Intersex and Transgender Theology

The Episcopal Church took the courageous step to approve same-sex blessing service at the General Convention last July. At the same time, the Church voted to amend church laws to include that no one would be discriminated based on “gender identity and expression.” The church affirms “gender identity (one’s inner sense of being male or female) and expression (the way in which one manifests that gender identity in the world) should not be bases for exclusion, in and of themselves, from consideration for participation in the ministries of the Church.” 

The Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge, an Episcopal priest and chaplain at Boston University, has worked with others for a number of years for the passage of the amendment. He was one of the panelists to speak about intersex and transgender theology at the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) on September 7. Other panelists include Dr. Susannah Cornwall from University of Manchester, Dr. Megan K. DeFranza of Gordon College, and Iain Stanford, a doctoral student at Harvard Divinity School.

Professor Patrick S. Cheng of EDS moderated the panel and said in his opening remarks that the Christian community has talked more about lesbian and gay issues than transgender and intersex concerns. He welcomed Dr. Cornwall, an expert on intersex theology and ministry from England, to EDS to have a dialogue with other scholars in Boston.

Intersex people are those persons whose biological sex cannot be classified as clearly male or female, because they have combinations of physical features of both. Intersex people have also been called “hermaphrodite” or people with “disorder of sex development” (DSD), although these terms are contested.

Cornwall’s book, Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ: Intersex Conditions and Christian Theology, is the first full-length examination of the theological implications pf intersex conditions and their medical treatment. Currently she is interviewing intersex Christians to deepen her study. She said that the Church of England has begun to discuss ministry to intersex and transgender persons, which is a step forward.

Cornwall emphasized that intersex persons challenge a binary construction of gender, which has dominated Christian theology for centuries. The acceptance of a non-pathological understanding of the intersexed necessitates the re-examination of some of the Christian images and teachings, such as the church as a feminine bride to a masculine god, the maleness of Christ, body and perfection, and marriage based on complementarities of the male and the female sexes.

In her intriguing remarks, DeFranza pointed out that the Bible offers material to discuss intersex issues. As someone who has grown up in a fundamentalist church in which women were not allowed to even pass the offering plate, she was surprised to find discussion of “atypical” bodies in the Bible. For example, in his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19:1-12, Jesus refers to different types of eunuchs, including those who have been so from birth (as different from those who have been castrated). DeFranza argues that intersex persons would have been included in this group. In Isaiah 56:3-5, the eunuchs who hold fast to God’s covenant are blessed. DeFranza said that instead of “an icon of shame,” the eunuch is raised up as “a model of discipleship.” The Bible also refers numerous times to barren women and some among them might have been intersex.

Just as intersex persons disrupt our ways of constructing gender, transgender people challenge us to see gender identity and expression not as fixed, but in a continuum. Partridge and Stanford reminded us that transgender theology concerns the whole church, because it affects how we see theological anthropology, the nature of creation, and the Body of Christ.

Partridge said that the feast he liked most is the Feast of Transfiguration. It marks the liminal space that life is not static and Christians are called to grow to be like God, as in the doctrine of theosis in the Eastern Church. He invited us to see creation as variegated and always changing and to have an expansive notion of the collective embodiment of the Body of Christ. With such an inclusive understanding of creation and the church, each person will be free to discern who God has called him or her to be and to embody the vocation that God has given.

Stanford was at the General Convention when the Episcopal Church passed the amendment not to discriminate transgender people. He noted that in church politics, the blessing of same-sex union is considered a “sexuality” issue, while the inclusion of transgender persons is seen as a “gender” issue. But the two are much related and often overlap with each other. He reminded us that homosexuals were called “inverts” by nineteenth-century sexologists such as Havelock Ellis. For them, the problem had more to do with gender non-conformity than what these people did in their bedrooms. He, too, exhorted the church to transform its understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality in its theology and ministry.

The panel provides much food for thought at the beginning of the semester. To continue the conversation, Professor Cheng is organizing a group to further discuss lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer issues and theology. The video of the panel will be available later at the Episcopal Divinity School website.

This post first appeared at the 99 Brattle blog of the Episcopal Divinity School.

Stand Up for Transgender Youths

This morning at the Boston Pride Interfaith Service, Ken and Marcia Garber received the 2011 Pride Interfaith Award. As David Houle of Dignity Boston read the award citation, Ken Garber would not hold back his tears.

CJ, the child of Ken and Marcia, wanted to be a boy since four years old. Ken, a firefighter, believes that parents should love and affirm their child, no matter the gender identity of the child. Marcia and Ken found that the Catholic Church to which they belonged could not quite accept that they had a transgender son. They were tired of hearing that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) people would go to hell.

They became involved in Dignity Boston and turned to the transgender community for support and help when CJ began his gender affirmation process. They have been active in the Massachusetts Commission for GLBT Youth, Mass Equality, and Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Sadly, CJ died of a drug dose at 20 years old, after suffering from years of bullying in school and struggling to find a job.

People around me at the Interfaith Service and I cried as we listened to Ken and Marcia telling their story. As a parent, I could relate to their deep felt pain. We all want to see our children grow up strong and enjoy life. Yet, our society has made it so difficult for CJ and others like him to survive and flourish. I could imagine the teases, snares, and belittlement. . .

Many years ago, after I taught at the Episcopal Divinity School for about two years, the students organized a weeklong evening services for GLBT people. A student Ann told the story of what happened after she had come out to her family as a lesbian. She was only about 13 or so, and her family wouldn’t accept who she was. The next day, her parents put all her belongings on the porch and asked her to leave.

My daughter was around 13 at the time, and I could not imagine doing this to my own child. Why was it so unacceptable to hear that your daughter loved a person of her gender?

Ann’s story opened a window for me to understand the pain and anguish of gay and lesbian youth. Discrimination against GLBT people was no longer something abstract, because one of my students was thrown out of her family simply because of who she was.

I was so moved by Ann’s story and I pledged to do whatever I could to stand in solidarity with GLBT people, so that fewer children would need to go through what Ann had gone through.

Transgender people are particularly at risk in our society. They face widespread discrimination and violence. Currently the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition is pushing for the passage of a bill that will add Massachusetts to the 15 other states that protect transgender people. The bill will include gender identity and expression in the state’s non-discrimination statute and will amend existing hate crime laws to explicitly protect people targeted for violence and harassment.

Ken has spoken at rallies and testified at the State House. Ken and Marcia have not gone back to live quietly in their suburban town. They have turned their pain into courage to stand up for others. We must do our part to stop hate and intolerance and make sure that it gets better for our transgender youths.

Radical Love by Patrick S. Cheng

Radical love is “a love so extreme that it dissolves our existing boundaries,” writes my colleague Patrick S. Cheng in his new book Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology.

While queer theory could be highly theoretical and off-putting, Cheng’s Radical Love summarizes the contributions of queer theology in the last fifty years in an accessible and readable way.

So what is “queer”? This term was used in a derogatory way, but has been reappropriated as a neutral or positive term since the late 1980s. Cheng defines “queer” in an inclusive manner: as an umbrella term that refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex people and their allies; as a label that embraces transgressive actions against societal norms, with respect to sexuality and gender identity; and as a term used to subvert and erase boundaries especially in queer theory.

After tracing the genealogy of queer theology, the book proceeds to discuss the three persons of the Trinity, following the framework of ancient creeds. God is the sending forth of radical love, Christ can be seen as the recovery of radical love, and the Holy Spirit as the return of radical love.

Following queer, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theorists, Cheng questions the rigid boundaries such as the East and the West, homosexual and heterosexual, male and female, and divine and human. He argues that Christian theology is a queer enterprise, destabilizing all kinds of fixed binary categories.

Queer theologians insist that gender identity and sexuality are social constructs, and these constructs are often deployed to provide sanctions for the status quo. To “queer” is to challenge “common sense” and to render what is hidden, transparent.

For example, the Roman Catholic Church has used Natural Law to justify its arguments in favor of heterosexuality and procreation. But biologist Bruce Bagemihl in his book Biological Exuberance shows that hundreds of animal species engage in homosexual, bisexual, and transgender behavior.

While feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether has questioned, “Can a male savior save women?” queer theologians go a step further to queer the gender and sexual identity of Jesus.

Jesus, as the embodiment of radical love, crosses sexual boundaries. Nancy Wilson and others have shown that Jesus was sexually attracted to both men and women: Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, the beloved disciple in John, and the nude young man in Mark 14:51-52. The late queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid portrays a Bi/Christ that challenges our fixation on binaries.

I suspect many readers will find the portrayal of Jesus crossing gender boundaries even more challenging. Virginia Mollenkott writes about the intersex Jesus Christ, that Jesus has two X chromosomes (from Mary), yet phenotypically male. Justin Tanis suggests that Jesus’ life experience parallel that of many transgender people.

Furthermore, Elizabeth Stuart argues that the body of Christ is the church, which consists of a multitude of genders sexualities. Baptism and Eucharist reveal that gender and sexual identities are not of ultimate concern.

The book might remind some readers of the “boundary war” among feminists in the mid-1990s. While feminists such as Marie Fortune argued for clear boundaries in their work against sexual abuses in the church and workplace, Carter Heyward decried that rigid boundaries could also betray us and reinforce hierarchical relationships.

In Cheng’s book, binary distinctions and hierarchical constructs are overcome because of radical love. Sexual abuses and oppressions of all kinds are clearly contradictory to radical love. But love without justice is blind. I would like to see more discussions on how to protect radical love and how to differentiate radical love from love that goes awry, and from abuses that masquerade as love.

One of the strengths of the book is that it touches on all major doctrines of Christian theology: revelation, trinity, creation, sin, atonement, church, saints, sacraments, and eschatology (the last things). It showcases the breadth of the theological output of queer theologians. The book includes further study questions and a lengthy bibliography. It will be a very good resource to be used in the classroom and in church and small groups.

I hope that the publication of Cheng’s book will stimulate more discussions on queer theology among the younger generation, especially among the racial and ethnic minorities. Although Cheng has included racial and ethnic minority authors, their voices are often drown by those of white authors’. I hope that more work will be available that explores the intersectionality of gender, race, class, sexuality in our changing world politics.