Religious Conversion, Gender Transition, and Contemporary American Anti-Trans Violence

What happens to trans folks’ religious commitments after being pushed out of religious communities? What are we to make of trans populations’ move away from the faith networks into which they were born? To what extent does gender transition affect religious conversion, and what does that relationship have to offer conversion studies? (And vice versa?) In this paper, I aim to bring theorizations of conversion studies—and of queering conversion studies—together to offer an understanding of transgender religious movement in the contemporary United States that adequately accounts for trans and queer people’s often ambiguous and shifting relationships with organized religious traditions. I argue that this contemporary lived-religious dynamic is helpfully characterized both by studies and theories in religious conversion, and in religious studies writ large, in ways that help contextualize current trends of American transgender religious re-identification.