Abstract
Theistic cosmologies have inspired many religious communities to alienate transgender individuals. While the growth in tolerance among congregations and institutions is important, there remains a pressing need to address the cosmologies at the root of intolerance. A re-examination of theological conceptions of God and the human person reveal not only acceptability, but significance, in the trans experience itself. Synthesizing gender studies with theology, this interdisciplinary article argues that God’s nature as deeply personal Love implies a sacredness in gender authenticity. The human person is part of an evolution toward deeply personalized consciousness. Gender, when freed from rigid constraints, is a social expression of this personalized self in a common cultural language. As infinite Love, God actualizes in the universe in deeply personal love. Therefore, by personalizing knowledge of one another and enabling deeper love between human persons, gender authenticity, in its fluidity, ambiguity, and continuous newness, deepens God’s existence. Ultimately, I argue, expressing one’s authentic gender(s) is a sacred act.
Introduction
The transgender experience is seen often as a challenge to religious conceptions of the human person. Yet transgender individuals in particular reveal that, much like the transcendent divine, the human person is inexpressible, complex enough to exist beyond rigid categorical understanding. Discussing her close relationship with God, trans scholar Joy Ladin writes that the two both found themselves “stranded in the wilderness beyond human categories.” 1 Author Ryka Aoki explained that for trans people, marginalized after their exclusion from the cosmologies upon which we rely for our conceptions of the human person, “even a mundane life can seem magical.” 2 It is not so much that being transgender is literally magical or transcendent; rather, it goes beyond our contextually articulated, but firmly grasped, conceptualizations of the universe—and when the inexplicable becomes apparent, it rarely bodes well in religious circles.
Phenomena which (necessarily) challenge our cosmologies have always produced shifts in theological epistemologies. The arrival of such people as Jesus, Muhammed, the Buddha, and a host of prophets, mystics, and holy people led to radically new theologies. The discovery of evolution encouraged reinterpretation of the details of creation. Feminist theologians rely upon newly liberated conceptions of the human person to generate non-patriarchal understandings of God.
While numerous transgender theologians have recognized a place for trans experiences in religion and spirituality, it is time for us all to reconfigure conceptualizations of God and the human person to include transgender knowledges. 3 In the oft-cited “Transing Religious Studies,” Max Strassfeld suggests that to “trans” the field is to understand the resiliencies of trans individuals—especially trans women of color—as religion, and thus “imagine alternate modes of both religion and divinity.” 4 Today, queer studies—including, most particularly, the subjective experiences and self-understandings on which it necessarily relies—must usher in a theology which allows for unique but unified recognitions of God in a world which, we now realize, is always experienced personally.
This article argues that God’s nature as deeply personal Love implies a sacredness in gender authenticity, including transition. The “Personalized Consciousness” section locates the human person as a development in a processual evolution toward situated, personalized self-consciousness. The “Gendered Relations” section describes how self-consciousness is expressed relationally through the cultural creation of gender. The section “God’s Personalizing Love” identifies personal love as the actualization of infinite Love, or God’s process of becoming. The “Gender Authenticity as Sacred Self-Expression” section, the core of the article, argues that the deepest self-expression—which for transgender individuals may include social, physical, or emotional gender transition—allows the deepest personal love and the deepest actualization of God.
Personalized Consciousness
Love becomes most deeply personalized in beings who can know themselves as persons. The human person is the most recent biological development in a cosmic evolutionary process of flowering complexity, corresponding in human beings with deepening consciousness. The universe, says Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is coming to an awareness of itself in diverse personalized beings. 5 Human beings introduce inner consciousness of a highly complex person to relate creatively to others.
Complexification and Interiority
The universe’s start was simple, singular, and of infinite sameness. “Infinitesimally small and infinitely dense,” 6 it exploded into early complexity in the Big Bang. As the universe expands, its evolution has become especially observable on earth. From atoms to multi-cellular organisms, from nervous systems to the puzzling human brain, organic life displays a rich process of complexification.
Teilhard de Chardin realized that corresponding to and underlying such “tangential” development is “radial,” or “interior,” development. 7 In other words, heightening material complexity is sharpening the universe’s capacity for consciousness. An interior existence beyond observable materiality exists on every level. Even the basic building blocks of the universe, quantums, have enfolded mathematical “quantum potentials” which act on particles in manners determined by the state of the universe. 8 Quantum chemist Lothar Schäfer suggests that molecules, as quantum systems, have both observable material states and “virtual states,” or mathematical forms for potential states which the molecule may actualize. 9
Yet only in the height of material complexity—brains—does consciousness as we understand it break forth. As species form communicative, quasi-linguistic capabilities, social groups and members gain more meaning. 10 Mammals especially possess great social and individual flexibility, indicating unique interiors. 11 Human consciousness is particularly complex—even momentary awareness draws simultaneously on sensation, emotion, memory, history, physical well-being, genetically and environmentally shaped bodies, and cultural context. 12 Both grounded in and transcending each experience, consciousness becomes highly personalized to each individual.
Self-Consciousness
While highly complex animals are self-aware, only human beings are aware of their own interiority. 13 Teilhard de Chardin characterized this “individuation” as “the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value.” 14 In other words, we form a sense of unique selfhood. Fritjof Capra suggests that “identity, individuality, and autonomy do not imply separateness and independence.” 15 The “self” develops only in relation to (and as distinct from) other people. Its intelligibility comes from what Humberto Maturana calls “languaging,” wherein “oriented [linguistic] behavior” allows a being to come to self-consciousness by generating “communicative descriptions” of itself. 16 The “self” is thus a relative term, formed in culturally embedded relations.
Even so, self-consciousness is not limited by context. In his integral theory of consciousness, Ken Wilber adds that the development of each subject is intertwined with the ongoing development of a cultural environment. 17 While shared meanings shape our self-understandings, we also shape these meanings, forming a processual feedback loop. This means that each person is more than who their culture taught them to be, that the human person may change, and that the possibilities for the self are infinitely fluid. Fortunately, Alicia Juarrero explains that an individual retains a whole identity not through constancy but rather through personal “resilience and flourishing.” 18 Given the complex fluidity of the self, its authentic expression is necessarily creative.
In sum, the whole universe is engaged in a cosmic evolution of complexification and personalization of consciousness. The deepest consciousness is evident in the human person, who can be known only by the interior self. The formation and articulation of the self is situated in fluid cultural frameworks. Since these frameworks tend to be gendered, individuals often experience the self as gendered. Although the culturally shared notion of “gender” helps to guide the formation of the self, each individual forms a unique particular self, which they may express using the language of “gender.” For this reason, we turn now to the way gender functions to relate the uniquely personalized self to others.
Gendered Relations
Gender is a creative way of expressing our personalized selves socially. Unfortunately, it has been simplistically systematized by groups in power, preventing authentic relations. Given the rich complexities of human self-consciousness, often transcending these well-taught boundaries, gender theorists suggest that we take an active role in shifting our cultural systems to allow richer expressions of our self-awareness. Our most authentic relations arise when we personalize our understandings of one another and recognize the infinite possibilities enfolded in the phenomenon of the human person.
Defining Gender
Transgender activist Leslie Feinberg defines gender as “self-expression.” 19 It is creative, artistic, even playful, but representative of our very real self-knowledge. In their career-defining work, Gender Outlaw, non-binary author Kate Bornstein describes that gender identity “answers the question, “who am I?”—a definition which allows for the fluidity, ambiguity, and instability of our identity as human persons. 20
If gender is self-expression, then it is primarily social. The notion of “gender” is a framework of shared meanings, “a form of communication, a language that we all use to express and interpret each other socially.” 21 Culturally, we signal gender in physical, behavioral, textual, mythic, power-laden, sexual, and/or biological ways. 22 Even as a cultural creation, gender is real. Even Judith Butler, who is known for her landmark theory of gender as performative, insists that gender cannot be willfully chosen, for it is too much a part of our abstract conceptual understanding of our inner selves. 23 Yet gender cannot necessarily be identified by others, for the uniquely personalized nature of our self-consciousness requires subjective knowledge.
Despite the highly personalized selves we know, most cultures have developed gender systems which mainstream self-expression into essential categories. Like any cultural creation, gender systems evolved in various ways among diverse societies. Each maintains different numbers and/or types of gender categories and undergoes varied social development. 24
Limitations of a Rigid Gender System
Western society, the focus of this project, uses a rigid binary system for gender, oversimplifying characteristics to fit two conceived genders. We assign gender based on sex, a term denoting physical characteristics. The notion of a sex binary is questionable. As Jean Roughgarden has documented, even when biologists identify sex by gonads alone, the animal and plant kingdoms include a myriad of species which display more than two sexes, switch sexes, individually possess more than one sex, and/or defy sex roles. 25
Human beings in particular each defy the “male” and “female” ideal to some degree because our hormones, chromosomes, genitals, and anatomical structures all appear in diverse and “conflicting” ways. Our sex-distinguishing features place males and females on a sort of bell curve. 26 Those with just enough variation to generate visible confusion are identified as intersex. Comparing perspectives on gender development, anthropologist Stephanie L. Meredith concludes that the overwhelming influence upon human development is social; even besides behaviors, individual phenotypes themselves arise from “complex interactions between individuals’ somatic characteristics and their experience with the social and physical environment,” beginning even before birth. 27 In other words, the cultural binary has itself generated most of the observable behavioral differences between males and females.
It was only our particular cultural evolution that made sexual differentiation meaningful. “The ‘wholeness’ of the body and the ‘sameness’ of its sex,” Susan Stryker claims, “are themselves revealed to be socially constructed.” 28 It was our particular cultural conception of gender that invented the sex binary. As Judith Butler claims, “sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along.” 29 She does not mean that sex and gender are equivalent, but rather that the rigid cultural gender binary preceded the notion of a sex binary. Since gender is relational in its expression, the purpose of relating a binary is therefore suspect.
Binary Harm to Relationships
Gendered self-expression exists to found social relationships upon knowledge of the other. While a knowledge of sex (in all of its nuances) is certainly necessary in medical settings, the purpose of connecting its signification to a social gender is far less clear. It is often suggested that gender was necessary to easily distinguish sex for reproduction. Yet psychiatrist Robert J. Stoller suggested that we have evolved far beyond this singular approach to coitus; the “higher the organism,” the more purposes it accumulates. 30 Furthermore, reproduction is possible for only a portion of our lives, and many cannot, or wish not to, reproduce (Kessler and McKenna 2006, 180). 31 Research also suggests that babies, almost entirely free of socialization, may be able to identify another’s sex without genital or gender cues. 32 In short, there is little need to systematically communicate our gonads to others in our everyday social lives, and even less need for our gonads to determine our holistic self-expressions.
The constraining gender system became an essential part of our identities for the purpose of controlled social relations. Second-wave feminists identified it as a system of power, known colloquially as “patriarchy.” Simone de Beauvoir suggested that the masculine is a universal standard for humanity, while femininity is simply the lack thereof. 33 Experiments by Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna verified her insight when participants frequently perceived a given figure as male—even if feminine characteristics were present—unless the figure had no masculine features at all. 34 Men maintained power by grasping minor physical differences, raising women from birth into subordinating positions, and proclaiming their created differences as natural. Truly, gender is better understood as a social assignment or relation than as part of our being. 35 A healthier gender system would not control relations, but facilitate personal ones.
Transgender Identity
Just as we vary within sex categories, some enough to be deemed intersex, we vary within our gender categories, some experiencing gender so beyond their assigned category that multiple, different, or new genders are required. The current umbrella term for these individuals is transgender, though it should be noted that some do not feel that this label fits their experience. Susan Stryker has pointed out that “trans” has different meanings in different communities, especially given the intersectional nature of our identities. 36 A general definition of transgender is “gender roles and practices which are not definable in terms of local understandings of gender normativity.” 37
Genealogist Henry Rubin adds that, while these non-dominant subject positions have always existed, their articulations depend on linguistic and cultural availabilities. 38 Rigid systems tend to force people to fit into given terms. This explains why transgender men were historically misidentified as lesbians—it was the closest-fitting offered category. 39 Clearly, linguistics is always limited—this is where the creative possibilities of gender identity and expression must come into the hands of each self-conscious subject. “New” terms like “transgender” help some people make sense of their experiences, and further articulations will continue to develop.
Authentic expression of an embodied self entails more than linguistic creativity. As Nikki Sullivan outlined in her discussion of “intercorporeality” and body modification, bodies and knowledges are related, making our self-embodiment and portrayal significant. 40 Sigmund Freud’s recognition of a “material reality of the imaginary” explains why we shape our bodies or presentations to form cohesion with our holistic self-knowledge. 41 For trans people, this may include sexual correction surgery, hormone therapy, vocal adjustment, or different dress. In response to concern about the biological integrity of these choices, one must recall that bodily changes from shaves to artificial limbs to surgeries have always occurred “for the continuance and development of [one’s] total integrity-potential as a human being.” 42 The evolutionary universe is self-creative, and continual adjustment is natural.
Personalization and Infinite Possibilities
Recalling that cultures are evolutionary, we need not scrap our histories, but evolve our systems to allow the infinite diversity of possible expressions. 43 An eye to infinity necessitates trust in a multitude of self-knowledges, an epistemological hallmark of transgender studies. Befitting its relational nature, knowledge about another’s gender can only arise in subjective accounts and personal expressions. 44
Liberated personalized knowledges are valuable in our evolutionary progression. As Donna Haraway proclaims in her feminist classic, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” we create all of our own boundaries, and we can delight in transgressing them. 45 In discovering new ways of being, she insists that we “embrace [the] partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves.” 46 Conscious of our responsibility for the ongoing situated creation of objects, societies, and selves, we may reclaim the human person’s power to self-proclaim. Transgender individuals, for example, combine self-knowledge with the cultural notion of “gender” to proclaim identities fitting their experiences, thus “seizing the tools to make the world that marked them as other.” 47
Such a process, it must be emphasized, is natural. In her discussion of embodiment as circumstantially performative, posthumanist scholar, Katherine Hayles, affirmed that new uses of bodies based on cultural changes affect “experiences of embodiment,” 48 in turn generating new language and the culture’s “metaphoric networks” and future encultured embodiment. Hayles recognizes our cultural systems as organizations of infinite possibilities, evolutionarily adaptable in changing circumstances. 49
Many individuals experience social evolution as a rattling loss of security in the encounter with infinite possibilities. Public health trainer Ben Singer suggests that the abundance of newly expressed possibilities is overwhelming—even for medical professionals in trans health clinics—as “reason [is] forced to confront its incapacity to deal rationally with the infinite,” 50 Yet he terms this societal encounter the “sublime,” a nearly spiritual term. 51
To embrace the infinite in the context of gender, a cultural self-expression, is to transcend the controlled relations of the past and allow infinite possibilities for authentically personalized human relations—even love—to emerge. As the infinite potentiality of love is a concept not unfamiliar to theologians and spiritual people, we turn now to God’s nature as infinite Love, actualized in personal relations.
God’s Personalizing Love
While the binary gender system is unprepared to approach love in its ever-expanding, personal actuality in the universe, we are prepared to grapple with the infinitude of Love. “Infinite connection,” or “unity,” is often articulated spiritually. A sense of oneness, beyond but inclusive of our own experience, has pervaded the human imagination for millennia. Paul Tillich called it our “experienced ultimacy,” our “passion for meaning,” arising naturally from our consciousness of our own finitude. 52
This infinite union becomes the ground for culturally and experientially situated spirituality. Interfaith scholar Raimon Panikkar revealed that all traditions understand the ultimate nature of reality as an overall flow or “rhythm.” 53 In the anthropomorphic terms of theistic religions, this union is understood as relational, leading them to articulate God as such. Theologian and interreligious scholar Douglas Pratt suggests that all theistic religions, especially monotheistic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, conceive of the divine as ontologically relational. 54 For monotheistic faiths, this relationality is personal. Christian scripture, for example, declares that “God is love” (1 Jn 4.8 ESV).
Yet the meaning of divine relationality remains contentious. God is often understood theistically as a distinct and separate creator who loves a distinct and separate creation. The problem, Panikkar insisted, is that this conception of God simply cannot speak to the current human condition. 55 Just as experiences of infinite union inspired our spirituality, rich human experiences of love must inspire its details.
God as Love
Love is meaningful only in its enactment. Mystics consistently experience God’s presence, not in a thought but by a sense of being swept away. 56 They echo well the notion of “love” as it is humanly experienced. Love is not a single thought, action, or static “thing,” but a relationship, a continuously renewing embrace. Since individual mystics and entire religious traditions have used this human term “love” to encompass the indescribable experience of God, we recognize divine love, too, as continual relation.
If God is love, then God must be dynamically loving something, revealing the world’s purpose. John Macquarrie theorized that God must create because, as infinite perfection, God’s nature—love—is God’s only choice. 57 Since divine love is perfect because it is entirely centered on another, 58 God could not fulfill God’s nature without some other to love. The world of existence provides another, or even a multitude of others. In the words of Charles Hartshorne, “we exist to enhance . . . divine glory.” 59
In order to create this other, an infinite God can only create out of Godself. This was Hartshorne’s primary contribution: if God is the infinite, or supreme being, then God cannot only be the absolute. If God’s infinity does not also contain the concrete world, then something is beyond God, negating God’s very infinitude. God is all, leading to Harthshorne’s concept of “dipolarity,” wherein two “extremes” of God’s (non-dualistic) infinitude are the unchanging absolute (the aspect of God which is worshipped in theistic religions) and the finite which is experienced in existence. 60
With conviction that the universe is an aspect of Godself, we turn to scientific revelation to grasp existence. Evolutionary biology reveals a dynamic universe, characterizing God’s act of creation as active creation. As Teilhard de Chardin contributes, the evolutionary universe is unfinished. 61 In fact, it appears to be in the process of creating itself. Since this finite universe is God’s very (actualized) existence, this means that God is Godself a process rather than a static substance—indeed, “God is.” 62
The unchanging nature of God’s infinity guides these processes, but it does not dictate their content. Physicist Paul Davies writes that the nature of the finite universe’s laws encourage creativity on nature’s own part. 63 In other words, the specifics of God’s finite actualization—God’s expression, if you will—are getting actively, personally created. Panikkar helpfully compares the infinite—which he deemed an “interindependence” of the universe, humanity, and God—to jazz, wherein each particular agent acts freely but is guided by an inner sense of connection to a whole melody. 64 His analogy articulates how God’s essential nature as infinite Love remains constant, while the actualization of such infinite potentiality is open to creativity.
Actualizing Love
The uniquely arising specificities of God’s actualization makes Love into personal love. Since God’s essential nature is Love, God is most deeply actualized not in beings, but in the multitude of loves they exist to enact. Albert Nolan prompts that “it is better to say that the mystery we call God is personal rather than a person.” 65 In this sense, God does not exist as an absolute being in love with a separate existence, but rather loves in and through our love for one another. Only in actualization can love be experienced on a personal level in the attraction and relations between the deepest center of one being and that of another.
We are engaged in an evolution toward deeper consciousness. Theologians such as Teilhard de Chardin and Ilia Delio understand this evolution as deepening our capacity for love. The universe has always been “governed by attraction and allurement.” 66 On immense levels, Delio considers gravity and its role in shaping the cosmos; on smaller levels, molecular forces pulling molecules toward union. 67 Such attraction, which Delio calls love, is necessary for complexification, which allows for deeper forms of consciousness. 68 Love begets deeper love. Indeed, deeper consciousness allowed deeper attraction, from willful social affinity to mammalian sexual passion to the profound love in human beings which baffles even the most articulate poets. 69 It is no coincidence that our experience of love seems nearly as inexpressible as God, who is Love itself.
Love’s actualization in the universe makes Love personal. Reflecting on the personalized, proximate intensity of human love, Teilhard de Chardin became convinced that perfect divine love must be at least as forceful and close to the beloved. 70 It thus needs to be unfathomably, deeply present in relation. Evolutionary creation of a complex multitude allows for a rich, deep love which knows the other personally. Mystics like Merton experience God’s essential Love in perfect simplicity, as “a huge, smooth activity.” 71 Recalling Panikkar’s musical analogies, one may only imagine Love in its infinitude by picturing a melody of such unfathomable unity that to be grasped by a human person, it could only appear as a single, perfect note. Yet with the perspective of an individual musician, as is possible in existence, our melodic connection becomes identifiable in the creative union of numerous musicians in proximity. In other terms, love crystallizes as creation complexifies. In evolution, unique selves emerge, forming unique relationships, allowing the unified whole to, in Teilhard’s de Chardin’s terms, personalize. 72
Love’s deepest actualization is in self-knowing human beings, who can consciously choose to actualize Love in deep, personal ways. Love, Delio suggests, does not control but allows freedom. 73 God’s worldly actualization can only reach its greatest depth when we freely choose personal love for one another in our authentic depths. Merton insists that though God’s presence as the Creator and the material of the world cannot be changed, God’s presence in humankind is our choice. 74 With our deep consciousness, we can choose—or reject—our loving nature. As the actualization of God, our one essence is Love. Teilhard understood this as our divine center pulling us toward it through higher levels of consciousness. 75 We experience God’s embrace by embracing one another at the deepest possible level. When we personalize love, we invite God’s deeper actualization. In each new relationship, we bring new forms of love into existence.
In sum, though God is ontologically infinite Love, the universe may be understood as God’s actualization in deepening and personalizing Love. As the most conscious product of this evolutionary process, the human person freely embraces and personally realizes God. Since we actualize God ourselves, we must take responsibility for enacting the deepest, most personal love, and examine our gender framework’s role in carrying out this purpose.
Gender Authenticity as Sacred Self-Expression
The most personal love requires knowledge of the other at the deepest level. With our evolutionary gift of self-knowledge, we have a deeper understanding of the self to give to others and to love in them. As a mode of expressing our inner selves in a way we can share with others, gender authenticity allows the deepest personal love. Transgender authenticity and social, physical, and emotional transition, as a way of expressing a deeply authentic self, is sacred in its allowance of personalized love, thus actualizing a deeper presence of God.
Love and Self-Knowledge
The deepest love requires the deepest knowledge. To love you, I must first know you. In his discussion of divine love as necessarily proximate, Teilhard de Chardin defined love as that which “joins them by what is deepest in themselves.” 76 In humanity, the person is the most necessary component for love to arise. Mechanistic collectivities which “absorb” the human person, Teilhard de Chardin says, destroy love that could have arisen. 77 His notion of an absorbing collectivity echoes the rigidly oversimplifying nature of the gender binary, which refuses the authentic uniqueness of those persons which do not fit neatly within it. Love cannot be so deep when the inner self is banished from relations.
Furthermore, love can occur only between free individual persons, as the perfection of divine love is in creation’s freedom to embrace it. Authentic love, Delio suggests, requires a “freedom of self,” and to express God in loving relations, each participant must be “at home within” oneself. 78 At the deep level of human consciousness, this necessitates an engagement with the inner self. She notably draws upon Bonaventure, who pursued knowledge as a means to love which is deep and free of control. While rigid social categorizations like the binary prevent knowledge of the other and control relations, flexible gender systems create deeper, more personal love through authentic expression of personalized selves. Indeed, to know the self and, more particularly, to know the personal self of others, is the way to release our grip from them and open the possibility of love. This is Godly love—it is free, not coercive, and arises from deep knowledge.
That the universe has evolved to personalize reveals infinite love to be an unfathomable myriad of diverse possibilities for love. Conceiving of God as the true life of all, Merton affirms that “love is my true identity”—but not uniformly. 79 God’s love is too rich for that; it has particular expressions through particular people; indeed, to experience God is to be “precisely the person you actually are before God.” 80 Only then may we love God by loving others, or experience God’s love through the experience of love from another. Actualized in creation, love must look different in each personalized relationship. To love another, we must know them, and for authentic knowledge, we each must know our self and live as that self.
This is not to deny the existence of a true identity in God, a hallmark of Merton’s theology. 81 Truly, the highly interiorized work of the mystics converges around the oneness of all—in Meister Eckhart terms—the ground of God’s being is the ground of our being. 82 Yet the very oneness of the universe does not preclude the self-conscious personalization which is intrinsic to its evolutionary nature. Panikkar reminds readers that “God is not an object” and so will be realized differently by differently situated individuals. 83 He recalls the Upanishad line, “I am Brahman,” as it refers not to the individual self as Brahman, but to Brahman as “I am.” 84 In other words, though God may be our truest essence, we are each unique actualizations of Love’s fecundity, which gets fulfilled, not in our individual existence but in our relationships. The self exists for love. To love the deepest personal self in another is to experience and share God’s infinitely personal Love.
Gender as an Expression of Love
Freed from its rigid constraints, “gender” is how we express our personalized self, our deepest and truest unique self-knowledge, using (and creating) the shared meanings of a cultural community. Kate Bornstein honors the “gender transcender” as one who sees beyond the false boundaries and distinctions between genders; yet even this individual will “perform that truth in such a way that the culture can hear it.” 85 Whether we identify with a well-known gender(s), one we create which better portrays our self, or none at all, we have some sort of identity or experience relative to the human notion of “gender” as a way of being in the world. Gender, in this sense, is a cultural framework through which the self may be related to and shared with the other.
Gender exists as gender in its expression, and expression is the sharing of the self with another. Gender is not our essence—as mentioned above; our essence is Love. “‘To be’ is ‘to be with.’” 86 In its relationality, authentic gender personalizes our particular actualization of this essence. To relate more authentically is to be more ourselves. To share the authentic self with others, and to embrace the authentic self in others, is the deepest love.
For this reason, gender systems with room for open, fluid, and ambiguous experiences are necessary to actualize deep love, while suppressed gender systems can reject and cage Love. The human person, with an individualized self-consciousness, is highly complex. The biology and psychology of sex and gender recognizes the wholly unique combinations of traits in each individual, defying categorical definition of the person. It is for this reason that Stone has referred to the cultural binary pressure as “one of relentless totalization.” 87 The system has gotten one thing right: its attempt to facilitate knowledge of the other. Yet it has completely failed in that it has controlled the individual in its attempt to streamline knowledge of the other. At this evolutionary stage, we are capable of much more personalized, non-mechanistic knowledge.
Gender, as it is understood in transgender studies, introduces an openness to fluidity and ambiguity which is necessary to deepen our love. For Delio, love means knowing the other in the way God knows them, in their “boundless depth and indestructibility.” 88 To know someone in this manner is not to attempt to understand them on one’s own terms—or constraining cultural terms, for that matter—but to engage in “a genuine embrace,” which “entails the ability-not-to-understand but to accept the other as a question.” 89 To know another is not to understand them seamlessly (a feat one would recognize as impossible), and flexible gender systems make no attempts to render the other “intelligible.” 90 Rather, making no assumptions, they are open always to new possibilities.
Flexible gender systems rely upon a liberated epistemology which is far less limited than the mechanistic systems to which we are accustomed. Drawing upon the critical theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Ben Singer suggests approaching gender as a “rhizome,” which, in a conceptual step beyond the tree of flowering complexity (as Teilhard envisioned), includes “rootless, unpredictable, and circuitous variability” which “evades quantitative operations.” 91 Instead of “knowing” people by neatly fitting them into our own categories, flexible gender systems respect the human person’s ability to honestly proclaim their personalized self. This allows for the rich and unpredictable multiplicity of personalized Love. To hope in a (continuously arriving) future of newness is at the very heart of religion. In God After Darwin, Haught stresses that religion is more about discovery than recovery, that temporal existence is oriented toward a future with a “richer realm of new possibilities.” 92 This notion of constant newness in God’s actualization is better known as becoming, a hallmark of transgender theology. In their work on “transing” religion by overcoming binary logic, activist-theologian Robyn Henderson-Espinoza urges an embrace of “becoming as a core ontological and epistemological value that has a tangible outcome in materializing new social practices.” 93 To approach gender as a rhizome is to engage in a religious hope in newness, and to love one another in our personalized authenticity is to bring this newness into existence, to facilitate becoming.
Orienting oneself to the endlessness of possibilities in love is, after all, to embrace God’s infinity in its actualization. Niels Henrik Gregerson helpfully calls upon Goethe, who suggested that “if you want to enter the infinite, walk in the finite world, and look to all sides.” 94 The finite is an ongoing actualization of infinite possibilities. Surely Singer was right to describe the unending array of gender possibilities as the “sublime.” As we open to an unending multiplicity of new loves made possible by authentically personalized self-expressions, we have no choice but to recognize the infinity of Love’s possibilities. Posthumanist Katherine Hayles spoke of patterns—such as the gender system—as “limitation[s] that drops away as human awareness expands beyond consciousness and encounters the emptiness that, in another guise, could equally well be called the chaos from which all forms emerge.” 95 Even in rejecting the meaninglessness of the binary system and recognizing an unfathomable infinite Love as our essence, we will continue to actualize Love in the finite forms of personalized love. This is why only gender freed from limitations can be a useful way to guide knowledge of the other for the sake of deep love in existence.
Sacred Gender Authenticity and Transition
The richer love made possible through an embrace of authentic gender expression is a deepening actualization and revelation of God. Encouraging developments in queer theology, Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood describe how deregulating “binary myths” in theology “de-regulated our representations of God.” 96 In fact, they even suggest that queer theory’s introduction into theology moves “from metaphysics to metamorphing,” allowing space for “the glorious and diverse creation of the divine to dance and be celebrated.” 97 In a personalizing universe, the deepest notions of God cannot be mechanized but only expressed creatively in love. Jeanine Thweatt-Bates considers human bodies “as sites of theological revelation” 98 which simultaneously defy gender binaries and generalized, universalized notions of the human person. In other words, the human person, with a unique and personalized consciousness, reveals God in God’s richness to us. Since the human person’s true identity is relational, authentic relations are themselves God’s presence.
Authentic expression and relationality must thus be understood as sacred. Michael Brierley writes that in “sacramentalist” views of the cosmos, religious sacraments are simply reminders that “everything has the potential to become a full vehicle of the divine,” as the cosmos itself is where God actualizes. 99 To express ourselves as we truly are, to share how God arises through each of us uniquely—just as Merton suggested—is to engage in divine love and, thus, to share God sacramentally with one another. To accept and love the most authentic, personalized version of the other is to live sacramentally.
Transgender authenticity and transition are sacred and must be guided as such. To discover oneself, and then to choose to express oneself to others, is to accept how God loves through us in our personalized manners. God does not love a single creation. God loves in and through creation. 100 As deeply conscious personalized members of creation, we creatively determine the finite details of Love in our gendered expressions of the self.
We are co-creators of what Love looks like in actuality. Each personalized love is a contribution to the overall Loving “rhythm of being,” as Panikkar would call it. 101 We do not invent love, but personally express an essential Love. Similarly, transgender identities are not “made up” by ego-driven youth; they creatively express the personalized human self, more authentically than the totalizing binary gender system. We could constrain Love into uniformity, but it would not then be authentic love. Divine love actualizes in the deepest, most personal way when gender is authentic, an incredibly sacred phenomenon.
Conclusion
A product of a dynamic cosmic evolution of personalizing consciousness, the human person has a deep capacity for self-knowledge. Freed from toxic constraints, gender serves as a creative social expression of this self. Gender’s relational nature echoes the infinite Loving nature of God, which becomes personal as God is actualized in love in the universe. By enabling more personalized knowledge and deeper love between human persons, authentic gender expression deepens God’s actualization. For transgender individuals, authenticity and/or transition from one’s given gender to one’s authentic gender is sacred because it deepens love, the actualization of God.
Joy Ladin has written that we must attempt to understand humanity in order to “recognize our kinship with God.” 102 Recognition of the infinite possibilities for the human person contributes to theological understandings of God. God is revealed in new ways with each authentically personal love. It is now the role of theologians and religious communities to embrace these unlimited new forms of knowledge and recognize the role of authentic human personhood in personal love. Perhaps, with a respect for the particularities of the Infinite, we may transcend our constraining understandings of gender and of God.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was funded by the Villanova Center for Research & Fellowships. It was completed as part of the Villanova Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
1.
Ladin J (2018) In the image of God, God created them: toward trans theology. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34(1): 54.
2.
3.
Ladin J (2018) In the image of God, God created them, 56.
4.
Strassfeld M (2018) Transing religious studies. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34(1): 52.
5.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 221.
6.
Hawking SW (1988) A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam Books, 1988, 8.
7.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man, 64–65.
8.
Bohm D (1985) Hidden variables and the implicate order. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 20(2): 120.
9.
Schäfer L (2006) The emergence of consciousness in biological evolution and quantum reality. In: Meynard T (ed.) Teilhard and the Future of Humanity. New York: Fordham University Press, 115.
10.
Capra F (1996) The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Books, 287–288.
11.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man, 155.
12.
Capra F (1996) The Web of Life, 292.
13.
Capra F (1996) The Web of Life, 286–287.
14.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man, 165.
15.
Capra F (1996) The Web of Life, 295.
16.
Hayles K (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 144–147.
17.
Wilber K (1997) An integral theory of consciousness. Imprint Academic 4(1): 71–92.
18.
Juarrero A (2002) Complex dynamical systems and the problem of identity. Emergence 4(1–2): 98.
19.
Feinberg L (2006) Transgender liberation: a movement whose time has come. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 205.
20.
Bornstein K (1995) Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Vintage Books, 24.
21.
Green J (2006) Look! No, don’t! The visibility dilemma for transsexual men. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 504–505.
22.
Bornstein K (1995) Gender Outlaw, 26–31.
23.
Prosser J (2006) Judith Butler: queer feminism, transgender, and the transubstantiation of sex. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 62.
24.
Morgan LM and Towle EB (2006) Romancing the transgender native: rethinking the use of the ‘Third Gender’ concept. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 666–684.
25.
Roughgarden J (2013) Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
26.
Stoller R (2006) Selection from Biological Substrates of Sexual Behavior. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 55.
27.
Meredith SL (2015) Comparative perspectives on human gender development and evolution. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 156: 91.
28.
Stryker S (2006) (De)Subjugated knowledges: an introduction to transgender studies. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 9.
29.
Butler J (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 8.
30.
Stoller R (2006) Selection from Biological Substrates of Sexual Behavior, 53.
31.
Kessler SJ and McKenna W (2006) Toward a theory of gender. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 180.
32.
Kessler SJ and McKenna W (2006) Toward a theory of gender, 181.
33.
Butler J (1990) Gender Trouble, 9–10.
34.
Kessler SJ and McKenna W (2006) Toward a theory of gender, 171.
35.
Butler J (1990) Gender Trouble.
36.
Stryker S (2006) (De)Subjugated knowledges, 15.
37.
Morgan LM and Towle EB (2006) Romancing the transgender native, 669.
38.
Rubin H (2006) The logic of treatment. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 482–498.
39.
Rubin H (2006) The logic of treatment, 482–498.
40.
Sullivan N (2006) Transmogrification: (un)becoming other(s). In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 563.
41.
Prosser J (2006) Judith Butler, 271.
42.
Riddell C (2006) Divided sisterhood: a critical review of Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 154.
43.
Felski R (2006) Fin de siècle, Fin du sexe: transsexuality, postmodernism, and the death of history. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 565–573.
44.
Whittle S (2006) Where did we go wrong? Feminism and trans theory—two teams on the same side? In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 199.
45.
Haraway D (2006) A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 104.
46.
Haraway D (2006) A cyborg manifesto, 109.
47.
Haraway D (2006) A cyborg manifesto, 112.
48.
Hayles K (1999) How We Became Posthuman, 207.
49.
Hayles K (1999) How We Became Posthuman, 286.
50.
Singer BT (2006) From the medical gaze to sublime mutations: the ethics of (re)viewing non-normative body images. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 616.
51.
Singer BT (2006) From the medical gaze to sublime mutations, 601–620.
52.
Delio I (2013). The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 63.
53.
Panikkar R (2010) The Rhythm of Being: The Gifford Lectures. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 39.
54.
Pratt D (2002) Relational Deity: Hartshorne and Macquarrie on God. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, xxi.
55.
Panikkar R (2010) The Rhythm of Being, 474.
56.
Nolan A (2006) Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 10.
57.
Brierley MW (2004) Naming a quiet revolution: the panentheistic turn in modern theology. In: Clayton P and Peacocke A (eds) In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 9–10.
58.
Delio I (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, 69.
59.
Pratt D (2002) Relational Deity, 174.
60.
Pratt D (2002) Relational Deity, 4–6.
61.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man.
62.
Delio I (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, 64.
63.
Davies P (2004) Teleology without teleology: purpose through emergent complexity. In: Clayton P and Peacocke A (eds) In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 101.
64.
Panikkar R (2010) The Rhythm of Being, 278.
65.
Nolan A (2006) Jesus Today, 146.
66.
Delio I (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, 38.
67.
Delio I (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, 38–44.
68.
Delio I (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, 44.
69.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man, 264.
70.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man, 269.
71.
Merton T (2007 [1961]) New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 228.
72.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man: 260–264.
73.
Delio I (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, 80.
74.
Merton T (2007 [1961]) New Seeds of Contemplation, 295.
75.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man.
76.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man, 265.
77.
Teilhard de Chardin P (1959) The Phenomenon of Man, 267.
78.
Delio I (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, 99–100.
79.
Merton T (2007 [1961]) New Seeds of Contemplation, 60.
80.
Merton T (2007 [1961]) New Seeds of Contemplation, 99.
81.
Merton T (2007 [1961]) New Seeds of Contemplation.
82.
Nolan A (2006) Jesus Today, 144.
83.
Panikkar R (2010) The Rhythm of Being, 361.
84.
Panikkar R (2010) The Rhythm of Being, 100.
85.
Bornstein K (1995) Gender Outlaw, 95.
86.
Delio I (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, 45.
87.
Stone S (2006) The empire strikes back: a posttransexual manifesto. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 232.
88.
Delio I (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, 203.
89.
Delio I (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, 135.
90.
Stone S (2006) The empire strikes back, 231.
91.
Singer BT (2006) From the medical gaze to sublime mutations, 617.
92.
Haught JF (2000) God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 190.
93.
Henderson-Espinoza R (2018) Transing religion: moving beyond the logic of the (hetero) norm of binaries. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34(1): 90.
94.
Gregerson NH (2004) Three varieties of panentheism. In: Clayton P and Peacocke A (eds) In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 35.
95.
Hayles K (1999) How We Became Posthuman, 286.
96.
Althaus-Reid M and Isherwood L (2007) Thinking theology and queer theory. Feminist Theology 15(3): 306.
97.
Althaus-Reid M and Isherwood L (2007) Thinking theology and queer theory, 314.
98.
Thweatt-Bates J (2011) Artifical wombs and cyborg births: postgenderism and theology. In Cole-Turner R (ed.) Transhumanism and Transcendence: Christian Hope in an Age of Technological Enhancement. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 109.
99.
Brierley MW (2004) Naming a quiet revolution, 8.
100.
Clayton P and Peacocke A (2004) In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
101.
Panikkar R (2010) The Rhythm of Being.
102.
Ladin J (2018) In the image of God, God created them, 57.