About the author: Maxine King is an enthusiastic lay person and cantor in the Episcopal Church. She is currently a student of theology at Virginia Theological Seminary.
Last month, hundreds gathered for the funeral of Cecilia Gentili in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Cecilia was an activist, writer, and performer known especially for her organizing work in expanding trans health care access and campaigns to decriminalize sex work in New York. She was by all accounts much loved by New York’s trans and sex worker communities, a reputation borne out by the joyous funeral itself. Those gathered sang to one another, heard Cecilia’s baptismal identity recounted, read Holy Scripture to one another, offered prayers for Cecilia and the communities she was a part of and worked for, and chanted her name. There were also some wonderful outfits, a fact noted by the officiating priest at the beginning of the liturgy: “except on Easter Sunday we don’t really have a crowd that is this well turned out.”
My favorite moment occurred at the reading of the epistle. As the lector walked from the nave to the lectern, the congregation cheered her on and she kicked out her leg at the top of the steps to the thrill of the assembly. Reaching the lectern, she said, “We still gonna show up as us!”, to further cheers, and then read the following from St. John’s letter:
Beloved: See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
The richness of John’s letter itself was only intensified by the context of its proclamation. The general truth that was expressed in the reader’s brief aside is that when we encounter God in Holy Scripture and the rituals of the Church, we do so not as others imagine we should be, not as we wish we were, but as us—as we truly are. Even more, it communicated the particular truth that trans people and sex workers might show up to this Church and this funeral as they really were and, in the event of this reading, claim these words as written for them as those who are children of God. Yet so we are.
However, it was unlikely that such a proclamation would go unnoticed in this moment of intensifying anti-trans backlash when the specter of trans people existing in locker rooms, libraries, and classrooms is enough to mobilize new political movements of “parental rights”; when over 500 bills that target the already lacking legal protections for trans people have been introduced in U.S. state legislatures; and when prominent political figures can call for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated.” It was surely inevitable in such a context that such a public display of trans life and joy in a prominent Christian space such as St. Patrick’s, as us, would become the occasion for great scandal.
I am altogether uninterested in relitigating or defending any particular moments of “scandal” or “disruption” that occurred during the funeral—any such attempt would be an exercise in adjudicating a respectability set by the terms that the reactionaries introduced.1 The fundamental point is that, for trans people to show up in Christian spaces as us, and not as some “decent” imaginary version of ourselves, will inevitably be conceived of as blasphemy in Christian imaginations that deride trans existence itself.
The cathedral’s statement in response to the backlash is the incarnation of such an imagination, clearly meant to protest their own innocence while further inflaming the scandalized culture warriors against trans people and sex workers. The statement accuses the funeral’s organizers of being “deceptive” in their request, equates the funeral-goers with the “forces of sin and darkness” that Christians struggle against during Lent, and claims that the funeral was even more sacrilegious, because it took place at a national symbol (“America’s Parish Church”). It is a concise tour de force of Christian anti-trans ideology: accusing us of deceptively colluding with demons in our attempt to destroy Western civilization from within.2
But this is all fairly bog-standard (and, really, quite boring) anti-trans ideology. It was the last sentence of the Cathedral’s statement that made me the most furious: “At the Cardinal’s directive, we have offered an appropriate Mass of Reparation.” The matter-of-fact report of a ritual cleansing demanded by reactionaries, clothed in a washing-of-hands appeal to the bureaucracy of an episcopal command. And yet it too is instructive: to the anti-trans ideology behind the statement, for trans people and sex workers to simply show up to the Church as ourselves is to desecrate it. Even more, we simply are desecration, and even represent the apotheosis of all the desecrating tendencies of the crises of modernity itself!3
Yet, to many of the funeral’s participants (and to many of us who later watched its recording), it was the funeral itself that contained the true “reparation” of the true “desecration” that Christian churches and their members continually visit upon trans people and sex workers. In a response to the Cathedral’s statement, the funeral organizers were exactly right: “We brought precious life and radical joy to the Cathedral in historic defiance of the Church’s hypocrisy and anti-trans hatred. … [Cecilia’s] heart and hands reached those the sanctimonious Church continues to belittle, oppress, and chastise.” Yet, for those unable to see the Church as anything other than an object of desecration and the subject of reparation, the suggestion that the Church might be repaired from outside itself by those it has desecrated is theologically unimaginable.
And while some of us might attempt to take comfort in inhabiting a putatively progressive corner of Christendom, if we are truly honest, we are chief among the sanctimonious Christians who belittle, oppress, and chastise. We are just as capable (and just as historically culpable) of deputizing ourselves into the arbiters of decency, becoming too easily scandalized by those who do not fit our prior expectations for the children of God. Even those of us who are trans and have been accepted—however precariously or tentatively—into various churches can so easily slide into shoring up our own decency and ecclesial acceptance by disavowing the sex workers, the disabled, and the mad among us.4 Such impulses cannot be theologically justified without turning the scandal of divine revelation into a possession that we control and into standards of decency that we administer.5
But it could be otherwise. Instead of receiving Cecilia’s funeral as blasphemous desecration, the Church might have received it as a reparative gift. And we might yet receive the countless other acts of devotion and life and joy from those who have been belittled, oppressed, and chastised by the sanctimonious Church as invitations to repentance and solidarity. We might yet become a Church that cedes control of knowing what it will look like in advance, and able to truly proclaim the words of St. John’s letter with those who so often have been categorically excluded from its fellowship.
Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.6
I do confess my desire to litigate at least one point in the footnotes: it seems to me that most of the backlash cited the content of the eulogies as what was most scandalous (despite the officiant explicitly inviting the eulogies during the liturgy). In my view, any pastor in a formal liturgical tradition knows that allowing for unscripted eulogies during the funeral liturgy itself means accepting the great likelihood that things will be said that do not express a particular church’s doctrine. To allow for eulogies and then publicly condemn their content is foolishness and grave pastoral malpractice.
The statement’s similarity to Christian anti-Jewish discourse should not be overlooked—see here for a recent exploration of this connection in contemporary reactionary politics.
See §155 in Laudato Si where Pope Francis seems to materially link the climate crisis to the mere existence of trans people.
For one such analysis of how much trans discourse itself produces and reproduces such disavowals, see Cameron Awkward-Rich, The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Durham: Duke University Press), 2022.
For how Barth might be among the useful resources in countering a possessive approach to divine revelation, see my “Dogmatics Against the Church” also from God Here and Now.
Many thanks to Helen Avery Campbell for the conversation and encouragement to write on this.