Theorizing Transness and the Study of Religion

In this paper, I address the intersection of gender transition and religious conversion, a dynamic currently under-discussed in trans* religious studies. I examine Mariecke van den Berg’s essay “Embodying Transformation,” which highlights parallels between gender transition and religious conversion in looking at two memoirs about transition (one gender and one religious) by Jewish women. While van den Berg’s paper does much to probe these transition–conversion parallels, it neglects an in-depth analysis of the *intersection* of the two. That is, in van den Berg’s paper, as in the two books she analyzes, only one identity -- religion or gender -- changes at a time. This paper, then, continues where van den Berg left off, and attempts to take seriously what a deeper instability between gender and religious identity, and their simultaneous *intersection,* might look like, and additionally what importance such a theorization holds for both trans* theory and for academic religious studies.

The idea of being a mother usually includes certain expectations not only of the social role it refers to, but physical characteristics of the mother’s body. This paper examines some ways that the idea of the mother can be invoked to stabilise feminine identities for those whose bodies do not meet these physical requirements, particularly trans women. Recognition as a mother legitimises the femininity of these bodies, lending them the physical characteristics they lack in themselves because motherhood as an ideal assumes the body it applies to is a woman’s. When expressed, the desire for recognition as a woman is often misrecognised as erotic, as in Freud’s reading of Daniel Paul Schreber. In Schreber’s Memoirs and the novel Detransition, Baby, however, it is clear that this desire is the desire for the recognition of a bodily fact, a fact which becoming a mother will render visible.

This paper explores the intersection of monastic practice with non-normative constructions of gender and intimacy in the eighteenth-century Pietist cloister of Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Drawing on an understudied eighteenth-century archive of textual and material culture records, I introduce what I call Ephrata’s salvific transness. I propose that Ephrata’s soteriology assumed that devoted Christians could transcend male/female binaries and retrieve a perfect androgynous unity in the image of the Divine that had been lost in the lapse of Adam. If Ephrata’s brothers and sisters dedicated their lives to an intimate mystical union with Christ/Sophia they would ultimately be resurrected as a prelapsarian *Gott-mann-weiblichen licht-leib* (divine-man-womanly body of light). I then investigate how Ephrata’s subject formation explored the disconnect between their female and male-perceived bodies and their ideal androgynous self and aimed to bring both into alignment through embodied devotional practices such as fasting and hymnody, as well as material designs.