Truth-in-Love

Back in 2014, I remember talking with a friend from graduate school who, at the time, was completing a Ph.D. program on the East Coast. Josephine is French, queer, thoughtful, and one of the only people I’ve ever met whose eyes actually smile. I was worried that she would be reproachful about my then-recent Catholic conversion, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She treated me, as always, with warmth and generosity. I remember listening to her description of the LGBT+ scene in New York City, how rapidly the transgender phenomenon was ramping up, especially among young people. “You don’t see butch lesbians anymore,” she said, “not under the age of 40.” I remember feeling saddened by this, disturbed that there was a certain genre of womanhood that was quietly being erased.

While I was in the process of writing this book, Josephine contacted me out of the blue, and we met for a chat over Zoom. The first part of our conversation consisted of mutual confessions: Josephine, an atheist, was working on a book that kept pulling toward the idea of incarnation, which in her European academic milieu was a major faux pas. “Mentioning Catholicism in a remotely positive way is just not done,” she said, laughing. I explained to her my own book project, which pushes back against the gender paradigm.

This was not much of a confession, at first. She acknowledged the dangers of gender nonconforming kids being “thrown into a framework” that leads them unnecessarily to the path of medicalization. “But some kids are transgender,” she said. “That’s just a reality.” I could feel a chasm forming between us along with the immediate temptation to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t there. I was beginning to fear the moment when Josephine would realize we were not standing on the same side of the precipice. This moment came when I admitted that I was not convinced that medical transition was ever a good thing. “Even for adults?” she asked. I nodded, and then we were out of the safe zone. I could sense a slow dawning on her end of the realization that my views would fall into the category of what she considered to be transphobic.

This part of the conversation began with a discussion of incarnation and a shared recognition that this notion expresses the idea of body and spirit united, as “always together,” to use Josephine’s words. “Doesn’t a transgender anthropology conflict with that idea?” I ventured. “How can the body and spirit be one, if that union must be inflicted on the body?” “Inflicted”—that was the word I used, and she reacted strongly to it.

“How is a sex change more of a punishment on the body than the punishment of having to try and have sex with a body that isn’t right?” she asked. “Wouldn’t that be even more traumatizing?” For some people, she argued, transition is the path to self-acceptance. “Sex change can be a gift to one’s own incarnation,” she said.

I wish I’d had the clarity and nerve to respond in that moment, to say that sexual gratification is not an end in itself, that incarnation is not something we create but something we receive. In the moment, I wasn’t sure what to say. I told her as much, and our conversation stalled into awkward silence. Josephine was voicing a side of this complicated story that I wanted to ignore: the fact that plenty of transgender people appear to be satisfied with their transitions. The evidence for this is often anecdotal, yes, due to the dearth of long-term studies on surgical reassignment outcomes. (The one long-term study that exists, in fact, shows a twenty-fold increase in suicidality after transition.) . . . There are well-adjusted transgender people in the world who find some relief through transition. That is true, and Josephine was right to point this out.

After the lull, I decided to tease out Josephine’s perspective. “How do you define ‘woman’?” I asked her.

“Woman!” she said. “Ah, woman is magic.” We laughed together at this; her effusiveness warmed me, pulling me out of the shell I’d ducked into. She went on, “There’s something problematic in deciding from the outset what ‘woman’ is. Every category is a simplification of multiplicity. Each person who is a woman relates to it differently.”

“So, do you see ‘woman’ as a kind of archetype, or . . . ?”

She thought for a moment. “No, not an archetype—woman is an art form.”

I smiled at this idea. “OK, so how does the art form of ‘woman’ differ from the art form of ‘man’?”

“Man is not an art form!” She laughed at this, and I had to laugh too, even though I disagreed, thinking passingly of Michelangelo’s David—more so the resplendent bodies of my sons, my husband. Man is a magnificent art form.

“I think about ‘woman’ like I think about ‘lesbian,’” Josephine continued with a more serious tone. She described the standard nominalist position that many feminists hold—the idea that categories like “woman” and “lesbian” are constructs, but necessary for activism. “You need the category for political struggle,” she said, “keeping in mind that it’s a fiction.”

“I guess that’s where I disagree,” I said. “I don’t think ‘woman’ is a fiction; I think we need a definition of ‘woman’ that is grounded in the body. If it’s grounded in the bodily potentiality of femaleness, being a woman doesn’t have to be about conforming to sex stereotypes. There’s something freeing about that.”

Josephine hesitated. “Yes, I do want to think that ‘woman’ is grounded in the body in some way,” she admitted. “I’m not entirely satisfied with my own answers!”

I realized then that we were feeling the same tension, but from different angles. I was unwilling to compromise my convictions that the sexed body matters and is integral to the self. But I felt the draw of taking an affirming political stance, in order to make intelligible another conviction: that trans-identifying people are beloved and made in the image of God. Josephine, in contrast, was unwilling to betray her political convictions, even though she felt a pull toward an embodied understanding of woman. We found ourselves at an impasse.

As a Catholic Christian, I am beholden to a twofold truth: the dignity of every human being and the dignity of the sexed human body. These truths are entwined, inseparable. A transgender anthropology says, whether implicitly or explicitly, that I can only affirm the former by rejecting the latter. I can only proclaim a trans person’s dignity by agreeing that his or her body is a lie. This puts me in a double bind, a no-win scenario. If I say that sex matters, I’m put on a one-way train to presumptive transphobia. If I say that sex doesn’t matter, I’m betraying the truth of my own embodiment and the truth of God’s self-revelation. I need to make peace with being misunderstood, because both prongs of the twofold truth need to be spoken—with compassion, to be sure, but spoken nonetheless.

Debates about gender and sexuality, especially in Christian circles, tend to split into two opposing camps, one staking a flag on Love, the other on Truth. I feel this apparent tension most painfully around the use of language. To affirm the dignity and personhood of a trans-identifying person, one is expected to use pronouns that align with the chosen gender, rather than the given sex. To “misgender” someone is seen as an act of violence, an erasure of existence. I understand this argument. A transgender identity is not primarily rooted in material reality, but in language. This is why there is so much fervor over words, a concerted effort to use language in a way that reflects transgender anthropology. If I use the word “he” to refer to a male who identifies as a transwoman, I am denying his existence as a woman. Of course, I am also simultaneously affirming his existence as a man, and as a human being.

Using sex-based pronouns, rather than gender-based pronouns, is undoubtedly disruptive and likely offensive to most trans-identified people. Such a move could close the door to a relationship with that person from the outset. Yet, if I use pronouns that conflict with sex, I am assenting to an untruth. More than assenting, in fact; through my own words I am actively participating in a lie.

Speak the truth in love. This is a phrase I hear bandied about, a phrase I find myself turning to, whenever I feel pulled in these opposing directions, these at-odds affirmations. This phrase too easily becomes a platitude, simple and trite, a scriptural fragment conveniently used to carve a party line. These words come from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, chapter four—a passage, it turns out, that is about not partisanship and division, but wholeness.

The chapter begins with a litany of unity: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, who is “above all and through all and in all.” This is a passage about ecclesiology, the nature of the Church, how the Christian community draws together all kinds of individuals, each with different gifts, into a cohesive whole. This whole is called a body—that’s the metaphor Paul uses here, relying on the integral reality of the body to illustrate his vision of the Church. The personal wholeness of body and soul is not simply a foundational tenet of Christian anthropology; it also grounds Christian ecclesiology. “Speaking the truth in love,” Paul writes, “we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love” (Ephesians 4:15–16). Truth and love are one, because they spring from the same source, the fountainhead of Christ, the Incarnate Word.

God’s truth is love, and God’s love is truth. If we ever find ourselves in a situation where we are sacrificing one for the other, we’ve wandered off the narrow track. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul gives us an image of what pseudo-truth sans love sounds like: a clanging cymbal, a cacophonous mess. Perhaps the counterimage—faux love sans truth—would be an advertising jingle, simpering and circular. Love divorced from truth descends into mere flattery. It is not loving to validate a lie. It is not loving to participate in someone’s self-deception. To learn how best to love someone, we must be willing to reckon with the truth of the human person, which is found not merely in our self-written stories, but in the overarching story of the whole.

When it comes to men and women, we need to use reality-based language. Within the gender paradigm, words are wielded to enforce a framework that distorts the reality and goodness of the body, particularly its sexed duality. This distortion perpetuates itself by hijacking language. I feel the temptation to acquiesce, to say the affirming thing, the unoffensive thing. I am also aware that, in doing so, I secure myself as part of the in crowd, the non-bigots, the illuminati on history’s right side. Less selfishly, I also want to express my belief that a trans person has infinite worth and is made for loving communion, like all human beings. Because of this, my affections and sentiments pull strongly in the direction of affirmation.

Whenever possible, I avoid pronouns when directly speaking with or writing about trans-identifying people, in order to avoid unnecessarily alienating someone I am called to love. But I can’t go further than this. Each time I think about making a full linguistic concession, something stops me. I run into a hard boundary, a line my conscience has marked not in sand, but stone. To call a male “she” is a lie, an inversion of the reality that that word names, a reality I happen to belong to, one that I have not chosen, but that has chosen me. I object to the very concept of preferred pronouns, because pronouns do not name a preference. “She” names what I am, my female birthright, with all its blessings and burdens. To give away that word would be a kind of betrayal: of myself, my sex, and those bodily threads knit by nature and grace that bind us to Christ, and also to the earth, to all her teeming life.

Love-in-Truth

We are loved with an infinite love that bestows upon us an infinite dignity. The boundless love of God ennobles every human person. Through the ever-present miracle of the Incarnation, each of us has been taken up into the very life of God. These words are my riff on the pontiff; I’m playing with phrases that vibrate with beauty from Pope Francis’ letter Evangelii gaudium. In this letter, Pope Francis describes what he calls the art of accompaniment, an art that begins by teaching us “to remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other.” . . .

Recently a mutual friend put me in touch with Adelynn, a vibrant young person who identifies as a transwoman. Addy, a devout Christian, was eager to speak with me after listening to a podcast interview I’d done about gender theory and Christian theology. And I was just as eager to speak with Addy. In the course of writing this book, I have spoken with a number of trans people who hold a range of political and religious beliefs, but none of them have a theologically traditional Christian perspective. Either they aren’t Christian at all, or they have drifted into heterodoxy and perhaps out of the faith altogether. Addy, then, is something of a unicorn—a young person who embraces both orthodox Christianity and a trans identity.

I tell this to Addy as we launch into our first conversation over Zoom. “I’ve been trying to find someone, some thinker, who can harmonize a Christian anthropology with a trans anthropology, but—”

“There’s no one,” Addy cuts in, anticipating my next words. “No one!”

Addy is working on this, though, drawing together three theological threads in an attempt to make a positive case for transition from a Christian perspective. The first thread is a reading of the Fall that situates trans people as living paradoxes, people who experience a disconnect between mind and body that is a consequence of living in a world that has lost its original harmony. Addy returns to this theme repeatedly during our conversation, gesturing toward the promise of the resurrection, the restoration of all creation: “God will fix whatever he needs to fix, whether that’s my head or my body.” In this reading of the Fall, that reconciliation of body and mind might not be attainable in this life; the psychosomatic unity that should be present in each person is simply not there for some, and so the question becomes how to live, to survive, amidst that discordance.

This is where the second guiding thread comes in: What would promote preservation of the whole? In Addy’s experience thus far, this preservation has come in the form of transition—specifically, almost six years of taking cross-sex hormones, after adopting a female social and legal identity in college. This is an example of what you might call a classic case of gender dysphoria, rather than the wave of rapid-onset gender dysphoria that is sweeping through teenagers today. Addy first experienced a sense of incongruence as a child, and that feeling persisted into young adulthood, when it manifested in debilitating physical symptoms, such as daily vomiting and severe underweight. Those symptoms have dissipated; Addy is now much more functional and, because of this, does not regret transition.

Still, the unresolved theological tensions are at times a source of unrest in Addy, who, unlike my younger self, is not hand-waving away the difficult questions in order to construct an easy, tailor-made theology that only affirms and never confronts. This is someone who is actively grappling with truth—like Jacob in the dead of night, wrestling with that mysterious divine being until daybreak, refusing to let go until he is blessed.

When Addy began transition, this refusal took the form of a resolute vow: “I am not cutting myself off from the church.” The few hours spent in church on Sunday were blissful, “a slice of heaven,” like being momentarily transported out of the world and all its painful paradoxes. “I didn’t want to leave after the benediction,” Addy tells me, and this consolation kindled a desire to be in church more regularly. “But it turns out that if you want to go to church every day, the only real option is a Catholic Mass.” So that’s where Addy went: Catholic Mass on the weekdays and a vibrant multiethnic reformed church on Sundays.

This ardent commitment to the church has not always been reciprocated. For most of our conversation, Addy is upbeat and smiling, speaking words that reveal a deep love for Christ and his people. But there are also flashes of pain, glimpses into unhealed wounds—wounds of abandonment and rejection. In relation to roots, Addy is an exile; transitioning in college resulted in public shunning by the church community, with no warning or attempt at reconciliation. That rejection was soon mirrored by Addy’s own family, and the resulting rupture has lasted for six years so far. This brings us to the third thread, the recurrent presence of the outcast in Scripture and Christian history: the eunuch, the leper—the person who doesn’t fit in and is, too often, exiled.

This aspect of Addy’s experience exemplifies one approach Christians can take in response to those within the gender paradigm—this is the way of ostracism, separation, a holy “us” opposed to an ousted “them.” But this, I would argue, is an approach that prizes truth to the exclusion of love, and is thus a counterfeit truth. Even churches that do not explicitly reject or shun people like Addy have little to offer in terms of a positive vision of how to live out the more challenging teachings of the Christian life. As Addy puts it, the Church, for the most part, “is not coming alongside and saying, this is how we will help you bear this.”

I see in this story another possible model for Christians to follow as we navigate a confused and polarizing culture. After finishing college, Addy eventually ended up with a Catholic roommate. After experiencing so much rejection from Christians, Addy wasn’t sure how this roommate would respond. But the roommate did something rather remarkable. Instead of being wary and suspicious, she was warm and friendly. Instead of telling Addy what to think and believe, she asked about Addy’s perspective and how one can reconcile Christian theology with the choice to pursue transition. These questions, and the spirit in which they were asked, sparked rich and lengthy theological conversations between the roommates. Avoiding the easy extremes of condemnation on the one hand and fawning affirmation on the other, Addy’s roommate chose to cultivate a relationship, to ask genuine questions, and eventually, to extend an invitation to Eucharistic Adoration.

Addy’s face lights up at this part of the story, this initial encounter with adoration: “I love it!” Once again I’m struck by the beauty of Addy’s heart—a heart like that of the bride in the Song of Songs, who calls out to her beloved, draw me after you (Song of Songs 1:4 New American Bible). This is what Christ is doing: patiently, lovingly, he is drawing Addy to himself.

The Christians in Addy’s hometown show one possible response to those who identify as LGBT+. But Addy’s roommate shows us a different, more Christlike way—the way of accompaniment rather than rejection; the way of love, rather than the way of fear.

Accompaniment is a way of journeying with someone deeper into the heart of Christ. Contrary to the cliché, conversion is not a one-time zap; the Holy Spirit is not a fairy godmother who makes you insta-ready for the ball. Conversion is a steady pilgrimage, a long trek into the heart of God. There are detours and switchbacks along the way; none of us hike straight; none of us can manage alone. Accompaniment evokes this sense of conversion over time, as well as the need for community along the way. Pope Francis makes a distinction between accompaniment as a pilgrimage with someone versus a “sort of therapy supporting their self-absorption.” . . . In other words, true accompaniment has a telos, a destination; it is ordered toward the highest love. While it should begin with affirmation of an individual’s worth, it cannot end there. We must journey toward the source of that worth, wherein lies our peace.

When I made a sudden hairpin turn toward Catholicism at the age of thirty, I was not on board with many of the Church’s teachings. I was not a typical, respectable Protestant, repelled by the macabre excess of Catholicism, her weeping statues and saints’ bones, her gruesome crucifixes. I wanted a cross with a body hanging on it; I longed to open my lips and taste the Blood of Christ; I would have loved to touch Saint Catherine of Siena’s desiccated head with my bare, trembling hands. But I didn’t understand or welcome the Church’s resistance to contraception, female priests, and same-sex marriage, and I became Catholic before having those questions resolved. My initial conversion was like going blind down a twisting slide and coming out head-first and breathless, eyes opened to a spinning, upside-down world. I didn’t immediately adopt every Catholic teaching in my personal life. I skipped over the phrase for us men in the Creed. I was mostly trekking alone, with no Catholic family members or close friends to guide me. I was “accompanied” only by a former-student-turned-seminarian, Stephen, to whom I brought all my objections, my unresolved questions. I grilled him on contraception, the priesthood, sexuality. Most of the time his answers pissed me off, and I neither accepted nor dismissed them. I let them kick around in my head like pinballs, until, over a period of months, each of them pinged home.

If Stephen had come out pistols blazing, grilling me on my sex life, calling me out for skipping words in the Creed, dissuading me from attending Mass until my sin-duckies were all in a row—I might not have entered the Church at all. Or I might have stayed an ambivalent Catholic, defensive and suspicious, holding myself off from full communion with the truth. He didn’t. He was open and patient; he listened to me; he took my concerns seriously, and he waited for me to come to him with my questions, rather than cornering me and forcing a conversation. When I did come to him, he was honest in his responses. He did not sugarcoat or equivocate; he spoke the difficult truths, in a spirit of nonjudgment. For this, I will always be grateful.

Even as we speak honestly about the machinations of the gender paradigm, we have to realize that there are real people, real lives, being churned up in its gears. We have to welcome these people into our parishes, into our families, into our communities. It is possible to judge whether an ideology is true or false—but we cannot judge persons; we have not been granted access to the inner chambers of the human heart. Each person’s status before God is a mystery that cannot be known from without. We must critique the framework, in the appropriate time and place, while embracing those who are caught up in that framework, no matter how they look or sound.

We need to accept that men and women might not look like we expect them to look. If you happen to see someone who might be transgender, you still have no idea whether that person is in the midst of transition or detransition. Because some aspects of medical transition are irreversible, even a woman who has embraced her sex might still look transgender. She might always have masculinized features. That doesn’t make her any less of a woman. Surgical reversals, even if desired, might not always be possible or could pose serious health risks.

Lee, a woman who suffered horrific sexual abuse as a child, medically transitioned late in life. She now regrets transition but has decided not to undergo reversal surgeries. “My body can’t take it. I’m not sure I’d survive all the surgeries,” she says. “I have to accept my body the way it is now. On the outside people see a little bloke. Inside I’m a traumatized little girl. But I’m more accepting of myself for the first time ever. I just wish I’d been helped to accept myself earlier.” For people like Lee, self-acceptance means embracing the body as it currently is. . . .

Of course, the gender-atypical woman you see in your local parish might not be trans-identified at all. She might just be a woman who has short hair and likes to wear men’s shirts. Both narrow-minded traditionalists and postmodern genderists fall prey to the same error: defining manhood and womanhood by stereotypical caricatures and policing those stereotypes, assessing how well individuals conform, or fail to conform, to a fantasized ideal. Part of countering the gender paradigm must be a greater openness to the variability within the categories of man and woman. Think of Saint Joan the warrior, Saint Dominic the beggar—the gentleness of Saint Francis de Sales, the fortitude of Saint Catherine of Siena. One quick tour through the halls of the communion of saints reveals motley manifestations of feminine or masculine genius that defy a singular mold.

I was given ample room to meander in my journey toward the truth, and the winding path I took unfolded largely within the community of the Church, rather than outside a high, locked gate. The Church is not for ready-made saints. The Church is for sinners, doubters, half-brewed Christians, conversions-in-process, tipsy wagon-riders who tumble off and climb back on again. Our parishes must be places where the truth is preached, yes—and also places where people are allowed to fumble their way toward it, gradually being made new.