Transgender Religious Life

The following is a guest post from SB Rodríguez-Plate, editor of CrossCurrents.

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Transgender Awareness Week culminates today. November 20th, with the Transgender Day of Remembrance. There are ceremonies, celebrations, and memorials being held all across the United States. As GLAAD notes: 

“At a time when transgender people have become targets of extreme political discrimination and violence, it’s imperative that anyone who is interested in and invested in protecting a free society learn the facts about who trans people are, become educated about the realities trans people face, and understand that our collective equality is connected to the safety and freedom of people who are transgender.”

From the perspectives of religion, and looking at so many of the news stories, it’s easy to think that it is religious people and powers that are standing in the way of this “free society” and “collective equality.” And while that is not incorrect, it’s simply not complete.

On one hand, we read about the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom pushing out court cases that actively discriminate against trans people. On the other hand, we read about a joint statement among Protestant Christian and Reform Jewish groups that support trans+, intersex, and non-binary people. 

On one hand, we see the Pope seemingly encouraging some kind of connection and dialogue with transgender people. On the other, we see the US Catholic Bishops work to place a ban on gender-affirming care for trans people at Catholic hospitals in the United States. 

Trans-Spiritualities at CrossCurrents

Speaking to these variances, we at CrossCurrents have just published a special issue on “Trans-Spiritualities.” 

Knowing that transgender life cannot be understood head on, but often requires a creative approach, we started by inviting several poets to speak about their experiences of trans livelihoods in connection with religious and spiritual life. This includes work by the trans poet and scholar Joy Ladin, who channels the divine feminine voice of shekinah; the Protestant minister of Judson Church in Greenwich Village, Micah Bucey, who offers a “praise hymn for my pronouns”; the trans-ally poet Bonnie Rose Marcus, who mourns the death of her trans partner; while the anger that many of us feel comes together in religious studies scholar Max Strassfield’s “Pour Your Rage on the Nations.” 

Then there are the personal accounts, woven with a variety of religious traditions. Ladin turns from poetry to prose to argue for a “trans theology” that is deeply woven with textual relations to the Torah and Talmud. Ray Buckner notes how his transitions have been part and parcel of a Buddhist understanding of becoming. Petra Peter Gardella provides personal accounts of their Catholic upbringing and the constant back and forth of male and female, innocent ecstasy and orgasmic spirituality. And Damien Pascal Domenack discusses embodied liberation through Afro-diasporic religious rituals. Meanwhile, journalist and writer David Van Biema draws up an extended essay on the Dominican Sister Luisa Derouen who has, for a quarter century, given much of her life to ministry to the trans community.  

None of these accounts are simple peaches and cream, and all have their struggles. And yet, each story, each poem, contains a longing for spiritual community, for co-creating rituals, for telling grand stories about self-creation, for believing in our own inherent spiritual goodness, for allowing our bodies to be who we were meant to be. 

As I note in a related essay at CrossCurrents’s sister website, The Commons, “We are always only becoming, acting even. Never stopping with ourselves but finding responsibility to being open to the world in ever new ways.” 

The introduction to Trans-Spiritualities, as well as Joy Ladin’s essay and poems, “Body Painting” and “Your Body,” will be freely accessible now through December 19, 2025.