants. Fulghum instructed the kids, “Decide now. Which are you: a Giant, a Wizard, or [an Elf]?”2 As the children prepared to launch into embodying one of the magical creatures, Fulghum felt a tug on his pant leg, and as he bent down to attend to the young child’s request, he heard, “Where do the Mermaids stand?”3 When he explained that there were no Mermaids, the child, determined, responded matter-of-factly, “Oh, yes, I am one!”4 Fulghum recalls that he had the presence of mind at the moment to respond with something to the effect that Mermaids should stand right next to the King of the Sea, indicating himself, but that later, upon reflection, he realized the poignancy of the child’s question—Where do the Mermaids stand? In other words, How does one fully participate in life when the categories of identity on offer don’t seem to encompass the felt essence of one’s soul? Fulghum understood that a creative answer to that question was the kernel from which a better world could be cultivated.5 The figure of the mermaid, a human torso connected to a fish’s lower half, is a potent one for many gender-nonconforming persons today, suggesting as it does a disconnect between the mind and the lower body. Diane Ehrensaft, one of the leading psychologists specializing in counseling gender-variant children (and their parents), testifies to the mermaid’s appeal: “In my work with transgender little girls and gender-fluid little boys, particularly gender hybrids, mermaids are indeed very popular. It makes total sense—one kind of body on 61

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top, another on the bottom.”6 As I explored in chapter 2, and as can be seen from the italicizations in the previous sentences, the vocabulary for gender designation—or, indeed, for opting out thereof—is running apace with the diverse emergence of a veritable movement. And children are leading the way.7 Ehrensaft’s journey toward pioneering gender-affirmative therapy began, she suggests, with the “I” of her own narrative, pointing to the truth that often persons are drawn to material providing strategies for their own mental health and self-discovery. In fact, as psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams points out, “I have concluded over the years that when clinicians talk most passionately about an attitude or process that is ‘at the center of’ or that is ‘the essence of’ the healing process, they often prescribe a stance that either normalizes their own dispositions or compensates for a limitation of their character type. In either case, they seem to be trying to heal themselves.”8 This is crucial for me, as a minister-practitioner, for “healing myself”—and teaching future practitioners how to do the same—is an important aspect of any effort to contribute to the healing of others. In Ehrensaft’s case, her interest began when she and her husband were summoned to their son Jesse’s preschool to discuss his penchant for announcing to the class that he wished he were a girl.9 Ehrensaft describes her intellectual and emotional evolution toward the position she now espouses of trusting children to “know” what is true about themselves, from previously having written several books on parenting in which she specifically addressed crosssex behavior in boys as “not at all related to later sexual identity [but] merely a manifestation of their cross-sex identifications and the ease with which they express the developing feminine aspect within them in their early years.”10 She has since moved from trying to reassure parents that gender expressions “at odds” with cultural expectations for a given sex didn’t necessarily mean that their child would turn out to be gay or transgender to her current position that it is a therapist’s duty to acknowledge a child’s gender expression and help parents make a safe space for the child’s ongoing gender creativity. She writes, “The job of the clinician is not to ward off a transgender outcome, but to facilitate the child’s authentic gender journey.”11 In a similar vein, Ehrensaft reflects back on her book Spoiling Childhood: How Well-Meaning Parents Are Giving Children Too Much—But Not What They Need,12 in which she sought to help overzealously permissive parents to place limits on their children’s demands being fulfilled. How did that strengthening of parental authority over the child jibe with her current admonishment to parents to listen to their children about their gender needs and to believe them? She writes, For some children and youth, there indeed is an impending crisis that requires immediate attention to avoid gender trauma and possible self-harm. But for

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other children, crisis is not the operating variable. Instead, patience and reflection are foreign concepts, and, for their parents, keeping their children happy by acceding to all their wishes becomes the dominating force in child rearing. . . . I have learned the necessity of sorting out true gender urgency from indulgent parents/child royalty conundrums. . . . Our gender creative children also need a guiding hand.13

Ehrensaft espouses a both/and approach for parenting that will honor the emerging gender narrative of children while safeguarding appropriate boundaries for its unfolding. Children require a protected ground upon which vital play and discovery can manifest. The historical shift Ehrensaft herself embodies has been from discovering the “why” of a child’s emerging gender expression and identity to focusing more “on the how of gender, specifically the ways in which an individual puts gender together, either in conformity or transgression of cultural norms and social expectations.”14 In 2008, Ehrensaft cofounded the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at the University of California, San Francisco, in order to “promote the gender affirmative approach—an effort to aid children in affirming their authentic gender rather than influencing them to accept the gender that would match the sex assigned to them at birth.”15 She thus became a leading and early figure in advocating for affirmative intervention to increase the psychosocial well-being of gender creative children. As a result of her efforts and the attendant shifts in medical provision for children smoothly transitioning into their “true gender selves,” considerations of the achievement of gender on the part of persons of all ages have undergone a seismic shift in the intervening years.

FROM DIAGNOSES TO ADVOCACY The 2013 publication of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders signaled a significant shift in the way gender is conceived by the psychiatric medical community. Rather than diagnosing a failure to conform to established gender identities, which the DSM-IV-TR’s designation of “Gender Identity Disorder (GID)” had previously policed,16 the project of ensuring adherence to such rigid gender identities was jettisoned in favor of seeking to assuage dysphoria with whatever configuration a person’s gender takes. The DSM-5’s section on “Gender Dysphoria” addressed “the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender. Although not all individuals will experience distress as a result of such incongruence, many are distressed if the desired physical interventions

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by means of hormones and/or surgery are not available. The current term . . . focuses on dysphoria as the clinical problem, not identity per se.”17 Rather than determining whether a person “fits” into preconceived—and in churches and seminaries, often scripturally “backed”—notions of what “gender identity” is or should be, the DSM-5 sought to provide comfort, minimize pain, and create a space for protected deployment of gender creative strategies. There is still work to be done in ironing out the indicators for gender dysphoria as a diagnosis, for “while the new name does move toward a pathologization of distress rather than gender-creativity,” the diagnostic criteria “still include ‘a strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender’ in addition to ‘a strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender,’ showing the continued pathologization of gender creativity.”18 In positing “the other gender,” the APA reinscribes the “one or the other” gender binary that nonbinary persons consistently demonstrate is taxonomically inadequate. Furthermore, there is the question of whether “gender dysphoria” should even remain a diagnosable condition for treatment or as a diagnostic gateway for medical gender affirmation interventions. Julia Serano notes that “the biased wording of the diagnosis seems to encourage genderreparative psychotherapies over transitioning, and renders happy and healthy post-transition trans people as ‘forever diagnosable’ with Gender Dysphoria.”19 Trenchantly, referring to the final of the five baseline premises for a gender-affirmative model of psychotherapeutic care delineated in chapter 3, Ehrensaft herself asks of gender dysphoria in young persons, “If gender pathology lies in the culture rather than in the children, we ask ourselves why we have a psychiatric gender diagnosis for children at all.”20 While advocates for gender-nonconforming persons of all ages heralded the APA’s shift in emphasis as a move toward positive change,21 Ehrensaft herself ultimately comes down against diagnosing gender nonconformity, for it “is not a disorder of childhood but, rather, a healthy variation of gender possibilities that may show up over the course of the child’s life with good effect if social supports are in place.”22 She advocates for the complete removal of psychopathology from gender creative lives. The pathology in the lives of gender creative children lies in the constricting social and cultural environments in which they attempt to live and breathe. Creating and maintaining safe spaces for developmental deployment of gender creative lives will be the responsibility of many and varied quadrants of society. Previously quoted Edgardo Menvielle puts the work of advocacy for gender-nonconforming children squarely in the hands of those who guarantee the social grounds of children’s development, writing in the foreword to Ehrensaft’s Gender Born, Gender Made, “Knowing that children who deviate from gender mandates

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are susceptible to social exclusion, [we] must instead learn to support [our] children as they walk through social minefields, figuring out their own steps. A person’s gender is no more than and no less than a creative individual achievement, and yet it can only develop through social exchange.”23 The paramount task of advocacy is no longer aiding children in better approximating culturally defined gender identity codes; the more present challenge toward which efforts must be directed is the careful attunement of the social exchange in which individual gender achievements are realized, whether on the part of parents, guardians, teachers, ministers, youth group leaders, caregivers, or, indeed, social policy analysts, politicians, or child therapists working with the families of transgender and gender-nonconforming children. This is no mean task. I can only draw attention here to some of the disjunctions that are raised by the uneasy confluence of rapidly emerging scientific findings and shifting gender experiences in contemporary life, as well as to the challenges of meeting the needs of those persons most affected, given the politicization of gender-affirmative care. I am suggesting, however, that a realignment of one’s notions of what gender is or can be, combined with an intentional effort to ally oneself with those who are different, provide powerful tools for one’s own spiritual evolution as an individual and for congregations and seminaries dedicated to the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Seeing lives other than one’s own through new perceptual lenses forms an important part of spiritual development. This process, however, takes courage, ongoing determination, and mutual accountability. Ehrensaft issues a strong word of encouragement, yet also of warning, to those pursuing child psychotherapy with an emphasis in gender dysphoria abatement: The workload . . . will be at least three times the individual work with adults. . . . To become a child therapist working with [transgender or gender-nonconforming] children is also to become a child advocate, for such children will only do as well as the school and community does in supporting them . . . to ensure that the children are enveloped in a social network of safety, security, acceptance, and gender creativity.24

I might add that the “community” of which Ehrensaft speaks includes, vitally, those places of worship where gender creative children and their parents can find refuge and spiritual nourishment. Sometimes, parents merely need a space to be in a community where the safety concerns that continually hover over their child can be held at bay for just a little while. In Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Andrew Solomon writes about the many aspects of human life that can intervene to make children at times startling different from their parents. In the case of transgender children, that difference can lead to violence perpetrated upon a child, and sometimes the parents are powerless to stop it. Solomon interviews parents

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who show him the “safe folder” that they carry with them at all times. Its contents are heartbreaking in their even being necessary, but they illustrate the extensive loving provision that gender creative children need: Paperwork to be shown in the event of trouble, as law enforcement and the medical system can be unfamiliar with or hostile to gender variance. A folder may include letters from the child’s pediatrician and a psychotherapist confirming the child’s gender identity; letters from at least three friends or family members and, if possible, a pastor or minister or other prelate that testify to the parents’ sound parenting skills; videos or snapshots of the child displaying atypical gender behaviors throughout life; copies of birth certificates, passports, and Social Security cards that reflect a change of gender or name; a home study documenting family stability, if available; and a Bureau of Criminal Information report that shows that the parents are not child abusers.25

As the emphasized portion of this excerpt indicates, ministers can play a direct, on-paper role in advocating for a gender creative child and in extending some of the safety the church building offers into the child’s life outside the congregation’s walls. As pharmacological technologies become more available, allowing a postponement of pubertal onset until gender-nonconforming children can be secure in their core gender affirmation, it is certainly the case that both the onus and privilege fall to parents to accompany their children and to make situation-appropriate medical decisions on their behalf.26 What pastoral professionals can do is to become versed in the existence of these technologies so as to provide sounding boards for those families in need of welcome. They might also assist in providing knowledgeable referrals for ongoing affirmative care.27 2008 marked the publication of the first guide to the shifting terrain, The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals. In it, authors Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper coached readers through what they acknowledged would not be an easy transition in thinking: It is much more difficult to justify telling your child who they are or aren’t, when the damage caused by denying her personal truth is so painfully obvious. More than ever before, people are coming to understand that the narrow confines we have given to gender are in many ways arbitrary. . . . Parents are faced now with the exciting and daunting task of raising children in a world that is expanding its understanding of gender.28

The authors invited all onto a learning curve that begins with understanding being transgender as “a normal part of human expression,”29 part of a larger category of persons who are gender creative.

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Ehrensaft’s concept of “gender creativity” stems from the fact that “gender” has significantly different meanings for different persons. In Gender Born, Gender Made, she articulates a model to help with relearning gender, and she is upfront about the fact that such a reframing will be required—necessary—for everyone, so thoroughly are selves saturated with conceptions of gender tied neatly to equally tidy notions of sex. She first argues that one needs to move beyond notions of “deviance,” or even “variance.” She then eschews, as Killermann does, the model of a “gender spectrum” because of its inherent two-dimensional constitution as a metaphor. Rather, Ehrensaft conceives of a “gender web” deployed in multiple dimensions, side-to-side, as well as up and down. This gender web encompasses “any particular child’s assigned gender, that which appears on the birth certificate; the child’s gender expressions—those feelings, behaviors, activities, and attitudes that communicate to both self and other one’s presentation of self as either male, female, or other; and the child’s core gender identity—the inner sense of self as male, female, or other.”30 In her subsequent book, The Gender Creative Child, Ehrensaft conceives of the gender web as comprising four major threads: nature (the physical and mental), nurture (relationships of all kinds), culture (societal values and proscriptions), and, as important, time: Like fingerprints, no two children’s gender webs will be alike. The same is true for any adult’s gender web as well. But unlike fingerprints, the gender web can alter in myriad ways from birth to death . . . , so we all . . . will always be tweaking our gender webs until the day we die.31

The majority of persons discover a largely adequate fit among assigned, expressed, and core gender among the influences of nature, nurture, and culture over time. Many, however, do not. These latter are the children who belong to Ehrensaft’s purposefully elastic category of “gender creative,” a “developmental position in which the child transcends the culture’s normative definitions of male/female to creatively interweave a sense of gender that comes neither totally from the inside (the body, the psyche), nor totally from the outside (the culture, others’ perceptions of the child’s gender) but resides somewhere in between.”32 The figure of the mermaid is an apt symbol for this in-between existence, although gender creativity would embrace a realm of possibilities more expansive, even, than that available to the mermaids of lore. Even the term “transgender” can become constricting in this new world of gender creativity; in its suggestion of movement, of transitioning from one place to another, “transgender” is tied to the gender binary from which many children feel themselves dislocated—or, indeed, freed. I have already delineated many of the various hybrids, fluidities, and cross-identified

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gender selves that can and do exist in this moment of time—designations, in fact, often sequentially employed within the lifespans of individual children as they develop, shift, adapt, and claim their selfhoods. Ehrensaft advocates for medical advances to be applied beyond cases of ultimately transsexual gender creative persons, to “open our horizons to understand medical interventions not just to achieve gender reversal, but also to afford the opportunity for gender in the middle or in unique iterations,”33 procedures that would include hormonal adjustments and/or a variety of single surgeries that might aid individual gender creative persons to achieve their “true” gender identity mix without the current medical and insurance expectation of “complete” gender transition. It is not my aim here to catalogue the medical and surgical options available to children and adolescents exhibiting gender nonconformity, which has been done comprehensively elsewhere.34 Rather, I look to the ways that caregivers—pastoral theologians, pastoral therapists, and church workers of various stripes—are being called to provide a place for gender-nonconforming children “to stand” in their hard-won authenticities. Unlike almost any other identity-based minority population, as Ehrensaft reports, “gender creative children . . . have an additional mark against them: They may face aspersion from their very own family, loved ones who are supposed to be their protectors.”35 Places of worship are uniquely poised environments in which to extend support and care to transgender and gendernonconforming children and their legal guardians. But congregations have done a less than adequate job of providing a protective sanctuary that gender fluid persons may need. In fact, as the introductory comments to the collected essays of the first National Conference on Gender Creative Kids make clear, Some of the worst violence (threatened and realized), it should be noted, has taken shape in the context of conservative religious communities. In a biblically based world in which God has created only “man” and “woman,” the gendercreative child serves as a living rupture to the perceived natural order of things.36

THE “TRUE GENDER SELF” A caveat at the start here, in that the notion of “true” and “false” selves conjures up yet another binary that would seem to need deconstructing. Conceptually, however, I think Diane Ehrensaft’s way of explicating the source and nature of gender creativity deserves a listen; the power of her theorizing lies in understanding that there will never be a completely “true” or “false” self or gender self, only approximations along the way to an individual’s ongoing achieving of their truest identity at any given time.

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In her conceptual development of “gender creativity,” Ehrensaft borrows from British pediatric psychologist Donald Woods Winnicott’s description of the way that the emergence of the true self of any individual is predicated upon avoiding rote compliance, through a process of individual creativity characterized by play: “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”37 Winnicott proposed that the original kernel of the true self is evident at birth. The potential for the true self to unfold is predicated on appropriate mirroring and emotional holding by the primary caretakers, in which the adults do not impose their own selves on the child’s psyche but rather allow the child’s authentic self to emerge.38

Winnicott theorized that persons who lacked a sense of themselves as purposeful selves had adopted, or been forced to adopt, false selves, and he began to see correlations between these false-self disorders and the tiny and (until Winnicott) unobserved nuances in parental care at the earliest stages of infancy. Winnicott sought to chart this continuum of gradations of love for the infant as a way of conceptualizing the necessary provision required for the emergence of the true self. Such a continuum also enables one to perceive the various forms of possible derailment from that goal and the means with which one could either prevent them or enable recovery and reorientation. Ehrensaft takes these three concepts of Winnicott (italicized in the previous paragraph)—“true self,” “individual creativity,” and “false self”—and adapts them to the development of a child emerging into their true gender self, itself an expression of the gender web described earlier: Like the [Winnicottian] true self, the true gender self begins as the kernel of gender identity that is there from birth, residing within us in a web of chromosomes, gonads, hormones, hormone receptors, genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics, but most important, in our brain and our mind.39

The “true gender self” is the author of one’s affirmed gender, and this affirmed gender is sometimes not in synch with one’s gender assigned at birth. In using the term “true gender self,” Ehrensaft also gets beyond some of the controversies involved with the various “trans” appellations by avoiding the sense of having to move from one’s “real” (assigned) gender to one’s “chosen” (affirmed) gender. Instead, a person is held always to have had an authentic gender, there from the beginning. The false gender self, like the Winnicottian false self, is a gender self-born of necessity, a self of compliant adaptation to a rigid environment. The false self can, however, act as a protective shield behind which the true self can

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hide until a suitably protective environment can be found. Here, Winnicott’s contribution was to postulate that by providing the kind of attuned environment in therapeutic work that parental impingements had denied a child in its formation, the therapist can aid in achieving access to that wellspring of subjectivity, meaning-making, and wholeness that children strive to embody. Ehrensaft likewise sees the “false gender self” potentially acting as a protective layer—if, that is, one knows when and how one is employing it: “The false gender self [can] be a strategy in the children’s conscious control in response to a world that is not yet ready, a strategy accompanied by the supportive voices of the people in the children’s most intimate world who are indeed ready.”40 Out of conscious control, however, the false gender self can easily become “a binding blanket that can smother.”41 Ehrensaft locates gender creativity within the spirit of individual creative play that Winnicott had claimed is essential for the emergence of the true self: “Gender creativity comes to save the day by working actively to circumvent the false gender self as well as privately keep the true gender self alive when it is not safe to let it come out.”42 The negotiations between “true” and “false” self, in fact, can serve to illustrate the nature of the ongoing debate among gender specialists related to “whether it is best to support a child expressing [their] true gender self and put pressure on the social world to work through their [sic] transphobia and support that child, or to teach the child about the unfair world and ask that child to put on a false gender self in situations where the world is not ready to embrace the true one.”43 Ehrensaft acknowledges that, especially with children, any given person “can go through many changes in a very short period of time. . . . We can never know with absolute certainty if a child who says [they are] transgender is expressing a stable, permanent lifelong identity or is just on a temporary stepping stone.”44 What does seem certain, however, is the need on the part of transgender and gender-nonconforming persons of all ages to be listened to, attended to, cared about, affirmed, and loved. Felicitously, even amid a cultural counternarrative using gender creativity as part of a pandering political ploy, there appears to be an emerging societal narrative that is positively conspiring to aid in embracing a more gender creative impulse, although it regrettably comes too late for too many. The difference between access to individual creativity and lack thereof can be literally the difference between life and death, as Winnicott himself wrote: We find that individuals live creatively and feel that life is worth living or else that they cannot live creatively and are doubtful about the value of living. This variable in human beings is directly related to the quality and quantity of environmental provision.45

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Ehrensaft stresses the communal quality of a child’s coming to their sense of gender: Gender exploration is a long and careful endeavor, interweaving the conscious and the unconscious, the psychic and the social, the social and the cultural. This is not a one-person operation on the part of the child. Rather, it is a relational process between child and adult, interweaving thoughts and feelings.46

The annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance, which commemorates victims of antitransgender violence,47 attests in part to the, tragically, frequent incidence of transgender teen suicide48 coupled with a documented high rate of violence against gender-nonconforming persons of all ages.49 These factors suggest that access to gender creativity is often a matter in which life itself is on the line. It is from this sense of urgency that Ehrensaft and others are crafting a course forward for gender creative parenting, the skills for which are transferable to pastoral caregiving modalities, to teaching, and to persons of all ages navigating toward an ongoing embrace of their evolving “true gender selves.” PART TWO CODA I learned of Robert Fulghum’s encounter with a Mermaid through a song setting of his account written by folk singer-songwriter Melinda Stanford, “Where Do the Mermaids Stand?”50 In the song, a “new kid named Lucy,” who “wore a dress the color of the sea and had long golden hair,” not only insists that she is a Mermaid but christens her fellow child narrator of the song “The Queen of the Sea.” I like to imagine that narrator as a vibrant gender-nonconforming child, temporarily hiding beneath a “false gender self” shell. The young tale-teller muses, “Well, no one had ever called me the Queen of the Sea. / Even though I wasn’t sure what it was, / It seemed more like me (so I said), / ‘Where do the Mermaids stand?’” As the other children begin to gather around this emboldened now Mermaid twosome, Lucy informs them that “Everyone’s a Mermaid .  .  . / But no two Mermaids look the same.” The game starts again with its parameters reframed, so that when the call goes out—“Choose what you’ll be!”—all the assembled “Began to shout with glee, / ‘Where do the Mermaids stand?’ / ‘Where do the Mermaids stand?’ / ‘Where do the Mermaids stand?’” It is my hope that with an increased gender creative sensibility, the “mermaids” in our midst can more freely “stand” wherever their hybrid hearts desire. For now, one may well have to straddle one’s wishes for access to gender creativity and the real-world circumstances that gender-nonconforming

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persons face. Ehrensaft talks of the “true” and “false” gender selves as needing to be in a productive tension: If we are to promote gender health for all our children, the goal is not only for the true gender self to “come out,” but also for the harm to be removed that required a false gender self in the first place. That means demanding that the world change to be more accepting and understanding. In the meantime, a false gender self is a necessary coating for many a gender-nonconforming child in a community that may at present be so rabidly hostile to these children’s true gender selves that their very physical safety is at stake if it “comes out.”51

Ministers, teachers, and pastoral caregiving practitioners can be change agents in a world often working against gender creative promise. To do so, we will need to join with educators like Killermann to see our kindred placement in the matrices of gender’s components. We will need to steel ourselves to consider anew, alongside psychologists like Ehrensaft, concepts and contexts we thought we knew. We will need to arm ourselves with a pastoral theology and a biblical perspective open to the kinds of new thinking required to deliver affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries that can bolster transgender and gender-nonconforming persons’ resilience. We will need to look within, heal from our own gender-transgressing wounds, and live into our “true gender selves” so that we can focus on others in our care. We may perhaps never completely understand gender creative human siblings, but alongside them, and with God, we can learn to “walk” together. To these projects, I now turn.

NOTES 1. The game, called “Giants, Wizards, and Dwarfs” in the 1980s, has been rechristened because of changing word choice for various genetic conditions resulting in atypically short stature. 2. Robert Fulgham, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts about Uncommon Things (New York: Villard, 1989), 83. 3. Fulgham, 84. 4. Fulgham, 84. 5. Fulgham, 84. 6. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 234 (emphases added). See also Mermaids, a U.K.based advocacy group for gender-nonconforming children, youth, and their parents: https://www​.mermaidsuk​.org​.uk/. 7. A version of a portion of this chapter was published in Pastoral Psychology; Craig A. Rubano, “Where Do the Mermaids Stand? Toward a ‘Gender-Creative’

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Pastoral Sensibility,” Pastoral Psychology 65, no. 6 (December 2016), http://doi​.org​ /10​.1007​/s11089​-015​-0680​-2. 8. Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner’s Guide (New York: Guilford Press, 2004), 148. 9. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 2. 10. Diane Ehrensaft, Parenting Together: Men and Women Sharing the Care of Their Children (New York: Free Press, 1987), 232–33, quoted in Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 123. 11. Ehrensaft, “True Gender Self Child Therapy,” 339. 12. Diane Ehrensaft, Spoiling Childhood: How Well-Meaning Parents Are Giving Children Too Much—But Not What They Need (New York: Guilford Press, 1997). 13. Ehrensaft, Gender Creative Child, 254. 14. Diane Ehrensaft, “Listening and Learning from Gender-Nonconforming Children,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 68, no. 1 (2014), https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /00797308​.2015​.11785504: 30. 15. Norman Spack, foreword to The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes, by Diane Ehrensaft (New York: The Experiment, 2016), xv. 16. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed., text rev. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000; 1994; 1987; 1980; 1973; 1968; 1965; 1952). 17. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2013; 2000; 1994; 1987; 1980; 1973; 1968; 1965; 1952), 451. 18. Jemma Tosh, “Working Together for an Inclusive and Gender-creative Future: A Critical Lens on ‘Gender Dysphoria,’” in Supporting Transgender and Gender Creative Youth: Schools, Families, and Communities in Action, eds. Elizabeth J. Meyer and Annie Pullen Sansfaçon (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2014), 46, citing APA, DSM-5, 452 (emphasis added). In the most recent incarnation of the DSM, no further changes in language have been made in the relevant diagnostic language; see American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed., text rev. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2022; 2013; 2000; 1994; 1987; 1980; 1973; 1968; 1965; 1952). 19. Julia Serano, “Trans People Are Still ‘Disordered’ in the DSM-5,” in Julia Serano, Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism (Oakland, CA: Switch Hitter Press, 2016), 156. 20. Ehrensaft, Gender Creative Child, 164. 21. See Elizabeth J. Meyer and Annie Pullen Sansfaçon, eds., Supporting Transgender and Gender Creative Youth: Schools, Families, and Communities in Action (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2014). 22. Ehrensaft, Gender Creative Child, 179 (emphasis added). 23. Menvielle, foreword to Gender Born, xi (emphases added). 24. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 225–226 (emphasis added). See an inspiring account of one family’s work with schools and community for a child’s gender creative

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dignity in Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (New York: Random House, 2015). 25. Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (New York: Scribner, 2012), 613 (emphases added). 26. Access to pharmacological pubertal postponement is disproportionately available to those with economic means and/or health insurance that will cover these procedures. Improved access to these drugs and their being included in health insurance coverage is at the cutting edge of activism on behalf of gender creative youth; see Jamie Stevens, Veronica Gomez-Lobo, and Elyse Pine-Twaddell, “Insurance Coverage of Puberty Blocker Therapies for Transgender Youth,” Pediatrics 136, no. 6 (December 2015), http://doi​.org​/10​.1542​/peds​.2015​-2849 and Zinnia Jones, “Four Low-cost Alternatives to Puberty Blockers for Transgender Adolescents,” Gender Analysis, July 21, 2017, https://genderanalysis​.net​/2017​/07​/four​-low​-cost​-alternatives​-to​-puberty​-blockers​-for​-transgender​-adolescents/. 27. Access to affirmative psychotherapeutic care is essential for children and parents alike to navigate gender dysphoria and the nuances of transition possibilities. For one view of creative strategies employed in assisting families, see Russell W. Healy and Luke R. Allen, “Bowen Family Systems Therapy with Transgender Minors: A Case Study,” Clinical Social Work Journal 47, April, 27, 2019, https://doi​.org​/10​ .1007​/s10615​-019​-00704​-4. 28. Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper, The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals: Supporting Transgender and Nonbinary Children, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2022; 2008), xiv. The genre of gender creative parental help literature has grown; see Stephanie Brill and Lisa Kennedy, The Transgender Teen: A Handbook for Parents and Professionals Supporting Transgender and NonBinary Teens (Jersey City, NJ: Cleis Press, 2016); Alisa Bowman and Michelle Angello, Raising the Transgender Child: A Complete Guide for Parents, Families and Caregivers (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2016); and Elijah C. Nealy, Transgender Children and Youth: Cultivating Pride and Joy with Families in Transition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). 29. Brill and Pepper, Transgender Child, 15. 30. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 4 (emphases added). 31. Ehrensaft, Gender Creative Child, 25. 32. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 5 (emphasis added). 33. Ehrensaft, Gender Creative Child, 194. 34. See Laura Erickson-Schroth, ed., Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022; 2014). See also the latest Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, 8th ver. (2022; 2011; 2001; 1998; 1990; 1981; 1980; 1979), published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/26895269​.2022​.210064. 35. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 20–21; for the voices of LGBTQ+ youth forcibly rendered unhoused by their families of origin, see Sassafras Lowrey, ed. Kicked Out (Ypsilanti, MI: Homofactus Press, 2010).

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36. Kimberley Ens Manning, Annie Pullen Sansfaçon, and Elizabeth J. Meyer, introduction to Supporting Transgender and Gender Creative Youth: Schools, Families, and Communities in Action, edited by Elizabeth J. Meyer and Annie Pullen Sansfaçon (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2014), 7. 37. Donald Woods Winnicott, Playing and Reality. Routledge Classics (New York: Routledge, 2005; Tavistock Publications, 1971), 72–73. 38. Ehrensaft, “True Gender Self Child Therapy,” 340. 39. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 78–79. 40. Ehrensaft, 90 (emphasis added). 41. Ehrensaft, 88. 42. Ehrensaft, 94. 43. Ehrensaft, 89–90. 44. Ehrensaft, “True Gender Self Child Therapy,” 347. 45. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 95–96. 46. Ehrensaft, “Listening and Learning,” 34. 47. See International Transgender Day of Remembrance, http://tdor​.info​/about​-2/. 48. See Luke Malone, “Transgender Suicide Rates are Staggering,” Vocativ, March 5, 2015, http://www​.vocativ​.com​/culture​/lgbt​/transgender​-suicide/. 49. See Human Rights Campaign, “A National Crisis: Anti-transgender Violence,” January, 2015, https://www​.hrc​.org​/resources​/a​-national​-crisis​-anti​-transgender​-violence; Human Rights Campaign, Addressing Anti-Transgender Violence: Exploring Realities, Challenges and Solutions for Policymakers and Community Advocates (Washington, DC: Human Rights Campaign, 2015), http://hrc​-assets​.s3​-website​-us​ -east​-1​.amazonaws​.com/​/files​/assets​/resources​/HRC​-Ant​iTra​nsge​nder​Violence​-0519​ .pdf; and see also statistics from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS) cited in chapter three. 50. Melinda Stanford, “Where Do the Mermaids Stand?,” BMI CAE/IPI #189149526, 1992, http://www​.melindastanford​.com. Lyrics reprinted with permission of the author. 51. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 90.

Part III

STRATEGIES OF RESILIENCE OPENING DOORS TO A GENDERAFFIRMATIVE PASTORAL THEOLOGY

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Gender Creative Resilience

In Parts I and II, I introduced a group of persons whose identities fly in the face of understanding gender as binary. From a social science point of view, it is clear that transgender and gender-nonconforming persons exist and that the gender creative population is growing, this despite the many societal roadblocks these persons face on a day-to-day basis. There is true progress on psychological fronts, with psychiatry moving toward ending gateway diagnoses for securing medical and legal changes in the sex assigned at one’s birth; diagnoses themselves shifting from identifying a medical “condition” toward helping to assuage the dysphoria provoked by cultural stigma; and gender-affirmative psychotherapies emerging to secure the resources necessary for gender creative persons’ thriving in light of the evidence that such intervention literally saves lives. Part III, then, focuses on gender creative thriving in the context of a pastoral theology that opens doors to affirmation beyond gender binaries. Diane Ehrensaft’s work, as seen, has been at the forefront of making normative various continua of gender expression and identities. She writes, For so many years, in trying to make a more equitable and accepting world, we have focused on teaching tolerance. Now it is time to teach resilience—the inner strength and centered sense of self and community that is never a given but rather a communal accomplishment.1

I seek to enhance this communal accomplishment of resilience through a gender creative deployment of pastoral theology as a field, considering benefits derivable from religious affiliation. My goal is to encourage pastoral leaders to become change-makers in their places of teaching, ministry, and caregiving. I have reported obstacles that gender creative persons face in navigating 79

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social, legal, and medical transitions necessary for living into the fullness of their true gender selves. I seek in this chapter to add a fourth, spiritual transition, required not only of gender creative individuals but of cisgender persons engaged in positions of ministry and pastoral care.2 In providing a home for the spiritual transitioning of gender creative persons, caregivers of all genders themselves “transition” to places characterized by the “more than” fullness of God’s creativity. To that end, the voices of gender creative persons will be heard from directly as they access resilience in the face of cultural opprobrium. Their strategies are delineated in a groundbreaking phenomenological study conducted by psychologist Anneliese A. Singh and colleagues.3 Surely gender creative persons are God’s human creations, equal in goodness to cisgender persons and just as interested in, and able to receive, the power that religiosity delivers—an integrating power, yet also a power great in its potential for disruption. Psychology of religion is a field of inquiry allied with pastoral theology that investigates psychological findings on personal thriving, seeking clues for how persons look to religion for succor and support. In that spirit, in chapter 7, I will present a theoretical model articulated by psychiatrist James L. Griffith that seeks to conceptualize those aspects of religiosity that inspire personal development and communal cohesion while also taking into account what in religion reinforces group insularity and negatively impacts spiritual strivings.4 I will consider the benefits of religiosity more generally and see whether the self-described resilience strategies and needs of transgender persons mirror provisions toward personal resilience that may be derived from religious community. In pursuing a way forward, in chapter 8, I suggest that “empathy,” as variously defined, may not be enough to enable adequate understanding of a gender expansiveness outside of one’s personal experience. Imperfect empathic understanding, however, should not deter from the gender creative promise of the encounter. Moving “beyond empathy” may lead to a humility that allows for difference. This expansion of a sense of empathy by “shrinking” its claims is in keeping with pastoral theology, itself an academic discipline always in a process of reappraisal in its search for genuine contact between human experience and theological understanding. I develop a metaphor for pastoral action, derived from Jesus’s parable in the Gospel of Luke (11:5–8) of the nighttime friend who knocks on a neighbor’s door in a moment of need. In asking the inhabitants within to respond, the neighbor persistently beckons the friend to embody, in the face of attendant fear, what I see as a pastoral persona of door-opener. To open doors is to embrace love necessarily expansive for discovering the promise of emerging affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries. One of the ways pastoral caregivers, teachers, and ministers can expand access to a sense of religious belonging and resilience is to mine the scriptural

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record for messages of inclusion and affirmation, to which I turn in Part IV. In chapter 9, I analogize an approach to interpretation from my own placement as a gay-identified, cisgender man to open more expansive vistas onto a gender creative biblical witness. In chapter 10, I re-examine biblical texts that have historically been used to support a presumed binary fiat in God’s creation. Finding biblical affirmation for gender creative living requires an imaginative leap on the part of persons who claim a more binary gender expression and identity. But the activity of living into biblical texts, no matter the particularities of any given interpreter, begins, vitally, with locating themself5 in the story of God’s ongoing life with and in humanity. Then, in chapter 11, I return to the theme of authorial transparency and reflexivity detailed in chapter 1 by stressing the work of introspection around every person’s gender expression and identity required to ally with gender creative persons. In this, I interweave Diane Ehrensaft’s four-pronged charge to the parents of gender creative children with an account of the visit of the Canaanite woman to Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of Matthew (15:21–29). Psychologist Anneliese A. Singh is Professor of Social Work and Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Tulane University’s School of Social Work, as well as co-founder of the Georgia Safe Schools Coalition and Trans Resilience Project, an initiative that works to combat intersectional oppressions in Georgia public schools. In a series of articles and in an accessible workbook for navigating sexual orientation and gender, Singh reports back from transgender persons, having listened to and compiled their strategies for resilience in the face of oppression.6 Singh is the foremost expert on transgender and gender-nonconforming resilience, having written over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, chapters, and media publications as well as coediting with lore m. dickey the influential collection Affirmative Counseling and Psychological Practice with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Clients.7 For a general definition of resilience, Singh cites the work of child development specialist Ann S. Masten, who describes resilience as a network of “the ‘ordinary magic’ that you can use to bounce back from hard times.”8 In an interview, Masten states that the engines of resilience are the basic, fundamental systems that help us throughout human development. And they also help us through difficulties. . . . The basic characteristics for resilience are: Caregivers and family that are looking out for you. A human brain in good working order. A human brain that has learned through interactions and training with a lot of people who care. Parents and teachers encouraging children to pay attention, solve problems and control behavior.9

For gender creative persons who typically suffer adverse societal, religious, and often parental deficits in care provision and encouragement, a dearth of resilience strategies can naturally follow. However, because resilience

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emerges from coping skills that are learned, it can be acquired and enhanced throughout the life cycle. Paradoxically, navigating through adversity leads to particularly strong resilience, so studying resilience patterns in transgender and gender-nonconforming persons illumines practices that lead to greater strength of character for persons of all genders. Singh, along with Danica G. Hays and Laurel S. Watson, designed a phenomenological inquiry that explored resilience strategies in transgender individuals—“phenomenological,” because the study sought to learn from the lived experiences of a population through its members’ own descriptions of their resilience practices.10 This is in keeping with a longstanding contention in the evolving field of transgender studies that the phenomenology of embodied experience is vital to maintaining and validating “the categories through which the subject makes sense of its own experience.”11 Singh and her colleagues conducted three interview rounds with transgender persons. The first round explored “general resilience strategies they had used throughout their lives and provided an everyday definition of resilience as ‘overcoming difficult times and experiences,’”12 including the context in which these experiences evolved; the second and third interviews went deeper, exploring details about the strategies shared and the meaning that the participants made of their strategies.13 Five common themes emerged across all participants, as well as two variant themes among a majority of those interviewed. I will describe briefly the themes that emerged from the study and flesh them out with first-person accounts taken from a growing literature of transgender voices.14 COMMON RESILIENCE STRATEGIES FOR TRANSGENDER PERSONS (1) The first common theme described by participants in Singh and her colleagues’ study as an important aspect of their resilience strategies as transgender persons was being able to evolve “a self-generated definition of self.”15 As we have seen, the ways that gender creative persons describe their placement on various gender continua can be highly varied, even within the lifetime of a particular individual. “Jamie” “identifies as genderqueer and uses the singular ‘they’”16 as their pronoun: I enjoy labels because I can mash them all together. I like cutting up the boxes and creating pretty pictures with them, finding as many words as I can to describe different parts of me. . . . I figured out about a year ago that there were terms for people who weren’t one sex or the other, that there were a whole host of nonbinary terms. I began to think that maybe not everyone had to work as hard as I did to keep up the act of trying to fit in to their genders. . . . It was the first time I really realized that there was something other than bisexuality

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happening within my life. . . . Even a lot of mainstream transgender communities are unwelcoming to nonbinary people. They exhibit the same type of attitude you get from a lot of mainstream gay and lesbian communities: “Oh, you’re bisexual? Get off the fence and decide!” They fail to understand that androgyny, just like bisexuality, is really a place.17

Jamie’s story illustrates Singh and her colleagues’ claim that “language regarding their gender became a way for participants to actively resist the traditional binary definitions of gender.”18 The diversity, contentious at times even among transgender persons, is demonstrated by Jamie’s positing a mainstream transgender community away from which a burgeoning nonbinary population is defining itself. As seen in chapters 2 and 4, this nonbinary-identifying subculture is now outnumbering a more binary transgender population from which it stemmed, often entering a world of self-defining neologisms that can prove an uphill journey for the uninitiated. “Dakota” “identifies as agender and uses ‘ze/hir’19 pronouns”20: It’s really challenging to maintain a nonbinary identity. I have an androgynous name and appearance, but people falter with regard to pronouns . . . so I usually tell people to use whatever feels comfortable for them. I have friends who consistently switch back and forth, and others who try to avoid pronouns altogether. Our language doesn’t offer a whole lot of options, and it’s so heavily gendered in a lot of ways. People want to know what to do to be respectful, but there’s not a lot of concrete instruction I can give them.21

In Dakota’s path toward self-definition, ze is simultaneously defiant and forgiving. On the one hand, Dakota chooses pronominal designations that are particularly confounding to outsiders; on the other hand, ze lives out a generous spirit of amenability to those in hir orbit. The absence of bedrock “rules” for how to address gender creative persons speaks to the openness to novelty through which one is invited to live in a world beyond binaries. “Helen,” who self-describes as an “androgyne-leaning femme,”22 expresses self-determining consternation regarding the era in which she lives, one characterized by both possibilities and a lack of boundaries: Not only is there no “standard,” generally accepted model for fitting anywhere outside the usual gender binary but there is also no generally accepted model for the process of questioning that binary, or for the process of formulating one’s own “labels” or identity outside of that binary. . . . If none of the labels we hear “feel” right to us, how do we go about creating a new label that does? How do we know whether we’ve “found” the right identity/label for ourselves because it really is the right one, or whether we’ve “found” the right one mostly through default?23

The process of defining oneself can be an ongoing, evolving series of “trying on” monikers, terms, labels, and names that can prove dizzying, but,

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importantly, self-constitutive and resilience-enhancing: “Although not all participants used the same language to describe their gender, all shared that being able to use their own words and terms to define their gender helped them cope with discrimination.”24 Often, the terms settled upon are multivalent, allowing identity to be claimed intersectionally in complex ways that incorporate more than merely gender. “Rafael” “identifies as stud and aggressive25 and uses the pronoun yo”26: These terms incorporate not only gender identity and expression but also race, which is really important to me. As an interracial individual, I try to stay away from terms like “transexual” and other identity labels that have been traditionally used in white communities. I see myself as an amalgamation within the matrices of identity: I am masculine of center, and also a person of color, and also queer. I need terminology that addresses all of these aspects because all of those things come together to shape my experience.27

Being able to evolve a self-generated sense of self, then, is a key step toward gender creative persons’ claiming the fullness of intersectional identities, including gender. (2) A second common theme to emerge in the resilience strategies of transgender participants in Singh and her colleagues’ study is that “it was important that they acknowledged and embraced their own self-worth as human beings; in other words, they had the right to live their lives and exist as transgender people.”28 The “imposition” that gender creative persons can feel they are making in “demanding” recognition from an often hesitant or resistant society is subsumed under the rightness and dignity of coming to own an identity that expresses their particularity—each a reflection of the image of God. “Max,” who self-describes as “transgender stone butch,”29 raises questions about the pressures that come to bear over embodying an internal/external identity “consistency”: Is everyone who’s having SRS [sexual reassignment surgery] having it because it’s consistent with their internal identity, or are some people doing it because the only images they’ve been shown of what a woman is are of female women with vaginas and breasts? Or tall men with penises and flat chests? I have spent much of my life desperately wishing I had a male body. But I’m starting to feel comfortable with the apparent contradictions between my female body and my male presentation. This contradiction is part of my strength and my identity, as well as part of what is hot to my lover! It’s part of what makes me unique.30

Participants in the study shared that in a world where so many things lie outside of individual control, they feel empowered to “draw on positive beliefs

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about themselves to cope with stress,”31 allowing them to be firm in their selfempowerment. The voice of “Clare” (who self-identifies as “queer”) perhaps speaks for many in the study: To answer the homophobes becomes easy, those folks who want to dehumanize, erase, make invisible the lives of butch dykes and Nellie fags. We shrug. We laugh. We tell them: your definitions of woman and man suck. We tell them: your binary stinks. We say: here we are in all our glory—male, female, intersexed, trans, butch, Nellie, studly, femme, king, androgynous, queen, some of us carving out new ways of being women, others of us new ways of being men, and still others new ways of being something else entirely.32

A person’s embraceable self-worth can gather strength from somewhere deep within and/or emerge bolstered by the approbation of others, whether or not those others intentionally meant to dignify a specifically transgender identity. A computer analyst wrote these words to then Vice President Al Gore upon receiving an award for developing specialized computer software: I am writing in advance to say thank you . . . and say that receiving your prestigious award is particularly important for me because it affirms that I, a transgendered (transsexual) woman am regarded by you as a valuable person.  .  .  . I was Richard Green when I wrote the key computer program….I am sending copies of the letter to The Post and other papers to advise others in advance of my preference to be regarded, treated, and referred to as the woman, Jewelia Margueritta Cameroon.33

Embracing self-worth became for the study participants “a critical component of a positive self image.  .  .  . They universally agreed that having a strong internal ‘coach’ to help them manage prejudice was instrumental in this fight.”34 (3) Third among common themes in the resilience strategies of study participants was an awareness of oppression: They described this awareness as being a stepwise development, in which they gradually recognized the extent of oppression they faced. . . . Participants described their awareness of oppression as helping them to identify societal messages that were not “trans-positive.”35

The kinds of oppression identified by Singh and her colleagues’ interlocutors ranged from the existence and experience of virulent transphobic discrimination to an awareness of the insidiousness of internalizing messages of “necessary” societal conformity. “Catherine,” “an orthopedic nurse [who] transitioned male to female (MTF)”36 and locates her community in a queer

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women’s circle, describes the positive ripples that can come from oppression awareness: When I was first transitioning, I wore a lot of dresses and fingernail polish and makeup. My dyke friends were like, “Just stop. Please will you stop?” It seemed unnatural to this particular group of women that I would want to wear the sort of clothes they despised. When I asked why she was so opposed to my dress, my friend Bonnie said, “I hate wearing dresses because I was forced to.” Her eyes went wide as comprehension dawned on her face. These days, Bonnie wears dresses more than she ever did, partly because now it is her choice and partly because it’s not a political statement anymore.”37

Often, an acute awareness of oppression emerges for transgender persons by way of contradistinction to the sometimes very different pressures and strictures faced by their “kindred” LGBTQ+ communities. Understanding the particular oppressions experienced by persons claiming the “T” allows targeted action on behalf of gender creative persons, as does unpacking the intersectional ways that other minority group statuses can exacerbate or attenuate gender identity/expression-specific oppressions. “Mosley,” who “identifies as stud, boi, and masculine of center,”38 speaks to the particularities of discrimination that fall onto both transgender and communities of color within the LGBTQ+ world she inhabits: When there is talk about LGBTQ issues, often issues of gay, privileged white men take center stage. The arguments become about marriage equality—and don’t get me wrong I’m very supportive of marriage equality; I want my rights, dammit—but issues of homelessness, sexual violence, racial discrimination, and housing discrimination are completely ignored. These are all more pressing issues than wanting your partner to get the same benefits that you have at your really elite job. Many people in poor communities or communities of color can’t even talk about benefits right now, because we’re not getting work. We’re not safe in our communities, and often we’re not safe from the very institutions that are supposed to protect us: law enforcement, social services, and other institutions that are supposed to help our communities [but] have often marginalized us in many ways.39

An awareness of the specificities of oppression faced by gender creative persons both informs targeted reforms and social activism as well as helps to identify negative societal messages to counteract their internalization. In the process, individuals are often moved to embrace others who share their particularities and struggles, which leads to a fourth common theme in resilience strategies among the participants in the study: the power of belonging to a group.

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(4) Connection with supportive community. “Olivia,” a trans woman minister in the United Church of Christ (UCC) denomination, stresses the importance of community in the context of her becoming aware of the differences of experienced oppressions within LGBTQ+ communities: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and other people whose identities are based on sexuality celebrate at pride parades . . . to be out in public and let everyone know that they are not ashamed of themselves. There are trans people who participate in pride, but for the most part, trans folk are forced to be spectacles every day so they aren’t necessarily interested in throwing a parade where even more people can gawk at them. The biggest celebration in the transgender community is Trans Day of Remembrance, where we hold vigils to memorialize our dead. The rates of suicide, murder, and drug overdose in the trans community are astronomically high. People in all parts of the world gather each November with pictures of our trans loved ones. We celebrate their lives and mourn their deaths.40

It is no accident that, since 2015, the Trans Day of Remembrance, which brings gender creative persons and their allies together in a communal grief, is being additionally charged through a wide-scale series of art projects as a “Trans Day of Resilience,” in order to “experience a world where trans people of color don’t just survive, but thrive.”41 Shared oppression can sustain vibrant communities of joy gathered together in spite of that oppression, even in the midst of sorrow. The fact that Olivia is a Christian minister anticipates a claim of chapter 7 that religious communities can be resources for the resilience strategies identified by Singh and her colleagues’ study participants. Coming together as a community that acknowledges its common experience of oppression is itself an expression of resilience. But Singh and her colleagues stress, based on their findings that, “although participants described having a very active role in building communities, these communities were not always transgender-only communities.”42 Classrooms and congregations can become those supportive communities for building gender creative resilience. Optimally, support and a sense of community would be part of a person’s upbringing. For some gender creative persons (and, one hopes, for more and more of them in time), family support has been a blessing they acknowledge. “Jeff,” a self-described “FtM (female-to-male)” trans man, credits his parents with allowing him the strength and resilience to embrace his trans reality: Probably my parents played the biggest role in my—not who I am because I don’t have a choice necessarily in who I am—but in how I was emotionally ready to adapt to the world as a man. I credit my parents with being able to lay

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the groundwork when I was young about being who I was and about accepting yourself and about diversity, about not playing, just be yourself.43

The family can thereby be a prototype for the kinds of supportive communities gender creative persons discover and/or create later in their journeys toward personal resilience. With parental support and communal camaraderie come more self-acceptance and the ability to look to one’s future with less fear and more hope. (5) Cultivating hope for the future. Participants reported using hope as a management strategy in times of felt discrimination over their gender identities and/or expression. Hope is experienced in various ways, sometimes in a wish on behalf of upcoming generations of gender creative persons who have a wider canvas of possibilities open to them. “Catherine,” the orthopedic nurse mentioned earlier, marvels at this brave new world: I look around at these young trans kids who pass44 beautifully because they got to take hormone blockers when they were still pre-pubescent and transition to hormones as teens. Many of them will never need the surgeries I had to have in order to pass. They will never face the same violence and ridicule as the people in my generation did. When I look around and see these kids transitioning, and these kids who have family support, I know that every battle we waged was worth it.45

Hope should be a natural outcome for gender creative individuals seeking community in Christian churches. However, as “Olivia,” the UCC minister noted earlier, understates: Christianity has not always been a welcoming space for LGBT people. In many churches, this is still the case. . . . I make sure that I use my pulpit to show how welcoming the light of God can be to everyone. People cite various biblical verses to prove that homosexuality is a sin, or that being transgender is a sin. When I minister about these verses, I try to put them in a historical and cultural context so that people think about the meaning of the words in a new way. . . . I may not be able to convince everyone that God loves and accepts homosexuals and transexuals, but I can usually help them realize that it is not their place to pass judgment on their neighbors, and that’s a good place to start.46

Cultivating hope by repositioning biblical verses that heretofore have been read and interpreted to exclude is perhaps the most powerful way pastoral theologians, ministers, teachers, and caregivers can begin to open the doors of Christianity to an affirmation of gender creative promise. It is toward this goal that I turn in Part IV. Hope can be cultivated in the face of oppression and discrimination, but it is inculcated best in a religious community in tandem

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with a message of God’s love and support. These reflections of “Mosley” (stud, boi, masculine of center), heard from earlier, tie together all five of the elements found in common among the study participants’ resilience strategies—self-generated definition of self, self-worth, awareness of oppression, supportive community, and hope for the future: Having a sense of community is vital. When you’re queer, the world is actively, actively trying to get you to be anything other than who you are, so we need to provide spaces that get us to feel comfortable in our own skin. Having a sense of self [and] a sense of health and wellness is going to translate into all facets of our lives. If we feel worthy, if we feel empowered, [and] if we love ourselves, that’s going to show up in our style, in the workplace, in our relationships, and [in] the way we treat others. It’s going to show up in how successful we conceptualize ourselves as being.47

An additional two themes found in a majority of the study’s participants can be seen to lead directly from a successful finding, implementation, and living out of the previous five themes held in common by all participants. (6) A majority of Singh and her colleagues’ study participants reported the “importance of engaging in social activism”; they described “both seeking out opportunities for activism and being exposed to activism through others.”48 The motivations for this activist work vary in the testimonies of gender creative persons. “Kurtis,” who self-describes as “transmasculine,”49 speaks of the attendant cultural advantages that accrued to him because of his transitioning and his felt conviction to pay it forward: I woke up one day as a white man in America. I feel that it’s my responsibility to do something with all that privilege, so I decided to work for a racial-justice organization. I do my best to use my powers and privileges to dismantle racism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia. I try to listen to those who are marginalized by racism and help ensure that their voices are heard. I’m not trying to sound chivalrous or gallant. The reality is I have power as a white “dude,” and if I’m not actively working toward antiracism, then I’m perpetuating a system of inequality. I can’t let that happen.50

Part of the ubiquity of activism among gender creative persons is due to the persistence of the oppression they suffer. “Greg” refers to transgender communities as being filled with “accidental activists”: I feel that a lot of trans folk become activists, not because they necessarily want to, but because there is a certain amount of need. You can’t change the gender marker on your driver’s license? You can’t find a doctor willing to treat you? You can’t find a safe restroom? No one else is going to take care of these issues, because their lives aren’t affected by them each and every day. As you deal

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with prejudice on a daily basis, you start picking and choosing which battles are the most important to you and then you start educating the people around you. Even if they never intended for it to happen, I believe most trans people become accidental activists.51

The definitions of “activism” are wide, from advocacy in educational, social, or legislative settings to the simple activist moments of claiming aloud a marginalized identity. “Jill,” who self-describes as a “male crossdresser” and “transgendered,”52 speaks to the power of allowing more and more persons to know a gender creative person by normalizing the experience through “coming out”: The more trangendered people there are out, even if you’re just out to your friends, even if it’s just one person, I think that’s activism. And that’s important. It’s important for the person, for both people, because the more people know that we are human beings and we’re not monsters, we’re not evil, that the more people can question their own ideas about gender, I think the more we will learn.53

“Beth,” a self-described “MtF (male to female)” trans woman, would concur, evidencing her mere non-passing presence as a positive witness for the “cause”: “I do think it’s important that God, the universe, whatever, decided to make me 6’3” and so masculine-looking so that I am not able to just stop and blend in and disappear into the woodwork after surgery. I’m having to be out here every day at least with people questioning. They might not know exactly, but questioning. So I think that’s good.”54 In turn, cisgender members of caring communities can engage in the “activist” endeavor of expanding the sense of their own gender and of gender in general. As noted in chapter 4, in finding personal placements on the various continua of gender, all persons’ gender identities and expressions might be “denormalized,” creating points of commonality from which to create community with and for gender creative persons. It is in the living of one’s life in relationships with others that more subtle forms of activism can be deployed by persons of all genders, leading to the final theme, found among a majority of the participants in Singh and her colleagues’ study—that of educating by example. (7) Being a positive role model for others. Whether it manifests in settings of work, church, family, or volunteer engagement, having a positive influence on others follows naturally from the kinds of “openly being yourself” social activism advocated by “transgendered” male crossdresser “Jill” and MtF trans woman “Beth.” Becoming a positive role model for others, like “accidental activism,” often starts from where one is already socially located.

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“Natalie” transitioned on the police force and found that she became a positive role model at her workplace by connecting with a common thread in her fellow officers: There are a lot of officers who joined the force because they wanted to make a difference and who want to uphold justice. These are the ones who truly want to protect and serve. I may not ever be able to reach the rogues, but most officers want to learn how they can help others and do their jobs better. That’s why I started training squadrons on how to work with transgender suspects and inmates. It started with my own station first. My boss asked me to lead some diversity trainings that focused on LGBT issues. To my surprise, everyone was extremely attentive and asked very informed questions. . . . From there it snowballed: I give two to four trainings at different stations each month. I occasionally feel tokenized, but I can put those feelings aside because I know that the work that I’m doing is invaluable.55

A lack of positive role models can cause gender creative persons to feel isolated and have the sense that no one could ever share their worries and struggles. The power of seeing role models in the media, on the internet, or in one’s own life, can often propel a transgender person to model resilience for others. Serving as a role model, in turn, better enables that person to continue to gather strength toward the vibrant living of their life. Singh and her colleagues found that “many participants described a desire to seek out jobs and careers where they could help others and find inspiration, which helped them mitigate some of the negative effects of oppression.”56 “Blake,” a Native American self-described “FTM (female to male)” Professor of Disability Studies, has found that his “teaching” extends beyond the classroom: Representation is incredibly important, but members of minority groups often cannot easily point to examples or positive role models or strong representatives. As an older person in the community, I feel that it is my duty to mentor youth and help guide the way for those who are taking the reins behind me. When my generation dies, the movement will fall into their hands, and we must teach them how to be strong leaders. During the summers, I go home to mentor and tutor youth on the Fort Mojave Reservation. It’s good for these young kids to see that they can leave the rez and make something of themselves, and it’s even better for them to see how important it is to return to the rez and give back to the community.57

Whether Singh and her colleagues intended it or not, each resilience strategy as enumerated can be seen to feed naturally into the next, with evolving a self-generated definition of self enhancing one’s ability to embrace selfworth. Having a named identity, and self-worth attached to that identity, will

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aid in steeling oneself in the face of a growing awareness of the prevalence of oppression and enhance the attendant ability to weed out harmful tropes and influences. Awareness of oppression, in turn, puts one in touch with others who suffer in like manner, and connecting with a supportive community contributes to being able to cultivate hope for the future. Sensing a possible positive future for oneself and others leads to the kinds of social activism necessary to bring about the changes one seeks. Such activism can be collective action on behalf of others or simply the strength of being oneself openly and proudly, which can furnish a positive role model for others. PASTORAL PRACTICE Possible ways that a caregiver, caring pastor, ministerial teacher, or pulpit preacher can contribute to, bolster, enhance—engender, even—all seven of these strengths come readily to mind: (1) inviting care receivers, students, and parishioners to name themselves with their own words and respecting those namings; (2) fostering positive self-images by providing affirmative messages about gender creative persons—in casual speech, in writing, and from the pulpit; (3) critically examining societal messages so as better to understand the oppression the persons in one’s care are experiencing; (4) providing, inculcating, and advocating for the community, the classroom, and the congregation to be the kind of supportive communities that build resilience; (5) strengthening relationships over time with those in one’s care so as to connect living, unfolding stories to hopeful outcomes; (6) attending to or sponsoring community, denominational, or academic activism by participating in rallies, religious services, and conferences that aim toward positive change in the public arena; and (7) being a positive role model on whom gender creative persons in one’s care can rely, and allowing the care receiver, in turn, to be a role model for the caregiver. Religion and religious community, however, can be double-edged swords, sources of oppression as well as of resilience. Pastoral theology and its allied field, psychology of religion, take into serious consideration the psychological dimensions of religiosity in all their complexity and ambiguity. These fields of inquiry can help discern the aspects of religious belonging that are forces for healing from those more liable to hurt, especially those on the margins of society. NOTES 1. Diane Ehrensaft, foreword to The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook: Skills for Navigating Sexual Orientation and Gender Expression, by Anneliese A. Singh (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2018), vii (emphases added).

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2. A version of a portion of this chapter was published in Pastoral Psychology; Craig A. Rubano, “Opening Doors to Resilience and a Gender-Diverse Pastoral Theology,” Pastoral Psychology 71, no. 6 (December 2022), https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​ /s11089​-022​-01027​-x. 3. Singh, et al., “Resilience Strategies.” 4. Griffith, Religion that Heals. 5. For the use of “themself” as a beyond-the-binary pronoun, see John Kelly, “Meet Themself, Our Next Gender-Neutral Singular Pronoun,” Slate, May 30, 2016, https://slate​.com​/human​-interest​/2016​/05​/meet​-themself​-our​-next​-gender​-neutral​ -singular​-pronoun​.html. 6. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies”; see also Anneliese A. Singh and Vel S. McKleroy, “‘Just Getting Out of Bed is a Revolutionary Act’: The Resilience of Transgender People of Color Who Have Survived Traumatic Life Events,” International Journal of Traumatology 17, no. 2 (2011); Anneliese A. Singh, Sarah E. Meng, and Anthony W. Hansen, “‘I Am My Own Gender’: Resilience Strategies of Trans Youth,” Journal of Counseling and Development 92, no 2 (2014); and Anneliese A. Singh, The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook: Skills for Navigating Sexual Orientation and Gender Expression (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2018). 7. Anneliese A. Singh and lore m. dickey, eds., Affirmative Counseling and Psychological Practice with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Clients (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2017). 8. Singh, Resilience Workbook, 1. 9. Quoted in Andy Steiner, “Ann Masten: Children’s Natural Resilience is Nurtured through ‘Ordinary Magic,’” MinnPost, September 17, 2014, https://www​.minnpost​.com​/mental​-health​-addiction​/2014​/09​/ann​-masten​-children​-s​-natural​-resilience​ -nurtured​-through​-ordinary​-m/; see also Ann S. Masten, Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development (New York: Guilford Press, 2015). 10. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 21. 11. Henry S. Rubin, “Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4, no. 2 (April 1998): 265. 12. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 22. 13. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 22. 14. I draw my illustrative quotations from several published collections of thematically arranged gender creative voices: Pat Conover, Transgender Good News (Silver Spring, MD: New Wineskins Press, 2002); Lori B. Girshick, Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2008); and Jackson Wright Shultz, Trans/Portraits: Voices from Transgender Communities (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015). Also of note are full-length memoirs of gender creative persons such as Jan Morris, Conundrum: An Extraordinary Narrative of Transsexualism, 2nd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1986; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2016; 2007); Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004); Jennifer Finney Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, 2nd ed. (New York:

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Broadway Books, 2013; 2003); and Nick Krieger, Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011). 15. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23 (emphasis added). 16. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, xx. 17. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 73–74. 18. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23. 19. “‘Ze and hir’ is the most popular pairing of gender-free pronouns in the online genderqueer community.” “The Need for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun,” Gender Neutral Pronoun Blog (blog), January 24, 2010, https://gen​dern​eutr​alpronoun​.wordpress​ .com/; “Ze” is pronounced “zee,” and “hir” is pronounced “here.” 20. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, xx. 21. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 74. 22. A person identifying as “femme” is “often a lesbian with an effeminate gender expression. However, this identity is sometimes claimed by gay or bisexual men as well.” Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 197. 23. Girshick, Transgender Voices, 14. 24. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23. 25. “Stud” and “aggressive” typically describe “masculine-presenting lesbian women” and are “used predominantly in black or African American communities.” Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 199. 26. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, xxii. See John McWhorter, “Is ‘Yo’ the GenderNeutral Pronoun You’ve Been Looking For?,” the website of the New York Times, the New York Times online, July 19, 2023, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2023​/07​/19​/opinion​ /language​-gender​-pronoun​-baltimore​.html. 27. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 104. 28. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23 (emphasis added). 29. “Stone butch” typically refers to “a female-bodied person who is strongly masculine in character and dress, who is generally dominant in sexual relations and often does not want to be touched genitally.” Girshick, Transgender Voices, 206. 30. Girshick, Transgender Voices, 71. 31. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23. 32. Girshick, Transgender Voices, 34. 33. Conover, Transgender Good News, 107. 34. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23. 35. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23. 36. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, xix. 37. Shultz, 79. 38. Shultz, xxi. “Stud” “typically describes masculine-presenting lesbian women. This term is used predominantly in black or African American communities” (Shultz, 199); “boi” usually describes “a masculine woman, genderqueer individual, or young trans man” (Shultz, 196); and “masculine of center (MOC)” is “a term for masculine women and used primarily in communities of color” (Shultz, 199). 39. Shultz, 81–82. 40. Shultz, 83 (emphases added). 41. Trans Day of Resilience, https://www​.tdor​.co.

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42. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 24. 43. Girshick, Transgender Voices, 54. 44. To “pass,” which is controversial in that it suggests a necessity for, or an optimal outcome of, gender conformance (paired with attendant “failures” to do so), is defined as “to be successfully recognized by others (usually strangers) as one’s desired gender.” Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 198. 45. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 194. 46. Shultz, 186–187. 47. Shultz, 99. 48. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 24 (emphasis added). 49. “Transmasculine” is “the adjective form of trans man.” Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 200. 50. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 107. 51. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 165. 52. There has been a historical shift from an earlier usage of “trangendered” to the current “transgender.” Generally, many argue, the word “transgendered” should be avoided because “transgendered suggests that being trans is something that happens to someone, as opposed to an identity someone is born with.” German Lopez, “Why You Should Always Use ‘Transgender’ instead of ‘Transgendered,’” Vox, February 18, 2015, https://www​.vox​.com​/2015​/2​/18​/8055691​/transgender​-transgendered​-tnr. 53. Girshick, Transgender Voices, 176. 54. Girshick, Transgender Voices, 176. 55. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 181. 56. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 24. 57. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 184.

Chapter 7

Psychology of Religion Ally to Gender-Affirmative Pastoral Theology

According to the Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling, psychology of religion “offers observations and explications of the phenomenon of religion, using the terminology of psychological theories.”1 It has not, however, always been clear where psychology of religion belongs taxonomically. “Is it,” asks David M. Wulff, author of the most comprehensive introductory textbook to the field, “a subfield of psychology or is it a specialty within religious studies?”2 Kate M. Loewenthal, the author of an introductory text on psychology of religion, points toward the inherent difficulties that attend even defining its terms, the relationship between psychology and religion having “been a very unhappy one. . . . Each domain has been seen as exclusive: if you are a psychologist, you cannot take religion seriously, and if you are religious you cannot take psychology seriously.”3 Theologians can have a tentative relationship toward psychology of religion perhaps because it seems to demystify what they might prefer to curate under cover of revelational mystery; psychologists may avoid it because, as a subject, “religion” itself appears to have no solidly “locatable” referent. If, however, as Loewenthal suggests, “psychology is the study of behaviour, thought, and feeling,”4 then, surely religious or spiritual experiences, among the most powerful of human living, would be of great interest to a psychologist. In turn, psychology’s description and analysis of the effects of spiritual experience can deeply inform the practices of religious groups, potentially expanding or redirecting an individual’s spiritual life in ways that enhance, rather than constrict, their sense of wholeness. As a source for pastoral theology, which finds its niche at the confluence of psychology and theology, psychology of religion provides important constitutive empirical data while allowing for an examination of personal religiosity in its operational complexity. 97

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Loewenthal concludes that her introductory text with three ways psychology of religion can help to bolster individual resilience.5 First, she argues that knowledge of religious practices and behaviors is essential to clinicians, social workers, and psychologists not only that they might separate normative religious behaviors from symptoms of persons with genuine psychophysiological disturbances, but also that care providers might enable access to the truly consoling and health-inducing benefits that practices associated with religion can deliver. Second, she points to the powerful harm inflicted through coercive religious indoctrination, suggesting that broader understandings of religious experience can locate openings for the great potential that religiosity has for increasing intergroup understanding. Third, while Loewenthal notes that religious doctrines and beliefs can tacitly or explicitly sanction domestic violence and abuse, religiosity can also promote greater compassion and tolerance. Greater psychological understanding of the ways that religion plays a formative role in the lives of the individuals can inform more helpful and respectful practices of pastoral care. I find that Lowenthal’s three identified positive practical contributions of psychology of religion to personal resilience are also in evidence in James L. Griffith’s Religion that Heals, Religion that Harms. Griffith, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, seeks to understand ways that religious beliefs and practices both aid and detract from medical and emotional recovery, by examining the emergence of religion, evolutionarily and socially, in human flourishing. As a pastoral theologian interested in providing models of understanding to ministerial practitioners engaged in care and counseling, I see great benefit in the attempt to understand religion from the respectful point of view of an interested psychiatric clinician like Griffith. From such clinical insights, the field of pastoral theology can glean more informed and targeted pastoral practices. Griffith pays close attention to the distorting effects that religion can have on persons’ abilities to alleviate their suffering. But he is interested in methods for clinical practitioners to help their patients tap into the benefits that religious coping can provide. He comes to the project having coauthored, with his wife Melissa Elliot Griffith, Encountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy: How to Talk with People about Their Spiritual Lives,6 a book that offers psychiatric health professionals ways of seeing, in the personal religiosity of their patients, alliances toward healing. Thus, he has a long history of participating in psychology of religion’s project of exploring the experiences of religiously affiliated persons. In conjunction with my using the seven resilience strategies identified by transgender persons in Singh and her colleagues’ study, Griffith’s work helps pinpoint the kinds of spiritual nourishment religious affiliation provides, which in turn may guide pastoral practices for promoting gender creative thriving and spiritual resilience.

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THE “MISSIONS” OF RELIGIOUS BELONGING Drawing upon sociological and anthropological studies7 on the emergence of religion in the development of the human species, Griffith identifies three broad, interconnected sociological “missions” of religion: (1) group unity and security; (2) the strengthening of individual morale; and (3) the attenuation of personal suffering. All three will be seen to contribute in essential ways to the living out of the resilience strategies already detailed, but there are important differences in the origins and the historical deployment of these missions. Griffith classifies the first two missions as sociobiological, that is, of evolutionary origin: Sociobiology consists of the interdisciplinary efforts by biologists, sociologists, ethologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists to explain complex social behaviors in terms of evolutionary advantages that particular behaviors may have held for early human species.8

Religion’s first two missions, then, have their origins 200,000 to two million years ago in the structuring of human groups and interpersonal relations.9 The third mission of religion, however, emerges socioculturally, independent of its ties to sociobiology, and is associated with the rise of religiosities beginning in the eighth century BCE that focused “on the moral self-consciousness of individuals.”10 It is Griffith’s central contention that the third, sociocultural mission of religion often works at spiritual, life-giving cross-purposes with systems associated with the previous two sociobiological missions, for “when religion turns destructive, usually one or more of these sociobiological systems has come to overshadow a person’s capacity to respond as a whole human being to the needs of self or others.”11 Two Sociobiological Missions of Religion and Their Fruits Griffith posits that the primary evolutionary advantage the human species had over previous hominids was the ability for individuals to work together as a group toward goals held in common. Religion, in its first sociobiological “mission” of providing group unity and security, evidenced in human prehistory by a belief in the numinous, becomes the “reason” for group cultural patterns that provide the sustaining structure necessary for survival: The rules, roles, and institutions of a culture have been consistently portrayed by people as having originated in the choices and actions of numinous beings— ancestors, spirits, gods, or God—and as still supported by those numinous beings. This belief has been the major force in cultures throughout history to sustain their rules and pattern, and to help maintain stability and order.12

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Religious adherence grew by projecting outward the social bonding biologically present in the familial unit, providing social cohesion across larger ethnic, tribal, and national dimensions. The readiness with which an individual has been willing to give up their own life in service to a religious cause is testified to across a range of organized religions, strikingly symbolized in the crucifixion event at the heart of Christianity. Sacrificial love and efforts on behalf of others are cherished values that emerge from the essential kinds of group cohesion that religions have both allowed and reinforced. Group-derived social unity is, as seen in Singh and her colleagues’ study participants, an important counterweight to outside pressures; supportive community inoculates against targeted injustices and oppressions. Loyalty to religion has decided downsides as well, however, when individuals act at cross-purposes to their personal senses of morality out of protective loyalty to their religious group. Group security is a treasured goal, sometimes enacted at costly prices, such as religiously bulwarked acts of violence against persons seen as other (in their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and/ or gender identity): “examples of moral blindness of religious persons arising out of protective loyalty toward one’s religious group occurs so commonly as to seem mundane were it not for their awful consequences.”13 Griffith’s second sociobiological mission of religion involves personal morale, which he defines as referring to “one’s sense of competence as a person,”14 tying morale to the embrace of self-worth found in Singh and her colleagues’ study participants. When in possession of morale, individuals feel more able to meet the expectations they set for themselves. Morale is felt individually but, like security, is derived from one’s group affiliation; the status of group affiliation is internalized, informing support mechanisms for self-coherence.15 The connection between morale and religiosity can be seen, for instance, when occasions of distress and dejection are the prelude to religious ecstatic experiences; demoralization can be the precipitating factor in religious conversion or initiation enabling a sense of deep belonging.16 Group unity, however, can also be understood as a hard contract, and felt disillusionment can be leveraged to solidify group solidarity. As can be seen most starkly in studies of cult formation, by first rendering a person insecure, decreasing their self-worth and increasing their disorientation, religious bodies are then able to provide a structuring solution via indoctrination into the groups’ ideologies, promising “their adherents experiences of direct communion with supernatural forces .  .  . especially under social conditions of misery and frustration.”17 In a Christian context, doubts sown about personal “salvation” can become the preface to articulations of grace and exhortations toward “proper” belief. The attendant danger of religion’s mission for personal morale is the stark line that can be drawn between those within and those outside of the religious identity’s grasp. Hatred for those outside

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the group is the most common technique for building up the morale of the faithful, used more often, and more effectively, Griffith claims, than group religious practices advocating for outward compassion.18 The effects of group security and individual morale derived from sociobiological imperatives can be at cross-purposes to the kinds of boundary crossings I am advocating here. However, as in Singh and her colleagues’ study, where an awareness of oppression can be marshaled against oppressive effects, understanding the evolutionary origins for these engines of “othering” is vital in searching for ways to counterbalance their force. In Griffith’s summary of his discussion of the first two sociobiological missions of religion, five underlying systems emerge that benefit human thriving: Sociobiological systems are compartmentalized behavioral systems that evolved according to the principle of inclusive fitness to solve specific survival problems faced by early hominids . . . . These sociobiological systems are fully operative today and organize how humans structure their groups and interpersonal relationships. As such, they both express and shape religious life. Sociobiological systems that are particularly salient in religious life are attachment, peer affiliation, kin recognition, social hierarchy, and social exchange.19

These five systems demonstrate the potentially double-edged quality of the fruits from the two sociobiological missions of religion, yielding powerful in both positive and negative ways. Attachment is a primary theme in much of developmental psychological literature, the evolutionary product of benefits to offspring through parental physical closeness in the face of a world of insecurity and potential danger. Derived in large part from British psychologist John Bowlby’s work to explain differing reactions of children separated from their parents during the attack on London in World War II, “early attachment to parents or other primary caregivers becomes internalized into an enduring attachment style that reflects attitudes about relationships, their importance, and how they ought to be managed.”20 However, just as an infant can develop secure or insecure attachments to their primary parental figures, those same variable attachment patterns can become part of an individual’s relationship with a personal God.21 Through mechanisms of peer affiliation, religious groups “provide relatedness by social category, roles, responsibilities, and loyalty,”22 fostering ingroup altruism and empathy, which are extended through ritual, communal gesture, and sometimes even dress. A place of worship can become the central location for a person’s sense of social belonging, leading to collaborative strategies of coping with life pressures.23 These affiliation totems, however, also help to demarcate who is not among the peer group.

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The kin recognition achieved through familial resemblance in biology is duplicated in religious groups through the use of language of address— “father,” “mother,” “brother,” and “sister”—as well as through credal adherences, which strengthen coalitional bonding. Sociologists Timothy Crippen and Richard Machalek argue that humans appear uniquely versatile in their ability to form extensive and varied systems of fictive kinship and to display marvelous forms of cooperation with and self-sacrifice for genetic strangers. . . . We contend that religion has evolved from the human capacity for “erroneous” kin recognition.24

The same insecure disturbances skewing attachment patterns, however, equally can infect the kin recognition patterns of religious belonging. Social hierarchy, as a way of organizing groups, is deeply entrenched in religious orders of all kinds, not only internally in a hierarchy of religious titles and responsibilities, but also externally in the relationship to God and the spiritual realm, which can be seen as a “kingdom” with a divine ruler or a heavenly council. Imputations of security-enhancing righteousness can travel through these socially hierarchical transmission routes into the religious body, influencing and reinforced by biblical interpretation: Exegeses of sacred scriptures provide rules, commandments, and other prescribed behaviors to which group members must submit in order to achieve status, prestige, honor, and respect. One gains closeness to God not through emotionally intimate interactions but through behavioral submission and obedience.25

As will be seen in Griffith’s third mission of religion, the detriments of rules-based religiosity can be counterbalanced by an imagination spiritually centered in personal wholeness. Finally, principles of social exchange are transmitted through ethical prescriptions for behavior, establishing channels of social exchange parity and reciprocal altruism. Often, there is a detailed system for determining the degree to which an individual has acceded to these rules, along with rewards and penalties to be meted out accordingly. Griffith cites social psychologist Melvin J. Lerner’s research into hypotheses of a “just world” to show a downside of social exchange religiosity when a “moral quid pro quo” is projected into the natural world: “when bad things happen to good people, an unfortunate but common conclusion is that those who suffer must not have been good people after all.”26 Religion, then, is powerful in part because of the combined degree to which it simultaneously activates and harnesses the bonding forces of all five of these sociobiologically evolved mechanisms. Griffith is quick to point out,

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however, that this does not mean religion itself was a product of evolution: “presumably these sociobiological systems evolved initially for survival purposes unrelated to religion. Once available, however, they become recruited into use by the psychological and social agendas of religious life.”27 Austen Hartke spent years reconciling his Christian identity with his gender creative one, sharing his insights along the way through an influential YouTube series and collecting his ideas in Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians.28 He confirms many of the connections I make between the transgender resilience strategies emerging from Singh and her colleagues’ study and the fruits of religion as detailed in Griffith’s work. The primary fruit of the first sociobiological mission, that of group solidarity and security, directly feeds the connection with a supportive community that gender creative persons say is so crucial for their resilience. Hartke writes, “Although religious affiliation in families has been connected to rejection of LGBT children, faith can also be one of the largest contributors to wellbeing in youth if their religious community supports them.”29 The second mission’s fruit of personal morale allows individuals to embrace a sense of self-worth vital to gender creative thriving. Hartke emphasizes the power of self-affirmation that flows from communal affiliation: When a church is trans-affirming, transgender Christians can show up as themselves, unapologetically. . . . This kind of authenticity is especially important to younger people, who often see the church as hypocritical and believe that being a churchgoing Christian means that you put on your fake smile alongside your Sunday suit. But once we tell our stories and let ourselves be seen—flaws and all, sins and all, full of beauty and sadness and fear and courage and joy—then we can be Christians who ask for forgiveness, who walk humbly with God, and who love our neighbors as ourselves.30

With group solidarity and personal morale, gender creative Christians can gain the support and self-worth they need to put into practice positive aspects of the sociobiological strategies Griffith details and to counteract the effects of societal and religious oppression. The fruits of the two sociobiological missions of religion can provide vital attachment needs that many gender creative persons may not have experienced from their families of origin. Church congregations can be sources of peer affiliation and kin recognition, constituting second, chosen familial environments, even when those bonds must be negotiated through various social hierarchies and avenues of social exchange that may ask for things in return for compliance. Indeed, according to Griffith, so long as the fruits of these sociobiological missions of religion do not jeopardize the reception of more inward-looking personal spirituality practices, all persons stand much to gain from religious affiliation and belonging.

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Important for my own purposes, Griffith goes on to argue that knowing about the sociobiological mechanisms that underlie religious unity, combined with the cultivation of practices that are mindful of the sociobiological underpinning of much of religious life, leads persons to achieve greater personal agency regarding moral reasoning and decision-making. In Griffith’s articulation of this mindfulness, the practical benefits that Loewenthal saw in psychology of religion draw near: providing access to health-productive benefits of spiritual practices, increasing intergroup understanding, and promoting compassion and tolerance. Griffith claims that the primary pathway for this mindful achievement is the third, sociocultural, “mission” he ascribes to religion: that of relieving personal suffering. The Sociocultural “Mission” of Religion and Its Fruits Seeking to understand God’s hidden purposes as revealed through suffering, religions provide navigational systems for their adherents, leading them away from, comforting them in their passage through, and/or strategizing their responses to, suffering. This, of course, can lead to passivity in the face of earthly challenges, for in a move away from the vicissitudes of life, sufferers lessen their engagement with the practicalities of the world, potentially increasing the suffering of others over the long term. However, this sociocultural third mission of religion serves as a counterbalance to the other two sociobiological missions, for Griffith holds that religion becomes harmful when one or more of the three missions are emphasized to the detriment of the other(s). Most often, Griffith claims, the split happens along the sociobiological line, with group-derived security and morale outweighing a concentration on the alleviation of personal suffering, for such alleviation is often ineffective for, or even undermining of, group cohesion: Well-being of individual persons is not of particular consequence for biological evolution. The suffering of any particular person rarely, if ever, could imperil the species. To the contrary, early disappearance of weak individuals by death or failure to reproduce could strengthen the gene pool.31

Griffith is convinced that the sociocultural move from the welfare of the group to the interior processing of the individual provides a counterbalance to sociobiological imperatives. Having knowledge of the ways group-derived unity and morale derive undergirding from evolutionary sociobiological forces enables a strategic response that can take its considered power from humanity’s sociocultural heritage of individual striving. Historically, as mentioned earlier, Griffith sees sociocultural spiritualities emerging when an “Axial Age” succession of teachers introduced frameworks for most of the regnant world religions:

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Lao Tzu, a succession of Hebrew prophets, Jesus Christ, the Buddha, and Mohammed were among the leaders who presented new religious beliefs and practices and reinterpreted older ones. Each of these innovative religious movements has continued until the present as a source of inspiration for individuals committed to personal tranquility and compassion toward others.32

These religious strains were aimed inward as never before, advocating for personal growth and awareness, embodying both intra- and interpersonal relatedness. Griffith summarizes the differences between religions’ missions: Sociobiological religion, but not personal spirituality, is formed by perceptual distinctions that are regulated by the different sociobiological systems. Personal spirituality, on the other hand, is mainly formed by perceptual distinctions involving attunement to emotional states of the individual.33

Sociobiological systems are teleologically vital for the continuation of the species and provide important safeguards for the development of individuals. But they aren’t “interested” in the well-being of individuals on a person-toperson basis. The boons that do result from individuals’ thriving can contribute to group cohesion and evolutionary aims, but these benefits are secondary gains. Most of the time, the three missions of religion operate in harmony by necessity. Sociocultural personal spirituality requires the compensatory effects that sociobiological processes engender. Indeed, a personal spirituality absent the sociobiological becomes a solipsistic practice in isolation from the essential relationality that religion provides. The individual thrives in community and in relationships of mutual accountability. Griffith’s larger purpose is to point toward salutary intervention techniques that draw from the thematic strengths of personal spirituality, strengths that equip one to do affirmative caregiving, the welcoming and relationship work of interest to my project. He lays out six emergent themes of “personal spirituality.”34 These are the knowable fruits of a healthy religiosity. One should be able to find the benefits of what Griffith is calling “personal spirituality” reflected in gains described earlier through the resilience strategies espoused by transgender individuals and, by extension, reflected in intentional congregational and classroom practices of welcome, support, and affirmation for gender creative persons. These practices, in turn, can lead to interactions of mutuality and growth. The first fruit that Griffith isolates as coming from Axial Age personal spiritualities is a “whole-person relatedness”35 characterized by a conscious openness of one’s self to another, combined with a specific interest in the other as other. Griffith makes reference to well-known models for human whole-person relatedness in Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” encounters (subject-to-subject, rather than “I-It”), in French philosopher

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Emmanuel Levinas’s “face-to-face” relations (where the face carries a trace of the Divine), and in anthropologist Victor Turner’s social process of “communitas” (where social hierarchies can briefly disappear through practices of ritual).36 Whole-person relatedness is the birthplace of true dialogue, in which both parties to an encounter come prepared to be changed in some way through the process. Here, a sociocultural connectivity that transcends the social hierarchies of the sociobiological realm comes into play. Practices of listening, mirroring, and reflection are typical on the part of therapists or religious practitioners in order to, in the words of Griffith and Melissa Elliott Griffith, “remain hospitable to spiritual stories.”37 In tandem with the first resilience strategy identified by Singh and her colleagues, whole-person relatedness not only can invite a hospitable welcoming of an individual’s self-generated definition of self but also can bolster the courage of the person themself to make such an evolution of self-definition. The power of naming and often, in the case of gender creative persons, of renaming, forms the bedrock in creating whole-person relatedness in congregations and classrooms. Hartke explains that while trans folks can’t realistically expect people to turn on a dime and start using a new name or new set of pronouns without any practice, . . . the best thing . . . is to make a concerted effort.  .  .  . Using a transgender person’s chosen name rather than their birth name shows basic respect, as well as demonstrating that you believe them to be who they say they are.38

Calling persons by their correct name and pronouns honors the self of the other and opens one’s own self to the other in a subject-to-subject, face-todivine-indwelling-face relatedness that builds resilience and erodes the social hierarchies that prohibit whole-person relatedness. Second among Griffith’s fruits of sociocultural personal spirituality is a “commitment to an ethic of compassion,”39 extending to a concern for justice rendered toward the other through actions of healing or protection. Religious historian Karen Armstrong emphasizes the importance of compassion, “the hallmark of all the major religions formed in the Axial Age. The new ideologies . . . insisted that the test of authenticity was that religious experience be integrated successfully with daily life.”40 Armstrong singles out the prophet Amos as the first “to emphasize the importance of social justice and compassion,” and his oracles as a place where God speaks “on behalf of the oppressed, giving voice to the voiceless, impotent suffering of the poor.”41 At the heart of all of the Abrahamic religions is a movement beyond cult and worship and toward compassionate action on behalf of the powerless: “the God of historical monotheism demands mercy not sacrifice, compassion rather than decorous liturgy.”42 This spirit of compassion can extend beyond the human to the otherness of all living creatures, contributing toward an

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ecological compassion for the planet and the cosmos. An ethic of compassion undergirds an individual’s ability to engage in social activism, one of the resilience strategies spoken of by a majority of Singh and her colleagues’ study participants. Hartke ties compassion together with a sense of calling that spreads from the individual to the collective and beyond: When God calls us to something, it’s always a call to move out of bounds. When ministers are called, they’re called out of the secular life they knew and into a new relationship with God and others. When transgender Christians are called, they’re called to move outside of the gender binary our society values and into a more challenging and yet stronger and more compassionate relationship with God and others. . . . Transgender Christians are both transforming others and transformed themselves.43

A third fruit of an inward-looking personal spirituality is a “compassionate care for the self,”44 a reflexive, secondary interiorization of the compassion directed outwards, and therefore, different from a narcissistic, self-centered focus divorced from consideration of others: “compassionate care for self provides containment for personal woundedness, which interrupts cycles of revenge and retaliation.”45 This third fruit, of self-care, would seem to provide for the ongoing implementation of the first two spiritual fruits of relating and compassion. Compassionate self-care invites the strength of self-love that could allow one to imagine becoming a person on whom another could rely or to whom they might look up. This allies Griffith’s third fruit with becoming the desired positive role model for others, a resilience strategy important to a majority of Singh and her colleagues’ study participants. In a concluding section of his book entitled “The Trans-Affirming Toolbox,” Hartke stresses to his transgender compatriots the importance of taking care of the self: Don’t forget to practice some spiritual self-care. Most of us have experienced some form of rejection, and building spiritual resilience is a difficult thing to do even under the best circumstances. . . . As a transgender Christian it’s pretty likely that you spend a good amount of time defending yourself, educating people, and just trying to muddle through your daily life. Being trans can be exhausting. . . . Recharge and reconnect with who you are and how you experience God in the everyday.46

If one can readily draw connections among the first three fruits of personal spirituality that Griffith identifies and Singh and her colleagues’ found resilience strategies, Griffith next zeroes in even more precisely where Singh and her colleagues’ expertise has led them. Fourth among the themes of Griffith’s conception of personal spirituality is what he describes as “emotional postures of resilience”47—ideation and feeling states of sustenance in the face

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of the uncertainties of life and its attendant suffering. Here, one enters the vital kinds of strategies that transgender and gender-nonconforming persons require to counteract and counterbalance the aspersion that can be directed at them not only by society at large but by the traditional sources of resilient strengths: family, school, and church. An awareness of oppression that faces gender creative persons and an empowered discernment in the face of it, key themes emerging in Singh and her colleagues’ research, are sustainable with the emotional postures of resilience that Griffith describes. For his part, Hartke is sanguine about the odds faced by gender creative persons in society today. The title of his first chapter is “Standing on the Edge,” where he describes his own ever-present sense of peril, even in affirming Christian community: “To this day, I feel just a little bit nervous when I walk into any unfamiliar church building. It’s a response reinforced by years of necessary self-defense, which too many LGBTQ+ Christians have to cultivate.”48 However, with the accompanying emotional postures of resilience Griffith describes as potentially flowing from a robust personal spirituality, the knowledge of the oppression that gender creative persons face can be “a refining fire that brings about an even greater passion for mercy, justice, and a relationship with God.”49 Fifth, Griffith lists “encounters with the sacred.”50 In this sociocultural fruit of personal spirituality, the transpersonal agency available through encounters with the All, God of many names, is used inwardly as a motivating force of creativity and moral reasoning. This is in counterbalance (and often in opposition) to the totemic uses for which the gods are employed in sociobiological systems of control. Key here is the evocation of the transcendent as deeply immanent in the development of human resilience. In Part IV, I will examine the biblical accounts of creation to see how living into the “very good” image of God in which all persons are created allows for recuperation of a self-image that is itself sacred and inviolable, bolstering the embrace of self-worth central to gender creative thriving. Hartke connects a felt communion with God to his personal agency in claiming a transgender identity, as well as to understanding the nature of his gender as God’s will: God created me with a body that was designated female when I was born—a body that I struggled to connect with for the first twenty-six years of my life and that I now finally feel at home in—but God also created me with a capacity for change and with a mind that identifies as male. I believe God made all of me—gender identity included—and intended for me to be a transgender person who sees the world through a different lens.51

Sixth and finally, Griffith says, a personal spirituality that embodies the third mission of religion is characterized by a “prioritization of the individual

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over the group.”52 This can be seen in the concern for self and/or others, but, importantly, others as individuals. Again, this is not to say that there are not important sources of personal strength in individuals’ embeddedness in social groupings. But especially when those very group cohesions become a source of opprobrium, as has been the case historically for gender creative persons, an emphasis on individual selfhood is key to the practice of personal spirituality. A vital claiming of individual selfhood is a necessary counterbalance to ways that religious affiliation can work at cross-purposes to personal sanctity. Having hope for the future is the end result of religion’s third mission, emerging among Singh and her colleagues’ study participants in tandem with a sense of individual identity. The individual comes first for Hartke and his transgender community: It would be impossible to try to live into the image of God that we bear while we were also trying to deny our gender identity. We had to say yes to who God created us to be before we could begin imaging God in the world.53

But it is in community that an individual’s claimed personhood begins to touch the possibility of hope in the midst of despair, a “combination of affirmation and shared narrative that can give transgender Christians the courage to carve out a space for themselves in a global church that often ignores or actively persecutes them.”54 When Hartke spent time together with similarly emboldened persons and was given opportunities to worship with other queer Christians in communities that exemplified diversity in gender, race, class, and nationality .  .  . [He] would look around . . . at the sea of faces—all different, all hopeful, all so grateful to be together—and think, . . . “This is what it looks like to become a house of prayer for all people.”55

Griffith’s parsing out the sociocultural from the sociobiological is useful for identifying ways that religious adherence can prevent a person from accessing proper care for their presenting problems. It also shows that religiosity can provide motivation for accessing strategies toward increased personal coherence and well-being. By isolating strengths derived from personal spirituality, Griffith makes those skills more available to conscious deployment and honing. These sociocultural practices exist at the level of personal experience and story, in retrievable memory, and largely under individual control. The sociobiological aspects of religiosity often operate at a substrate level of consciousness and can be more difficult to recognize, alter, or oppose. This is why, in Griffith’s own psychiatric practice, he proposes interventions based on listening to the care recipient beyond their articulation of a belief system.

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An individual’s held beliefs are typically propositional postures tied to power relationships between persons and often operate outside the patient’s explicit memory systems: “Neurobiologically, beliefs often represent models of reality stored in implicit, or nondeclarative, memory. Implicit memories appear as feelings, images, or bodily sensations, with no felt sense of remembrance. As such, people commonly do not experience these implicit models as beliefs, but rather as gut feelings, intuitions, or prejudices about ‘how the world really is.’”56 Inquiring into a person’s religious “beliefs” is often not a pathway toward true dialogue, for such questioning triggers neurobiological defenses against dialogic empathy. Rather, a concentration on personal story, on experiential idiom, and on accessing the stream of metaphorical power that gives form to the lived faith of the patient are the routes toward establishing trust. The skills of pastoral care taught in seminaries and practiced in caregiving ministries can be informed by recognition of the sociobiological substrate of religiosities predisposed to reactivity. Psychology of religion informs pastoral theology pedagogies through these intersections with biology and culture, encouraging attention to what is most individual about the persons in one’s care. This is not to suggest a culturally naïve application of pastoral care, for individuals are embedded in systems that can support as well as constrict, but it does point toward inculcating pastoral strategies that can access personal spirituality at the heart of religious belief systems. The resilience strategies articulated by gender creative persons in Singh and her colleagues’ study also can be employed reflexively by care practitioners, teachers, and ministers. As pastoral theology opens itself to engaging gender creative promise, it acknowledges that strategies for personal resilience and fruits of religious belonging and personal spirituality may be found in all persons, of all genders, care receivers and caregivers alike. Hartke’s template for transgender Christians to “experience life in abundance” in church reads like a set of necessary conditions for life-abundant congregations and classrooms: When they are welcomed into community; when they are loved for all of who they are; when their differences are respected; when they know they can count on their community to help with their daily human needs; and when they feel safe enough to drop their defenses in order to take on Jesus’ gentle yoke of discipleship. That may sound like a lot to ask of a church, but . . . if the life Jesus promises is abundant, surely there’s enough to go around!57

From this encounter, cisgender to gender creative, there emerges a capacity to imagine, understand, and have empathy for one another, and thereby to effect important change. But is empathy enough? In its efforts to open doors to compassionate dialog beyond gender binaries, pastoral theology may need courageously to open itself to the limits of its empathy and understanding.

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NOTES 1. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Psychology of Religion: Empirical Studies, Methods, and Problems,” in Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling, ed. Rodney J. Hunter (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 1007. 2. David M. Wulff, Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 1997; 1991), 11. 3. Kate M. Loewenthal, The Psychology of Religion: A Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2000), 6. 4. Loewenthal, 1. 5. Loewenthal, 151–153. 6. James L. Griffith and Melissa Elliott Griffith, Encountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy: How to Talk with People about Their Spiritual Lives (New York: Guilford Press, 2002). 7. Griffith relies on the work of religious studies scholar Michael Barnes, especially his synthesis of research on the evolution of human religiosity (see In the Presence of Mystery: An Introduction to the Story of Human Religiousness [Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1984]), and British Professor of Archaeology Steven Mithen’s work on early human cognitive and religious life (see especially The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science [London: Thames and Hudson, 1996]). 8. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 22. 9. Griffith, 22. Two million years ago marks the entrance of the homo lineage and stone tools; the archaic homo sapiens species (of which modern humans are a subset) began 200,000 years ago (Mithen, Prehistory, 19–20). 10. Griffith, 28. Griffith refers to the religious foment that emerged in the period of 800–200 BCE as “The Axial Age,” a term coined by German Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers. Jaspers employed “axial” in the sense of a pivotal time, here an age in which, across wide swaths of geography unlinked by cultural ties, a similar shift was felt in human religious consciousness: “the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece. And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today.” Karl Jaspers, The Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 98. The term was taken up prominently by British religious historian Karen Armstrong, especially in her tracing of the Abrahamic religions in A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), on which Griffith relies. 11. Griffith, 7. 12. Barnes, Presence of Mystery, 39. 13. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 17. 14. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 17. 15. Social psychologist Henri Tajfel pioneered “social identity theory” in the late 1970s, “arguing that the groups (e.g., social class, family, football teams, etc.) which people belonged to were an important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give

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us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world.” Saul McLeod, “Social Identity Theory,” Simply Psychology, 2008, https://www​.simplypsychology​ .org​/social​-identity​-theory​.html; see Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology (New York: Academic Press, 1981). 16. See Jerome D. Frank and Julia B. Frank, Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; 1973; 1961), in which this team of father and daughter psychiatrists finds personal demoralization to be the common historical characteristic of humans seeking psychotherapeutic, religious, spiritual, and religiomagical healing. 17. Frank and Frank, Persuasion and Healing, 76. 18. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 18. Social dominance theory “postulates that societies minimize group conflict by creating consensus on ideologies that promote the superiority of one group over others. Ideologies that promote or maintain group inequality are the tools that legitimize discrimination. To work smoothly, these ideologies must be widely accepted within a society, appearing as self-apparent truths. . . . Legitimizing myths help to stabilize oppression.” Felicia Pratto et al., “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1994), http://doi​.org​/10​.1037​ /0022​-3514​.67​.4​.741: 741. The “social dominance orientation” of individuals, or the degree of their general preference for group domination, is conversely correlative to their empathic ability to feel concern for others outside of their group affiliation. 19. Griffith, 22 (emphases added). 20. Griffith, 23; see John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss: Vol. 2. Separation; Anxiety and Anger (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 21. See Ana-Maria Rizzuto, The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), for psychoanalytic examinations of the formation of God representation in human development. Rizzuto concludes that a child’s God representational process “is heavily loaded with parental traits . . . in a wider context of family, social class, organized religion, and particular subcultures. All these experiences contribute a background to the shape, significance, potential use and meaning which the child or the adult may bestow on their God representations” (209). 22. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 24. 23. For a detailed accounting of how persons understand and deal with life stressors through different “religious coping,” styles, see Ken I. Pargament, The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice (New York: Guilford Press, 1997). 24. Timothy Crippen and Richard Machalek, “The Evolutionary Foundations of the Religious Life,” International Review of Sociology 3, no. 3 (November 1989): 68 (my quotation of theorists referenced by Griffith [Religion That Heals, 25]). 25. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 26. 26. Griffith, 27; see Melvin J. Lerner, Belief in a Just World (New York: Plenum Press, 1980). 27. Griffith, 27–28. 28. For Hartke’s world of YouTube testimonials (where he operates under the web blogger name “AustenLionheart”), see Austen Hartke, “AustenLionheart,” https://

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www​.youtube​.com​/user​/ArienKatrim​/featured; see also Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018). 29. Hartke, Transforming, 20. 30. Hartke, Transforming, 109–110. 31. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 31. 32. Griffith, 28. 33. Griffith, 30–31 (emphases added). 34. Griffith, 28–34. 35. Griffith, 29. 36. Griffith, 29; see Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone, 1996); Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991); and Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Routledge, 1969). 37. Griffith and Griffith, Encountering the Sacred, 33. 38. Hartke, Transforming, 84. 39. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 29. 40. Armstrong, A History of God, 44. 41. Armstrong, 46. 42. Armstrong, 392. 43. Hartke, Transforming, 110–111. 44. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 30. 45. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 30. 46. Hartke, Transforming, 174. 47. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 30. 48. Hartke, Transforming, 10. 49. Hartke, Transforming, 11. 50. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 30. 51. Hartke, Transforming, 2. 52. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 30. 53. Hartke, Transforming, 58. 54. Hartke, 99. 55. Hartke, 100. 56. Griffith, Religion That Heals, 67. 57. Hartke, Transforming, 152–153.

Chapter 8

Beyond Empathy in Pastoral Theology

Ethan Miller wakes up the morning of his first day of high school to find that, sometime in the night, as he lay sleeping, he has changed into a young woman named Drew Bohner. Ethan is the protagonist of Changers, a four-part young adult fiction series written by married couple T Cooper and Allison GlockCooper depicting an ancient strain of humankind called Changers. During each of Changers’ high school years, they incarnate teenage versions (“V’s”) of themselves disparate in class, race, body size, ability, and gender. From these four lived experiences, Changers select one “forever V” as their path forward. Ethan/Drew will take their part in what the authors call “the last hope for the human race on the whole to reverse the moral devolution that has overcome it”1 through a project of empathy-building: “Changers believe more Changers equals more empathy on planet Earth. And that only through empathy will the human race survive.”2 The physical experience of inhabiting others’ lives is said, literally, to make a difference, thereby increasing the forces of empathic understanding in the world. For now, the Changers exist in secret, but they look to a time when their work will no longer be needed, or when the process of changing can happen without the levels of bureaucratic and safety protocols needed to ensure secrecy. As the newly minted Changer frosh are told by the head of their regional Council, As Changers, you are conduits; you bring people together, various disparate people whom you never dreamed could exist in one household, much less one body. You are living proof that humans can indeed understand one another, can in essence be one another, can ultimately share this planet, not in spite of their differences, but because of those differences. . . . You have certainly changed, and you will no doubt change again, and in doing so, you slowly, steadily, undeniably change others. As it says in Book One of our CB [Changers Bible], In the many, we are one.3 115

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While it is not my purpose here to detail the various permutations Ethan/Drew goes through over the course of the series,4 I was struck by the claim of the Council: through a wide-scale implementation of empathy, humanity can turn a page and enter a time of moral evolution. One of the series’ authors, T Cooper, is a trans man, so he would know firsthand how coming into one’s “true gender self” is a journey, one that requires stamina, determination, and a highly honed ability to shift and make changes along the way. The series implicitly advances the idea that it is gender-variant persons who can, and perhaps will, lead the way into a better future—that gender creative persons are by necessity experts on empathy. Perhaps gender creative persons are a “Changers” strain of humanity, an empathic leavening agent that pastoral theologians, ministers, teachers, and caregivers need to engage for the sake of all gender-negotiated lives. A Google search for “empathy” returns an apparently succinct definition that goes to the heart of what seems to be two major camps encompassing contemporary authors’ use of the word: “The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”5 The key word in this definition may well be “and,” for most discussions of “empathy” dwell primarily on the second requirement: to share the feelings of another—to have a vicarious experience of another’s feelings. But can there be “empathy” without both sharing and understanding? Sharing without an understanding of that shared experience seems of limited value, but what of understanding without sharing? Would persons in the position to care for marginalized persons be more likely or able to achieve an understanding of another’s plight than be emotionally equipped to share the other’s pain? If there is no “sharing” involved, however, is one still talking about “empathy”? The publication of Yale Professor Emeritus of Psychology Paul Bloom’s extended argument Against Empathy6 prompted a back-and-forth discussion between Bloom and British Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, whose The Science of Evil represented his third tome on the topic of empathy.7 Baron-Cohen’s definition of empathy includes two factors that mirror the Google definition cited earlier, with “cognitive empathy” relating to how one understands other persons and “affective empathy” referring to one’s emotional reactions to others, one’s ability to share their experience.8 In his latest book on the subject, Baron-Cohen mostly leaves aside the cognitive element of empathy (although he explored that facet in his earlier Mindblindness) because he wants to defuse, or actually to eliminate, the use of what he sees as the lessthan-precise word “evil” in favor of the term “empathy erosion.” He argues that empathy erosion—concerned with the affective empathy circuit—is “necessary but not sufficient for cruelty to take place.”9 He notes that conditions attenuating affective empathy are the first steps in rendering a person an object, who then can be treated as such, leading to acts perceived to be cruel.

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While Baron-Cohen writes that achieving affective “empathy by definition prevents you from hurting another person,”10 Bloom would beg to differ, arguing that “the ability to accurately read the desires and motivations of others is a hallmark of the successful psychopath and can be used for cruelty and exploitation.”11 Bloom, in effect, decouples “evil” from any necessary empathic erosion: “The problems with psychopaths may have more to do with lack of self-control and a malicious nature than with empathy, and there is very little evidence for a relationship between low empathy and being aggressive or cruel to others.”12 Bloom, however, goes further, for it is, he says, the realm of human feelings, especially intuitions about what others are feeling, that lead to trouble. This is because persons most readily “empathize” with those most like themselves, rendering them parochial in their empathic outreach and easily susceptible to in-group acts of solidarity that relegate the truly “other” even more to the margins. Bloom concentrates in the direction of what Baron-Cohen referred to as “cognitive empathy” but would argue against even assuming that such cognition of another’s feelings is truly possible. Rather, Bloom writes, cognition is often constructed with the mission of propping up the “gut” feelings one develops about others. Can these and many other books on empathy be brought into any kind of sensible conversation? Each author seems first to give their definition of what they intend “empathy” to mean before going on to trumpet or debunk it. Bloom parlays a rather narrow definition of empathy into a reason for eschewing it altogether. What he does in the process, however, is to show many of the perils faced by those who advocate for empathy, for while there are relatively stable personality inventories for measuring varying definitions of “empathy,”13 any scientific quantification of a, decidedly, subjective array of human mental powers is nearly impossible. Bloom defines empathy as “the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does,”14 with his wording, in my reading, falling squarely on the word “think.” Given the provisional, subjective content of what any one person “thinks,” Bloom proceeds to argue against using empathy as the channel toward making the world a more hospitable place. Rather, for him, the way forward lies in the uniquely human power of reason tied to a compassionate willingness to act. Changers suggests that the Changers spread empathic power into their surroundings, that they operate as contagious empathy strains. But the provisional nature of Changers’ empathy is revealed even in the lives of the series’ protagonist; while they have the power actually to inhabit the bodies of others, thereby potentially acquiring the affective empathic “feeling what another feels,” this knowledge extends only as far as one person at a time. Further, given that the person engaging in the bodily empathizing is, technically, no longer around, having been subsumed by a subsequent incarnation, one could argue that Changers would be privy to little more than sequential

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subjectivity. This highlights one of the drawbacks to empathy that Bloom emphasizes, its solipsistic constitution. For Bloom, empathy “does poorly in a world where there are many people in need and where the effects of one’s actions are diffuse, often delayed, and difficult to compute, a world in which an act that helps one person in the here and now can lead to greater suffering in the future.”15 In place of a slippery empathy, Bloom advocates for “self-control and intelligence and a more diffuse compassion,”16 the kind of rational concern that can come to the fore precisely in the absence of a hypothetically achievable felt mirroring of another’s feelings. Bloom comes closest to my own fields of inquiry when he addresses the therapeutic environment, which provides evidence for his line of argument in the most direct way: the idea that a therapist’s efficacy would be tied to their ability to experience what the client is feeling flies in the face of what happens in the therapeutic encounter. Surely a client doesn’t seek help from a care practitioner in order for the latter to mirror the client’s despair? Nor can a care practitioner sustain such an experiential mirroring, as British neuropsychologist clinician Paul Broks notes: Anyone who has worked with patients on acute hospital wards will tell you that you cannot resonate with every tremor or feeling, and that sometimes there are visions of horror and raw fear that can only be observed obliquely. Perfect, constant empathy in such circumstances would be suicidal.17

To be sure, having an idea of what a particular client is living is a useful place to begin, but Bloom would argue that it is when one veers closer to “empathy” with clients that one becomes ineffective, and that “not only can compassion and kindness exist independently of empathy, they are sometimes opposed. Sometimes we are better people if we suppress our empathic feelings”18 to attain a clear-headed sense of the questions before us. Bloom suggests that it is the client who should approximate a kind of “self-empathy” in the therapeutic encounter rather than the therapist achieving empathy for the client. Of course, “self-empathy” is a near contradiction in terms, for it is precisely with another that empathy is supposedly achieved. Perhaps, however, something akin to “self-empathy” is what clients seek from their encounters with helping professionals—an exteriorization of inner life such that coming to a better understanding of it feels like empathy. What emerges, then, from this cursory exploration is awareness that there is no commonly agreed-upon definition of or consensus on what “empathy” signifies, nor of how to measure it in any precise way. However, if empathy speaks to the ability of humans to enter the experience of another—either to make a therapeutic intervention or merely to expand limited consciousness— then, this is clearly a conversation central to the work of ministry and pastoral theology, of caregiving.19 Perhaps the primary takeaway from a discussion of

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the potential processes of empathy is a word of caution. Caregivers may best be served by owning their limited empathic prowess and adopting a position of learners in their encounters with others. Here, I come to what might be the crux of my own encounter with gender creative persons, for, try as I may, I seem incapable of fully intuiting or feeling what they may be experiencing. I can approximate understanding the emotional fallout stemming from the vitriol heaped upon gender-variant persons because of the aspersion I have experienced in crossing gender norms as a gay-identified man. But more important may be for me to remember that a gender creative person doesn’t demand, need, or even want me to experience their life. They want me to listen, learn, and act. As David Kundtz writes in his coauthored pastoral care manual Ministry among God’s Queer Folk, I have often heard gay people say, “I just don’t understand transgender people.” The astute pastoral caregiver will diplomatically identify and help the person to see that there is nothing to “understand” about trans people any more than there is to “understand” about gay or lesbian or straight people. It’s not a question of “understanding” but of believing and accepting their lived experience—or not.20

It behooves me not to understand, not to attempt to feel what a gender-variant person is feeling, if these might lead to some pronouncement of casuistry or judgment, even as I acknowledge that their self-narration, as mine, must always held open to mutual transformation and ongoing discovery. Rather, I can listen, I can learn, I can put into operation and test a moral imagination that allows me to suspend anxiety about the pros and cons of empathy, and I can move beyond fears that personal inadequacies might lead to failure of connection, all in favor of a compassionate encounter with an other I may well never “understand” but may indeed come to love. Part of bridging what can seem like impassable differences is to realize how distinct and varied all persons are, even those who would seem to have the most in common. In making the familiar strange, a space is generated for new meaning to develop in connection and cooperation with members of an always-expanding in-group. This “more-than-empathy,” this attempt to be in relationship outside of a need or ability to fully share or understand, is in line with the aim of pastoral theology as currently constituted as a field. THE FIELD OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY The limitations of empathy as a process leading to understanding have come to the fore in the writing of Bonnie Miller-McLemore, one of pastoral theology’s preeminent contemporary proponents. Miller-McLemore, Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture Emerita at the Divinity School and

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Graduate Department of Religion of Vanderbilt University, has a feminist liberationist stance within practical theology. She was concerned that the androcentric and intrapsychic emphasis of pastoral theology be expanded to include the worlds of sociology, cultural identity, and political activism in order to be able better to understand the self as always contextual, always formed in relationship, and physically constricted by mechanisms of the socially constructed forces of sexism, racism, and heterosexism. Any pastoral caregiver and any author will be defined (and limited) by their own social location, and therefore, less able than perhaps previously thought to “speak” for another: When we admit that knowledge is seldom universal or uniform, and truth is contextual and tentative, we discover a host of methodological, pedagogical, and practical questions. In some ways, teaching and ministry become harder, professors and clergy more vulnerable.21

Part of that increased difficulty stems from acknowledging that one cannot speak for others. Those voices kept at the margins of dominant discourses of church, counseling, and academy need to be amplified as they speak from their social location for themselves: If knowledge depends upon power, then power must be turned over to the silenced. This lesson—that we must hear voices of the marginalized from within their own contexts—is one that pastoral theologians have known all along, but perhaps never articulated in quite this way.22

Going forward, Miller-McLemore avers, pastoral theology “will have to include, even if only to a limited extent, social analysis of oppression, alienation, exploitation, diversity, and justice in its clinical assessment of individual pathology.”23 It is surely the case that there are limits to what any one author or care provider can speak to with authority, and this must serve as an essential caveat to any claim of even partial cisgender mastery of the lives of transgender and gender-nonconforming persons: “Sometimes a person must admit an inability to understand fully the lived reality of the oppressions suffered by another. There may be boundaries beyond which empathy itself cannot go.”24 The eschewing of full appropriation of understanding extends even to pastoral theology’s definition of itself. Pastoral theology is in a constant state of self-appraisal and redefinition, engaged at the juncture of theological reflection and human lives in the creative interplay of theory and practice. As an academic subject of study, the discipline of pastoral theology was established, in great measure, by Seward Hiltner during his time teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. For him, pastoral theology was a place of synthetic critical inquiry, a meta-analysis,

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drawing from theology but also from cognate disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology to provide resources for the practitioners of pastoral care and counseling, usually ministers in places of engagement with suffering persons in settings such as churches, hospitals, the military, and outpatient clinics. In a vital collection of historical pastoral theology documents, Images of Pastoral Care: Classic Readings, editor Robert C. Dykstra describes the field as one that “joins persons across all barriers of cultural location and difference.” As such, pastoral theology is an apt field by which to engage in the kinds of compassionate dialogue, welcome, affirmation, and cooperation across gender binaries I advocate here. What is “pastoral” about pastoral theology, however, isn’t that “pastors” do it, though many ministers referred to as pastors do. Rather, it is a qualitative aspect of actions taken on behalf of others that gives rise to the nomenclature of the field. Pastoral theology engages a pastoral quality of theological imagination, and its name derives metaphorically from the same quality of concern that gave rise to various (largely Protestant) Christian denominations referring to their ministers as pastors. Pastoral theology is, then, always already a metaphorically engaged endeavor. As such, I conclude this chapter with a proposal for a new metaphor for the actions taken by pastoral theologians, drawing from the Younger Testament25 and, in the process, leading the way into the biblical witness that I engage in Part IV. The word “pastor” derives from the biblical region of the Eastern Mediterranean where, even today, the continual peregrinations of herds of sheep and goats are a common sight. These herds and their herders are engaged in an ongoing search for the terrain’s elusive grassy patches on which to graze. It is the grass (Latin, pasto) and the act of grazing (Latin, pascere) that allow the herders metonymically to be referred to as “pastors,” the enablers of the search for grassy sustenance. It is no wonder that Jesus, steeped in the everyday life of his time, would appropriate herding as a way of communicating the actions of a caring God to persons well acquainted with a world whose food base depended on herds. The Johannine tradition, in particular, has Jesus taking on the metaphor, becoming the good “shepherd,” a caring herder for his followers. Since Christians, for millennia, have tended to reify metaphors taken from biblical texts, the route of transmission for “ministers” to be called “pastors” is particularly easy to trace. In fact, Hiltner himself metaphorically uses “shepherding” as the central way of qualitatively examining the actions of pastoral care, seeing in them acts of healing, sustaining, and guiding.26 Hiltner’s appropriation of the shepherding metaphor, in turn, led to formative ways of tracing the history of pastoral care as an activity of God’s people. In a seminal study, pastoral theologians William A. Clebsch and Charles R. Jaekle described the history of pastoral care as a succession of eras, each marked by the salient emergence

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of one of shepherding’s characteristic actions: those of (Hiltner’s) “sustaining, guiding, and healing” along with Clebsch and Jaekle’s own addition of “reconciling.”27 In short, pastoral theology has tended historically to test metaphorical ways of interpreting its own practices in constituting itself as a field and attempting to guide pastoral action. Dykstra, in Images of Pastoral Care, makes a studied collection of just such vocational metaphors.28 His volume not only proffers rationales for pastoral theologians contributing to a steady stream of metaphorical images for their vocation, but also allows for weighing various of those images. That process invites me to consider my emergence into the field as a pastoral theologian by offering a pastoral image of my own, segueing to Part IV’s use of scriptural texts significant to gender creative persons. A parable related by Jesus to his disciples in the Gospel of Luke (11:5–8), where the text’s importuner and importuned are blurred semantically, allows me to proffer an apt metaphor for an affirmative pastoral theology beyond gender binaries.

OPENING DOORS And he said to them, “Among you, what man would have a friend, and would come to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, Since a friend of mine has just visited me from the road and I have nothing I might set before him,’ And the one inside would say in response, ‘Do not present me with difficulties; the door has already been closed, and my children and I are in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even if he will not rise and give it to him because he is his friend, still on account of his persistence he will rise and give him whatever he needs.”29

This parable text is found only in the Lukan gospel. As I began to work on a translation of the verses, I discovered two equally plausible points of view, those of the “Knocker” and of the “Sleeper.”30 While either version suffices as a translation, I suggest that both versions can be understood simultaneously; after all, the Knocker was a sleeper but for a third, usually neglected, character in the parable, that of the Journeyer, who sets the story in motion by arriving at the house of a friend. The translation offered above preserves the ambiguity in the original Greek with either the Knocker version—“[the man] would come to him at midnight”—or the Sleeper version—“[the friend] would come to him at midnight”—discernible in the English wording. The parable is set in an honor-shame cultural setting in which friendship constitutes the relationships of expected reciprocal hospitality. Each

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interaction between a guest in need and a resident villager involves the risk of entering the encounter, the potential disgrace and attendant shame if the expected relationship of friendship doesn’t ensue, and the opportunities for gaining honor through proffered hospitality.31 The Journeyer has risked attendant shame by arriving unannounced in the middle of the night at the door of the future Knocker. The Journeyer, therefore, is the original “knocker” who sets the events in motion. The original “sleeper,” to avoid disgrace, must rise and open the door to provide for the Journeyer. This original sleeper, having no way of providing for the Journeyer, transitions into the Knocker of the parable who, in turn, also will have to risk shame by going to the neighborfriend in the middle of the night to ask for food to provide for the Journeyer. So, leaving the Journeyer at home, the now-Knocker goes to the house of another friend. A second Sleeper is awakened, having put the household to bed, including children. I would imagine an initial fright, as for anyone whose door is knocked on in the middle of the night. In fact, only the importunity of the Knocker elicits any response at all from the Sleeper. A conversation ensues with the Sleeper still in bed, who calls out, “Go away!” However, the Knocker explains the predicament, namely, that the Journeyer has risked shame and has, in turn, compelled the Knocker, too, to risk shame. The Sleeper, in turn (and to avoid disgrace), answers the call of the Knocker, rises, and opens the door. Honor is restored all around. One can imagine Jesus’s apostles gravitating toward this narrative precisely because it addressed their Knocker needs as soon-to-be itinerant ministers of the gospel. Indeed, the hospitality on which the apostles would depend is itself the content of that very gospel message: love your neighbor-friend. The parable illustrates God’s promised benefaction through “steadfastness of hospitality.” It is the bounty of God, as revealed in the sometimes-begrudging hospitality of fellow humans, on which the apostles are charged to depend. Indeed, “God” is revealed in this transaction of generosity. Strong claims in the passage, then, are an obligation to render care to one’s fellow human despite what may be inconveniences to regular operating procedures, and the reality that achieving a relationship of reciprocity can at times require persistence. By opening oneself to the plight of another in need, one has an opportunity to render care to the other by opening the door, and that action propels one into the godliness that exists in the knowledge of interconnectedness. The original sleeper was transformed into the Knocker because of the Journeyer’s need. So, too, if we can muster the will to rise to the challenge (however burdensome it may seem) of opening the door, we involve ourselves in the movement of God’s providence. We then are given opportunities to experience the hospitality of doors opened to us in the course of our duty of opening them to others. Journeyers knock, transforming sleepers into journeyers who knock, and so it goes.

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PART THREE CODA Pastoral caregivers and pastoral theologians may rediscover ways to “walk with God” alongside their gender creative siblings in becoming some of the Changers this world needs. To do so may require new metaphors, new language to describe the inherent welcome and mutuality embedded in their professions. To move toward an affirmative pastoral ministry beyond gender binaries, caregivers can do the things I am attempting here: to self-disclose the social locations from which they operate; to learn about the existence, the complexity, and the diversity within the gender creative world; to gain an awareness of various gender continua and psychological models for describing the life cycles of gender creative persons; to inquire as to the resilience strategies of transgender individuals; and to expand their sense of how religious affiliation and belonging are transmitted in ways benign, destructive, or transformational. If they engage in these practices while persistently wrestling with the parameters of their own gendered selves, these endeavors will contribute to a pastoral theological effort to open doors to genuine dialogue and care, finding the gender creative promise that lies on the other side. Further, for Christian caregivers, the place of scripture in guiding gender creative sensibilities becomes an essential starting point for rediscovery. In what follows I attempt to reconcile biblical witnesses to, and seek biblical affirmation for, gender creativity as a specifically Christian posture, reckoning with biblical texts historically used to cement complementarian gender roles and a binary conception of creation. But perhaps, the gender creative spirit of welcome is already embedded within timeworn biblical texts? To this question I now turn.

NOTES 1. T Cooper and Allison Glock-Cooper, Changers Book One: Drew (New York: BlackSheep/Akashic Books, 2014), 282. 2. Cooper and Glock-Cooper, 282. 3. Cooper and Glock-Cooper, 112. 4. The other installments are T Cooper and Allison Glock-Cooper, Changers Book Two: Oryon (New York: BlackSheep/Akashic Books, 2015); T Cooper and Allison Glock-Cooper, Changers Book Three: Kim (New York: BlackSheep/Akashic Books, 2016); and T Cooper and Allison Glock-Cooper, Changers Book Four: Forever (New York: BlackSheep/Akashic Books, 2018). 5. “Empathy,” Google Dictionary, https://www​.google​.com​/search​?lr=​&hl​=en​ &as​_qdr​=all​&ei​=WON​QW9a​OA8O​3gge​ZjbnoCA​&q​=empathy​&oq​=empathy​&gs​_l​ =psy​-ab​.3.​.0i6​7k1l​3j0l​2j0i​67k1j0l4​.38938​.39984​.0​.40270​.7​.7​.0​.0​.0​.0​.168​.628​.6j1​.7​ .0.​.2.​.0..​.1​.1​.64​.psy​-ab.​.0​.7​.627..​.0i131k1​.0​.TkIjkK​-feg4.

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6. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: HarperCollins, 2016). 7. Baron-Cohen’s previous two books focusing on empathy were Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995) and The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain (New York: Basic Books, 2003). 8. Simon Baren-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (New York: Basic Books, 2011), ix. 9. Baren-Cohen, vii. 10. Barzn-Cohen, 15. 11. Bloom, Against Empathy, 3. 12. Bloom, Against Empathy, 42; for a discussion on highly problematic behaviors emerging from empathic connection, see Fritz Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy, trans. Andrew B. B. Hamilton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019). 13. For a developing project to list all known quantifiable empathy measures, see Empathy Training Literature Review, https://sites​.google​.com​/site​/emp​athy​trai​ning​ litreview​/measurements. 14. Bloom, Against Empathy, 16. 15. Bloom, 31. 16. Bloom, 35. Bloom may err, however, on the side of a rationalization for never really acting in a concrete act of compassion with a suffering individual in one’s personal orbit. 17. Paul Broks, Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 59. 18. Bloom, Against Empathy, 141–142 (emphasis added). 19. Recognition of misunderstanding among persons is also key in this equation of entering into another’s experience; see Melinda A. McGarrah Sharp, Misunderstanding Stories: Toward a Postcolonial Pastoral Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013). 20. David J. Kundtz and Bernard S. Schlager, Ministry among God’s Queer Folk: LGBTQ Pastoral Care, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019; 2007), 13; the authors split the chapters between them, but I quote from Kundtz’s portions throughout. 21. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, “The Human Web: Reflections on the State of Pastoral Theology,” Christian Century 110, no. 11 (April 7, 1993): 369. 22. Miller-McLemore, “Reflections,” 369. 23. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, “The Living Human Web” in Images of Pastoral Care: Classic Readings, ed. Robert C. Dykstra (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2005), 41. 24. Miller-McLemore, “Living Human Web,” 46. 25. I adopt the terminology of theologian Ellen T. Charry, who substitutes “the titles ‘Older Testament’ and ‘Younger Testament’ for the standard ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament.’ When the conventional terms were created to distinguish the predominantly Hebrew texts from the Greek texts of the Christian Bible, perhaps they were less value laden than they are today, given that in the ancient world novelty was not as prized as it is now. However, it could be that even at their origin they had a

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supersessionist connotation. In any case, Christian supersessionism is now increasingly recognized to be problematic, in light of its catastrophic consequences for Jews. The terms . . . are simply a nod in the direction of developing a new approach to the attitude of Christianity (and Christians) toward Judaism (and Jews).” Ellen T. Charry, Psalms 1–50: Sighs and Songs of Israel (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2015), xxvi. 26. See especially Seward Hiltner, Preface to Pastoral Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958). 27. See William A. Clebsch and Charles R. Jaekle, Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective: An Essay with Exhibits (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964). It should be said that “shepherding” also involves more quotidian actions of chasing, clipping, and cleaning, perhaps less abstractable into ennobling pastoral caregiving pursuits! 28. Dykstra, ed., Images of Pastoral Care. 29. Hart, New Testament, 132–133 (Luke 11:5–8, emphasis added). Note: in addition to capitalizing the first word in each sentence, Hart capitalizes the first word of each new verse. 30. The Greek verb for “would come” (italicized) in Luke 11:5 can correspond to both second and third person because the original subject combines “you” and “which”: “This makes at once for an ambiguity as to who goes to whom. Does our addressee go as the one with an unexpected guest, or get visited by the one with an unexpected guest?” John Nolland, Word Biblical Commentary, Volume 35B: Luke 9:21–18:34 (Dallas: Word Books, 1993), 623 (emphases added). Most English translations err on the side of a second-person conjugation of the verb in question, such as the New Revised Standard Version which has “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight . . .” Walter J. Harrelson, ed., The New Interpreter’s Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003), 1875. The New English Bible translation of Luke 11:5, however, espouses the third-person alternative: “Suppose one of you has a friend who comes to him in the middle of the night . . .” Samuel Sandmel, ed., The New English Bible with the Apocrypha: Oxford Study Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 86. 31. See Halvor Moxnes, “Honor and Shame,” in The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation, ed. Richard L. Rohrbaugh (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1996); and Herman C. Waetjen, “The Subversion of ‘World’ by the Parable of the Friend at Midnight,” Journal of Biblical Literature 120, no. 4 (Winter 2001).

Part IV

“YET I SAY UNTO YOU” GENDER CREATIVE BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION AS AFFIRMATIVE PASTORAL ACTION

Chapter 9

Toward a Gender Creative Lens on Biblical Interpretation

In chapter 6, in the face of her experience that “Christianity has not always been a welcoming space for LGBT people,” trans woman Christian minister “Olivia” was heard discussing using her pulpit “to show how welcoming the light of God can be to everyone.”1 She made specific mention of the way that “people cite various biblical verses to prove that homosexuality is a sin, or that being transgender is a sin,” but indicated that hers is a ministry of putting biblical passages “in a historical and cultural context so that people think about the meaning of the words in a new way.”2 She makes intentional space for a liberative reception of scripture in a transgender and gendernonconforming context. I come to the task of biblical interpretation with a history of having had to discover a proactive welcome for my God-given identity as a gay-identified man. While sexual orientation is not equivalent to gender identity, nor are the current cultural disruptions and attendant aspersion surrounding these phenomena comparable in their depth and nuance, certain connections between them have been vital to my own interest in providing pastoral caregiving outreach to gender creative persons. I conceived this project in the hope that, along with providing an introduction to gender nonconformity, my own life context might provide instrumental access into lives quite different from my own. My personal struggles toward Christian authenticity gave rise to my interest in learning from and supporting an analogous sense of personal authenticity in the gender creative community. For Christians, reconciliation with scripture is an important—for many, the important—element in discerning what is perceived to be God’s will for human lives. How Christians go about that task, however, is subject to the vagaries of denominational and historical tradition. In an “evangelical response” to “the 129

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transgender challenge,” Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, writes, For Christians, the first question to ask when confronting any issue is: what does the Bible say? The answer to this question is fundamental to Christian faith and practice. The ultimate authority for our understanding of reality is the Bible, which is nothing less than the very Word of God. Our knowledge on anything of importance regarding essential questions of life is grounded in the reality that the one true and living God is also the God who speaks.3

At issue within Christian communities and denominational bodies is how one “hears” “God’s speech” in the biblical record and whether that revelatory message is sealed in historically bounded ways. Liam Hooper, a United Church of Christ minister and cofounder of “Trans Still Speaking,” a project of the online Christian nonprofit advocacy group Transfaith, stresses the ongoing, living quality of God’s covenant with humanity: The sages say that God gave Torah to the people in the wilderness because, without the teaching, the world is a wilderness and the people wander aimlessly. And yet, after receiving it, the people wandered. This is because practicing the way is not nearly as easy as receiving it. Thankfully, this covenant between the Eternal One and us is not contingent on continuous good behavior, on always getting it right, or on never having to learn from our mistakes. Time and again, God renews God’s covenant: a faithful commitment to be in sustaining relationship with us—all of us—and a call for our relational commitment to God and to one another.4

Hooper emphasizes the steadfastness of God’s faithfulness in scripture to persons inevitably falling short of following through on relational commitments, a steadfastness extending within the biblical record over diverse historical eras. Persons since time immemorial have been and continue to be “practicing the way” to be in right covenant with one another and with God, finding strength and community in hearing God’s speech to them in their context and in their time. The time is now for “hearing” God’s speech to transgender and gender-nonconforming persons. In Part IV, I bring theological and biblical support to the project of resilience and religious belonging considered in Part III. If gender creative persons’ stated resilience needs can be strengthened through religious affiliation, then finding a framework for gender affirmation in scripture will be essential for pastoral Christian caregiving ministries open to gender boundary crossings. My biblical survey here concentrates on a small collection of passages that trace the appearances of “male and female,” from creation to Jesus and beyond to Paul, to reclaim the very texts at the center of conservative Christian opposition to

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seeing gender creativity as part of God’s plan for humanity. I proceed from a place of humility, in the position of a learner. Complementing my stated desire to be an agent of change in opening doors of possibility for an affirmative pastoral theology beyond gender binaries, I approach biblical interpretation with a similar acknowledgment of inexpertise: I am not a biblical scholar, but rather a minister and pastoral theologian interested in developing a biblical foundation for pastoral caregiving actions that enhance transgender resilience. The aim of a gender-affirmative pastoral theology allied with psychology of religion is to ensure that the benefits from religious affiliation and belonging be made available to gender creative persons and that all persons might be transformed in the process. Often, the obstacle to such deployment can be an antiquated interpretation of the Bible. I focus a gender creative interpretative lens on scripture to generate a biblical framework of principles allied with transgender resilience strategies. These principles hopefully will guide pastoral caregiving ministries for gender creative thriving and promise, opening doors to new relationships of mutual accountability.

THE IMAGING OF GOD Gender identities that differ from those thought to accompany determinations of sex at birth may upend a traditional sense of order, but pastoral ministry invites the care of persons as they are, not as cultural conventions insist that they ought to be. Conventions are built in defense against those unlike the majority in various ways, so it is no surprise that such thinking can lead to a conventional imaging of God. Justin Sabia-Tanis, whose work inspires my biblical survey, writes, “We tend to create God in our own image. If we ourselves are uncomfortable with gender variation, then we say that God is uncomfortable with it. Rather than looking to the image of Jesus in the Christian Bible and his nonjudgmental approach to difference, we define our social strictures as God’s ordained will. We also tend to project onto others our own fears and discomforts, and then hate the other for displaying those characteristics.”5 Some strains of Christianity have historically taken “male” and “female” to be sacrosanct fields of meaning “from the beginning,” yielding sex and gender roles seen as “intended.” This in turn informs social action that denies transgender and gender-nonconforming identities beyond a male/female binary, encouraging persons instead to “accept” sex and gender assignments at odds with, in Diane Ehrensaft’s language, their “true gender selves.” These positions take their lead from entrenched understandings of biblical texts that corroborate previously held assumptions.

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Gender creative persons have had these interpretations imposed upon them from a young age. “AJ,” who self-describes as a “female-to-male transsexual” man, speaks of his churched childhood: Preachers and religious people are always telling us that “God made man and God made woman. There are no other genders besides that. If you try to change what God made you then you’re a freak and doomed to hell. God don’t make mistakes.” I’ve grown up with the religious message that you’re either male or female, and you must dress and act that way. When I went to the Baptist Church with my family, the preacher would actually pick me out of the whole church and preach on how girls should dress like girls. Anytime he would mention homosexuality, he would put cross-dressers, transsexuals and child molesters in the same category . . . preaching that they all were not going to heaven.6

AJ’s experience in his Baptist church is not an outlier. The Southern Baptist Convention’s teachings “On Transgender Identity,” written in 2014, stress what is called “God’s good design that gender identity is determined by biological sex and not by one’s self-perception—a perception which is often influenced by fallen human nature in ways contrary to God’s design.”7 Using traditional patriarchal language both for humanity and God, the rationale informing the Convention’s determination of “God’s design” of gender identity is affirmed in Article III of “The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message,” a summary statement of the Southern Baptist Faith: “Man is the special creation of God, made in His own image. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation. The gift of gender is thus part of the goodness of God’s creation.”8 But as will be seen, conclusions drawn from citations of primordial creation myths are far from self-evident. Gender creative promise in a Christian setting will require a gender creative interpretation of scripture. Ultimately, I want to be in service to (and in turn served and blessed by) those who, like “Olivia,” can say with newfound determination, I’m a Christian. . . . God is the most important entity in my life, along with my family. There are a fair number of people who think that being a Christian and a trans woman are contradicting identities. I think they just haven’t spent enough time talking to God. . . . There are so very many lesbian, gay, and transgender people who have been beaten with the Bible who come to shun God’s love. . . . I started thinking, if God doesn’t make mistakes, then my cross-gender feelings couldn’t be a mistake either. I think I was supposed to be born a man and learn acceptance and love through the journey of becoming a woman. I surmise that God didn’t make a mistake with me; he was just teaching me a lesson. I am a trans woman, and I am a Christian, and that is not a contradiction.9

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Liberative biblical textual interpretations that enable persons to feel known and loved by God in all their complexities can make a life-and-death difference. Knowing oneself as loved by God is an important first step in allowing for the possibility of being loved by others. If one’s “true self” is in hiding (to the extent that one has access to that truth), one cannot be known in full authenticity, much less loved and cherished for that authentic selfhood. Certainly, the potential for feeling unsafe to be oneself is heightened for gender creative individuals, but all persons must navigate lowering various social façades to allow for the authentic connection that religious community optimally provides. Episcopal priest Elizabeth M. Edman writes of the struggles LGBTQ+ persons have in finding places of connection where they can be most completely themselves, suggesting that gender creative Christians have much to teach other members of their congregations about the power of community and the life-giving courage of demonstrating personal authenticity: The draw of human connection is powerful. It is perhaps the most important reason that anyone chooses to join a faith community. . . . Christian community should be a place where one gets to work out the most vexing ethical challenge of our lives: the challenge to perceive and negotiate a healthy relationship between Self and Other.10

Communities of faith join one’s own story of faith and life with those of others. Much of what is transformational about going to church stems from exposure to other ways of seeing things, from seeing through different glasses, as it were. If God is larger than any person, then intentionally being in the presence of others helps individuals to imagine themselves into realities of which they are only a part. By interacting with groups of persons engaged collectively in strategies of spiritual formation, education, resistance, and caring for one another’s souls, persons enter new avenues of meaning-making. This is no simple task. Much may be required to ensure that those with distinctive differences feel that they belong, in all their diversity, which will require that all resist assumptions of shared understanding, even with others of similar appearance or action. Ministers are the curators of many of these congregational experiences. They are often in the business of asking for a consideration of change. Sermons attempt to coax parishioners into new ways of thinking, to be made new. Edman puts it bluntly: “In Christian community, difference is not a problem to be overcome; it is a strength that is crucial to our call.”11 Transgender and gender-nonconforming persons challenge and invite congregations into paradigm change of abundance for all. To gain a gender-affirmative foothold for pastoral theology and caregiving rooted in scripture, space must be opened up for new interpretation of the very biblical texts that have fortified narrow

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readings of binary sex and gender. I seek in chapter 10 to coax broader, more open, gender-affirmative readings of age-old texts. In marshaling a rediscovery of biblical texts that seek to deliver hope, inspiration, and liberation for gender creative persons, a theologically sound gender creative interpretative lens on scripture moves away from confirmation of restrictive rules and toward an unsettling new vision of freedom. In this movement, I enjoin myself with the liberative move attributed to Jesus of Nazareth—“You have heard it said . . . yet I say unto you”12—by availing myself of a new installment of what Robert E. Shore-Goss urgently advocated in the 1990s for gay and lesbian persons: a contextual, “queer” lens on biblical interpretation. In 1993, Shore-Goss, an ordained Jesuit priest and comparative religious studies professor, published Jesus ACTED UP: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto. In it, he noted, “contemporary theological practice concerning gay men and lesbian women has not been contextual or even pertinent to their own experiences.”13 Shore-Goss pointed to the fact that, in recent years, the grand discursive claims of Christianity had been contested from various social locations—feminist, African American, Latin American—leading to various liberation theologies that “challenge dominant Christian political regimes of universal truth with the concrete, lived situation of oppressed peoples and their liberative practices.”14 He argued that it was time such a project of liberation was undertaken on behalf of gay men and lesbian women, stressing that new contextual theologies must always emerge from the bodies of those experiencing direct oppression. This claim is important for me to acknowledge, for it is not I who will write a gender creative liberation theology, but transgender individuals themselves. Nonetheless, I can engage in the imaginative development of some principles for such a project, opening doors for liberation. Shore-Goss’s articulations of a gay and lesbian lens on biblical interpretation were important for me in reconciling my own body with a Christian identity; I use his work here to point to an emerging liberation theology for gender creative persons and an allied field of transgender biblical studies.15 Shore-Goss laid out in an accessible way the steps necessary for opening up liberative understandings of biblical texts. To “hear God’s word” in scripture as vital spiritual substance and inspiration, one needs to understand the various social contexts through which biblical texts come into particular receptions of them. Shore-Goss stressed the importance of recognizing that “all biblical texts are social constructions of androcentric patriarchal culture and history. The Bible is written in the words of men”16—cisgender men, it must be added. For Shore-Goss, a gay and lesbian interpretative lens on scripture must “recognize the oppressive social construction of biblical texts in the past and try to find contemporary meaning .  .  . [in the] struggle for justice, solidarity, and liberation.”17 While historically, biblical interpretation

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has been considered “value neutral,” there actually is no such thing as valueneutral scriptural scholarship; rather, “Christian biblical discourse is a site of conflict and contestation.”18 Scripture must be examined, taking into account its original social construction in order to enact a “historical reconstruction of biblical texts from the past into the present liberative practice”19 of interpreters in their context. As a liberation theologian, Shore-Goss insists that God’s revelation is found in the lives of the marginalized: “The Bible is the revelation of God’s praxis of compassion, justice, and freedom for the oppressed. It reveals God’s preferential option for the poor and the oppressed.”20 Writing of what were new coalitions among lesbians, feminist women, and gay men in the 1990s, Shore-Goss adopted the term “queer” to describe this collective. While his use of the word may be qualitatively different from the way it is used today as part of the LGBTQ+ acronym, his adoption of the appellation was “part of the movement to reclaim derogatory words from oppressive culture” and, therefore, in keeping with his project of surfacing “alternate forms of knowledge to dominant constructions of discourse.”21 A “queering” lens on biblical interpretation, for Shore-Goss, is therefore, one that flies in the face of historically powerful interpretative strategies: “Fundamentalist churches and ecclesial hierarchies have subjected the reading of the Bible to a heterosexist and literalist reading of the Bible as one sacred text. They bring uncritical assumptions and prejudices to their textual interpretations.”22 Biblical literalism is allied with systems of power and vested regimes of truth, which have “generated blatant mistranslations of key words. Biblical truth has been constructed from inaccurate readings of the text or impositions of political interpretations upon the text, and this truth has been used as a tool of oppression, terrorism, and violence.”23 Those with the power to interpret wield the power to fashion the narrative that prevails, which then disguises itself as value neutral, but all exegesis is always already eisegesis. A gay and lesbian (“queer”) interpretative lens refuses “to leave the Bible in the hands of the powerful to be used as a weapon” but instead uses a “liberating practice to read the Bible anew. . . . Gay people must make a commitment to be a force to be reckoned with in theology . . . by claiming and assuming [their] right to theologize”24 and to do so in the context of their own bodies and lived realities. Reading Shore-Goss’s arguments in light of my own project, biblical reconstructions need the practice of critical engagement in the present social context of the interpreter/reader to complete the interpretative process of the Scriptures. These reconstructions need to be appropriated in the lives of their readers. . . . A queer critical reading means reading the Bible as [their] own. . . . The truth of a particular text requires an interpretation that includes the social context of the text and the truth of their own queer lives. The lives of queer Christians become another

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text from which they interpret the biblical text. Queer Christians refigure the meaning of the text by interpreting and applying it to their lives.25

Adding to Shore-Goss’s agenda of combating heterosexist assumptions, a new generation of gender creative Christians wants also to combat transphobic assumptions. A gender creative reconstruction and interpretation of biblical texts is underway, emerging today in analogous ways to the birth of the liberative biblical reconstruction for gay men and lesbian women in the 1990s.26 Vanessa Sheridan, one of the first transgender-identified Christians to write a book-length plea for transgender inclusion in the church, opens her Crossing Over: Liberating the Transgendered Christian with the following question: “How can the institutional church exist or operate with integrity if it unjustly shuns, rejects, marginalizes, or oppresses some human beings based upon the arbitrary criteria of gender orientation or gender presentation?”27 Her answer begins with an important ground rule for any serious consideration of gender creative lives in light of scripture, and one that has immediate echoes in the self-worth resilience strategy of transgender-identified persons identified in the study undertaken by Singh and her colleagues:28 that gender-variant persons be seen as a valued part of God’s creation. Sheridan writes, “I am loved and accepted by God because of what I am, not in spite of it.”29 The Bible’s many texts are accounts of specific persons’ or communities’ interaction with their historical worlds and with the Divine as they understood it; the lives of gender creative persons likewise add to understandings of the workings of God in the world. The factual existence of gender creative persons grounds this hermeneutical project because, as Shore-Goss claims, only by centering “biblical reconstruction” in the social experience of specific persons’ lives can specific liberative meaning be discovered in the text. What follows in chapter 10 is a reading of the biblical witness that seeks to find confirmation of God’s love for gender creative persons. In Sheridan’s words: Despite the exclusive, unjust and discriminatory interpretations of the Bible that many of us learned while growing up, the scriptures can truly become a hopeful, inspiring, liberating word of freedom and redemption for our souls if we learn where and how to look for that liberation.30

I engage a process of biblical exploration that brings to scripture the context of gender fluidity. I ally myself with the liberative stance of gender creative persons being the subjects of biblical exegesis. The liberation of

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gender creative promise inspires unanticipated freedom for persons of all genders to live into their God-given human particularities with fresh intentionality. FINDING ONE’S SELF IN BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION Readers of any text bring to bear their own fabric of understanding about what the text might mean and what messages it might contain. The very translations of the biblical texts will have already furnished interpretative glosses in keeping with the political and theological commitments of the translators.31 Accordingly, I will use translations of the Older and Younger Testaments that help in allowing the reader to see passages through “new eyes.” To begin, I seek to demonstrate that the project of finding one’s self in biblical interpretation is in keeping with the ministry of Jesus. I have selected David Bentley Hart’s Younger Testament translation for my purposes here32—first, because it is relatively new, and hearing the Bible in ways that are unfamiliar aids a new reception of its meanings; second, because a single translator gives a consistency of approach that flies in the face of translations by committee, where “the most important decisions are negotiated accommodations, achieved by general agreement, and favoring only those solutions that prove the least offensive to everyone involved”;33 and third, because Hart seeks to create a text “as scrupulously faithful as [he] could make it, that would not merely reiterate conventional readings of the text, and that would allow [him] to call attention to features of the Greek original usually invisible in English versions.”34 As Younger Testament scholar Robert P. Martin attests, “All translation involves interpretation. Interpretation, of course, involves the influence of theology; and as all translation involves interpretation, so all translation involves theology.”35 But some forms of translation philosophy are perhaps more susceptible to vested theological interests than others.36 To move away from interpretative positions used to exclude gender creative persons, it is important not only to be conscious of what remains “invisible” in any given translation but, in many cases, of what has been “added” to the text by the conscious or unconscious theological commitments of the translators: In the end even the most conscientious translations tend, at certain crucial junctures, to use language determined as much by theological and dogmatic tradition as by the “plain” meaning of the words on the page. And in some extreme cases doctrinal or theological or moral ideologies drive translators to distort the text to a discreditable degree. . . . Moreover, even when ideology does not intrude quite so violently on the work of translation, a kind of inertia has come to hold sway.  .  .  . Where difficult words or syntactical uncertainties or grammatical

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obscurities appear in the Greek, the solutions favored by earlier translators are generally carried over by their successors, even when there may be more plausible or more interesting alternatives.37

Beyond selecting more accurate English translations of scripture, I will bring a desire for gender creative liberation to my own interpretation of the biblical text. This kind of exegetical inclusion is scripturally present in stories of the interpretative care that Jesus brought to his own ministry, for he found in the text and the tradition that which was life-giving in his context.38 Early in Mark’s gospel, for example, Jesus confronts a religiosity concerned with obeying rules—the Pharisees, associated with Temple-based Judaean39 worship—and offers an expansive ministry of revisioning: And it happened that [Jesus] passed through fields of grain on the Sabbath, and his disciples began to pluck ears of grain as they made their way. And the Pharisees said to him, “Look: Why do they do what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” And he says to them, “Did you never read what David did when he was in need and hungry, as well as those with him? How he entered the house of God in the days of the chief priest Abiathar and ate the loaves of bread of Presentation, which it is unlawful for any but the priests to eat, and gave them also to those who were with him?” And he says to them, “The Sabbath came about for the sake of man, not man for the sake of the Sabbath; Thus the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”40

Here, Jesus takes an event recounted in the Hebrew scriptures and wrests new meaning for a new context. He allies his disciples’ own hunger (leading them to pick grain, which, as the Pharisees indicate, violates the rules of the Sabbath) with an episode in which David’s hunger led him to violate Temple rules against eating consecrated bread. The principle Jesus employs is that Temple rules, scriptural precedent, and Sabbath regulations all need to be gauged in light of current need and context. When certain textual readings have become calcified over time, it can take a teaching moment to prompt re-examining those texts, bringing new textual interpretation so that new action might give rise to reading old texts in new ways. The Pharisees in Mark’s gospel account might have interjected that David’s story was about Temple desecration, whereas Jesus’s disciples were violating Sabbath rules. They could, in other words, have found no parallel between the two events. Jesus, however, saw the hunger at the heart of both stories, and because of the current need of his followers, he was able to bring a new focus, that of hunger—of human need—to the interpretation of scriptural precedent in a way that was liberating in the present. Knowing that the Pharisees would have no trouble identifying themselves with David, Jesus shows them that his own disciples, too, can “find themselves” in David’s plight and can thereby wrest new meaning for their own lives from an ancient text. Jesus’s pastoral action of liberative textual interpretation draws

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his disciples into the authoritative circle of being the subjects of scriptural interpretation. In the movement back and forth between the actions of Jesus’s disciples and citations of scriptural story, I find liberative means for gender creative persons to appropriate scriptural messages of inclusion and by which contemporary cisgender Christians can examine their own actions regarding gender creative persons in light of scripture. The statements of Jesus in this passage are fascinating for another reason, for they do not “accurately” depict the Davidic event in question, with Jesus setting the loaf stealing in “the days of the chief priest ‘Abiathar.’” The scriptural incident Jesus enlists, that of David taking the Temple’s consecrated loaves of bread, is found in 1 Samuel 21:1–7, where the text is clear that Abiathar’s father is the high priest at the time, not Abiathar. Later, Abiathar does come to be closely associated with David’s kingly reign, but his character has not even been introduced into the biblical story at the time of the narrative of the sacred bread. My point is not to spar with apologists for biblical inerrancy.41 Rather, I see the discrepancy as a useful example of precisely the lesson Jesus goes on to teach in his skirmish with the Pharisees: details of codes, laws, or, here, history, are not always what is most important in determining one’s course of action, especially when it comes to acting with compassion and dignity. What is important is to find ways that Temple rules, Sabbath regulations, or indeed, the textual interpretation of scriptural pericopes, can be life-giving in the present. Such new readings do not take anything away from the text, but rather expand understanding of a text’s nuances, opening a greater discernment of scripture. Biblical texts, as it were, came about for the sake of humans, not humans for the sake of the Bible. Gender creative persons are no less able and worthy to find their stories reflected in biblical precedent than any others across history. Christian caregivers can choose to align with Jesus-modeled inclusion in their approach to biblical interpretation. In doing so, they may unearth a theologically sound lens through which to approach any biblical pericope. The blessing—the gender creative promise—in risking interpretative disruption can be to see that, in Vanessa Sheridan’s words, “the salvific, redemptive love and acceptance of God really is there in the Bible for anyone who desires a close, personal relationship with the Creator”42—and for anyone who desires to live in affirming community with others who may be different. I will tie my receptions of the biblical texts directly to the resilience strategies of transgender persons in Singh and her colleagues’ study so that the power of scriptural support can be marshaled toward pastoral actions affirming gender identities beyond binaries. As Sheridan says: The lives and welfare of human beings are ultimately more important than any orthodox religious doctrines or ideologies created by and for society and its

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institutions, no matter how well-intentioned, popular, or well-established those ideologies or doctrines may be.  .  .  . Religious and spiritual guidelines should always be designed and implemented to help persons live into their full individual potential. . . . People are created in the image of God—and rules are not. Socioreligious guidelines, doctrines, and dogma invariably become idolatrous whenever they are elevated in importance above the human beings they were intended to help and serve.43

Sabia-Tanis was already an ordained minister in the Metropolitan Community Churches denomination when he began his gender transition process. Sabia-Tanis speaks of his sense that God’s presence is with him at every stage of his coming into his “true gender self.” He writes, “The more comfortable I become with my own presence on this earth, the more I am able to be aware of resting comfortably within God’s embrace.”44 In his transition process, he found that, as his context shifted, so too did his sense of the meaning he derived from biblical texts. I will follow Sabia-Tanis’s lead in finding ways forward into interpretative complexity, choosing to begin with the arc of passages in which the words “male and female” appear, drawing upon my identity as a pastoral theologian for expanding his interpretations. Sabia-Tanis, like Sheridan and like Shore-Goss, begins with persons in their lived realities: “Our bodies are made in the image and likeness of God and are the only ways in which we experience the divine. We have no way of knowing God except as we are—embodied beings.”45 Transgender and cisgender persons alike—persons of all genders—cannot but encounter God through the medium of their lived embodied experience. One reads, hears, and processes scripture—just as one encounters and digests everything encountered in this life—through the bodily medium that is specifically one’s own, reflective of a particular life journey of development, change, gain, and loss. Sabia-Tanis writes, “Through different bodies, God speaks different words to that individual and to the world. Because we are unique, we can know unique aspects of God’s being and speak a distinct word of God to the world.”46 The presumption that the biblical text was written with the specificities of certain lives in mind has been part of the privilege accruing to those conforming to heteronormative and gender normative strictures. Confronted with a reading of scripture that seems at odds with what has secured this privilege up to this moment, a first impulse may be to assume that there must be a problem with the new reading of the text. But if God is, by definition, beyond full or final description, or the experience of any one person, then a relational approximation of God’s presence would insist on listening carefully to those whose experiences of God are different from one’s own in order to get a fuller (though never complete) account of the mystery of God.

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NOTES 1. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 186. 2. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 186. 3. R. Albert Mohler Jr., “The Transgender Challenge: An Evangelical Response,” the website for Decision Magazine; Decision Magazine online, January 3, 2017, https://billygraham​.org​/decision​-magazine​/january​-2017​/transgender​-challenge​ -evangelical​-response/. 4. Liam Hooper, “Trans Still Speaking in the United Church of Christ,” Believe Out Loud, August 7, 2017, http://www​.believeoutloud​.com​/latest​/trans​-still​-speaking​ -united​-church​-christ (emphasis added). 5. Justin Sabia-Tanis, Transgender: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018; 2003), 88. 6. Girshick, Transgender Voices, 39. 7. Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), “On Transgender Identity (Baltimore, MD—2014),” 2014, SBC Resolutions, http://www​.sbc​.net​/resolutions​/2250​/on​-transgender​-identity. 8. Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), “The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message,” SBC, 2000, http://www​.sbc​.net​/bfm2000​/bfm2000​.asp. 9. Shultz, Trans/Portraits, 111–12. 10. Elizabeth M. Edman, Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know about Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 141. 11. Edman, Queer Virtue, 150. 12. Variations on these words appear six times in Matthew 5:21–44. 13. Goss, Jesus ACTED UP, xvi. 14. Goss, Jesus ACTED UP, xvi. 15. Regarding an emerging gender creative liberation theology, see Shore-Goss’s publication following up on Jesus ACTED UP, Robert E. Goss, Queering Christ: Beyond JESUS ACTED UP (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002). See also the groundbreaking Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, eds., Trans/Formations (London, UK: SCM-Canterbury Press, 2009); as well as Patricia Beattie Jung and Aana Marie Vigen, eds., God, Science, Sex, Gender: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Christian Ethics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Christina Beardsley and Michelle O’Brien, eds., This Is My Body: Hearing the Theology of Transgender Christians (London, UK: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2016); Cheryl B. Evans, What Does God Think? Transgender People and the Bible (Ontario: writtenbyamom​ .c​a, 2017); and Tara K. Soughers, Beyond a Binary God: A Theology for Trans* Allies (New York: Church Publishing, 2018). For a personal transgender theological understanding of the biblical passion narrative, see Shannon T. L. Kearns, Walking toward Resurrection: A Transgender Passion Narrative (QueerTheology​.co​m, 2015), http://www​.shannontlkearns​.com/. An emerging field of transgender studies was set into motion by the influential article, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” written in 1987 by Sandy Stone (first presented at the “Other Voices, Other Worlds: Questioning Gender and Ethnicity” conference in Santa Cruz, CA,

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1988; first published in Kristina Straub and Julia Epstein, eds., Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity [New York: Routledge, 1991]) in response to Janice Raymond’s 1979 anti-transgender The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979); updates to Stone’s article have been made over the years: the latest can be found on her website, https://sandystone​.com​/ empire​-strikes​-back​.pdf (2014). Important transgender studies academic journals are The International Journal of Transgenderism (begun in 1987, published by Taylor and Francis) and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (cofounded in 2014 by Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah, published by Duke University Press); see also the important Transgender Studies Reader collections of essays: Susan Stryker and Stephen White, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (New York: Routledge, 2013). 16. Goss, Jesus ACTED UP, 88. 17. Goss, 88. 18. Goss, 89. 19. Goss, 89 (emphasis added). 20. Goss, 90. 21. Goss, xix 22. Goss, 91. 23. Goss, 94. 24. Goss, 99–100. 25. Goss, 102–103. 26. See Robert E. Goss and Mona West, eds., Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2000) and Robert E. Shore-Goss and Mona West, eds., The Queer Bible Commentary, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 2022; 2006). See also Teresa J. Hornsby and Deryn Guest, Transgender, Intersex, and Biblical Interpretation (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016); Linda Tatro Herzer, The Bible and the Transgender Experience: How Scripture Supports Gender Variance (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2016); Austen Hartke, Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018); and Chris Dowd and Christina Beardsley with Justin Tanis, Transfaith: A Transgender Pastoral Resource (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2018). 27. Vanessa Sheridan, Crossing Over: Liberating the Transgendered Christian (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001), xiii. 28. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies.” 29. Sheridan, Crossing Over, 5. 30. Sheridan, Crossing Over, 8. 31. For a sampling of conservative biblical interpreters’ strategies to locate transgender and gender-nonconforming persons outside of God’s original plan for humankind, see Focus on the Family’s “Helping Families Thrive,” with resources on “dealing with ‘transgenderism’” and on “dealing with the homosexual and transgender activism in schools.” Jeff Johnston, “Understanding ‘Transgenderism,’” Focus on the Family, 2015, https://www​.focusonthefamily​.com​/socialissues​/sexuality​/ transgenderism​/understanding​-transgenderism. On handling “activism” in schools,

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see “Express Your Viewpoint,” True Tolerance, https://www​.truetolerance​.org​/your​ -voice/. 32. Hart, New Testament. 33. Hart, xiv. 34. Hart, xv. 35. Robert P. Martin, Accuracy of Translation and the New International Version: The Primary Criterion in Evaluating Bible Versions (Edinburgh, UK: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1989), 41. See also Bruce M. Metzger, The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001). 36. Robert Martin delineates two broad translation orientations: (1) “formal equivalence,” “to parallel closely the linguistic form . . . of the original” (Martin, Accuracy, 7 [emphasis added]) and (2) “dynamic equivalence,” “to use the most natural form of the language of the reader” (Martin, Accuracy, 7 [emphasis added]). Martin is writing in the context of evaluating the accuracy of the 1978 New International Version (NIV) translation, a project “uniting evangelicals around the dream of a trustworthy, accessible Bible translation for the whole English-speaking world.” “NIV Story,” Biblica, https://www​.biblica​.com​/niv​-bible​/niv​-bible​-story/. Martin identifies the NIV as one of “dynamic equivalence,” in which the translator “tends to be relatively unrestrained in [their] theologizing. . . . The result is that . . . the interpretive layer between the reader and the original text tends to be thicker than with formal equivalence translations.” Martin, Accuracy, 42–43. 37. Hart, New Testament, xv–xvi. Hart singles out the NIV and the English Standard Version, which was “created by a team of more than 100 leading evangelical scholars and pastors” (“The English Standard Version,” Crossway, https://www​.esv​ .org), as “notorious examples” of translator distortion: “These may represent the honest zeal of devout translators to communicate what they imagine to be the ‘correct’ theology of scripture, but the preposterous liberties taken to accomplish this end often verge on a kind of pious fraudulence.” Hart, New Testament, xvi–xvi. Robert Martin had concluded, “The NIV is not worthy of becoming the standard version of the English-speaking world. Its accuracy is suspect in too many ways.” Martin, Accuracy, 70. 38. This revision by Jesus of Pharisaical interpretation need not be read as Christian supersessionism, for internal-to-Judaism reflection is in keeping with later rabbinic comfort with such discussion in the form of midrash. See Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 39. The translation of Ioudaios as “Judaeans” better reflects the meaning of the word for the original creators and receiving audiences of the Younger Testament texts: “Where English readers are accustomed to reading the Gospel as referring, often opprobriously, to ‘the Jews,’ the original text is usually referring to the indigenous Temple and synagogue authorities of Judaea, or to Judaeans living outside Judaea, or even to ‘Judaeans’ as opposed to ‘Galileans.’” Hart, New Testament, 549. 40. Hart, New Testament, 67 (Mark 2:23–28); see also Matthew 12:1–8 and Luke 6:1–5. Hart eschews using the anachronistic “persons” or “humanity” for the text’s “man,” even though such an effort would be more gender inclusive. His project is to

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be a faithful translator of the words as they appeared in their original context. While the patriarchal tone may be jarring within my own project of inclusivity, a textually accurate translation allows access to a closer sense of the “original.” Note: in addition to the beginning of sentences, Hart capitalizes the first word of each new verse. 41. See Daniel B. Wallace, “Mark 2:26 and the Problem of Abiathar” (presented at the Evangelical Theological Society’s Southwest Regional Meeting, Bible, March 13, 2004), https://bible​.org​/article​/mark​-226​-and​-problem​-abiathar, for a succinct account of the possible “solutions” for this “problem.” 42. Sheridan, Crossing Over, 8. 43. Sheridan, Crossing Over, 22. 44. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 133. 45. Sabia-Tanis, 164. 46. Sabia-Tanis, 164.

Chapter 10

Principles for Delivering Affirmative Pastoral Caregiving Beyond Gender Binaries

In an exploration of biblical texts through a gender creative lens, in this chapter, I will surface five principles for delivering affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries that support the five resilience strategies held in common by transgender persons discussed in Singh and her colleagues’ study. As a reminder, those strategies, in the order I revisit them here, are (1) embracing self-worth; (2) evolving a self-generated definition of self; (3) awareness of oppression; (4) connection with a supportive community; and (5) cultivating hope for the future.1 Two additional subthemes in the resilience strategies of a majority of study participants—(6) engaging in social activism and (7) being a positive role model for others—were seen as the kind of outwardly focused projects made possible by having implemented the first five common strategies. So, too, employing my five gender creative principles in the delivery of pastoral caregiving may open doors to activism and role modeling in care receivers. For pastoral theologians, ministers, teachers, and caregivers to practice bold activism and role modeling themselves, however, will require them first to engage in the gender introspection advocated in chapter 11. PRINCIPLE 1: GOD CREATES GENDER VARIANCE AS PART OF GOD’S CREATION (GENESIS 1:26–28A) The work of Danish biblical scholar Kjeld Renato Lings has been devoted to demonstrating that negative attitudes and nonaffirmative denominational policy papers on sexuality and gender are rooted not in the Bible but in centuries of Church tradition, often stemming from inaccurate, vested translation issues from “the beginning.” He writes, 145

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Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people rarely think of the biblical creation story in relation to the various orientations inherent in human sexuality as they are understood today. However, the circle most hostile to awarding civil rights to the so-called sexual minorities often search this part of the Bible for arguments. Characteristically, they will say “God created man male and female.” This means, in their view, that it is the divinely ordained destiny and duty of all human beings to marry heterosexually and produce children.2

In Focus on the Family’s series on “Transgenderism,” the first order of business is a section entitled “Male and Female He Created Them: Genesis and God’s Design of Two Sexes,” where the authors point to the creation account in Genesis 1 as having begun in a series of what they call “separations,” a translation of a version of the Hebrew word, kadosh, invoking a holiness coming from having been “set apart”: These separations include heaven and earth, light and dark, day and night, morning and evening, clouds and seas, and water and dry land. . . . Finally, in Genesis 1:26, we see the pinnacle of God’s creation—mankind—called forth into being. Humans are first created separate from the animals. But we are also told that there is a separation of mankind into two sexes—male and female— wholly complementary, yet each sex uniquely and mysteriously bearing God’s image—the imago Dei. Humans bear the image and likeness of God as male and female. And it is in this way, as men and women, that humanity is called to make visible the invisible Creator God on this planet.3

Yet, as Justin Sabia-Tanis notes, Genesis 1 lends itself to quite different— separate, in fact—interpretations, depending on one’s perspective: “the first chapter .  .  . has been used both to support a broadened understanding of a range of the gender of humanity and God as well as a way to support the concept of the division of humanity in two distinct and separate genders.”4 The creation through separating one thing from another is more blurred than binary if one examines the text closely and if one’s translation of the text more accurately renders into English the ambiguous Hebrew original. But even a commonsense view, Sabia-Tanis says, suggests that reality itself is hardly “night and day”: While in the Genesis account, God separates the day from the night, the sea from the land, and the plant from the animal, our own observations of the creation reveal less differentiation than the text seems to imply. Day and night are not fixed entities with clear boundaries where one ends and the other begins; every day contains both dawn and dusk, which create a time in which day and night exist together in the same moment as one moves into the next. The tides make it difficult to see where the division of land ends and the sea begins. . . . Distinguishing plant from animal, as is the case with coral, is not always easy.

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In the story of Genesis, even while God was creating apparent opposites, God also created liminal spaces in which the elements of creation overlap and merge. Surely the same could be said about the creation of humanity with people occupying many places between the poles of female and male in a way similar to the rest of creation.5

In seeing the dusky, swampy, coral-like blurriness of reality, readers must begin, writes Episcopal priest Tara K. Soughers, by acknowledging that the first chapter of Genesis is a long, poetic description of the creation of all things. It does not read like a science textbook, but more like philosophy, theology, or even literature. . . . If we are free to understand parts of the story figuratively—to say, for example, that there is not a layer of water above the sky from which rain originates—why should we insist that other parts must be understood literally?6

I begin my own biblical survey, then, with the biblical mythologies of creation. In using the word “mythologies,” I am not suggesting that the ancient stories “hold no truth,” for to do so, in the words of anthropologist Christopher Ryan and medical doctor Cacilda Jethá, “misses the deepest function of myth, which is to lend narrative order to apparently disconnected bits of information, the way constellations group impossibly distant stars into tight, easily recognizable patterns that are simultaneously imaginary and real.”7 I do seek, however, to hear the early Genesis texts in their intended “primeval” character or, in other words, to understand that the “events” described lie outside of, because chronologically prior to, any accounting of human “history” as such. In the first book of his magisterial three-volume commentary on Genesis, German Older Testament scholar Claus Westermann8 characterizes the early writing in Genesis as obscuring origins rather than pinpointing them: “Talk about creator and creation is everywhere colored by a reverent concern to guard the inaccessible mystery of creation from the human attempt to describe it.”9 The Genesis accounts identify creation as an originary instance of interaction between God and God’s people that is lost to prehistory. Its authors seem not to be presenting depictions “of the beginning of the world as definitive and rejecting all other explanations”; as such, they do “not exclude a scientific explanation of the origin of the world and of humanity, insofar as such an explanation remains open to the same reverent recognition of the creator that characterizes”10 the Genesis stories. The Genesis creation myths emerged in the context of the many such tales extant in the cultures of the world, before and since. After all, “stories of the creation of the world and of [hu]mankind are spread over the whole earth and throughout the whole of humanity; they reach from the oldest, primitive cultures to the high cultures and beyond.”11 Indeed, the narratives of Genesis

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themselves are retellings with differences from mythologies, Babylonian primarily, extant at the time of composition; those Babylonian myths are dependent, in turn, upon Sumerian antecedents, and on and on into the mist of prehistory. Tales of origin can be looked at for what they accentuate. In early Genesis, then, one is in primeval mode, before human vested interest because before human existence. In these creation myths, humans exist only as exemplars of created beings: “The relationship to God is not something which is added to human existence; humans are created in such a way that their very existence is intended to be their relationship to God.”12 Intentionally preserving the primeval character of these texts guards against a tendency to bring contemporary human understandings to things literally unfathomable, which would run the risk of the friends of Job who were not present, or even inhabiting humankind, when God “founded earth.”13 Like Job and his friends, it sometimes behooves contemporary readers to put their hands over their mouths and “not go on.”14 K. Renato Lings undertook “an in-depth analysis of the original Hebrew narrative” of the Older Testament “in order to gauge the meaning of key words .  .  . which play a prominent role in Genesis.”15 Lings surveyed the twelve leading English translations for “the degree of faithfulness or literalness vis-à-vis the original text” and “the degree of consistency with which a given Hebrew word or phrase is rendered into English.”16 To see the Genesis texts in a new light, I use a translation by English poet and biblical translator and scholar Mary Phil Korsak, suggested by Lings, that pays particular attention to translating key Genesis terms, capturing the linguistic ambiguities in the Hebrew. I highlight the plurals and singulars—italics for the plurals and CAPS for the singulars—to demonstrate the intentional complexity at work: Elohim SAID We WILL MAKE A groundling (Adam) in our image, after our likeness Let them govern the fish of the sea the fowl of the skies, the cattle, all the earth every creeper that creeps on the earth Elohim CREATED THE GROUNDLING in HIS image CREATED IT in the image of Elohim male and female CREATED them Elohim BLESSED them.17

Striking in this pericope is the “more than” quality both of God (Elohim) and of the groundling (adam). Adam is a Hebrew contraction of adamah, the word for “ground” or “earth” and, while the creature is much later referred to as “Adam” (Genesis 5:1), conferring upon it a proper name, here the creature is unnamed. The creature is also ungendered and, even more baffling,

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of uncertain number. The issue of number is reflected in the plural quality of God’s own self, for “Elohim” is plural in the Hebrew and the groundling is specifically created in our—God-plural’s—image. The “more than one” quality that inheres in God, and duplicated in the nature of the groundling, leads to various ways of hearing this text. A gender creative interpretative lens enlightens a text often instead used to argue for a bimodality of human gender “from the beginning.” The groundling is revealed, rather, as an ungendered “them” created in the image of a plural God. In its context as a plural entity, Elohim is said to have contemplated making a creature, whom They (Elohim) then created as a plural groundling, plurally gendered, “male and female.” One of the prominent stumbling blocks to an understanding beyond gender binaries is the difficulty of rendering nonbinary reality in languages that are themselves structured in binary ways (and, in languages other than English, in gendered forms). Throughout this writing, I have followed an intentional use of the singular “they” to honor agender or gender-fluid persons who specifically, singularly, claim the referring pronoun “they.” In Genesis, the Deity at work in creation is itself a “They,” creating a creature in Their likeness— male and female. The blessing of Genesis 1:28 falls upon this plural, multigendered creature, formed from the earth that is to be their home. Nearly all translations do something to “correct” the vertigo caused by the number and gender of the passage’s Hebrew. Lings demonstrates that in all twelve most common English translations, missing “is the creative theological tension in the Hebrew text” among plurals and singulars: “between the nominally plural name of Elohīm and the singular aspect of ‘in his image,’” and “between the name Elohīm and a whole series of verbs in the third person singular.” Further, “the juxtaposition of divine plurals and singulars does not stand alone. Particularly intriguing is the fact that the first human creature reflects exactly the same grammatical and literary complexity.”18 Korsak renders the reality of the linguistic beauty of the original text into more accessible English.19 In the beginning (or “at the start,” as Korsak translates the title of the biblical book of Genesis), therefore, the human creature (“human,” like “groundling,” participates in an earth metaphor in sharing its etymology with “humus”) was full of the plural, ambiguous, multigendered, “more than” qualities of its creator. Sabia-Tanis agrees: “The account of creation, described in Genesis 1, tells a story that strongly supports a broader view of gender. Not only does God’s own being incorporate both the male and the female, but so too does the human creation.”20 Seeing the passage read through a gender creative interpretative lens invites access to God and creation that is beyond binaries (even beyond an exclusively rendered gendered reality), beyond the singular, and infused with a mystery and complexity difficult to render in language.21

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A first biblical principle for delivering pastoral caregiving generative of gender creative promise, then, surfaces from this consideration of Genesis 1: God creates gender variance as part of God’s creation. Each person’s body is the creation of God, deserving of the embrace of self-worth vital, as seen in Singh and her colleagues’ study, to gender creative resilience and thriving.22 In keeping with this principle of gender creative intentionality in God’s creation, Vanessa Sheridan writes, God loves gender-variant persons faithfully and unequivocally, accepting and welcoming us freely and fully into the family of believers just as we are. . . . God has chosen each of us to embody unique aspects of the Godhead within our gender and other particularities.23

The special placement of each person’s gender on four continua of sex, identity, expression, and attraction described in chapter 4 allows God’s creation varied ways of coming into being, each instance unique in the universe. This multiplicity allows for a greater approximation of each human’s ability to perceive and respond to an unfathomable God’s actions in the world. What is perhaps more familiar is the notion, ostensibly “found” in scripture, that “male” and “female” are the “only” ways that God has created human beings, that those two modes are ontologically different, one from the other, and that these two gender options are linked to one another by complementarian fiat. In this view, each discrete gender comes complete with roles and responsibilities in the world divvied out in varying degrees of mutuality. In a “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World,” prepared under the leadership of Pope John Paul II, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger begins by quoting the former: “Man is a person, man and woman equally so, since both were created in the image and likeness of the personal God.”24 Ratzinger goes on to state unequivocally that “their equal dignity as persons is realized as physical, psychological and ontological complementarity.”25 Complementarianism between women and men can be seen as a reflection of God’s relationships with humankind and analogized to fit—with “men” cast to play the role of “God” in this equation. Indeed, if complementarian bimodality defines the interpretative lens one brings to reading biblical passages, one can certainly “find” passages that appear to bolster those positions, passages located at the very beginning of the collection of texts in canonical scripture.26 But by changing one’s lens to open doors to new spaces for liberation, a first principle for gender creative pastoral caregiving is amply demonstrated from the beginning, that each person’s body is the creation of God: singular, plural, male, female, and “more than” language can capture—just as is the God who creates. God creates gender variance as part of God’s creation, and varied genders are not fixed across time but subject to the complexities of the creator

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“Ones.” In affirming this gender complexity at the heart of God’s creation, pastoral caregiving may affirm gender creative strivings toward embracing self-worth that can be the difference between life and death for transgender and gender-nonconforming persons.

PRINCIPLE 2: BODIES AND LIVES ARE COCURATED WITH GOD OVER TIME (GENESIS 2:7, 18–24) The second (in the sequence) creation account in scripture, likely written before the first, does not feature the phrase “male and female.” Because the two parallel stories are often conflated, however, it is important to examine the second chapter of Genesis.27 A thorough reading will find numerous differences between these two accounts, itself suggesting that the Divine is more complex than can be imagined in any singular way. While Jewish rabbinic tradition has generally allowed polyvalent textual readings, interpretations, and associated traditions,28 the various Church Councils leading to the consolidation of doctrinal Christianity enforced the silencing of minority opinions, rendering inaccessible many alternative readings of biblical accounts over the centuries.29 Some coaxing of Christian appetite for interpretative variance may be in order. Older Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann proposes as a salutary rule for interpretation of a sort of tentativeness and wonder, “that we may learn from the rabbis the marvelous rhythm of deep interpretative dispute and profound common yielding in joy and affectionate well-being.” He warns that “the sometimes characteristic and demonic mode of Reformed interpretation is not tentativeness and relinquishment but tentativeness that is readily hardened into absoluteness.”30 Despite the canon of Younger Testament texts being subjected to a centuries-long process of winnowing by committee,31 it is equally notable that it retained four gospel accounts of Jesus’s teachings, each at points at odds with the others. Ultimately and inescapably, plurality is embedded in scripture, the Bible announcing its very “collection” status—“Bible” being the English for the Greek plural biblia for “books”— “at the start” in presenting two distinct mythologies of creation, verbal approximations of a primeval time by definition inaccessible to language. Strikingly, Genesis 2 offers even a different name for God, a two-phrase compound, with a singular “term” now preceding the already plural “Elohim” found in Genesis 1. This first term has no vowels and is therefore unpronounceable, a so-called “Tetragrammaton”—“tetra” for the four consonants that constitute it: YHWH. “YHWH Elohim” as a notation for God defies any later human attempt to encapsulate, gender, number, or even speak of it. In this early account of creation, on what would have been the first-placed creation account’s “third day,”32

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YHWH Elohim formed the groundling, soil of the ground He blew into its nostrils the blast of life and the groundling became a living soul.33

In this account, God has two distinct names that are at once singular, plural, and in a sense, unpronounceable. Here, God doesn’t textually contemplate creating a groundling, as in the previous Genesis text; YHWH Elohim moves to create the groundling. The definite article suggests that this groundling is the end total of what God has in mind; this one groundling will seemingly be the subject of the ongoing narrative of the creation events. English theologians Chris Dowd and Christina Beardsley, in their landmark Transfaith: A Transgender Pastoral Resource, concur: “[The creature] seems to be a unique creation designed to look after the Garden of Eden.”34 In this creation account, there is no gender attached to the groundling, but unlike the myth in Genesis 1, the groundling is singular. Having placed the groundling in a garden specially made for it, God’s work appears to be done. Sabia-Tanis notes, however, that while the Genesis 1 account “emphasizes the goodness of creation throughout the story,” the Genesis 2 version “finds a fault—it is not good for ādām [the groundling] to live alone.”35 The story continues: YHWH Elohim said It is not good for the groundling to be alone I will make for it a help as its counterpart.36

The stage is now set for the creation of “Eve,” but that is not what happens. Instead, a long process of courting begins between God and the groundling, as God brings a series of new creatures to the groundling for approval and naming: YHWH Elohim formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field, all fowl of the skies and brought them to the groundling to see what it would call them Whatever the groundling called to each living soul that is its name The groundling called names for all the cattle for all the fowl of the skies, for all beasts of the field But for a groundling it found no help as its counterpart.37

The passage strongly celebrates human deliberation, a dance of mutuality between God and God’s created humanity. Professor of Biblical Studies Tremper Longman III writes in his commentary on Genesis that “human

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agency may be seen in God’s charge that Adam name the animals.”38 The groundling participates in God’s creation by naming the creatures brought for its approval as its potential counterpart. I use “its” intentionally here, for gender is not a part of God’s creation to this point. Not only does the creature have no named sex but also there is no sense that God intends for there to be any sexual reproduction leading to more groundlings. God does, however, come to desire companionship for the groundling. God understands community to be good, and God does what God can think of to provide that collectivity for the groundling. The groundling, for its part, is a cocurator of the creative process, invested by God with the agency to “know” when there will be a desired “fit” between it and a possible counterpart of its living. The groundling found no “fit” among the various cattle, fowl, and beasts presented to it. But God has another idea, and, in a sense, starts over, a kindred move to God’s later post-Flood “reboot.” God disassembles the groundling and, from some of the material therein, fashions something new—actually, two new things, for the subsequent groundling is not the same creature as before: YHWH Elohim made a swoon fall upon the groundling it slept He took one of its sides and closed up the flesh in its place YHWH Elohim built the side he had taken from the groundling into woman He brought her to the groundling The groundling said   This one this time   is bone from my bones   flesh from my flesh   This one shall be called wo-man   for from man   she has been taken this one So a man will leave his father and mother he will cling to his wo-man and they will become one flesh.39

Korsak explains her decision to use the annotation “wo-man” as a way to capture the aural association, the alliteration, present in the Hebrew between ishah (wo-man) and ish (man). These two words are used in this early text primarily, it would seem, for the sound of their pronunciation, as a sort of verbal pun that makes a point. The words have one syllable in common (ish) and one not in common (ah), so both similarity and difference are expressed in this word pairing. Ishah and ish have separate etymologies as words, but

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they come to participate as linguistic kindred in the storytelling through their sound association.40 In addition, the translation Korsak makes for tselac is “side” rather than what in English is expected to be “rib,” as the word tselac, which appears elsewhere in scripture, is uniquely rendered “rib” in this verse by numerous English translations; elsewhere, these same translations render tselac as the “side” of something like a hill (2 Samuel 16:13) or the tabernacle (1 Kings 6:16).41 Thinking of the groundling being broken into sides suggests the radical do-over that this operation represents, unlike the cosmetic surgery suggested by “rib,” the latter something the groundling might afterward not even miss. Rather than “woman” being derived from “man,” the sense in the text is that it is not from “man” but from the groundling that wo-man is created, leaving what is left of the original groundling to be crafted into “man.” Korsak notes that “wo-man” appears in verse 22, before the appearance of “man” in verse 23, and so is technically “prior” in the creation narrative;42 this priority is accentuated by the sound of the word for “man,” for ish has seemingly been “taken” from the longer sound of the word for “woman,” ishah. After verse 23, the “groundling” referred to in the text is no longer the same as it was prior to God’s action that rendered “wo-man” and “man”; in its place are now two creatures fashioned from the original groundling material, creatures apparently different in some ways yet largely the same, made from the same materials and sharing a syllable (ish); they are, one might say, “same-ish.” With verse 24 (“So a man will leave his father and mother . . .”), a new kind of narrational voice unseen so far in Genesis makes its entrance, a storyteller who packages the previous verses into a parable of blooming human adulthood. Here, the employed metaphor suggests the original groundling as something like what now might be thought of as an adolescent. The developmental stage of a person shifting attachment from parents to counterparts (peers) is seen as a mirroring in reverse of the creation of woman and man from the groundling.43 The fact that so much “historical” determinism in terms of “proper” procedure subsequent to “marriage” has followed from various readings of this verse is perplexing and unsupported. Westermann notes that “there is no tradition of the narrative of Gen[esis] 2–3 throughout the whole of the Old Testament. . . . It is not quoted and is never mentioned. . . . The reason for this is that Israel never considered it to be a historical incident.”44 There is also nothing in the passage to suggest the “creation” of an institution of marriage, but that has not stopped interpreters and translators from writing into the text their desires for divine sanction of this uniquely human institution. Verses 23–24 are not about marriage but rather about community and about the creation of new spiritual unity: one potentially leaves the primary spiritual bond one has with one’s parents for a newly primary spiritual bond

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with a peer partner. Westermann issues a stern warning for biblical interpreters regarding these primeval texts: “there is the widest of chasms between the broad sweep of the original meaning of these narratives and the restricted dogmatic meaning given them in their traditional Christian explanation.”45 In Genesis 2:21–24, a counterpart has been found for the original groundling, one in whom the “man” sees himself and yet one different from him. The fact that the wo-man is apparently biologically female and the man male is somewhat of a reader-response inevitability given the myth of origins this tale is meant to embody: two creatures with reproductive capacity are necessary to provide the humanity that follows. Many things here, however, are left unsaid (such as the necessary incest apparent in a literalistic reading of this myth, where two human beings propagate a species without extrafamilial assistance), including the “sex” of the creatures at the time of their creation. Sabia-Tanis argues further that one can read the text to suggest not that it is in marriage between woman and man that completeness of God’s plan becomes manifest, but in the mixture of the two: While this text is traditionally used to support the concept of heterosexual marriage, with the argument that we find our full completion only in a partner of the opposite sex, a sense is also here that from a single androgynous being come two types of beings. . . . We could read this passage as opening up the possibilities of gender. If completeness comes from having both male and female, then a person who possessed both is a return to the original completion in the earth creature.46

Or as theologian Virginia Ramey Mollenkott argues, The original created being is either hermaphroditic or sexually undifferentiated, a “gender outlaw” by modern terms, closer to a transgender identity than to half of a binary gender construct. . . . Binary gender would be a later development, not the first intention of the Creator but provided subsequently for the sake of human companionship. From this angle, hermaphrodites or intersexuals could be viewed as reminders of Original Perfection.47

Seen through a gender creative interpretative lens, what emerges in the second creation story of Genesis is not a concentration on the differences between the created beings but a revelation of their inherent sameness. Salient instead is the prominent ennobling of human agency. Sabia-Tanis develops a similar avenue of thought in accentuating a participatory process between God and God’s creation: We can argue, then, that from the beginning humanity has been invited by God to participate in the creation process. The development of our minds, our bodies, and our spirits, over the course of our lifetimes, has been given to us as a responsibility from God. Therefore, the ways in which we have learned to modify our

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bodies to reflect our spirits could be a part of this creative process that has been ongoing from the origins of humanity. We share, with God, the responsibility for creating our lives; God designed creation in this fashion.48

Each person is given creative gifts and capabilities to become a codeterminer, a cocurator with God, of the pathways to be taken in their life. It is for humans to select bodies and/or counterparts that are developmentally appropriate, bodies and others both sharing and expanding one’s original attributes and desires. Here, then, adding to the first principle of God having created gender variance as a part of God’s creation, I surface a second principle for delivering affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries: bodies and lives are cocurated with God, as one travels with God and others over time. This celebration of agency is striking in its alignment with a stated common resilience need of transgender persons in Singh and her colleagues’ study, the ability to evolve a self-generated definition of self,49 here supplemented with the notion that it is in their God-given natures for persons of all genders to be cocurators with God. PRINCIPLE 3: CALLINGS MAY LEAD OUTSIDE OF GENDER ROLES AND NORMS (MATTHEW 19:3–6; 10–12) As a segue into the Younger Testament, I move to a place in Matthew’s gospel (Matthew 19:4–6), where Jesus is said to have invoked both Genesis 1:27 (“male and female created them”) and Genesis 2:24 (“So a man will leave his father and mother”), for this has been taken by some not only to reaffirm, justify, and sanction a heteronormative marriage institution to the exclusion of like-gender and other unions but retrojectively to reinforce reading of the Genesis verses to suggest that “men” and “women” are all that God ever had in mind—that a bimodality of gender is the sum total of God’s intentions for creation. In Focus on the Family’s series on “Marriage,” Jeff Johnston draws on Matthew 19:4–6 to stress the foundation of a heterosexual gender binary in God’s creation: “Jesus first reminded His followers that in the beginning, God made humanity in His own image, male and female. Men and women are different, yet complementary; specifically designed by God to complete each other. Both are intrinsically valuable. The male body and the female body show us we are physically complementary, but being a man or a woman isn’t only about biology; a husband and wife fit together body, soul and spirit.”50 But if the groundlings in the two creation stories are invested with both an abundant fullness and a taxonomical ambiguity, this would belie any strict suggestion of a binary orientation of Godself passed on to God’s creation. In Matthew 19, Jesus draws from the ambiguity and “more than” fullness in Genesis to point to a variety of ways that lived interactions with God and

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others can unfold—in one’s life purposes and callings. Jesus will advocate for a multiplicity of ways to organize godly lives regardless of gender identities and expressions. The episode unfolds from an engagement of Jesus’s exegetical acumen: And Pharisees approached him to test him and said, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?” But in reply he said, “Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning ‘made them male and female’? And said, ‘For this cause a man shall leave father and mother and shall be joined fast to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh’: So that they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God joined together let no man separate.”51

As in the passage from Mark’s gospel discussed earlier (Mark 2:23–28), the Pharisees of Matthew’s gospel are, once again, anxious to tie strict rule obedience to godliness, and again, as he did in claiming human lordship over the Sabbath, Jesus finds ways of subverting pharisaical narrowness by citing scripture, this time employing an excursus on Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. Specifically, the Pharisees try to force Jesus into an either/or opinion regarding contemporary understandings of divorce. In their question, they specify, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?” (Matthew 19:3b). Jesus ignores their question in its essence, quickly moving the conversation beyond the legality of a union between a man and his wife and past the various permutations of how such unions have been broken, amended, and policed over human history. Instead, Jesus speaks to the quality of the union that is optimal, specifically quoting from both Genesis creation stories just examined. First, Jesus quotes from Genesis 1:27 (“male and female created them”), invoking the gendered fullness individuals bring to a partnership; and then, from Genesis 2:24 (“So a man will leave his father and mother / he will cling to his wo-man / and they will become one flesh”), reminding his hearers of the developmental achievement that forming such a partnership entails. Jesus therefore redirects the Pharisees’ legal question to the quality both of the “more than” personhood available because of their creation by God in God’s image and of the pointed desire for companionship that prompted their creation. Having invoked the name of God as the ultimate arbiter of the interactions among persons, Jesus adds his own words, “What therefore God joined together let no man separate” (Matthew 19:6b). In parallel to his redirected answer to Pharisees’ objections to Sabbath nonobservance, Jesus avoids answering the question. He substitutes for the rules-based concerns of the questioners an answer that goes on to illustrate the calling some persons have to enter into relationships with one another, unions that reflect the special kinds of affinity and difference present in individuals “from the beginning.”

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Worth noting is that the Pharisees are not asking whether men can marry men, or women marry women; they are asking about the specific reasons a man can divorce a woman in their culture. To find answers to contemporary marriage equality questions in this interchange would be an anachronistic overlay onto the text.52 That is not to suggest, however, that given a modernday version of the same story, where the question might be whether a man could legally divorce a man, Jesus couldn’t make the same argument about relationship quality and sanctity using the same verses of scripture. In fact, Jesus takes the Pharisees out of their own historical human constructs of marriage by invoking the Genesis texts that speak to the companionship at the heart of why God created more than one groundling in the first place. Jesus reorients the Pharisees to the qualitative difference that distinguishes human beings from all other creatures on earth: they have the ability to choose one another based on what they perceive, along their journeys with God, to be a special fit with others. The sanctification of relationships does not happen because of obeying the vagaries of historical human marriage constructions but in the invocation of human companionship as an essential attribute of humanity itself. A particularly startling part of this Matthean interchange, however, is Jesus’s response to what happens next, for in hearing about the inherent responsibilities in the sanctity of a union between two persons, the disciples wonder if it is even worth the effort! At the time, of course, unions between men and women were the only kinds legally sanctioned. But here, Jesus moves the ground beneath even the cultural assumptions underlying the Pharisees’ question and the disciples’ exasperation. He brings to the conversation those individuals in Judaean society whose reproductive ability or social expression of gender identity rendered them unable to participate in the only kinds of unions legally and religiously available. Quite unexpectedly, Jesus makes room at the table even for those not included in the conversation until that moment in his invocation of, and nuanced distinctions among, “eunuchs”: “The disciples say to him, ‘If such is the responsibility of a man with a wife, it is not profitable to marry.’ But he said to them, ‘Not all can accept this saying—save those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who were born so from their mother’s womb, and there are eunuchs who were gelded by men, and there are eunuchs who gelded themselves for the sake of the Kingdom of the heavens. Let him who can accept this accept it.’”53 Regarding the role that eunuchs played in the historical time periods associated with the varied biblical texts and their possible contemporary counterparts, some biblical commentators have emphasized the physical castration of slaves and/or the officials delegated with protecting the wives of dignitaries. Professor of Religion Sean D. Burke speaks to both realities in the time of the biblical texts’ writing. On the one hand, “most eunuchs in antiquity were

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slaves or freedmen. . . . The act of castration itself reinforced a key aspect of slavery, namely, one human being’s absolute ownership of another’s body.”54 On the other hand, “some ancient eunuchs rose to positions of great influence in royal and imperial courts. The social institution of court eunuchs most likely developed from eunuchs’ roles in harems, where they came to be trusted not only by the women they guarded but also by their sons, some of whom grew up to be rulers.”55 In the history of Mosaic Law, there had been varying pronouncements regarding the ritual purity of eunuchs and their suitability for entrance into Temple worship. However, while Deuteronomy 23:2 had prohibited anatomically mutilated persons from worship (“No one with crushed testes or lopped member shall come into the LORD’s assembly”),56 the third section of prophecies gathered under the name of Isaiah57 contains a counter-proclamation said to be directly from God: For thus said the LORD: Of the eunuchs who keep My sabbath, and choose what I desire and hold fast to My covenant, I will give them in My house and within My walls a marker and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name will I give them that shall not be cut off.58

Whether the Isaiah passage was written before or after the Deuteronomy proscription, the pairing of these verses shows changes, even in what are said to be God’s decrees, for changing contexts and needs. As Sabia-Tanis writes regarding this passage from Trito-Isaiah, “The emphasis is now not upon the external characteristics of people who worship Yahweh, but rests upon the faithfulness of the person.”59 Strikingly, the proclamation in Isaiah has the LORD holding the name of “eunuchs” in higher esteem than the conventional sex binary gender titles parceled out to offspring—“better than sons and daughters”—and, pointedly, the everlastingness of their name will halt the “cuttings off” they may have experienced in the past. The progression from Deuteronomy to Isaiah represents a movement in scripture that can be seen as continuing, finding fulfillment even, in the ministry of Jesus and beyond. In the eighth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, through the intervention of an angel of the Lord bent on effecting a conversion, the apostle Philip is brought into contact with a eunuch of some note, a court official from Ethiopia. Not coincidentally, one imagines, Philip finds the official engaged in reading a selection of scripture found in the book of Isaiah (53:7–8 [Acts 8:32–33]), mere pages from the portion giving an “everlasting name” to observant eunuchs. Here, Philip discovers just such an observant eunuch, specifically described as returning to his land after having “gone to Jerusalem to worship.”60 After Philip’s engaging the official in some biblical exegesis, this eunuch proclaims the subversive inclusivity of God’s creation: “Look, water. What prevents me being baptized?”61 So, there is ample berth given to

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a posture of welcome for eunuchs in both Temple-based and proto-Christian worship communities in scripture. In fact, what biblically centered movement there has been toward greater acceptance of various gender expressions and identities in contemporary places of worship, of having moved beyond a broadly conceived “love of neighbor” sensibility, has been specifically ensconced in the various passages of scripture in which “eunuchs” are mentioned.62 Mollenkott connects the eunuchs of old with persons more recognizable today: Regarding gender inclusion in Scripture, perhaps the best example is that of the eunuch, a term that refers to castrated men or to people who are unable to have children. By modern understanding, the term includes intersexuals and postoperative transsexuals and symbolically includes homosexuals and celibates.63

Regardless of who “eunuchs” can be said to resemble or scripturally anticipate in contemporary societies, here Mollenkott provides an echo to the penchant of some commentators on Matthew 19:12 for emphasizing metaphorical approaches to the passage, especially regarding the group of persons that Jesus refers to as having “gelded themselves,” seeing in Jesus’s words advocacy for celibacy as a spiritual practice.64 What is extraordinary in Jesus’s short speech, however, is that in responding to questions regarding the culturally prescribed actions of men—for it was an expected gender role of Judaean men to marry and to reproduce— Jesus instead speaks to the fact that there are persons in his society for whom male-female marriage and/or reproduction either is not a biological option or for whom it is not a calling. Jesus reminds his listeners of what is apparently commonly known evidence for at least three categories of ambivalently gendered personhood at the time: those who had been born with what one now would call intersex characteristics, those who may have been maimed in war or surgically conscripted for servitude, and presumably some who either physically or metaphorically had removed themselves from expected gender roles. As United Church of Christ minister Linda Tatro Herzer writes, The fact that Jesus included the one thing the Gospels report him saying about gender variance in the very same conversation in which he quotes the verse about God creating humans male and female (Gen 1:27) indicates that Jesus was well aware that there were more than just two ways to live out one’s gender— that male and female were not the only two realities.65

One need not go so far as to identify Jesus as participating in an intersex matrix because of his necessarily (because of the doctrine of his “virginal conception”) parthenogenetic origin giving him an XX karyotype66 to see

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Jesus as identifying, somehow, with marginalized gender performance. Jesus was apparently a man in his thirties who was single and would therefore have been considered outside of traditional male comportment expectations, particularly for a religious teacher. Here, one can imagine Jesus speaking from his heart, from his own experience as an outsider to the gender norms and expressions of his day. All these ways of being gender-variant, or intersex, or living outside of, or in opposition to, existing gender roles and expressions, Jesus here associates with the Realm of God (or Kingdom) central to his own ministry. As Sabia-Tanis notes, “The understanding of Jesus seeing himself as analogous to eunuchs also fits with his identification with others on the margins of society.”67 The inbreaking of God’s Realm coincides with accepting specific callings from God, leading to a third principle for delivering affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries, one that surfaces from Jesus’s expressed awareness of social constriction and cultural discrimination of various kinds: callings may lead outside of gender roles and norms. In this, Jesus exemplifies a third resilience strategy of those transgender individuals in Singh and her colleagues’ study, that of having an awareness of oppression68—the oppression that comes from roles and norms enforcement. My first principle for guiding pastoral caregiving of gender creative thriving and promise proclaimed God’s intentional creation of gender variance and made a connection to the resilience strategy of gender creative self-worth. My second principle acknowledged a cocuration with God of embodied lives over time and made a connection to Singh and her colleagues’ transgenderidentified resilience strategy of evolving self-generated definitions of gender creative selfhood. My third principle adds a further cocuration with God of human purpose through callings that may lead outside of gender roles and norms and adds connection to a resilient awareness of the oppression that confronts gender creative persons. The implications of Jesus’s words to the Pharisees may well be hard for them, and many, to accept—to which he might well retort, “Let those who can accept this accept it.” Sabia-Tanis writes, “For way too long, Jesus has been used as a tool of exclusion and selfrighteousness, when his own words counter that view and present for us a radical statement of positive inclusion in the dominion of God.”69 Jesus opens doors to new ways of understanding relationships among people of God. PRINCIPLE 4: ALL BELONG TO GOD (GALATIANS 3:24–29) I turn now to the apostle Paul’s letter to followers in Galatia,70 to continue a central theme of this chapter, namely, that God’s love for humanity moves persons beyond arbitration of laws and rules and toward a discovery of the

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ways that “the Sabbath” can be made to work for personal fulfillment and wellness. In the Galatian epistle, one finds the final appearance of the thematic “male and female” phrase that I have traced “from the beginning.” Regarding Galatians 3:28–29, Chris Dowd and Christina Beardsley write: “In this much loved text there appears to be an echo of Genesis: ‘male and female’ recalling Genesis 1:27 and ‘one in Christ Jesus’ the ‘one flesh’ of Genesis 2:24, but here reconceived as a relationship, no longer based on flesh and blood connections, but on union with Christ.”71 Paul’s message here is that Mosaic Law, as understood in God’s covenant with God’s people, was one stage in an unfolding of God’s grace that has reached, according to him, a culminating point in Jesus, whom Paul hails as the Anointed One, the Christ. Paul had apparently introduced his notion of being baptized into a faithful community of righteousness in a previous trip to the region. He is now at pains to correct what he understands to be the results of a second wave of proselytizers. Paul is at his wit’s end: “O, witless Galatians, who has bewitched you . . . ? This alone I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit from observance of Law or from faith’s obedience?”72 In contrast to the faith-based gospel of Paul, a Law-based approach has spread to the Galatian church. In what Sabia-Tanis notes as “most likely an ancient baptismal formula,”73 Paul proclaims a new reality as a result of the Christian community, one that changes everything his listeners thought they knew about the Law: Thus the Law has become our custodial guide to the Anointed, so that we might be proved righteous from faithfulness; But, the faith having come, we are no longer under a custodial guide. For you are all God’s sons through the faithfulness within the Anointed One Jesus; For as many of you as were baptized into the Anointed have clothed yourselves in the Anointed. There can be neither Judaean nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there cannot be male and female, for you are all one in the Anointed One Jesus. But, if you are the Anointed’s then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to a promise.74

Sabia-Tanis writes passionately about his discovery of this passage when he was in college, still identifying as a woman and freshly immersed in feminist liberation theology: This verse was part of what enabled me to choose to identify as a Christian . . . because I could see this new world opening up before me, a world in which gender was not the ultimate dividing force in my life.75

An expansive realm of God-with-us self-integrity is framed by Paul as a return to the promise God had made to Abraham, a return to a time before the Law of Moses. Here, the Law is seen as something akin to the training wheels on a bicycle; in modeling oneself after the faithfulness as lived by Jesus, one

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is invited, through Jesus’s example, into a righteous, post-Law relationship with God through faithfulness. Looking at this passage through a gender creative interpretative lens, I am struck by Paul’s use of a metaphor of clothing oneself in the Anointed to describe this rebirth into fullness. This imagery is in keeping with what can be the first stages of the social transition some transgender and gendernonconforming persons navigate in coming into their “true gender selves”; social transition can require a literal reclothing, matching one’s outer gender presentation with one’s internal gender identity. The exhilaration of seeing oneself beginning to embody the person one knows oneself to be is often one of the first tentative steps taken by gender creative persons in the privacy of their own homes: trying on new ways of being, beginning on a journey that can lead to radically different outward appearances. This path is not merely cosmetic, according to Sabia-Tanis, but marks an underlying spiritual transformation: The process of gender transition contains a number of revelations that continue through our lifetimes: the discovery within ourselves, the sharing of that knowledge with others, the revelations of the body as it appears in new clothes or with medical modifications, the telling of our stories, and the intimate knowing of our bodies by ourselves and with others. We reveal who we are becoming as we transform our bodies . . . an ongoing process of revelation.76

Paul aligns a reclothing of oneself with the expansiveness that comes with being baptized into an experience of grace; the power of clothing as gendercoded presentation is alive in this imagery. A basic premise of my work here is that, along with the social, legal, and sometimes medical transitions undergone by gender creative persons coming into their “true gender selves,” a transition into greater access to a vibrant spirituality can enable, enrich, and guide the other three transitions often described in the literature. Galatians 3:24–29 becomes a baptismal formula for just such a spiritual transition process, one available to persons of all genders. Paul describes Christians as “God’s sons,” alongside the preeminent sonship of God demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth. Here, one finds “sons” with a difference in that they have “changed their clothes,” entering a space in which there “cannot be male and female” because one’s identity as God’s own is not predicated upon gender, just as it is not dependent on ethnic or class status. The freedom promised by Paul is one beyond restrictions, beyond ethnic allegiances of Judaean or Greek, beyond class distinctions of freeman or slave, and beyond binaries of male and female. Whether or not Paul means that these superseded divisions are to be eliminated, his point is definitive in suggesting that relationship with God is not dependent upon ethnic, racial,

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economic, class, or gender identities. Sabia-Tanis adds, “Paul is not simply ignorant or erasing difference here, but rather altering the way in which we relate to those differences.”77 As echoed in the participant testimony in Singh and her colleagues’ transgender study, one gains the courage to claim resilience from a supportive community.78 According to Paul, when that community is in “the Anointed,” in Christ, one assumes an identity that claims God’s radical love. To surface a fourth principle for delivering affirmative pastoral ministry beyond gender binaries, one’s belonging to God is not predicated upon the careful attunement of oneself to one gender among many possibilities; rather such belonging is realized in newly palpable ways when, in the kind of supportive community so important to Singh and her colleagues’ described resilience strategies, one moves together with others beyond gender, beyond ethnicity, beyond class, to embrace a faithfulness that ensures that all belong to God. Paul is apparently directly quoting Genesis 1:27 (in Galatians 3:28), for the conjoining article between “male and female” takes it out of the parallel sentence structure set up by “Judaean nor Greek” and “slave nor freeman.”79 “There cannot be ‘male and female’” conjures the possibility of a future state of being clothed in the Anointed by pairing it with the original intention of Elohim to create a groundling “in our image, after our likeness,” investing Christian membership in the community of the Anointed with the “more than” plenty mirrored in the plural bounty of the Divine Themself. The argument of Paul that would ally newly baptized Anointed ones with the promise made to Abraham—before the need for the training wheels of Mosaic Law became evident—here extends back further, into a time more primeval even than that of Abraham. In the quotation of “male and female,” Paul promises that, in clothing oneself with the faithfulness of Jesus, one recaptures a fullness present in the original intention of the divine impulse to create humankind. Paul urges upon his Galatian flock the notion that in embracing a faithfulness like that of Jesus, they can recapture the originary impulse of Divinity in creation, one that, as seen earlier, is both prior to and suffused with the plurality of gender from the beginning. Sabia-Tanis writes that the kind of community described by Paul would be one in which “the entire process of distinguishing some as superior and some as inferior is to pass away.”80 Gender creativity is a powerful enactment of Paul’s metaphor of reclothing, and entering into one’s “true gender self” in the company of supportive community is the fulfillment of a fourth affirmative pastoral caregiving principle that opens doors for adding celebratory triumph to the intentional, cocurated, purposeful process of God’s alliance with gender creative persons: how one belongs to God is not predicated upon gender, any more than it is on any other human particularity. All belong to God.

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AN EXCURSUS ON “MALE” AND “FEMALE” With Galatians, I complete a tour of the appearances of the phrase “male and female” in scripture, having shown that principled gender creative pastoral ministry and caregiving can be derived from, and developed out of, a gender creative appreciation of those passages’ nuances and possibilities. I want now, as preamble to surfacing a fifth and final principle for delivering affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries, to examine what initially may seem beside the point: What did “male” and “female” really mean, anyway? That is, how might one better approximate what those words may have pointed to for the writers and audiences in biblical times? I suggest that the gender creative movement’s expansion or making precarious the meanings one attaches now to “male” and “female” is but a continuation of what happens over time: the meanings of words shift, change, and accrue cultural specificities in different times and places. Beginning with the 1990 publication of American historian Thomas W. Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, the words used today to describe what has appeared self-evident—the idea that “male” and “female” refer to two distinct sexes—must now take into account a long history of other meanings. “Male” and “female” have not always referred to two “sexes” across history. Laqueur, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, reassesses the notion that biology defines the sexes. Instead, he writes, “No particular understanding of sexual difference historically follows from undisputed facts about bodies.”81 In place of the seemingly self-evident contemporary “two sex model,” for thousands of years, including the period of the development of early Christian thought, “it had been a commonplace that women had the same genitals as men except that, as Nemesius, Bishop of Emesa in the fourth century, put it, ‘theirs are inside the body and not outside of it.’”82 In fact, until relatively recently, men and women constituted a single “sex” with similar anatomical features, the differences between them conceptualized as matters of degrees of perfection. In the second century, no less heralded an authority on medicine and science than Galen of Pergamon “demonstrated” that “women were essentially men in whom a lack of vital heat—perfection— had resulted in the retention, inside, of structures that in the male are visible without.”83 Laqueur traces the history of the concept of “sex,” revealing that separate terms for the bodily organs of men and women did not appear until the eighteenth century, when new thoughts about cultural differences between men and women were read into their physiology. The “sex-es” were born: “a new model of radical dimorphism, of biological divergence, no longer a single same sex with varying degrees—instead, two different sexes. An anatomy and

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physiology of incommensurability replaced a metaphysics of hierarchy in the representation of woman in relation to man.”84 In his book, Redeeming Gender, British theologian Adrian Thatcher began to investigate the ways that this shift in understanding, from a “one-sex model” of humanity to a later two-sex conceptualization, required the invention of a theology of complementarity in order to conceive of how sexes now understood as ontologically distinct could exist in relation to one another.85 Previously understood hierarchically in their gradations of perfection, now, an ontological distinction between beings was required in order to enforce patriarchal control over rising democratic impulses in the body politic: “European politics needed a means of justification for the subordination of women at a time when the idea of democracy was becoming more influential, and the new biology provided it.”86 Social factors, according to Thatcher, produced the biological “discoveries” that informed the development of complementarian theological views. Sexual complementarity was then retrojected into understandings of scripture. Differences between newly opposite sexes were subsequently “found” where they were expected to be: in the “word of God.” By the early 1800s, gone are the attempts to base gender distinctions on heat or the balance of ancient elements and humours. The two sexes can be accepted as given by nature and God, along with their proper roles.  .  .  . To one side is assigned domesticity, household management, and insubstantiality or shadow; to the other side is assigned government, commerce, and real substance. Real differences between men and women are made to fit into a grand a priori dialectical scheme where biological differences can be taken as read. Only when the scheme of opposites is introduced, is up and running and given, is the male/female pair introduced. Nature has already expressed itself in two distinct sexes and in the unequal roles each plays in divine and human law.87

Democratic impulses led to imposed policeable distinctions and biological differences, with a newly fashioned complementarian theology to reinforce them. All of this is not to say that women were not seen as inferior to men throughout recorded history, including by the authors of biblical texts—“the alleged polluting effects of women on men, well attested in the Hebrew Bible, confirm the gross inferiority of women consistent with the one-sex continuum”88—but women had not yet been conceived of as embodying a separate ontological reality. This is consistent with my readings here of the Genesis texts. In Genesis 1, God creates a singular groundling (written and read as a man by the standards of the day) and, to enable reproduction, that groundling is rendered “male and female,” that is, made to embody varying degrees of the one sex; the “two adjectives ‘male’ and ‘female’ do not license the two sexes that modernity takes for granted.”89 Similarly, in the passages from Genesis 2, one groundling

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is created, from which hierarchical degrees-of-perfection subsets, woman and man, are fashioned. This is all in keeping with the one-sex model of the day. The passages in Matthew and Galatians likewise do nothing to disrupt the one-sex model of the time, but Jesus and Paul do suggest that, in God’s eyes and in God’s Realm, the differences in hierarchy are and will be superseded or rendered unimportant: In the words of Jesus, “When they rise again from the dead they neither marry nor are married, but are as angels in the heavens.”90 In light of the one-sex model present in the biblical texts, Thatcher attempts to reclaim the one-sex model, minus the hierarchy, in order to set in motion the eponymous process of “redeeming gender”: “There is much value in continuing to think of human being as a single continuum, provided its axis is horizontal, not vertical or requiring a descent from male perfections to female impurities.”91 Thatcher takes a suggestion from Professor of Religious Studies Eugene F. Rogers Jr., author of the influential Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God,92 that, in place of a continuum, a circle be envisioned for gender, with no privileged ends. Thatcher’s theological commitments lead to his postulating that “Christ might be seen as the circle around whom all humanity revolves,”93 a single human nature prior and subsequent to all human vagaries of gender, sex, and hierarchy. In Thatcher’s vision of the risen Anointed, a return to the original plurality envisioned in the Genesis texts is “newly” asserted: “the body of Christ, we may safely conclude, is polymorphic. It has blurred edges and permeable boundaries. Its members are members of other bodies too. The body of Christ is both ineffably mystical and factically material, as it oscillates between the agony and ecstasy of flesh, and the timeless purity of eternity.”94 In this gender creative promise of fullness, Thatcher finds a rich vein for his own gender-affirmative theological writing.

PRINCIPLE 5: WORDS CANNOT CONTAIN GOD (APOPHATIC THEOLOGY) My own way forward lies in the “always already” indeterminacy at the heart of language itself, as revealed through this brief excursus on historically shifting meanings for the words “male” and “female.” Biblical language is no different from other language in its being subject to the cultural shifts of time. As seen throughout Part IV, new meanings can be wrested from the same words on a page through the effects of reconstructions of ancient writings, enacted through the embodied contexts of new readers with new realities. A fifth principle for emerging affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries, then, is that in speaking of one’s lived experience with God, words are always approximations, ways of pointing toward culturally shaped

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realities at specific times in specific places for specific audiences: words cannot contain God. And yet, a word contains multitudes. One experiences the signifying richness of language along with the tentativeness of its mooring in time and place. The more closely one enters the conversation with a text, the more closely one approximates the mechanisms that give poetry its signifying power and polyvalent beauty. Closer and closer readings make it increasingly difficult to stitch a singular interpretation to any textual fragment. The lability of language reveals both the power and fragility of words. Respect for the poetry at the heart of scripture is in line with an apophatic, negative theology (the via negativa) which takes its cue from the unpronounceability of “YHWH Elohim” from the very start: God cannot be contained in human language. In God’s freedom from constraint, I find alliance with the fifth resilience strategy of Singh and her colleagues’ study participants, the ability to cultivate hope for the future.95 Apophatic theology, defined through its denial or negation (Latin, apo-) of an ability to say (Greek, -phánai) what or who God is, was an important element in Christianity from its beginnings, “including Clement of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom, and (later) Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas. It emphasized journeying, movement and change, rather than apotheosizing fixity and stasis.”96 Contemporary thinkers have enlisted this indeterminacy in new liberative modalities. British theologian Susannah Cornwall describes the flowering of apophatic theology in Aquinas as being rooted in the firm and constantly reiterated belief that “God does not exist in the same way that other things exist. God is indescribable, because human metaphor always falls short of communicating perfection.”97 She connects the ultimate unknowability of God with the indeterminacy at the heart of the gender creative liberative project: “Just as both knowing and unknowing further the project of understanding God even in God’s ineffability—coming to know, in fact, that part of God’s nature is to be unknown—so too bodies and identities can be recognized and endorsed in their knowability even as it is emphasized that their full significance is ultimately elusive.”98 All this is in keeping with the beyond-empathy pastoral theological stance that hopefully characterizes this entire work. Not only can I never fully understand or explicate another, but my self-narration needs always to be kept open, provisional, humble also in the knowledge that, whatever new horizons of transformation and renewal are available through relationships of mutuality, because of an always-already saturation in cisheteronormativity, along the way, harm will inevitably have been caused to others more marginalized than I. I take special comfort, then, in the essential inscrutability that an apophatic theological stance lends to my whole project as we emerge as ever-more affirmative caregivers beyond gender binaries. We learn as we go, but we can certainly always do better.

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Harvard theologian Mark D. Jordan connects apophatic theology and the care rendered to one another in pastoral caregiving: “Negative theology does not confront us for the sake of being clever or obscure. . . . [It] hopes to prevent the limits of human language from blocking a soul’s progress toward God.”99 In her memoir Dazzling Darkness, Anglican priest Rachel Mann credits an apophatic theological stance for helping her find a place for her “true gender self” in the Church: So much of what I want to say here comes down to the idea that we cannot quite say who God is and as such we must ultimately be left in silence in her presence. And yet, again and again, in my life and in my theological reflection I feel invited by God to be expansive, to multiply the ways in which we speak of her. And if, ultimately, one must be silent before God in order to let her be God, I remain convinced that one must be unafraid to play wild language-games with her too. For perhaps it is only in the creative dynamic between Word and Waiting that we may hope to be our true selves.100

Employing this fifth principle for affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries—that words cannot contain God—opens doors to interpretative textual work firmly in the realm of the provisional, a notion already seen in tracing “male and female” through various iterations across centuries of biblical writing. Walter Brueggemann stresses the ongoing, accruing, and dynamic way that the various texts in the Bible have come into being: “It becomes clear that the interpretive project that constitutes the final form of the text is itself profoundly polyvalent, yielding no single exegetical outcome, but allowing layers and layers of fresh reading in which God’s own life and character are deeply engaged and put at risk.”101 By intentionally putting oneself in the service of a God experienced as polyvalent, one enters into the mystery and unknowability at the heart of community with space to minister to and alongside those perceived as different. I have set myself on a course toward a more expansive pastoral care, of the kind that Jordan says is meant to help guide persons toward a fuller image of God in creation: The language of pastoral care must recognize itself as afflicted by our inability to describe [the] Trinity, to narrate its presence in human hearts, to capture the ways it draws human beings to itself. . . . The language of practical theology falls fully under the vent or operation of negative theology because human life cannot be narrated except in reaction to the unnarratable life of God.102

An apophatic stance that sees any definition of gender as secondary to more ultimate concerns will help transgender and gender-nonconforming lives to become models for all Christian living. In Cornwall’s words,

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Accepting the provisionality and penultimacy of human constructs of sex and gender must be done first and foremost by those who have the most to lose as a consequence, as an eschatological-prophetic act of solidarity with those often made marginal because of their body identities.103

Jordan himself locates passionate wordlessness in the erotic impulse, for any appreciation of eros begins in love: “Near love, language ignites or evaporates.”104 If acts of emerging affirmative pastoral caregiving can reflect love for persons severely marginalized in and by congregations or seminaries, one can hope to discover language-defying visions of welcome beyond gender binaries. The possibilities of openness suggested by my fifth principle for pastoral actions, that God cannot be contained in words, recalls the fifth common theme in resilience strategies among Singh and her colleagues’ study participants, namely, their expression of hope for the future. GENDER CREATIVE PASTORAL PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGIES OF RESILIENCE In this chapter, I have suggested that a particularly meaningful pastoral act in support of common themes found by Anneliese Singh and her colleagues in the resilience strategies of transgender persons is to employ a gender creative lens on biblical interpretation that emerges from embodied liberative impulses. Using a style of scriptural reconstruction derived from Robert Shore-Goss’s articulation of a gay and lesbian exegetical mandate in the 1990s, I have surfaced and delineated five principles to open doors for and guide delivery of affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries, principles aligning with the five common transgender-identified resilience themes identified in chapter 6: (1) a principle derived from the first chapter of Genesis, that God creates gender variance as part of God’s creation, allows for a resilient articulation of self-worth; (2) seeing in Genesis 2 that bodies and lives are cocurated with God over time gives biblical sanction to the important evolution of gender creative persons toward self-generated acts of self-definition; (3) understanding with Jesus in Matthew 19 that callings may lead outside of gender roles and norms grants a sense of purpose in the face of a needed awareness of the oppression that faces gender-variant persons; (4) living into the surety that all belong to God calls for the kinds of supportive communities so vital to gender creative thriving and for which the apostle Paul was advocating in his plea for the Galatians to clothe themselves as members of the Body of Christ; (5) to honor these first four principles, pastoral ministry is nuanced by the apophatic claim that words cannot contain God nor can they contain sex and gender; the via negativa of apophatic theology

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allows all to join with gender creative siblings in Christ in cultivating hope for the future. The additional two subthemes in the resilience strategies of a majority of the persons in Singh and her colleagues’ study—those of (6) engaging in social activism and (7) being a positive role model for others105—present challenges for the character of gender creative pastoral ministries. But congregations and classrooms can become settings for ministerial activism and positive bar-setting. Such activism might entail creation of trans-friendly Bible studies, liturgies for name adoption, structured programs of proactive congregational education, manuals for guiding positive interactions with gender-nonconforming persons, and advocacy initiatives in governmental, church, and school bodies.106 If ministers, pastoral theologians, teachers, and caregivers can aspire to be activists and role models for welcome, affirmation, and inclusion, they become leavening agents of cultural growth akin to the Changers described in chapter 8. In the process, they prepare for the unpredictable workings of the Spirit that, in its penchant for blowing where it may, can be as disruptive as it is liberating. In an article on gender and sexual indeterminacy and Christian ethics, Associate Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Loyola University Chicago Aana Marie Vigen emphasizes that in discovering the “truth of how life is,” a necessary collapse of prescription into description will follow, when, what we thought we knew comes into collision with actual lived example: as “an individual’s and a society’s values . . . shift over time so that they resonate more fully, or conflict less, with the deepest truths known via individual and communal experience.”107 Vigen acknowledges that inviting challenges to the “way things are” regarding gender or sexuality will not be easy. The act of recognizing the need for a change in a pastoral approach to caregiving, to ministry and teaching with, for, and about gender creative persons, can be difficult to contemplate. This is especially true when Christian doctrine has dismissed sexual and gendered “others” as signposts of humanity’s “fallen nature” to be pitied and encouraged to change. Vigen proposes to take seriously the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John, seeing in gender creativity the movement of the Holy Spirit: I still have many things to tell you, but right now you cannot bear them; But when that one comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you on the way to all truth; for he will not speak from himself, but will speak what he hears, and he will announce to you things to come.108

Gender creative persons point ministries of caregiving in new directions. The question is, as Vigen asks, “Do we trust the Holy Spirit to guide us deeper into the truth?”109

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NOTES 1. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23–24. 2. K. Renato Lings, Love Lost in Translation: Homosexuality and the Bible (Bloomington, IN: Trafford Publishing, 2013), 3–4. 3. Focus on the Family Issue Analysts, “Male and Female He Create Them: Genesis and God’s Design of Two Sexes,” Focus on the Family, 2015; 2008, https:// www​.focusonthefamily​.com​/socialissues​/sexuality​/transgenderism​/male​-and​-female​ -he​-created​-them​-genesis​-and​-gods​-design​-of​-two​-sexes. 4. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 55. 5. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 57–58. 6. Soughers, Beyond a Binary God, 67–68 (emphases added). 7. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 32. 8. Westermann taught at the University of Heidelberg from 1958 to 1978. The three volumes of his Genesis commentary are Genesis 1–11: A Continental Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion, SJ (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994; Augsburg 1984); Genesis 12–36: A Continental Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion, SJ (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995; Augsburg, 1985); and Genesis 37–50: A Continental Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion, SJ (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002; Augsburg, 1986). 9. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 173. 10. Westermann, 176. 11. Westermann, 19; see especially “The Creation Narratives,” 19–47. 12. Westermann, 158. 13. Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 3, The Writings, Ketuvim; A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 564 (Job 38:4a). 14. The reference is to Job 40:4, 5 (Alter, Hebrew Bible, Ketuvim, 571). 15. Lings, Lost in Translation, 4. 16. Lings, Lost in Translation, 27. 17. Mary Phil Korsak, At the Start: Genesis Made New (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 4 (Genesis 1:26–28a) (all emphases added); the text is set duplicating the versified line breaks in Korsak’s rendering. 18. Lings, Lost in Translation, 22–23. 19. In Hebrew and many languages, verbs have forms corresponding to number, allowing for the instances in this text of the plural noun for God (Elohim) operating in singular ways (make, created, and blessed). The gender(s) of God are also very much in question; the “his” Korsak employs (italicized caps in the text) for Elohim (“in HIS image”) could equally correctly have been translated as “its,” as was done for the groundling (“created IT,” also italicized caps). Since, however, the traditional use of a masculine pronoun for God is ubiquitous, Korsak opts for “his” to refer to the plural God’s actions, despite giving God a plural possessive pronoun (“our”). 20. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 59. 21. Interesting, from an evolutionary standpoint, biologist Joan Roughgarden’s “social selection” revision (The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness

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[Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009]) of Darwinian sexual selection (whose “advocates take the position that the whole-organism male/female binary is primitive and hermaphrodism is derived” [111]) sees an evolutionary account that corresponds with the original gender plurality of Genesis 1: “the social selection position is that separate sexes have evolved as a specialization from an initially hermaphroditic body plan . . . whereby males provide ‘home delivery’ of sperm to the vicinity of the eggs.” Roughgarden, Genial Gene, 113 (emphasis added). 22. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23. 23. Mollenkott and Sheridan, Transgender Journeys, 68. 24. John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Women), August 15, 1988, http://w2​.vatican​.va​/content​/john​-paul​-ii​/en​/apost​ _letters​/1988​/documents​/hf​_jp​-ii​_apl​_19880815​_mulieris​-dignitatem​.html, para. 6. 25. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic World on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World,” May 31, 2004, http://www​.vatican​.va​/roman​_curia​/congregations​/cfaith​/documents​/rc​_con​ _cfaith​_doc​_20040731​_collaboration​_en​.html, para. 8 (emphasis added). 26. Theologian Megan K. DeFranza notes that, given the importance assigned to complementarianism, a notable lack of detail characterizes defining these apparently inviolable gender poles: “Both evangelicals and Roman Catholics are committed to gender essentialist complementarity .  .  . and base their theological anthropology on this foundation. . . . But for each, complementarity is a simplistic binary model. There are only two ways of being in the world—an ideal masculinity and an ideal femininity.” Megan K. DeFranza, Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2015), 167–168. 27. The precedence of Genesis 2 is the consensus of biblical scholars: while the creation account in Genesis 1:1–2:3 is first in terms of its placement in the Bible, it is largely seen as a “Priestly” version coming into its full form in the time following the Babylonian captivity (sixth century BCE), while the “Yahwist” account (Genesis 2:4b–24), so-called because of its innovative nomenclature for God (with “Yahweh” being a conjectural pronunciation of the unpronounceable Hebrew compound consonantal root, YHWH), and second in biblical placement, is thought by many to date even further back, to the tenth century BCE See James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007), especially “The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship,” 1–46. 28. Professor of Talmudic Culture Daniel Boyarin writes that while “cultures that base themselves on the interpretation of the Bible have sought to reduce or eliminate (rather, suppress) the textual evidence for difference within the biblical text . . . it is, however, considerably less true of rabbinic Judaism, where the heterogeneity of the biblical text is represented in the canonized dialogue and dialectic of midrash.” Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 230. See also James L. Kugel, The Bible As It Was (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997). 29. See Ramsay MacMullen, Voting about God in Early Church Councils (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); credal enforcement led not only to the silencing of opinion, but to the elimination of persons: “Our sources for the two and a quarter centuries following [The First Council of] Nicaea [325 CE] allow a very

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rough count of the victims of credal differences: not less than twenty-five thousand deaths.” MacMullen, Voting about God, 56. 30. Walter Bruegemann, “Biblical Authority: A Personal Reflection,” in Walter Brueggemann, William C. Placher, and Brian K. Blunt, Struggling with Scripture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 14. 31. See Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); John Barton, How the Bible Came to Be (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997); and John Barton, The Old Testament: Canon, Literature and Theology: Collected Essays of John Barton (New York: Routledge, 2007). 32. The Yahwist story of origins has no delineated “days” of creation. 33. Korsak, At the Start, 5 (Genesis 2:7). 34. Dowd and Beardsley, Transfaith, 101. 35. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 61. 36. Korsak, At the Start, 6 (Genesis 2:18). 37. Korsak, At the Start, 7 (Genesis 2:19–20). 38. Tremper Longman III, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Genesis (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 56. 39. Korsak, At the Start, 7 (Genesis 2:21–24). 40. See David Curwin, “Ish and Isha,” Balashon—Hebrew Language Detective, October 17, 2008, http://www​.balashon​.com​/2008​/10​/ish​-and​-isha​.html, in which he writes, “Almost all modern linguists say that ish and isha aren’t related.” He gives modern English verbal pairings that partake of sound associations but whose isolate terms have separate etymologies: “for example, pull and pulley, isle and island.” Curwin, “Ish and Isha.” 41. See a good discussion of tselac translations in Lings, Love Lost, 29–36. He writes, “In Genesis 2:21–22, it is indeed surprising that all [English] versions choose to speak of a rib despite the fact that they translate tselac accurately everywhere else. . . . Among Christian commentators, the ‘rib’ interpretation . . . may not have been universally accepted until Latin became a major church language. In Jerome’s Vulgate version of Genesis the words costam and costis lend themselves to be understood as either ‘side’ or ‘rib.’ Obviously the latter rendering prevailed during the Middle Ages. As demonstrated by today’s English versions, it still reigns supreme in translations of Genesis 2.” Lings, Love Lost, 33–34. 42. Korsak, At the Start, 230. 43. In his overview of psychological biblical criticism, D. Andrew Kille mentions both the sudden entrance of a new narrator voice in Genesis 2:24 and the developmental metaphor employed, noting that semanticist Ellen van Wolde argues that “a developmental theme is woven into the very core of the Gen[esis] 2:4b–3:24 narrative. Only once in the text, in 2:24, does the narrator speak directly. What seems a non sequitur, breaking into the story with a seemingly unrelated conclusion, is in fact an ‘iconic representation’ of the entire sequence. . . . Genesis 2–3 is an expanded telling of this human development from dependent child through ‘necessary disobedience’ and separation into mature independence and (pro)creativity.” D. Andrew Kille, Psychological Biblical Criticism (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001), 110; see

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Ellen van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3: A Semiotic Theory and Method of Analysis Applied to the Story of the Garden of Eden (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1989), 216–19. 44. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 276. 45. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 275. 46. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 61. 47. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach, 2nd ed. (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2007; 2001), 99. 48. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 59. 49. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23. 50. Jeff Johnston, “What Did Jesus Say about Marriage?,” Focus on the Family, 2018; 2015, https://www​.focusonthefamily​.com​/socialissues​/marriage​/marriage​/the​ -foundation​-of​-marriage. 51. Hart, New Testament, 37–38 (Matt. 19:3–6); see also Mark 10:2–12. 52. For wrestlings with scripture in support of marriage equality, irrespective of gender, see Chris Glaser, As My Own Soul: The Blessing of Same-Gender Marriage (New York: Seabury Books, 2009); James V. Brownson, Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2013); Susannah Cornwall, Theology and Sexuality (London: SCM Press, 2013); and Mark Achtemeier, The Bible’s Yes to Same-Sex Marriage: An Evangelical’s Change of Heart (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014). 53. Hart, New Testament, 38 (Matt. 19:10–12). 54. Sean D. Burke, Queering the Ethiopian Eunuch: Strategies of Ambiguity in Acts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 98. 55. Burke, Queering, 99. 56. Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 1, The Five Books of Moses, Torah; A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 695. 57. The book of Isaiah is thought to be comprised of at least three sections, each of different authorship (although Deutero and Trito Isaiah may have the same author writing in two political contexts), the whole broadly divided by scholars according to historical period: The eighth-century BCE “Isaiah of Jerusalem” (chapters 1–39); “Deutero-Isaiah,” written in exile in Babylon, following the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE (chapters 40–55); and a Palestinian “Trito-Isaiah” (chapters 56–66) written post-Exile (after 538 BCE) during the building of the Second Temple. See G. A. F. Knight, “Trito-Isaiah,” Religious in Education 27, no. 2 (1960); and Susan Ackerman, “Isaiah,” in Women’s Bible Commentary, expanded edition with Apocrypha, eds. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998; 1992). 58. Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 2, Prophets, Nevi’im; A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 810 (Isa. 56:4–5) (emphases added). 59. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 70. 60. Hart, New Testament, 237 (Acts 8:27b). 61. Hart, New Testament, 238 (Acts 8:36b).

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62. See Mollenkott, Omnigender; see also Susannah Cornwall, ed., Intersex, Theology, and the Bible: Troubling Bodies in Church, Text, and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 63. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, “Gender Diversity and Christian Community,” The Other Side 37, no. 3 (2001): 26. 64. See Francis J. Moloney, “Matthew 19:3–12 and Celibacy: A Redactional and Form Critical Study,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 1, no. 2 (March 1979). Although, as Justin Sabia-Tanis reminds us, “At least one prominent example survives of a Christian taking the words of Jesus in Matthew 19:12 literally. According to one tradition, the third-century theologian Origen castrated himself out of his conviction that eunuchs could be made so for the dominion of heaven.” Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 73. 65. Herzer, The Bible and the Transgender Experience, 47. 66. See Mollenkott, Omnigender, 114–118; see also Susannah Cornwall, Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ: Intersex Conditions and Christian Theology (London: Equinox Publishing, 2010). 67. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 75. 68. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 23. 69. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 75. 70. The exact location of “Galatia” is in some dispute; see “Who Were the Galatians?” Ligonier Ministries, https://www​.ligonier​.org​/learn​/devotionals​/who​-were​-the​ -galatians/. 71. Dowd and Beardsley, Transfaith, 166. 72. Hart, New Testament, 372 (Galatians 3:1a, 2). 73. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 83. 74. Hart, New Testament, 374 (Galatians 3:24–29) (emphases added). 75. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 80. 76. Sabia-Tanis, 167–168. 77. Sabia-Tanis, 81–82. 78. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 24. 79. “The distinctive formulation of the third pair, ‘male and female,’ suggests a citation from Genesis 1:27.” Karin Neutel, “Galatians 3:28—Neither Jew nor Greek, Slave nor Free, Male and Female,” the website of Biblical Archaeology Review; Biblical Archaeology Review online, January 15, 2019, https://www​.biblicalarchaeology​ .org​/daily​/biblical​-topics​/bible​-interpretation​/galatians​-3​-28/. 80. Sabia-Tanis, Transgender, 80. 81. Laqueur, Making Sex, viii (emphases added). 82. Laqueur, 4. 83. Laqueur, 4. 84. Laqueur, 6. 85. “Sex before the seventeenth century, in other words, was still a sociological and not an ontological category.” Laqueur, Making Sex, 8. The reifying of ontological difference between sexes extends even to the most cutting edge contemporary scientific work on genetic codes. Sarah S. Richardson writes (“Sexes, Species, and Genomes: Why Males and Females Are Not Like Humans and Chimpanzees,”

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Biology and Philosophy 25, no. 5 [2010], http://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s10539​-010​-92075) that “comparative genomic work on human differences conceives of the sexes as like different species, with different genomes” (823) but warns that doing so “exaggerates the amount of difference between them, giving the impression that there are systematic and even law-like differences distributed across the genomes of males and females, and playing into a traditional gender-ideological view of sex differences” (828). 86. Adrian Thatcher, Redeeming Gender (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), 62. 87. Thatcher, 75. 88. Thatcher, 89. 89. Thatcher, 94. 90. Hart, New Testament, 90 (Mark 12:25); see also Matthew 22:30. 91. Thatcher, Redeeming Gender, 138. 92. Eugene F. Rogers Jr., Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). 93. Thatcher, Redeeming Gender, 140. 94. Thatcher, Redeeming Gender, 149. 95. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 24. 96. Susannah Cornwall, “Apophasis and Ambiguity: The ‘Unknowingness’ of Transgender,” in Trans/Formations, eds. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood (London: SCM-Canterbury Press, 2009), 18. 97. Cornwall, 19. 98. Cornwall, 20. 99. Mark D. Jordan, Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 61. 100. Rachel Mann, Dazzling Darkness: Gender, Sexuality, Illness and God (Glasgow, UK: Wild Goose Publications, 2012), 16–17. 101. Brueggemann, “Biblical Authority,” 15. 102. Jordan, Telling Truths, 66. 103. Cornwall, “Apophasis and Ambiguity,” 32. 104. Jordan, Telling Truths, 66. 105. Singh et al., “Resilience Strategies,” 24. 106. For resources other than those already cited or mentioned previously, see Leanne McCall Tigert and Maren C. Tirabassi, eds., Transgendering Faith: Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Stories and Worship Resources) (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2004); Institute for Welcoming Services, TransACTION: A Transgender Curriculum for Churches and Religious Institutions (Washington, DC: National LGBTQ Task Force, 2005), http://welcomingresources​.org​/transaction​_final​.pdf; Timothy Palmer and Debra W. Haffner, A Time to Seek: Study Guide on Sexual and Gender Diversity (Norwalk, CT: Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing, 2007); Chris Glaser, ed., Gender Identity and Our Faith Communities: A Congregational Guide for Transgender Advocacy (Washington, DC: Human Rights Campaign, 2008), https://assets2​.hrc​.org​/files​/assets​/resources​/Gender​-Identity​-and​-our​-Faith​ -Communities​_2008​-12​.pdf?​_ga​=2​.165441402​.456067469​.1548169811​-841607020​

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.1548169811; Cody J. Sanders and Angela Yarber, Microaggressions in Ministry: Confronting the Hidden Violence of Everyday Church (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015); Gene Robinson, Transgender Welcome: A Bishop Makes the Case for Affirmation (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2016); Monica Joy Cross, Authenticity and Imagination in the Face of Oppression (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2016); David Elias Weekley, Retreating Forward: A Spiritual Practice with Transgender Persons (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2017); and Unitarian Universalist Association, “Transgender 101: Identity, Inclusion, and Resources,” https://www​.uua​.org​/lgbtq​/identity​/transgender. 107. Aana Marie Vigen, “Conclusion: Descriptive and Normative Ways of Understanding Human Nature,” in God, Science, Sex, Gender: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Christian Ethics, eds. Patricia Beattie Jung and Aana Marie Vigen (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 255. 108. Hart, New Testament, 207 (John 16:12–13). 109. Vigen, “Descriptive and Normative,” 255.

Chapter 11

Gender Creative Pastoral Caregiving Skills of the Canaanite Woman

I began in chapter 1 by checking my privilege as a cisgender male while allowing my identity as a gay man to guide the unfolding of this project. In chapter 2, I introduced the broad, diverse community that somehow manages to fit, for political and liberative purposes, into the “T,” “Q,” and “+” additions to an ever-expanding LGBTQ+ acronym in communal striving toward gender creative thriving. After a sobering look at the realities facing gender creative persons in U.S. society in chapter 3, chapters 4 and 5 fleshed out various gender continua as well as emerging psychotherapeutic understandings of how gender creativity can be valued and guided from childhood on. The work of Diane Ehrensaft, who coined the term “gender creativity,” has been crucial in this regard. She acknowledges the gender creative achievement of all who must navigate through continua of anatomical sex, gender identity, gender expression, and attraction. Ehrensaft’s work is a constructive template for the field of pastoral theology. In chapter 7, I demonstrated the ways that the benefits stemming from religious affiliation and belonging undergird the resilience strategies articulated in chapter 6 by participants in a study by Anneliese Singh and colleagues as important instances of pastoral theology in alliance with psychology of religion. In doing so, I drew on a parable of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke in chapter 8 to “open doors” for a gender-affirming pastoral theology operating with “more-thanempathy.” For gender creative Christians, narrow readings of scripture have created obstacles to religious inclusion. In chapter 9, I focused on a gender creative interpretative lens for biblical texts as a liberative act of theological imagination, finding, in chapter 10, the joy of gender creative promise in the very texts previously used to bolster religious opprobrium. I surfaced five principles for delivering affirmative pastoral caregiving to gender creative persons, each aligning with the common resilience strategies identified by transgender 179

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individuals in Singh and her colleagues’ study. In this process, I have discovered a greater sense of promise and purpose in seeking caregiving actions of love in communion with gender creative persons. I have attempted to be forthright in acknowledging my own struggles in this advocacy and prophetic ministry. Actions of radical pastoral welcome and affirmation require introspection and communal fortitude. More must be done. As ministers, teachers, pastoral theologians, and caregivers, we continue to look within and wrestle with the complexities of our own gendered selves. In this chapter, I contribute to a goal of greater inclusivity by exploring a biblical model for advocates alongside transgender and gender-nonconforming persons. Here, I seek scriptural support for allies of—coconspirators with—gender creative persons and for the cocuration of sanctuary in the face of cultural or religious sanction.1 For this, I turn to the visit of a Canaanite woman to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, a perennial narrative of exegetical consternation because of its seeming depiction of Jesus as antagonist in the story of a woman and her daughter in need.2 I will braid my exploration of the Matthean text with the charge Diane Ehrensaft gives to parents who seek to transcend the, often, negative responses to their transgender children: If transformation trumps transphobia, the child stands a good chance of emerging with a positive gender identity. If, on the other hand, transphobia and trauma run transformation into the ground, the child may be left with a bruised and battered psyche, a contorted self, and even a wish not to be around anymore.3

Achieving transformation requires work not only on the part of parents but also of those striving toward a gender creative pastoral sensibility. Ehrensaft is clear that embedded religious or philosophical beliefs often make the difference between surrendering to coercive legislation of children’s gender outcomes and a transformative negotiation of internalized gender strictures. Unpacking the “I” of my narrative began and ends my writing here. Gender creative caregiving requires not only an ongoing accounting of one’s social location but also a wrestling with the contours of one’s own “true gender self.” Pastoral theologians, ministers, teachers, and caregivers of all kinds must engage in the gender-self introspective strategies Ehrensaft urges on the parents of transgender and gender-nonconforming children to be at least provisionally self-differentiated for the work ahead. Ehrensaft articulates four vital tools for siding with gender creative children: (1) “personal success in working through and feeling comfortable in your own gender authenticity whatever that may be”;4 to the extent that one can live nonreactively in one’s own body, the difference represented in the bodies of others can exist without threatening one’s own; (2) “the capacity to

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stay steady when the going gets rough, not letting yourself get bowled over by anxiety or head for the hills when you see conflict coming your way, either from within yourself or between yourself and someone else”;5 with requisite self-differentiation, allies are better equipped to remain calm in the face of less self-differentiation among others in their care and among the authorities with whom caregivers negotiate for children’s safety and well-being; (3) “the capacity to de-center; that means taking the focus off yourself—seeing your child as a separate person, reflecting and organizing around [their] needs, rather than your own”6—parents and allies do not own children (even their own)—and children are not accessories to one’s personal needs and often express radically different sensibilities; and (4) “bonds of love to your child so stalwart that they transcend all other adversities that come your way”;7 with a secure attachment upon which children can rely comes the ability to side with them even, in the case of gender creative children, in the face of what may be a cruel reception by others. With these four injunctions in mind, I move to the biblical pericope from Matthew 15:21–29: And going out Jesus departed from there into the regions of Tyre and Sidon. And look: A Canaanite woman from those bounds came forward and cried out, saying, “Have mercy upon me, Lord, son of David, my daughter is badly demon-possessed.” But he answered not a word to her. And, approaching, his disciples implored him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out behind us.” But in reply he said, “I was not sent forth except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and prostrated herself to him, saying, “Lord, help me.” But in reply he said, “It is not a good thing to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” And she said, “Yes, Lord; for the dogs also eat, from the crumbs that fall from their masters’ tables.” Then in reply Jesus said to her, “O woman, your faith is great; as you desire, so let it happen to you.” And her daughter was healed from that hour. And, moving on from there, Jesus went by the Sea of Galilee and ascended a mountain and seated himself there.8

This Matthean account derives, at least in part, from the narrative of Mark’s gospel (Mark 7:24–31), or perhaps, the two accounts emanate from a third source in common. The pericope of the Canaanite woman (or the Syrophoenician woman, as the Markan version refers to her [Mark 7:26]) falls within sections in both gospels involving food and manners, bracketed as they are by two mass “loaves and fishes” feeding events (the “Feeding of the 5,000” [Matthew 14:13–23; Mark 6:31–46] and the “Feeding of the 4,000” [Matthew 15:29–39; Mark 8:1–10]). Shaken by the reported death of John the Baptizer, who was killed at a feast in Herod’s palace, Jesus seeks time to think but is accompanied around the Sea of Galilee by masses of followers. Then, he and his disciples travel the farthest north Jesus is ever believed to have journeyed

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(farther north, even, than Caesarea Philippi), over the large mountain range north of Galilee and into the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon (present-day Lebanon)—solidly pagan Gentile territory.9 Mark’s account indicates that Jesus traveled there with the desire that no one would know his whereabouts. But once he arrived, he couldn’t escape notice (Mark 7:24). It is notable that this voyage takes Jesus so far off the beaten path. No reason is given for this trek. After this encounter with the woman in distress, he and his entourage travel all the way back to Galilee. The temptation in receiving this text is to render the story more safe: “Jesus didn’t really ignore, talk badly about, and deliver an ethnic slur to a woman in terrible need.” I try, instead, to understand Jesus’s apparent mean-spiritedness as holding a mirror up to humans’ propensities to ignore, demean, and defame others who live outside of their own cultural and religious categories. It is not an easy passage. But to become too comfortable with the accounts of Jesus’s ministry is to cease adequately to encounter the complexities of his humanity and lived example. The encounter itself is virtually unprecedented—to begin with, Jesus is addressing a woman, which is rare in the gospel texts though there were surely women traveling alongside him his entire ministry (Mark 15:41). Jesus is living (as were the gospel writers) in a severely patriarchal and religiously delineated society10 in which women were more likely to be considered unclean and not requiring narrative mention. In fact, that anything is known of this meeting with Jesus—that the gospel writers chose to pass along a tradition of this kind of encounter in his ministry—allows one to imagine that the Canaanite woman has mastered something akin to Ehrensaft’s first parenting tool, that of working through and feeling comfortable in her own gender authenticity. The Canaanite woman knows the rules, understands the protocol of approach, and the means of address. She owns the patriarchal procedures of her time. Only this knowledge secures her story a place in the narrative. But she finds a way to push social conventions to their virtual breaking points in her zeal as the ally of her child. Readers are not told how the woman has gained access to Jesus. Mark depicts Jesus as being inside a house when she approaches him (Mark 7:24), which may suggest that she is socioeconomically of higher status than Jesus himself,11 although it would not have taken much to be so situated. She is certainly foreign—ethnically, racially, geographically, and likely religiously; Mark describes her as “Greek, by race a Syrophoenician,”12 in other words, Gentile, a Phoenician, from Syria. Matthew refers to her as “a Canaanite,” which renders her even more foreign, for there had not been any “Canaanites” mentioned in scripture since the Hebrew people “entered the promised land” and renamed the territory at least 1,500 years earlier.13 Things had gone badly for the Canaanites in the Older Testament book of Joshua, when the Lord God orders and ensures the complete destruction of the people of Canaan—men,

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women, children—without mercy (Joshua 11). “Jesus” is a variant on the same name as “Joshua,” translated “Joshua” from the Hebrew (Yehoshu’a) and “Jesus” from the Greek translation of its Aramaic short form (Yeshu’a).14 Here, then, one finds another Joshua, facing once again his Canaanite “foe.” This woman is about as “other” as the author of the account could have possibly arranged; what is most distinctive about her, at least for my purposes, is that she is, first and foremost, a parent. It is virtually exclusively as a parent that one knows her. This renders her unique in the gospel narratives.15 There are other gospel characters who are parents, but their parenting typically is not featured. Jesus is beseeched by a mother who is desperate—her child is “badly demon-possessed.” Though the meaning of this phrase is uncertain in modern-day terms, clearly this mother thinks that enlisting Jesus’s aid will lessen the pressures that are preventing her child’s peaceful existence. “Have mercy upon me,” she cries, presenting him with her request. His response? He answered not a word to her. Jesus completely ignores the woman. Here is a juncture in a mother’s advocacy for her child that could well be the end of the story. No answer at all? Game over. Or worse, escalation, indignant anger: “How dare you ignore me when I have thrown myself at your mercy on behalf of my child!” The Canaanite woman, however, has a remarkably high capacity to stay steady in the face of cultural disavowal, thereby embodying Ehrensaft’s second principle for advocacy. Rather than escalate to anger or beat a retreat, it appears instead that she regroups, perhaps realizing that Jesus’s nonresponse can’t be about her—after all, she has just met him. This demonstrates her capacity to de-center, Ehrensaft’s third injunction. She is not there to receive validation of her own life; she is there to appeal to Jesus about the needs of her child. She remains in the story, able to approach the intransigence of Jesus from a different angle, allowing his seeming dismissal of her neither to imperil the sanctity of her self-worth nor to distract from her mission on her child’s behalf. This pericope may seem to pose an obstacle as an illustration of a parent advocating on behalf of a gender-nonconforming child. The text, after all, suggests that there is something “wrong” with the woman’s child. I see the passage, however, as demonstrating the power of a parent to transform the culture around her to make the child’s environment more accommodating to the perceived transgressing nature of her child’s situation. The “demon” tormenting the woman’s child may well be cultural strictures that disallow that child to live in authenticity. Much of the exegetical discomfort with this passage stems from the fact that the forces of societal oppression are embodied in Jesus. But although readers learn nothing about the nature of the transformation of the Canaanite woman’s child, they do witness the transformation of Jesus. The woman gradually succeeds in reframing the moment to suit her

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and her child’s needs. I am suggesting that Jesus’s transformation is itself the moment the child’s demon is removed. But first, the woman apparently appeals to Jesus’s disciples to gain an audience with him. In her persistence, she gets their attention, for they, in turn, go to Jesus. However, rather than appeal to him on her behalf, they appeal to what they perceive is his frame of mind; he doesn’t want to be disturbed. They had not traveled for days over mountains to get away from beseeching crowds to be pestered by the locals: “Send her away, for she is crying out behind us.” But she is still there, hearing the disciples ask Jesus not to help her but to get rid of her! Then, she hears his answer: “I was not sent forth except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” something akin to “She is not one of us. Not my problem.” What might be an expected reaction from the woman at this point? She might well give up rather than face the dejection that comes when all doors of access are closed. Or, she might plan a further attempt to secure Jesus’s ear on another day. The Canaanite woman again regroups. She somehow finds it in herself to get past what Jesus and his disciples are saying about her. She knows who she is. She knows who her child is. She knows the faith it took for her to come ask for help. The Canaanite woman has bonds of love to her child so strong as to transcend the adversity—in the form of Jesus—that has come her way, and thus embodies Ehrensaft’s fourth resource for secure parenting. The woman gets up—until now, one can imagine she has kept a careful distance—and kneels before Jesus: “Lord, help me.” At this point in the narrative, Jesus delivers the line that would have been so easy to leave out of Mark’s, and then Matthew’s, gospel accounts. Luke’s gospel, by contrast, omits mention of the whole trip to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Jesus of Nazareth, the man anointed in the Younger Testament as the Christ, with this woman kneeling next to him in the dirt trying to catch his eye, speaks into the air: “It is not a good thing to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Dogs, in the culture of the time, were carrion-eating scavengers, and the association of the woman and her child with these animals rises to the level of a slur upon their very status as children of God.16 Astonishingly, the woman, for the third time, regathers her composure and, lying on the ground, is heard to reply: “Yes, Lord; for the dogs also eat, from the crumbs that fall from their masters’ tables.” Imagine a longish pause and a slow turn of Jesus’s head as he meets this woman’s eyes for the first time and sees in her face the possibility of another way: “O woman, your faith is great; as you desire, so let it happen to you.” It is a remarkable interchange. Demonstrating the all-too-human propensity to bristle at persons who are different (whether religiously, culturally, or by way of personal identity markers that render them other), Jesus publicly derides this woman—a Greek, likely pagan, Gentile, Phoenician, Syrian,

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Canaanite, woman. She, for her part, persists in reaching out toward what she can have no real hope of attaining. She remains calm in the face of being ignored, of being talked about as a nuisance, of being reminded explicitly of her foreignness, and of being dismissed as among those not chosen by God. Then, calmly, and with a faith beyond anything she probably knew possible within herself, she asks yet again, only to be cursed at, dragged to the very lowest rung of humanity, verbally abused as a groveling beast. In the life of a person of any faith, there are surely moments of spiritual disconnection and deeply felt lack of access to the source of desired wholeness, giving emotional connection to parts of this woman’s story. Seekers call out in prayer, or ask for assistance from others, in a moment of terrible hardship, and hear nothing in return. Does this silence lead to a hardened heart? Does the seeker turn away from faith and community? Or does it inspire a spirit of fortitude and sustaining hope for another day? Few readers may have experienced the series of affronts that this woman sustained one after another. But these things happen every day, and perhaps no persons know this more poignantly than the parents of gender-nonconforming children who attempt to navigate their ways through various systems—educational, health, social policy, religious—meant to provide the basic support that children need to grow with dignity. Before taking leave of this biblical story, it is important to remember what one does not read here. One does not read that Jesus asks the Canaanite parent for anything in return—that she repent, that she adhere to Judaean religious trappings, and that she foreswear her pagan ways. No, on this day she gets an audience with Jesus against his will, and she speaks words that, on any other day, might well have come from his own mouth, so topsy-turvy is their contour. Canaan comes to call on Joshua, and the result is not genocide but grace. “As you desire, so let it happen,” Jesus utters, and the woman’s child is “healed.” Perhaps, better, the woman succeeds in rendering the world a safer place for her child to live unfettered. Doors are cracked open to Gentiles in the story of the redemption of God’s people. Jesus goes back to Galilee to begin the final stretch of his journey toward a cross in Jerusalem. As a pastoral theologian, minister, teacher, and caregiver, I am thankful for this particular passage in the life of Jesus where he behaves just as I have and probably will still. He is tired, he is frustrated, he is irritated, he is trying to get his head together—and an outsider approaches with her problems. Whether one imagines that he is a changed man or whether these moments had been foreseen may be up to theological systematicians to determine. What I know is that I am changed when I read this passage, and I only hope that, with a little more compassion, I might have days of finding the humanity in another’s predicament when it could instead be more natural to experience just otherness. Perhaps, the most challenging thing about gender creative parenting, akin to an eschatological point of view among persons of faith, is that of not

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knowing (not “now,” anyway) exactly how things will turn out for oneself or for one’s child: A child’s gender development is always a work in progress. As much as we know about how the gender web works, much still remains a mystery. To be [gender] creative is not just to allow yourself room to roam and ruminate. Being creative is also to be able to tolerate suspending yourself in a state of not knowing.17

Ultimately, as Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper note, for some children, expressing a transgender or nonbinary identity may be an exploratory phase; for others, it is not. . . . Regardless of the eventual outcome, the self-esteem, mental well-being, and overall health of a gender-diverse child relies heavily on receiving love, support, and compassion from their parents.18

More and more, as cultural mores shift, children are experimenting with their gender expressions in ways that fly in the face of the idea that gender is determined at birth and remains rigidly in place over time. Much is yet to be revealed. What is clear, however, is that these children need pastoral support, and the more nonconforming they are, the greater their need. Brill and Pepper might have taken a page from the Canaanite woman when they urge the following on their parent-readers: We hope that despite the misgivings you may feel, you are able to separate your emotional process from your job as a parent. In other words, it is completely fine to feel bewildered, angry, sad, and disheartened—these feelings will change over time, but they need to be felt. Remember that you are still a parent and that your child-rearing does not wait for you to catch up emotionally. It remains your job to create a home full of love, support, safety, and nurturance.19

These words apply equally well to ministers and others who provide pastoral caregiving, and I count myself in their number. In owning up to our job of gender creative alliance, we would do well to embrace four skills of the Canaanite woman, by way of Diane Ehrensaft: (1) to wrestle with the messy contours of our own “true gender selves” in order to feel at ease in a specifically claimed gender authenticity; (2) to steel ourselves to remain calm and steady in the face of anxious reactivity coming either from within ourselves or from the environments in which we deploy our ministries; (3) to master the art of decentering, persistently refocusing on those with whom we are in caring relationships, despite the tempting proclivities to make things about ourselves; and (4) to reinforce bonds love with those in our care strong enough to withstand the adversities that will surely come.

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In rehearsing these skills, in the story of the Canaanite woman, we have two role models for opening doors to affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries: first, the woman herself, who shows a persistent resiliency of advocacy toward which we too can aspire; and second, the model of Jesus, who here must be given several chances to learn and to do the right thing but who, in the end, displays an emerging, healing, welcoming spirit and is himself transformed. Finding such models within sacred texts bolsters a gender creative pastoral sensibility in our care and advocacy for all members of the Beloved Community, guiding persons of all genders to gender creative promise in our places of worship and beyond. PART FOUR CODA As a cisgender pastoral theologian who seeks to learn from and minister to and with gender creative persons, I end with words by Jill Weiss, a person of deep faith. I enjoin us to make the longing and gratitude of these words of prayer our own: When I was a little boy, I prayed to God. I prayed God would make me a girl because I knew I wasn’t really a boy, not inside. I didn’t want to keep pretending to be a boy because it was hard to pretend all the time. I knew I couldn’t go on forever pretending like that. It made me very tired and sad. I wondered why God would want me to be tired and sad every day. But I tried hard not to disappoint God. One morning, after praying like this for many years, I woke up and God had changed me. God changed my tiredness into courage. God gave me the courage to tell the truth. God gave me the courage to tell people that I wasn’t a boy, even though it made some people laugh and some people get mad. God’s courage has made me happy. God’s courage has taught me to love myself. God’s courage lets my outside be like my inside. God’s courage gives me the gift of honesty. God is Truth. I thank God for giving me the courage to tell the truth. I thank God for giving me the courage to be me. Thank you God, for creating the whole infinitely complex universe and for creating infinitely complex me.20

May courage abound. NOTES 1. Social activists have been shifting their language to reflect the commitment and attendant danger that attends the side-by-side solidarity justice change requires.

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Whereas “being an ally” language did serve as a corrective to the “savior” work in which dominant culture persons had tended to engage in the past, “ally” is more and more seen as majority-directed work in service to individuals in marginalized communities—volunteering. Especially advocates of color now are urging a more thorough focus on dismantling the structures that lead to marginalization in the first place, including the decision-making agency at the heart of social justice initiatives. So, rather than merely volunteering for a cause, minority-culture activists ask that dominant culture actors attend to the directives of primary stakeholders in justice work as “accomplices” or “coconspirators”—those terms containing within them the inherent danger in contesting power. To coconspire, to serve as an accomplice, is always, on some level, tied to risk, and in that sense, is an act of faith. It takes faith to be decentered from authority, to join in with others who may well have gender identities, cultural ways, beliefs, credal imperatives, and ultimate allegiances very different from one’s own. Whatever the language used, advocacy work alongside gender creative persons must begin with a personal reckoning with one’s own gender continua and with lingering woundedness from the repercussions of infractions to gender policing experienced in one’s own development. See Rose Hackman, “‘We Need Co-conspirators, Not Allies’: How White Americans Can Fight Racism,” the website of The Guardian, The Guardian online, June 26, 2015, https://www​.theguardian​.com​ /world​/2015​/jun​/26​/how​-white​-americans​-can​-fight​-racism. 2. After publishing a version of a portion of the material here (Craig A. Rubano, “Where Do the Mermaids Stand? Toward a ‘Gender-Creative’ Pastoral Sensibility,” Pastoral Psychology 65, no. 6 [December 2016], http://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s11089​-015​ -0680-2), I discovered that a similar approach had been taken by Justin Tanis in “Eating the Crumbs That Fall from the Table: Trusting the Abundance of God,” in Take Back The Word: a Queer Reading of the Bible, eds. Robert E. Goss and Mona West (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2000). In the context of illustrating the education and selfdetermination necessary for transgender thriving, Sabia-Tanis emphasizes that both Jesus and the Canaanite woman “model for us the power and possibilities that are present when we face our limitations to step over and beyond them” (Tanis, “Eating the Crumbs,” 47), suggesting that the unconditional love at the center of the story in the mother’s care for her child leads to a new awareness (even on the part of Jesus) of the vastness of God’s abundance. 3. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 58. 4. Ehrensaft, 62 (emphasis added). 5. Ehrensaft, 62 (emphasis added). 6. Ehrensaft, 62 (emphasis added). 7. Ehrensaft, 62 (emphasis added). 8. Hart, New Testament, 31. 9. Francis J. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012; Hendrickson Publishers, 2002), 144. 10. Edgar V. McKnight, “Varieties of Readings and Interpretations of the Biblical Text,” in The New Interpreter’s Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, ed. Walter J. Harrelson (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003), 2271–2272.

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11. Richard W. Swanson, Provoking the Gospel of Mark: A Storyteller’s Commentary. (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005), 206. 12. Hart, New Testament, 79 (Mark 7:26). 13. Richard W. Swanson, Provoking the Gospel of Matthew: A Storyteller’s Commentary (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2007), 197. 14. See “Joshua,” Behind the Name, January 22, 2019, https://www​.behindthename​.com​/name​/joshua. 15. One might think of the royal official in John 4:46–54 as an example of someone known only as a father, and, indeed, in John’s account, the man’s parental persistence is analogous to the Canaanite woman’s. The example is complicated, however, by the two other gospel accounts of the same healing: Luke’s gospel (Luke 7:1–10) refers to the subject of the man’s concern as a “slave” (Greek: doulos), while Matthew’s gospel (Matthew 8:5–13) refers to them even more elliptically with the Greek word pais, a noun both masculine and feminine, variously translated as “child,” “boy,” “servant,” and “young man.” Thanks to James Klotz, “‘Let It Be Done for You According to Your Faith’: Matthew 8:5–13 through Queer and Postcolonial Lenses” (paper given at the PhD students’ Koinonia Conference, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, 2015), for bringing my attention to the parental aspect of at least one of these three accounts of Jesus and a man in need. 16. Swanson, Provoking the Gospel of Mark, 207. 17. Ehrensaft, Gender Born, 133. 18. Brill and Pepper, Transgender Child, 83. 19. Brill and Pepper, Transgender Child, 27. 20. Jill Weiss, “Prayer,” in The New Congregation Beth Simchat Torah Siddur B’chol L’vav’cha for Friday Night, ed. Rabbi Sharon Kelinbaum (New York: Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, 2008), 261.

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Index

Page references for figures are italicized acronyms. See identity acronyms affectional orientation. See attraction agender. See gender identity ally. See coconspirator American Psychiatric Association (APA), 63–64 anatomical sex, 20, 24, 25, 35, 41, 42–47, 49, 55–56n12, 82, 84, 158–60, 165–67, 179; continua of, 42–43, 43, 46, 53, 179; eunuch, 158–60; hermaphrodite, 10, 24, 56n12, 56–57n20, 67, 72– 73n21, 172–73n21; intersex, 15n11, 28n12, 44–47, 160–61; one-sex model, 165–67; sexual complementarity, 150, 168, 173n26; transsexual, 3, 14n8, 23, 30n17, 48, 68, 84, 85, 132, 160; twosex model, 165–66 androsexual. See attraction apophatic theology, 167–70 Armstrong, Karen, 106 asexual. See attraction attraction, 21–24, 41–43, 49, 51–53, 179; androsexual, 51; asexual, 28n12, 42, 52; bisexual, 19, 21, 23, 27n1, 53–54; continua of, 42–43, 43, 52, 53, 179; demisexual, 28n12; fluidity of, 16n22, 52–53; gay, 5,

6, 8, 9, 16n15, 19, 21, 23–24, 35, 53–54, 81, 87, 119, 129, 134–36; graysexuality, 28n12; gynesexual, 51; heterosexuality, 51, 54; homosexuality, 23, 51, 54, 129, 160; lesbian, 16n15, 19, 21, 23, 53–54, 86, 87, 134–36; pansexual, 28n12, 52; polysexual, 28n12, 52; queer, 21, 54, 135–36; skoliosexual, 51; straight, 9, 19, 23, 28n12, 35, 41, 119 authorial “I,” 7–10, 35, 62, 168 Axial Age, 104–6, 111n10 Baren Cohen, Simon, 116–17 Beardsley, Christina, 152, 162 Bible passages: Acts 8:27–36, 159–60; 2 Corinthians 4:1–2, 3; Deuteronomy 23:12, 159; Galatians 3:24–29, 161–64, 167, 170, 176n79; Genesis 1:26–28a, 132, 145–51, 156, 157, 162, 164, 166, 170, 172n21, 173n27; Genesis 2:7, 18–24, 151–57, 162, 166, 168, 170, 173n27, 174n43; Isaiah, authors, 175n57; Isaiah 53:7– 8, 159; Isaiah 56:4–5, 159; Job 38:4, 148; Job 40:4–5, 148; John 10:10, 5, 15n12; John 16:12–13, 171; Joshua

209

210

Index

11, 182–83; 1 Kings 6:16, 154; Luke 6:1–5, 143n40; Luke 7–10, 189n15; Luke 11:5–8, 11, 80, 122–24, 126n30; Mark 2:23–28, 138–39, 143n40, 157; Mark 6:31–46, 181; Mark 7:24–31, 181, 182; Mark 8:1–13, 181; Mark 15:41, 182; Matthew 5:21–44, 141n12; Matthew 8:5–13, 189n15; Matthew 11:15, 13, 17n32; Matthew 12:1–8, 143n40; Matthew 14:13–23, 181; Matthew 15:21–39, 12, 81, 181; Matthew 19:4–12, 156–61, 167, 170, 176n64, 181–87, 188n2; 1 Samuel 21:1–7, 139; 2 Samuel 16:13, 154 biblical interpretation/translation, 4, 5, 11–13, 57n29, 81, 88, 92, 122–23, 126n30, 129–40, 143–44nn36–41, 145–49, 151–64, 166–68, 170, 171, 172n19, 173nn26–27, 174nn40–43, 176n79, 181–87, 188n2; gender creative interpretative lens, 4–6, 9, 12, 13, 36, 48, 131, 134, 139, 149, 150, 155, 163, 170 bigender. See gender identity bisexual. See attraction Bloom, Paul, 116–18 Bowlby, John, 101 Boyarin, Daniel, 173n28 Boylan, Jennifer Finney, 26 Brill, Stephanie, 66, 186 Broks, Paul, 118 Brueggemann, Walter, 151, 169 Buber, Martin, 105 Burke, Sean D., 158–59 Butler, Judith, 51 Charry, Ellen T., 125–26n25 Chase, Cheryl, 45–46 Child and Adolescent Gender Center (San Francisco), 63 cisgender. See gender identity Clebsch, William A., 121–22 coconspirator, 187–88n1; ally, 10, 28n12, 188n1 composite self. See Erikson, Erik H. Conover, Pat, 93n14

continua models, 10, 24, 41–43, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 52, 53, 57n30, 72, 82, 179, 188n1; spectra models, 41–43, 48, 67 Cooper, T, 115–17 Cornwall, Susannah, 168–70 creation myths, 147–48 Crippen, Timothy, 102 C., Sara, 47 Curwin, David, 174n40 DeFranza, Megan K., 173n26 demisexual. See attraction diagnoses, 63–64, 98; gender dysphoria, 44, 63–65, 73n18, 74n27, 79; Gender Identity Disorder, 63 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 63–64, 73n18 dickey, lore m., 81 Dittes, James E., 7–8, 35 Doehring, Carrie, 13n11 door-opener, metaphor, 12, 80, 122–24, 179 Dowd, Chris, 152, 162 Dykstra, Robert C., 121, 122 Edman. Elizabeth M., 133 Ehrensaft, Diane, 3, 9, 10, 12, 14n2, 25, 30–31n23, 36, 38, 44, 54, 61–71, 79, 81, 131, 179–84, 186 empathy, 3, 11, 80, 110, 112n18, 115– 19, 125n13; affective empathy, 116, 117; cognitive empathy, 116, 117; “more than empathy,” 11, 80, 119, 168, 179 Erikson, Erik H., 16n24 Erlick, Eli, 53, 55n5. See also Moore, Anna eunuchs. See anatomical sex false gender self. See true gender self Focus on the Family, 142–43n31, 146, 156 Foucault, Michel, 56–57n20 Fulghum, Robert, 61, 71

Index

gay. See attraction gender-affirmative models, psychotherapeutic, 5, 24, 38 gender-affirming care, 3, 15n8, 22, 25, 30n17, 36, 37, 44–46, 65, 66, 68, 74nn26–27, 88, 89–90, 184 Genderbread Person. See Killermann, Sam gender creative. See gender identity gender creative interpretative lens. See biblical interpretation/translation gender creative promise, 5, 6, 13, 27, 43, 80, 88, 110, 124, 132, 137, 139, 150, 161, 179, 187 Gender Dysphoria. See diagnoses gender expression, 5, 21–25, 35, 41–43, 49–51, 62–63, 67, 82–92, 158, 179; continua of, 42–43, 43, 49, 53, 179; cross-dressing, 22, 23, 90; gender roles, 6, 20, 23, 35, 41, 43–51, 64, 86, 119, 132, 161, 163, 180 gender-fluid. See gender identity gender hybrid. See gender identity gender identity, 9, 14–15n8, 21–25, 35, 41–43, 47–51, 62–65, 82–92, 94nn19, 22, 25, 29, 38, 109, 157, 158, 179; agender, 15n11, 21, 28n12, 42, 51, 83, 149; bigender, 21; cisgender, 5, 8, 10, 15n14, 35, 41, 49, 81, 90, 110, 134, 139, 140; continua of, 36, 42–43, 43, 47, 53, 124, 179; gender creative, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14n3, 24–26, 36, 61–72, 110, 119, 139, 140, 163, 171, 179; gender-fluid, 9, 15n11, 16n22, 20, 35, 38, 61, 67, 149; gender hybrid, 61, 67; genderqueer, 21, 42, 48, 82; gender-variant, 5, 9, 10, 24, 61, 67, 116, 119, 150; nonbinary, 20, 21, 37, 42, 48, 52, 82–83; pangender, 21; polygender, 21; queer, 21, 54, 85–86, 109, 135–36; transgender, 12, 14n3, 14–15n8, 19, 20, 22–24, 35, 48, 61–72, 79–92, 95n52, 103, 106–8; transgendered, 90, 95n52, 136; transgenderist, 22; two-spirit, 29n12

211

Gender Identity Disorder. See diagnoses gender-neutral titles, 15n11, 29–30n16 genderqueer. See gender identity gender roles. See gender expression The Gender Unicorn. See Moore, Anna gender-variant. See gender identity gender web, 67, 69 Girshick, Lori B., 93n14, 94n29 GLAAD, 54, 59n51 Glock-Cooper, Allison, 115–17 Goss, Robert E. See Shore-Goss, Robert E. graysexuality. See attraction Griffith, James L., 11, 80, 98–110 Griffith, Melissa Elliot, 98, 106 gynesexual. See attraction Hart, David Bentley, 137–38, 143n37, 143–44n40 Hartke, Austen, 103, 106–10 Hays, Danica G., 82. See also Singh, Anneliese A. Hays, Jason D., 16n22 hermaphrodite. See anatomical sex Herzer, Linda Tatro, 160 heterosexuality. See attraction Hiltner, Seward, 120–22 homosexuality. See attraction Hooper, Liam, 130 identity acronyms, 6, 9, 21–22, 27n1, 28–29n12, 35, 54, 86, 135, 179 International Transgender Day of Remembrance/Resilience, 71, 87 intersectionality, 23, 27–28n8, 36–37, 39n6, 41, 43, 49, 55n8, 84, 86, 89, 120 intersex. See anatomical sex Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), 45 Jaekle, Charles R., 121–22 Jaspers, Karl, 111n10 Jethá, Cacilda, 147 John Paul II, Pope, 150 Johnston, Jeff, 156

212

Index

Jordan, Mark D., 169, 170 Jordan-Young, Rebecca, 20 Jorgensen, Christine, 22, 29n15 Kille, D. Andrew, 174–75n43 Killermann, Sam, 36, 41–43, 43, 47, 49, 51, 54, 55n3, 67, 72; Genderbread Person, 41–54, 43, 55n3 Kinsey Scale, 54 Klotz, James, 189n15 Korsak, Mary Phil, 148, 149, 153, 154 Kundtz, David, 119 Laqueur, Thomas W., 165, 176n85 Latinx, 23, 29–30n16 Lerner, Melvin, J., 102 lesbian. See attraction Levinas, Emmanuel, 105–6 LGBTQ+. See identity acronyms Lings, Kjeld Renato, 145–46, 148, 149, 174n41 Loewenthal, Kate M., 97–98, 104 Longman, Tremper, III, 152–53 Lopez, German, 95n52 Machalek, Richard, 102 MacMullen, Ramsay, 173–74n29 Mann, Rachel, 169 Martin, Robert P., 137, 143n36 Masten, Ann S., 81 McGarrah Sharp, Melinda A., 16n29, 125n19 McWilliams, Nancy, 61 Menvielle, Edgardo, 25, 64–65 mermaid, 51–52, 71–72, 72n6, 188n2 microaggression, 24, 30–31n23, 49–50 Miller-McLemore, Bonnie, 119–20 minister, role of, 6, 24–27, 35–38, 44, 48, 54, 65–66, 68, 72, 79–81, 87–89, 92, 98, 103, 105, 106, 108–10, 116, 121, 124, 129, 133–34, 164, 170–71, 180, 185–86 missions of religious belonging, 99–110; sociobiological missions, 99–105, 109; sociocultural mission, 99, 104–10

Mohler, Albert, Jr., 130 Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey, 155, 160 Moore, Anna, 53, 55n5, 57nn21, 27, 57–58n30; The Gender Unicorn, 51, 53, 55n5, 57nn21, 27, 57–58n30 National Conference on Gender Creative Kids, 68 Neutel, Karin, 176n79 nonbinary. See gender identity one-sex model. See anatomical sex Pan, Landyn, 53, 55n5. See also Moore, Anna pangender. See gender identity pansexual. See attraction parenting, 12, 25, 26, 36, 37, 45, 46, 61–63, 65–66, 68–70, 87–88, 108 pastoral theology, 5–9, 11, 24, 79, 80, 82, 97, 98, 110, 119–24, 133, 168, 179 Pepper, Rachel, 66, 186 phenomenological inquiry, 82 pit brow lasses, 50 polygender. See gender identity polysexual. See attraction Pratto, Felicia, 112n18 Prince, Virginia, 22 pronouns, 15n11, 81–84, 93n5, 94nn19, 26, 106, 149 psychology of religion, 11, 80, 92, 97–98, 104, 131, 179 queer. See attraction. See also gender identity queer movement, 21, 135 Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal, 150 resilience, 11, 13, 72, 79–92, 98–110, 136, 139, 145, 150, 156, 161, 164, 168, 170–71, 179–80, 188n2. See also International Transgender Day of Remembrance/Resilience Richardson, Sarah S., 176–77n85 Rizzuto, Ana-Maria, 112n21

Index

Rogers, Eugene F., Jr., 167 Roughgarden, Joan, 55–56n12, 172– 73n21 Ryan, Christopher, 147 Sabia-Tanis, Justin, 37, 131, 140, 146– 47, 149, 152, 155–56, 159, 161–64, 176n64 Sanders, Cody L., 52–53 Schultz, Jackson Wright, 30n17, 93n14, 94nn29, 38, 95n44 Serano, Julia, 27n1, 64 sex. See anatomical sex sexual complementarity. See anatomical sex sexual orientation. See attraction Sheridan, Vanessa, 5, 10, 136, 139–40, 150 Shore-Goss, Robert E., 12, 134–36, 140 Singh, Anneliese A., 11, 79–92, 100, 101, 103, 105–10, 136, 139, 145, 150, 156, 161, 164, 168, 170–71, 179–80 single-sex model. See anatomical sex skoliosexual. See attraction social dominance theory, 112n18 Solomon, Andrew, 65–66 Soughers, Tara K., 147 Southern Baptist Convention, 3, 4, 15n10, 130, 132 spectra models. See continua models Stanford, Melinda, 71 Sterling, Anne Fausto, 45 Stone, Sandy, 141–42n15 straight. See attraction Tajfel, Henri, 110–11n15 Tanis, Justin. See Sabia-Tanis, Justin Thatcher, Adrian, 166–67

213

Transfaith, 130 transgender. See gender identity transgendered. See gender identity transgenderist. See gender identity transition, 3, 4, 12, 14n2, 19–20, 36, 48, 64, 74n27, 80, 88, 91, 140, 163 transsexual. See anatomical sex Trans Student Educational Resources, 52 transvestite. See gender expression, cross-dressing true gender self, 3, 5, 10, 13, 14n2, 36, 48, 54, 62, 63, 66–72, 80, 116, 131, 163, 164, 180, 186; false gender self, 68–72 Turner, Victor, 106 two-sex model. See anatomical sex two-spirit. See gender identity Unitarian Universalism, 12, 17n31 U.S. Transgender Survey (2015), 36–37, 38n2 Valentine, David, 22–25, 30n17 van Wolde, Ellen, 174–75n43 Vigen, Aana Marie, 171 Villain, Eric, 47 Watson, Laurel S., 82. See also Singh, Anneliese A. Weiss, Jill, 187 Westermann, Claus, 147–48, 154, 155 Winnicott, Donald Woods, 10, 36, 68–70 World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), 74n34 Wulff, David M., 97 Yarhouse, Mark A., 57n29

About the Author

Craig A. Rubano received his PhD in Pastoral Theology from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he also completed his Master of Divinity and Master of Theology in Pastoral Care degrees. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale College, he earned a Masters degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. His article publications have focused on practices of grief, along with explorations of resilience and alliance among and with gender creative persons of all ages. The Rev. Dr. Rubano is a minister in full fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

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