Christians Must Not Compromise on Trans People's Unconditional Worth
And We Must Make Communication Possible
About the author: Ed Watson is a PhD candidate at Yale University, focusing on questions of theology and conceptualization. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring the relationships between Christian talk of grace and racial difference.
Trans life writ large has never been particularly easy. All the same, trans people are under unprecedented attack in this present moment.
Christians are faced with a stern and forbidding moral demand. Navigating the world requires pragmatism and discernment, but there can be no hedging or half-measures when it comes to the ends for which Christians are called to work. In this case, there is an absolute moral obligation to make real a truth that is under attack—the truth that trans people are the beloved of God and are becoming what God has created them to be. What this looks like will be different in different cases, and the character of the demand is different for trans and non-trans Christians. But even if freedom of religion is not guaranteed by secular power, the freedom to make this truth real is a Christian “religious” freedom in the most proper sense, framed by the command of God's grace to have no fear of those who cannot kill the soul.
My conviction in this regard is first grounded in Scripture. I am not going to dwell on exegesis here, but I am unable to read Genesis 1:27 or Galatians 3:28 in any way that does not guarantee the divine and graced character of trans life.1 It is secondly grounded in the trans people I know. I will not put anyone on a pedestal, but I have seen the difference between people whose existence is out of joint with themselves and people living into who God calls them to be. If the trans people I know are not being made in the heart of God's eternity, then no one is.
I have a third and negative ground alongside these two positive grounds for conviction. This has less to do with trans people themselves and more to do with society as a whole. I spend a great deal of my time reading 19th and 20th century texts defending Jim Crow segregation, including the spectacle of lynchings that brought into full view the violence of this everyday order of things. At the heart of this defense, all the way from 1865 to 1969, was the specter of interracial sex, specifically black men having sex with white women. On the one hand, black men were coded as threats to innocent white women; on the other, the prospect of white blood being corrupted by blackness was held as an existential threat to white survival, all too often in the name of innocent white children. These appeals justified any violence. They justified any political order that “protected” women and children from corrupting blackness. There are substantial dis-analogies between the language of interracial sex and the language of gender, and I want to be clear that I am not trying to equate people who have sincere doubts about trans realities with white supremacists. My claims here are not moral ones, and I will go on record saying that, for all my conviction, I do believe that such doubts can very much be held in good faith.
I will, however, note that anti-trans rhetoric is being used to formally analogous effects in American contexts. The instinctive desire to protect vulnerable people is transfigured into a willingness to eliminate racialized and gendered threats, whether directly or indirectly. The nature of these threats is then articulated as simple transgressions of nature. The racial logics of Jim Crow were treated as self-evident in the same way as “common-sense” logics of gender. I also read, again and again, words written by Christians who were subsumed by Jim Crow logics—who, at best, failed to work against the brutalities of racial violence, and worst, led lynch mobs in the name of God.
There are differences between then and now. These differences do not ameliorate the danger of appeals to violence grounded in natural necessity made in the name of protecting those who cannot defend themselves.
Taken together with the simple commands of Christian obedience, Christians have an absolute and non-negotiable freedom not just to defend trans people but to make real the conditions of trans flourishing and to make unreal the worlds that would threaten this flourishing.
The difficulty, however, is that this freedom cannot be exhausted by a freedom to proclaim truths in the hope that others will receive them. To think with Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments, part of the problem here is that the conditions for truth too often do not obtain–even if we hear or speak the truth, it cannot be understood. I imagine that many of you reading have had the experience of realizing that you cannot communicate with another person on matters of trans life (Micah Cronin has written movingly of something like this on this blog). We often come up against an adamantine barrier of disagreement, past which we cannot move. We arrive at a difference in bedrock convictions so foundational that further conversation becomes impossible or violent. It is not just that we cannot agree to disagree—it is that my conviction renders my companion's conviction unthinkable and vice versa. Since we cannot bear to trouble the foundations of our thinking, there is no possible encounter beyond refusal. This experience often provokes frustration, anger, disorientation, isolation, and despair. The question becomes, “how can someone think what they think, and why can't they make sense of what I am trying to say?” Often, this question arises when people we know to be loving, kind, and generous do not see something we see, because of how they have taught us to see. In such cases, Christian freedom cannot just be freedom for proclamation, whether in person or online. We must seek the freedom to create conditions where we can speak in the same world.
What, then, is to be done where these conditions do not exist?
The first thing to note is that this situation usually has a deeper foundation than truth claims can reach. In my experience, the impossibility of communication is grounded in matters of meaning before it is grounded in fact. What a fact is depends upon what it means, and so where two people speak the same words but inhabit different worlds of meaning, it can be difficult, to put it mildly, to enter the same communicative space.
Secondly, “meanings” are not ethereal objects waiting to be expressed. Meanings are made, and how we learn to make meanings is a function of how we are formed. Stanley Cavell expresses the depth of this making and this formation in a passage that has been foundational for my research, and which I cite here in full:
When you say “I love my love” the child learns the meaning of the word “love” and what love is. That (what you do) will be love in the child's world; and if it is mixed with resentment and intimidation, then love is a mixture of resentment and intimidation, and when love is sought that will be sought. When you say “I'll take you tomorrow, I promise,” the child begins to learn what temporal durations are, and what trust is, and what you do will show what trust is worth. When you say “Put on your sweater,” the child learns what commands are and what authority is, and if giving orders is something that creates anxiety for you, then authorities are anxious, authority itself uncertain. Of course the person, growing, will learn other things about these concepts and “objects” also. They will grow gradually as the child's world grows. But all he or she knows about them is what he or she has learned, and all they have learned will be part of what they are ... What we learn is not just what we have studied; and what we have been taught is not just what we were intended to learn. What we have in our memories is not just what we have memorized.2
Cavell does not use the language of “making” or “formation” here. This passage nonetheless expresses both how meanings are made—through saying “I love you” in a way that communicates resentment; saying “I promise” and then going back on one’s word—and how we are formed to make meanings as we learn to render “love” as what we have been taught of love. This is true at the levels of intellect and emotion because “concepts” are always suffused with affect, and “affects” are bound up with concepts. Often, we cannot communicate with each other because we have been formed to make meanings in ways that introduce an invisible distance.
Thirdly, formation does not stop. As we age, we tend to grow less obviously malleable, but we are always being formed to make meanings in new ways, whether we realize this or not. This is most evident in the force of propaganda, a mode of communication that gains power from its capacity to reshape one’s vision. Through emotional manipulation and a false communication of implicit necessity (among other things), propaganda invites its audiences to adopt the practices of meaning-making that make sense of the world it presents without ever having to make this work explicit. The most effective advertisements shape consumer desire, for example, rather than offering a product that will satisfy existing desires.
Theological language is invested with extraordinary formative power. Even at its most abstruse and esoteric levels, theological reflection is an attempt to make sense of some fundamental desire, some fundamental pain, some fundamental question. Follow a question of Christology to its driving source, and you will often find a soul that wishes to understand itself in relation to God. As a result, theology can be a tool for ideological closure. When theology is used to provide definitive answers to existential questions, particularly those concerning gender, it can foreclose the possibility of any other world of meaning. After all, if my entire sense of self rests on a particular understanding of God's design, then I cannot leave the world of this understanding without losing myself, even if I believe that salvation depends on accepting that loss.
However, theology can also be a medium for making visible the work of meaning-making and stepping into the space of indistinction that divides irreconcilable worlds of meaning. Suppose I am invited to reflect on how I have been shaped to understand salvation and how this understanding informs my sense of myself. In that case, I can begin to discern some of the things I have learned without consciously studying them. And as I begin to discern these things, I can make my meaning-making practices visible to myself. This need not be in terms of the matter directly at hand. We can make our practices of meaning-making visible with regard to gender by bringing wider practices into view through theological reflection on other subjects. In discourses on salvation, this need not be any more complex than learning to say “fear for my immortal soul leads me to desire a feeling of incontestable worth” or “the idea that I must earn my salvation has made me afraid of any imperfection.” These realizations express habits of mind through which everything else makes sense. And when I can see these habits of mind more clearly, I can learn to see the space that renders communication impossible more clearly—perhaps even to such an extent that I can invite others into this space, and so finally meet someone from whom I have become isolated.
Theologians can perform this work of making visible as an invitation, not an imposition. In contrast to propaganda, which seeks to conceal our work of meaning-making from us through manipulation, theologians can engage in and invite others to adopt a contemplative practice that makes us visible to ourselves and each other. This is hard work. It cannot be done outside of conversation, requiring me to speak to you-singular rather than you-plural. It also typically requires good faith engagement—I am thinking here of discussions with people of good faith who disagree on points of foundational conviction, of whom there are many. Where communication has become impossible, theological discourse can nonetheless create the conditions for a meaningful encounter. We can learn to inhabit our depths by speaking a language that expresses the deepest human desires.
In the course of his reflections on “love,” “trust,” and “authority,” Cavell also poses the question, “what will the day be like when the person 'realizes' what he 'believed' about what love and trust and authority are? And how will he stop believing it?”3 Christians are formed to love and trust a God whose authority is the final ground for what "love" is, for better or worse. We are also formed to believe certain things about the differences that God has made us to inhabit. It is a small thing, but theology can be used to unsettle the certainties of our formation, especially insofar as it has been used to ossify them. It can be used to make the unconditional worth of trans people visible where others work to deny this worth by making it unthinkable. Put otherwise, theological reflection can create the conditions for hearing truth, then making this truth real.
I do not have space here to go into the “how” of this unsettling beyond what I have gestured to above—this is for another time. I also do not want to idealize the possibility of communication (though I fully confess that I am an idealist here). We may communicate effectively, but still find conflicts unresolved. But the faith by which I know that Christ died and rose for me compels me to pursue this work as fundamental to my Christian freedom. Barth is well known for his conviction that theology can destroy our idols. This is work for theologians, both “academic” and “non-academic,” who converse out of love for those who have been taught that idols are of God and out of an uncompromising commitment to those who are being sacrificed to those idols, in faith that God might act through our freedom.
For a very recent collection of trans Biblical interpretation, see Joseph A. Marchal, Melissa Harl Sellew and Katy E. Valentine, eds., Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture (Westminster John Knox, 2025).
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, and Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 1999), 177.
Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 177.
I am by no means an expert here, but I note that your article hinges on the analogy of treatment for trans identifying children with racial discrimination. You do not mention that the key argument facing the Supreme Court's upcoming decision is the argument that race is not the crucial analogy, but age. The analogy with age points towards the potential of child abuse in which all sides must be protected from harm, both enablers and participants. Now how does one determine which analogy is more appropriate re: the trans debate? That's what's at stake in the coming weeks. But this article, for better or for worse, considers one analogy alone, the racial, as if that's all there is to it.