Increased anti-trans legislation and sentiment in the U.S., manifested through media and buttressed by conservative Christianities, as well as pervasive reach of control alongside care shape the realities of trans and queer life. This panel addresses the politics of relationality, identity, and activism through theological and ethical disciplinary lenses. Papers that comprise this panel employ diverse methodologies to consider and address these entanglements across diverse contexts.
On March 8th, 2023, a tranche of emails from anti-transgender activists leaked online. These 2600 emails give an inside look at anti-transgender legislative efforts from 2019-2021. Much can be said about the biological and medical claims made in the emails. However, the question I address is: what role does religion play in mobilizing anti-transgender activism? I found six strategies: mimicking Biblical speech patterns, offering insider connections within the church, referencing ‘underdog’ Biblical narratives, using prayer, selectively invoking religious freedom, and construing detransition as religious conversion. Two responses are considered: framing transgender rights as religious freedom, and narrating transgender theologies.
What connects anti-choice reproductive politics with the current wave of politics targeting LGBTQ Americans, primarily trans persons? Addressing this question, I will first “queer” Chantal Mouffe’s passionate politics by focusing on the passion she overlooks: sex. Democracy needs to defend the equality of all citizens while also reproducing “correctly” The People who are imagined as sovereign. Thus, democracies require securing racialized ethno-national identities, by, as I will add, controlling sexual passions and bodies of women or other pregnancy bearing persons. Second, the U.S.’s reproductive economy that privatizes the cost of bearing and raising children, makes doing so economically irrational. Doctrinally innovative, anti-choice, heterosexist, and anti-trans Christian theologies of “gender complementarity” respond to these contradictory erotic politics. They produce and naturalize exclusive binary heterosex claiming that “men” and “women” are equal while also marking “women’s” reproductive bodies as public property to be uniquely burdened with reproducing The People.
Eva Hayward’s “More Lessons from a Starfish” brings together the bodies of the transsexual and the starfish as forms of sensory beings, most strikingly in her use of the term “fingery-eyes.” Hayward’s lyrical account of trans becoming offers a significant place for the more-than-human in our gendered embodiment; I wish to extend this into a theological register, suggesting that the divine too is entangled in our gendered being. I consider fingery-eyes both as the site of gendered formation and as a mode of relation with God. While this is a risky proposition, opening us up not only to misrecognition but also to the potential for violation, it is an account of gender as inherently reciprocal, existing in the space of touch that is simultaneously robustly material (embodied, phenomenological, felt) and irreducibly more-than-material (entangled in the ethics of recognition and humility).
This paper analyzes Pauli Murray’s life through the lens of their* intersectional identity—as a biracial, trans/gender-fluid, and Christian—revealing a unique use of both an ethic of resistance and an ethic of control to survive in an oppressive society and dismantle its systems. First, I theorize an ethic of resistance, extrapolating from the works of Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, E. Patrick Johnson, and the quare experience. Next, I theorize an ethic of control, using the work of Sharon Welch and Katie Cannon. Finally, utilizing lived theology as a method (Charles Marsh), I exegete Murray’s sermons, autobiography, and historical accounts of their 1940 bus arrest in Virginia, connecting their lived theology to their creative use of both ethics. Examining the theo-ethical impact of Murray’s intersectional identity enables scholars to understand better how identity manifests itself in the outward performance of religious beliefs in a given society.
*To honor Pauli Murray’s gender identity, the author utilizes "they/them" pronouns.