Roundtable: Toward a Transfeminist

Religious Studies

Transing Religious Studies

Max Strassfeld

Keywords: bathroom bills, Mary Daly, transgender, transmisogyny

When Joy Ladin transitioned in 2008, a media firestorm erupted. Ladin

is a tenured professor of English at Yeshiva University, which bills itself as
the oldest university in the United States to combine Jewish and secular
learning. She was hailed in the media as the first transsexual teaching in
an Orthodox yeshiva. The response from the institution was swift: Yeshiva
University forced her to fight for her position, a fight in which she was ulti-
mately successful.
In addition to being a poet and professor of English, Ladin is, notably,
an expert in trans studies in religion. In Ladin’s memoir, Through the Door
of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders, she analyzes the press coverage
of her transition. One of the most widely circulated news stories was an arti-
cle that appeared in the New York Post entitled “Ye-SHE-va University is
Rattled by Transgender Prof.” The New York Post, in general, is not prone
to offering thoughtful observations on gender and Judaism, but as Ladin
notes in her memoir, she became the punchline of the article.1 The pun

1
 Joy Ladin, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). For the original article to which Ladin was responding,
see Rebecca Rosenberg, “Ye-SHE-va University Rattled by Transgender Prof.,” New York Post,
September 8, 2008. The New York Post is famously conservative—Rupert Murdoch purchased
the paper in 1976 after which a marked shift in its editorial policy resulted. See David McKnight’s
article on Murdoch’s neoliberalism and his influence on the media: “‘A World Hungry for a New
Philosophy’: Rupert Murdoch and the Rise of Neo-Liberalism,” Journalism Studies 4, no. 3 (2003):
347–58. For the New York Post, titles that employ puns are nothing new: In the same issue as the

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.1 (2018), 37–53

Copyright © 2018 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.  •  doi: 10.2979/jfemistudreli.34.1.05

-37-
38 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.1

“Ye-SHE-va” (accomplished by changing an i to an e) was congruent with the

rest of the newspaper’s tone. And yet, in indulging in a pun about a trans-
woman, the New York Post unwittingly or not participated in an established
genre.2 This formulation of transsexuality offers an easy transphobic and
misogynist laugh.
“Ye-SHE-va” becomes something much more than standard transphobia in
the article, however; it functions as a pun about the incongruity of transfemi-
nine bodies in Orthodox Jewish space. As Ladin writes:
But even for the Post, the joke of transsexuality is stale. Few New York–
area transsexuals make tabloid headlines. What made my story tab-
loid-worthy was the incongruity of a transsexual, the quintessence of
a secular individualism that says we are all free to define our identities,
teaching at an institution for which identity, including gender, is defined
in terms of divine law. Transsexuals (in tight shirts and flirty skirts no
less) and Orthodox Jews—what could be funnier?3

“Ye-SHE-va” renders Orthodox Judaism and trans as mutually exclusive terms.

The “SHE” that disruptively breaks up yeshiva relies implicitly on a stereo-
type of Judaism as misogynistic and by extension, transphobic. The article,
which in its entirety displays all the classic hallmarks of both transphobia and
transmisogyny, at the same time displaces that transphobia onto religion in a
phenomenal sleight of hand. To make the secular coverage in the New York
Post trans-positive, Judaism becomes the scapegoat.4 Moreover, the tension
between yeshiva and university (“secular” and religious modes) is mapped onto
Judaism and transsexuality.5 In this formulation, transsexual becomes secular,
modern, neoliberal, and feminized, while Judaism is religious, sexist, legalistic,
cisgender, and masculinized. Neither religion nor transsexuals fare well in this
comparison.

story about Ladin is the deeply problematic “This Curry Is Too Spicy,” an article on the host of the
Today show Ann Curry. The reference to Curry obliquely conjures Curry’s race while relegating her
to the status of food.
2
 For a discussion of the use of humor to humiliate and shame transwomen, see Kate
Bornstein, Gender Outlaw (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. 87–93.
3
 Ladin, Through the Door of Life, 11–12.
4
  I am not arguing that all forms of Judaism are feminist or trans-positive or that Judaism is
not guilty of misogyny. I am, however, calling out the way transphobia and sexism is assigned to
Judaism. The move to frame Judaism as the originator of misogyny has its own anti-Semitic his-
tory. See Judith Plaskow’s classic response to Christian feminist anti-Semitism: “Blaming Jews for
Inventing Patriarchy,” Lilith 7 (1980): 11–12.
5
  The secularity of the university system is, of course, debatable. See Robert Orsi’s classic
essay “Snakes Alive: Religious Studies between Heaven and Earth,” in Robert Orsi, Between Heaven
and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005): 177–205.
 Roundtable: Toward a Transfeminist Religious Studies 39

In this opening to our roundtable conversation, I ask us to consider the

effects of this constructed incongruity between religion and transgender—both
the direct impacts on trans people and the legacy within religious studies as an
academic pursuit. In my essay, I read closely the language of Mississippi HB
1523 (an example of bathroom bills) in order to think through how the cate-
gory of religion is being negotiated on the backs of trans people. I then analyze
the special scrutiny of transwomen’s bodies in particular and argue that the
history of religious studies (and feminist scholarship in the field) has colluded
with transmisogyny. I end by posing a question: if both religion and religious
studies have been positioned as cisgendered, what might it look like to trans
religious studies?
A final note: perhaps it is banal but it bears reasserting—the intersection
of religion and trans cannot be predetermined. There is neither a singular
“religion” nor a singular “trans.” The imbrication of trans bodies, trans textu-
alities, trans lives, and trans religions must be understood within the contexts
in which they occur. This essay, therefore, cannot be exhaustive; I hope my
fellow discussants will take us beyond the limitations of my (US-centered,
Jewish, gender nonconforming/transmasculine inflected) snapshot of transing
religion.

Mississippi HB 1523: Anti-Trans Bills and the

Freedom of (Cisgender) Religion
Mississippi House Bill (HB) 1523 seeks to regulate trans people’s access
to public facilities. The law’s authors framed it in terms of freedom of religion
and wrote it to specifically protect a religious belief in the gender binary. At
the time of this writing, the law has gone into effect. The Supreme Court
refused to hear the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not have stand-
ing to challenge the law. Several legal advocacy groups have asked Mississippi
residents to report incidents of discrimination so that they may mount suits in
the future.6
Mississippi HB 1523 was just one of a much larger legislative slate of
over 100 anti-LGBT bills proposed in 2016.7 The proposed laws vary widely

6
  See, for example, the Campaign for Southern Equality, which has a link to report inci-
dents of discrimination: https://southernequality.org/. Beth Orlansky, the director of the Mississippi
Center for Justice, has been quoted as saying her organization would try to overturn the law when
a case of discrimination under the law arises. See Samantha Allen, “SCOTUS Lets Mississippi’s HB
1523, America’s Most Anti-LGBT Law, Stay in Place,” Daily Beast, January 11, 2018, https://www
.thedailybeast.com/scotus-lets-mississippis-hb-1523-americas-most-anti-lgbt-law-stay-in-place.
7
  The ACLU updates its list of anti-LBGT bills every Monday and has been tracking the
recent increase: 2017 saw over ninety anti-LGBT bills introduced. American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU), “Legislation Affecting LGBT Rights Across the Country,” accessed January 16, 2018,
https://www.aclu.org/other/legislation-affecting-lgbt-rights-across-country.
40 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.1

in terms of effects and penalties.8 A substantial subset of these bills—the

so-called bathroom bills—addresses access to public facilities for trans peo-
ple although it is not immediately clear why discussion has focused on bath-
room spaces specifically as opposed to locker rooms and other traditionally
single-sex public facilities.9 The tactic of referring to them as bathroom bills
seems designed to play off white supremacist fears (organized around the
protection of certain classes of white women) while simultaneously trivializ-
ing the laws, as if bathrooms are unimportant spaces and do not provide an
essential function.
Instead of trivial space, bathrooms have been at the heart of political strug-
gle in US history. While I will refer to Mississippi HB 1523 as what I believe it
is—an anti-trans bill, among other things—I reject the notion that the issue of
access to bathrooms is trivial from a trans studies, religious studies, or feminist
studies perspective.10 Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender-nonconforming activist and
poet, addresses the space of bathrooms:
When we speak about restrooms we talk as if gender ends on the sign
outside the door. But I learned intimately how gender segregated
restrooms are here to actually create gender itself. The boy’s restroom
was where my classmates peered over one another’s urinals to look at
each other’s dicks, was where they talked about the girls they wanted
to fuck, was where they came to have private conversations, to fight, to
tease, to compare. I didn’t go into the boy’s restroom because I hated
being gendered. I wanted to pee without having my body surveilled,
compared, categorized. . . . It’s not just misgendering that is the problem,
it’s gendering.11

8
  One of the harshest bills was an anti-trans bill in Oxford, Alabama, that criminalized using
a restroom of the sex that was not assigned to you at birth and could have resulted in a fine of $500
and up to six months of jail time. Proposed in response to Target’s policy of allowing people to
use the bathroom of their choice, the city council passed the bill unanimously but subsequently
repealed it after the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and ACLU threatened to sue. SPLC,
“Alabama Town Repeals Anti-Transgender Restroom Ordinance,” accessed July 3, 2016, https://
www.splcenter.org/news/2016/05/04/alabama-town-repeals-anti-transgender-restroom-ordinance.
9
  In fact, the media’s anxieties focus specifically on women’s restrooms, in particular, which
tend to have stalls with doors, unlike many locker rooms or changing rooms. In my reading, trans-
misogyny is to blame; I discuss transmisogyny and the focus on transwomen’s bodies later in the
article. See also Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook, “Bathroom Battlegrounds and Penis Panics,”
Contexts 14, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 26–31, which discusses that precise question. An editorial
that addresses both transphobia and innovative new bathroom designs is Susan Stryker’s op-ed,
“Everyone Poops. No One Should be Stigmatized or Criminalized When They Answer Nature’s
Call,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2016.
10
  I am not the first to critique the phrase “bathroom bills.” The ACLU refers to these bills as
anti-transgender bills. ACLU, “Anti-LGBT Religious Exemption Legislation across the Country,”
accessed July 3, 2016.
11
  Alok Vaid-Menon, “Why Do We Have to Gender Peeing and Pooping?,” October 10, 2015,
https://www.alokvmenon.com/blog/2015/10/10/why-do-we-have-to-gender-peeing-pooping.
 Roundtable: Toward a Transfeminist Religious Studies 41

To Vaid-Menon, bathrooms are spaces that produce gendered (and cisgendered),

racialized, straight, and able bodies, and as such, are inherently fraught. Strug-
gles over the fraught space of bathrooms (however much publicity Mississippi
HB 1523 has recently garnered) are also nothing new. Pauli Murray, a black
gender-nonconforming activist, writer, and lawyer who was born in the early
twentieth century, developed a political analysis of the racialized and gendered
violence of his/her surroundings. He/she dubbed the system “Jane Crow” in
order to describe the intersections between racialized and gendered regimes
of segregation. These regimes in bathrooms are not just an artifact of history.
Sociologist and sexuality studies scholar Sheila Cavanagh suggests that the
whiteness of porcelain in bathrooms is a reiteration of Christian ablution rituals
designed to reinscribe racial purity. Bathrooms both are and have been a space
in which white, male, able-bodied, Christian, and non-trans subjectivity was
negotiated and enforced. Mississippi HB 1523, therefore, is a recent iteration
in a longer arc of struggle.12
The language of Mississippi HB 1523 invokes religion both obliquely and
explicitly. Although the bill’s title is “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from
Government Discrimination Act,” it conflates both conscience and morality
with religion. As feminist scholars Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen argue
in their analysis of sodomy laws, morality is often the term employed in legal
contexts to disguise Protestant values as neutral or secular.13 In fact, in the
injunction issued against the law, Judge Carlton Reeves similarly under-
stands Mississippi HB 1523. In his adjudication of the question as to whether
the parties have standing to challenge the law, he writes that “[HB 1523]
will undeniably impact [the plaintiffs’] lives. The enactment of HB 1523 is
much more than a ‘psychological consequence’ with which they disagree, it
is allegedly an endorsement and elevation by their state government of spe-
cific religious beliefs over theirs and all others.”14 Here, Reeves argues that

12
  Sheila Cavanagh, “Gender, Sexuality, and Race in the Lacanian Mirror: Urinary Segregation
and the Bodily Ego,” in Psychoanalytic Geographies, ed. Paul Kingsbury and Steve Pile (New York:
Routledge, 2016), 323–39. See also Simon D. Elin Fisher, “Pauli Murray’s Peter Panic: Perspectives
from the Margins of Gender and Race in Jim Crow America,” TSQ: Trans Studies Quarterly 3, nos.
1–2 (2016): 95–103. I follow Fisher’s use of pronouns and descriptors for Murray. There is a lot
of fantastic scholarship on bathrooms that exceeds the scope of this article. For an excellent over-
view of the legal origins of sex-segregated bathrooms in the United States, see Terry Kogan, “Sex-
Separation in Public Restrooms: Law, Architecture, and Gender,” Michigan Journal of Gender and
Law 14, no. 1 (2007): 1–57. Finally, for an analysis of recent activist alliances between trans and dis-
ability activists on the issue of restrooms, see Isaac West, Transforming Citizenships: Transgender
Articulations of the Law (New York: NYU Press, 2013).
13
 Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of
Religious Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 2004).
14
 See the Barber Order, filed June 30, 2016, 23. The Campaign for Southern Equality
has posted the full text of the injunction online: http://www.southernequality.org/wp-content
/uploads/2016/07/CSE-v-Barber-Order.pdf.
42 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.1

the religious beliefs protected by the law constitute the specific beliefs of a
religious tradition. As such, according to Reeves, enactment of the law would
be a violation of the First Amendment. In Mississippi HB 1523, the conflation
between conscience, morality, and religion implicitly characterizes those that
oppose the bill as lacking morality or conscience (and by extension, religion).
In the opposition between trans and religion, therefore, trans bodies become
inherently amoral or irreligious.
The opening of the law defines what specific religious beliefs are protected:

(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one

man and one woman;
(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.

Within the context of the bill, the first two clauses define protected religious
belief as heterosexual and monogamous. The language of “is” or “should be” in
the first clause evokes a wish to reframe marriage, even as the law regulates and
ordains that reframing; there is more to say here, however a full exploration of
the marriage section is outside the scope of my argument. I will confine myself
to note that legal attempts to restrict marriage to one man and one woman are
not new, although this bill also extends the regulation to out-of-wedlock sex for
heterosexual couplings as well.
For our purposes, the third clause warrants closer attention. It reads:

(c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s

immutable biological sex as objectively determined by
anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

The third clause establishes that sex and gender identity must be both regu-
lated and assigned at birth in the service of protecting heterosexual monogamy.
Undergirded by a complementarian theology, in which God creates two sexes
that are counterparts in marriage in the figures of Adam and Eve, the regulation
of sexuality and gender identity must go hand in hand.15
Leaving aside the fact that genetic testing is not standard practice on all
newborns, the wording of this clause is suggestive. The parentheses render the
two terms male and man one entity, and the same with female and woman. By
collapsing the terms for sex with the terms for gender identity, they become
entwined. On the one hand, this move rejects any easy distinctions between sex

15
  For an example of conservative applications of complementarian theology, see Focus on the
Family, “Transgenderism—Our Position,” in which they state: “Focus on the Family is dedicated
to defending the inherent honor, dignity, value, and equality of the two sexes as created in God’s
image—intentionally male and female—each bringing unique and complementary qualities to sex-
uality and relationships” (accessed January 10, 2018, http://www.focusonthefamily.com/socialissues
/sexuality/transgenderism/transgenderism-our-position).
 Roundtable: Toward a Transfeminist Religious Studies 43

and gender. However, this rejection is predicated on the belief that there is an
objective sex/gender identity that is both biological and determined at birth.16
The language of biology and genetic testing also introduces the question
of science into a bill designed to regulate and define religious belief. Science
and religion collude to determine the immutable truth of sex at birth. When
the bill entwines the scientific and theological, the law conspires to naturalize a
divinely ordained gender binary. In the process of defining protected classes of
conscience, therefore, the state of Mississippi has also ruled that it is a religious
belief that science objectively and immutably establishes both sex and gender
at birth. In other words, it is a scientific/religious belief that transsexuals cannot
exist.17
When Mississippi HB 1523 understands morality as being (religiously
and scientifically) opposed to transsexual bodies, law and religion are being
cisgendered. The term cisgender refers to those people whose gender identity
agrees with the sex they were assigned at birth.18 Cisgender generally desig-
nates non-trans people; it marks the (unmarked) norm. When I employ the
term cisgender, I do not mean to imply that cis is a stable category of identity.
Instead, I use it as a verb: what is the mechanism by which this law cisgenders
religion?
Ryka Aoki, an author, performer, and professor, delivered an address at the
2016 Association of Writers and Writing Programs as part of a panel of trans
authors discussing magic and religion. In her talk, she described the cisgender-
ing of religion:
Somewhere between the “and then there was light” and “yo, don’t eat
pork, and go circumcise yourselves” was the man and woman thing.

16
  This, of course, raises the question of intersex bodies; some intersex people have anatomies
and genetic assignments that do not neatly align as either male or female. Demoya Gordon, a lawyer
from Lambda Legal who is working on the HB2 case, relayed that they have hesitated to employ a
legal strategy that argues specifically for the impossibility of single-sex spaces for intersex people. In
the past, this line of argumentation has only been successful in getting specific exemptions written
into the bill for intersex people, while retaining the penalties for others. Demoya Gordon and Ryan
Rasdall, “Stalled Progress: Combatting Bathroom Bullies’ Attacks on Transgender People” (presen-
tation, Philadelphia Trans Health Conference, Philadelphia, PA, June 9, 2016).
17
  For a fuller discussion of the imbrication of religion, science, transsexual bodies, and the
state (in the Iranian context), see Afsaneh Najmabadi’s excellent monograph Professing Selves:
Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2013).
18
  For a history on the development of the term cisgender, which has been employed since
the early 1990s (along with a critique of the term), see A. Finn Enke, “The Education of Little Cis:
Cisgender and the Discipline of Opposing Bodies,” in Transfeminist Perspectives: In and Beyond
Transgender and Gender Studies, ed. Anne Enke (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012),
60–77. I mean to use cisgendering similarly to Enke’s suggestions of the origins of the term: “rather
than being fixed in identities, cis and trans describe locations and effects” (68). My gratitude to
Paisley Currah for the reference to Enke’s excellent article.
44 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.1

Male and female happen—but WHY do they happen? Cis folk don’t
really notice this omission—since they don’t tend to question their gen-
der so much. But trans people do. Not merely why did god make man
and woman—but why did god make sex and gender anyway? It’s not that
I need intervention/prophecy, either magical or divine, to conquer some
quest or save the world. The universe hasn’t turned against us; we are in
a universe that had no room for us in the first place.19

Aoki, like HB 1523, was referring to the creation story recorded in the book
of Genesis. Aoki uses cis understandings of this story to describe a universe
that trans people never had to be excluded from, since cisgendered cosmology
precludes trans existence. In the context of a violently cisgendered world—a
world undergirded by the structuring forces of a homicidal racism toward
transwomen of color—there is a concerted effort to enact this cosmology. Aoki
informs us that within a universe that had no room for her in the first place, the
mundanities of a trans of color life are divine. Her trans cosmology is formed
out of fundamentally different questions.
I am not just interested in asking about the all-too-familiar ways that reli-
gion is hostile to trans people, a question that seems to assume conflict. Rather,
I ask us to consider the processes by which religious subjects, traditions, spaces,
and communities are cisgendered—in other words, are both rendered hostile
to trans people and articulated through cisgendered logic. If we were to inves-
tigate the cisgendering of religion, including in our own scholarship, what new
contours of religion would we discover? Have we placed limitations on what we
even consider to be religion?

Frankenstein’s Monster: Legacies of Transphobia

in Religious Studies
Representation at its most magical, the transsexual body is perfected
memory, inscribed with the “true” story of Adam and Eve as the ontological
account of irreducible difference, an essential biography which is part of nature.
A story which culture tells itself, the transsexual body is a tactile politics of
reproduction constituted through textual violence.
—Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”

Mississippi HB 1523 is an example of the administrative violence that is

the result of conceptualizing religion and transgender as hostile to one another.
However, before we can employ the tools of religious studies to deeply engage
attacks on trans people carried out in the name of religion, we must first survey

19
  Ryka Aoki, “Magical Realism, Magic, and Trans Identity” (paper presented at the Association
of Writers and Writing Programs, panel entitled “In Whose Image: Trans and Genderqueer Writers
on Magic, Spirituality, and [the Bodies of] God,” Los Angeles, CA, April 2, 2016).
 Roundtable: Toward a Transfeminist Religious Studies 45

the legacy of the field itself. In this section, I read the work of Mary Daly in
order to explore the transmisogyny at the heart of some strands of feminist
theology. If we are to resist the cisgendering of religious studies, we need to
address this legacy of rendering transwomen’s bodies the stand-in for patriar-
chal religion. It is past time to take stock of our inheritance.
In response to what might be the most famously transphobic text—Janice
Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male—Sandy
Stone penned the classic essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual
Manifesto.”20 Ironically, then, Raymond’s transphobia can be said to have inad-
vertently spawned transgender studies as a field. Perhaps less well-known is
the fact that Daly, one of the most important radical feminist theologians and
philosophers of her time, was Raymond’s advisor.21 Scattered throughout Daly’s
works are references to Raymond, and the figure of the transsexual became
for Daly a central metaphor for patriarchal religion.22 While Daly is not the
only example I could have chosen of transphobia in the field, the centrality of
her work to the history of feminist studies in religion makes her legacy worth a
particularly close look.
In Beyond God the Father, Daly encouraged deep structural and concep-
tual changes to our notions of divinity; her work was a groundbreaking interven-
tion in feminist theology. For Daly, turning from the concept of god to goddess

20
 Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1979); and Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual
Manifesto,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and
Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 280–304.
21
  See Siobhan Kelly’s brilliant JFSR Blog post that covers the transphobic legacy of Mary
Daly in religious studies and also connects it to the bathroom bills. Siobhan Kelly, “Feminist
Transphobia, Feminist Rhetoric: From Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminism to HB2,” JFSR Blog,
August 30, 2016, http://www.fsrinc.org/feminist-transphobia-rhetoric/. Daly cites Raymond directly
in a passage I quote in the body of the text. But also see Daly’s dedication in Gyn/Ecology: the
“second passage” is dedicated to Jan Raymond. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical
Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978), front matter.
22
  That Daly was also called out for racism is well documented. See, most famously, Audre
Lorde’s open letter to Daly reprinted in her book of essays: Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays
and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 1984): 66–72. Daly’s legacy in religious studies is important,
which is why I address her directly in the body of this essay. She is not, however, the only example
I could draw on of texts that are problematic for trans, intersex, or gender-nonconforming people.
Take Wendy Doniger’s Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980). Although Doniger was writing before intersex activism was vocal, she used
terms like true and pseudo-androgyne without any sense of the way terms like pseudo-hermaphrodite
have historically been used in the medical literature to marginalize intersex bodies. Her framing of
the question was problematic, to state it mildly: “Androgynes or hermaphrodites do occur as natural
freaks, but it would be misleading to regard them as the source of androgynous symbolism” (284).
My goal is not to call out only feminist religious studies as transphobic, but rather, in the context of
this roundtable, to foster a conversation on a transfeminist vision for religious studies while address-
ing the historical legacies of transmisogyny.
46 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.1

was insufficient and a mere surface reconstruction of the phallocracy.23 As a

metaphor for the kind of surface change that she wished to reject, Daly inter-
jected the figure of the transsexual:
Such replacement can amount to a “change” as minimal as a transsexual
operation on the patriarchal god. Since, as Jan Raymond has shown, a
“transsexed” male is still male (a “she-male” or a male-to-constructed
female), it is clear that such an operation—whether men perform it on
each other or their god—cannot be expected to bring about profound
psychic or social change. A transsexed patriarchal god is still patriarchal
and will function (at least in subliminal or subterranean ways) to serve
the interests of the fathers, for such a symbol is external to the experi-
enced reality of women and nature.24

This passage functions on two levels. The first is a literal denial of transsexu-
ality: by Daly’s logic, transsexual women are not women and transsexual bod-
ies appear deceptively female but are actually male. This, of course, leaves
out entirely transsexual men but also opposes transsexual women to both
non-transwomen and nature. As Siobhan Kelly points out in a response to
Daly, denying transsexuality has been taken up in the political arena to jus-
tify policies that disproportionately affect transwomen.25 This reasoning sounds
eerily like the theology of Mississippi HB 1523, which also argues transsexuals
do not exist and transpeople are deceptive, albeit by joining nature, science,
and theology instead of opposing them. The second function of transsexual-
ity is symbolic: transsexuality is shallow theology, and such theologies obscure
deeper (women’s) truths in the service of rearranging the window dressings of
patriarchy. Transsexuals—transsexual women in particular—are therefore by
definition opposed to the aims of feminist theology.
Daly borrowed these ideas explicitly from Raymond but married the figure
of the transsexual to phallocratic theology. In doing so, she established a prob-
lematic dualism between surfaces and essences, where transsexuality is firmly
on the side of surfaces. Just as the passage transphobically suggests that all trans­
women are inherently deceptive in their self-representation, so too transsex-
uality becomes by definition a human self-deception about the nature of the
divine. The net effect is that women and nature are opposed to transsexuality,
and transsexuality is always already both patriarchal and unnatural. This idea of

23
  For an excellent overview of Daly’s work and intellectual trajectory (in particular, on the
issue of God), see Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow, Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in
Religion (New York: Harper Collins, 1979), 1–25.
24
  Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston:
Beacon, 1973), xvii–xviiiv.
25
  Kelly, “Feminist Transphobia, Feminist Rhetoric.”
 Roundtable: Toward a Transfeminist Religious Studies 47

unnaturalness is what led Daly to famously characterize trans bodies as akin to

Frankenstein’s monster.26
In her 1994 field-defining essay, Susan Stryker responded to Daly’s mon-
strously unnatural transsexual by reclaiming monstrousness. Originally pub-
lished in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein
above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” was one of
the first articles by a transsexual author in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
In the piece, Stryker relates to Frankenstein’s monster: “I find a deep affilia-
tion between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully
human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my
exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that
I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to
exist.”27 Stryker’s repetition of the word monster and fragmentation of the
prose in this passage convey both rage, longing, and the desire to interrupt
a narrative, to break apart those scripts that render transsexual bodies out-
side the bounds of human community. Stryker reclaimed and celebrated her
monstrous transsexual body by arguing that its construction reveals the sutures
in all bodies. In embracing the idea that she was at war with nature, Stryker
rejected those critiques that designate trans bodies as a perversion; in reclaim-
ing Frankenstein’s monsters, therefore, Stryker both countered and engaged
Daly’s transphobic theology.
There is, however, a cost to monstrousness. In the essay, Stryker related the
story of Filisa Vistima, a transwoman who wrote in her journal about feeling like
Frankenstein’s monster. Vistima was eventually pushed out of the LGB commu-
nity in Seattle and killed herself, and Stryker poignantly posed the question of
whether her death should be considered murder at the hands of the community
that rejected her. Even as Stryker reclaimed monstrousness as a site of trans-
gender power and rage, she did so while acknowledging the violence enabled
by rendering trans people less than human. This is not a romanticization of
monstrousness per se, but rather a desire to dispel its harms. If Daly slipped
between metaphor and materiality in her extended meditations on duplicitous
trans bodies, at the same time, she betrayed a deep ignorance of the impacts of
a theology of unnaturalness on actual trans bodies.28

26
 Daly, Gyn/Ecology.
27
  Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian
Studies 1, no. 3 (1994): 237–54, quotation on 245.
28
  The idea that trans people are duplicitous in their gender presentations has been explored
in J. Halberstam’s work In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New
York: NYU Press, 2005). Halberstam argues that “passing” is figured as deception in biographies of
trans lives. For an account of the various instantiations of the trope of the deceptive transwoman, see
Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
(Berkeley, CA: Seal, 2007): 36–41. The question of the “deception” of transwomen has also been
48 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.1

Daly’s (and Raymond’s) vitriol was predictably directed primarily toward

transwomen. Such focus was not confined to Daly, Raymond, or other feminist
scholars but was part of a broader trend whereby transwomen, and particularly
transwomen of color, were—and still are—subject to the highest rates of phys-
ical and administrative violence.29 The statistics about transwomen of color are
brutally clear: in 2015, 54 percent of homicides of LGBTQI people were trans-
women of color; while discrimination on the job is nearly 90 percent for all trans
people and the unemployment rate is twice the national norm, for trans people
of color it is four times the national rate; while transmen have lower than aver-
age rates of HIV infection, transwomen face nearly twice the national average,
and these rates climb dramatically when you isolate the infection rates of trans
people of color.30 As Lourdes Ashley Hunter, cofounder of the Trans Women of
Color Collective, famously put it: “Every breath a black trans woman takes is an
act of revolution.”31
The transphobic legacy of Mary Daly is only one brief example of the way
religious studies has been shaped by transphobia, and how, in turn, trans studies
has responded. My point is not to reject feminist religious studies out of hand.
Rather, I am arguing here that until we address the legacies of transphobia that
animate religious studies more broadly as a discipline, the work of a transfem-
inist religious studies cannot fully begin. We must take responsibility for the

invoked by defendants in murder trials as a mitigating factor to explain their homicidal actions.
See, for example, Victoria Steinberg’s review of Martha Nussbaum’s Hiding from Humanity, which
discusses the Gwen Araujo case, in which a deception/panic defense was employed. As Steinberg
points out, Nussbaum treats the subject of disgust and shame in law, including gay panic defenses,
but never discusses trans panic cases. Victoria Steinberg, “A Heat of Passion Offense: Emotions
and the Bias in ‘Trans Panic’ Mitigation Claims: Hiding from Humanity by Martha C. Nussbaum,”
Boston College Third World Law Journal 25 (2005): 499–524.
29
  The phrase “administrative violence” comes from Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative
Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2015).
30
  Jaime Grant, Lisa Mottet, Justin Tanis, Jack Harrison, Jody Herman, and Mara Keisling,
“Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey,” National
Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 2011, http://www
.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_summary.pdf.
31
  Lourdes Ashley Hunter, “Every Breath a Black Trans Woman Takes Is an Act of Revolution,”
Huffington Post, February 15, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/every-breath-a-black
-tran_b_6631124. Here, of course, Hunter is addressing the specific virulence of antiblack racism
specifically; in other statements she talks more broadly about transwomen of color. It is not uncom-
plicated that I am a white gender-nonconforming/transmasculine-ish person writing the opening to
a roundtable on trans religion. I have incorporated the words of trans and gender-nonconforming
(GNC) people directly into the body of this essay in part in response to the lack of GNC and trans
women of color voices within religious studies. Academia is structured by the same virulent trans-
phobia and transmisogyny as every other industry, and I take neither my job nor the lack of more
transwomen of color in academia as either neutral facts or faits accomplis.
 Roundtable: Toward a Transfeminist Religious Studies 49

way the field has contributed to the process of making transwomen of color
monstrous. It is time for a transfeminist religious studies to flourish.

Addressing the “YeSHEva”: Transmisogyny and the

Project of Transing Religion
I return now to the questions I raised at the beginning of my essay in order
to more deeply explicate the dynamics of transmisogyny and religion. So far,
I have noted but not fully unpacked the focus on transwomen in writings as
diverse as the New York Post and Beyond God the Father. In order to under-
stand this special scrutiny of transwomen’s bodies, I use the New York Post
coverage of Ladin to demonstrate the gendered politics of transmisogyny. From
there, I briefly highlight transwomen’s writing on religion and then issue my call
(and benediction for) a transfeminist religious studies.
Julia Serano defines transmisogyny as the moment when: “a trans person
is ridiculed or dismissed not merely for failing to live up to gender norms, but
for their expressions of femaleness or femininity.”32 When Daly described trans­
women as insufficiently female, or female on the surface (without being sub-
stantively so), she was policing women’s bodies and recapitulating the strategies
of misogyny. However, she was also participating in the same regulation of the
category of female that Serano argues is a central facet of transmisogyny. We
can see some of the same strategies employed in the press coverage of Ladin’s
transition. Reading closely the article in the Post means exploring yet more
deeply disturbing writing about transwomen but also demonstrates why a fem-
inist religious studies without transfeminism is not feminist at all. In closing,
I return to the words of Ladin herself on trans theology and the possibilities of
transfeminist religion.
Technically, Joy Ladin teaches at Stern College, which is the women’s col-
lege associated with Yeshiva University and a center for Orthodox women’s
learning. Yeshiva learning is historically a masculine preserve, so the misspelled
“she” at the center of the Post’s pun is doubly ironic. Via the simple substitution
of an e for an i, the Post also inadvertently wandered into the complicated gen-
dered politics of Jewish learning.
The “SHE” in ye-SHE-va can be interpreted as a female disruption of mas-
culine space. This theme of disruptive femininity continues in the text of the
article itself, which begins, “Literature Professor Joy Ladin, formerly known as
Jay Ladin, 47, showed up for her first day of school sporting pink lipstick, a tight
purple shirt and a flirty black skirt. She cheerfully strutted through the doors
of the Midtown campus’ main building, where she oversees the writing center.”
The phrase “formerly known as” accompanied by “before and after” pictures, is

32
 Serano, Whipping Girl, 14.
50 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.1

both overtly disrespectful and transphobic. This idea of “outing” transwomen’s

assigned sex is built on the deeply problematic (and often dangerous) idea that
transsexual bodies lie. Paradoxically, in classic transmisogynist fashion, the Post
throws doubt on Ladin’s femininity while at the same time highlighting her fem-
ininity through sexism; in particular, a sexist running commentary on Ladin’s
choice of “hyperfeminine” clothing.
A reporter commenting on a woman’s clothes (and not her own expert
opinions on Judaism and Trans Religion, or where she earned her PhD, surely
facts as germane to the article as her outfit that day) is a persistent form of sex-
ism in the media. And yet, the New York Post not only characterizes Ladin but
also hypersexualizes her through her clothes. The skirt itself is “flirty”—as if her
clothes become a metonym for her conspicuous, trans body, and her gender
itself constitutes a sexual transgression. Her body struts, is painted on with lip-
stick, and, seemingly obliviously, cheerfully interrupts the space of the yeshiva.
Given the hypersexualization of transwomen’s bodies in the media, the “flirty
skirt” does not exist in a vacuum. In acknowledging Ladin’s femininity, it is as if
the author cannot then seem to look away. Ladin’s femininity is rendered more
conspicuous, more presumptuous. Transmisogyny, therefore, functions to distill
and amplify the sexist conflation of woman as body.
At the same time, Ladin is figured as inserting herself within a context alien
to her: an Orthodox institution. The description of her appearance slyly implies
that her clothes are perhaps inappropriate (or even unprofessional) for a profes-
sor at Stern College, an idea which online commentators discussing the article
picked up on. While a skirt is standard for women in an Orthodox context, the
descriptors (“tight” and “flirty”) do not necessarily fit with the rules of tzniut
(modesty). Ladin’s femininity is figured as inappropriate—even offensive—to
Orthodox Jewish space.33
I want to make one final point about the way transphobia functions in the
media. The New York Post quotes Rabbi Tendler, professor of biology and med-
ical ethics and a dean at the university, in a virulently transphobic passage about
the incompatibility of transwomen and Jewish law. While Ladin responds to
Tendler in her book, the article quotes her only to say she cannot comment.
This is in part because the story broke during the ongoing legal negotiations.
Still, it is important to pay attention to whom the Post constructs as an expert by
the Post and whom (despite her credentials and writings on the topic of trans
Judaism) it does not. I return to the subject of Ladin’s expertise by exploring
her own trans theology shortly, but an obvious conclusion here is that trans peo-
ple are the object not the subject of conversation—whether in HB 1523, Mary
Daly’s work, or the Post—often to disastrous effect.

33
  Ladin addresses more of the transphobic language within the article directly in her mem-
oir: Ladin, Through the Door of Life.
 Roundtable: Toward a Transfeminist Religious Studies 51

I have analyzed the New York Post article so extensively to demonstrate that
when we collude in a transmisogynistic religious studies, we cooperate more
generally with misogyny. There is no possibility for feminist religious studies
when we participate in policing transwomen’s bodies and transwomen’s religi-
osity. In the context of a roundtable on trans religion in the Journal of Feminist
Studies in Religion, I want to state as emphatically as possible that feminist reli-
gious studies must be transfeminist religious studies or it is simply not feminist
at all.
Creating a transfeminist religious studies requires more new modes of
thought than I can explore in this short article.34 Here, I discuss just one of
these new modes: engaging with trans people writing about their experiences
of religion. Below, I provide only a few brief examples. In her address to the
Association of Writers and Writing Programs, author and professor Ryka Aoki
states: “As queer, and trans, and especially as trans women of color, even a mun-
dane life can seem magical.”35 Later in the paragraph, Aoki substitutes divine
for magical, playing with the boundaries between those traditional categories
of religion and magic, the mundane and the sacred. To take seriously Aoki’s
divinity requires us to rework our categories. In what ways might we expand
our analyses of prayer and ritual if we took the lives and the resiliencies of trans-
women of color as religion? What new forms of religion might we encounter if
we were open to the possibilities of transing religion?
The term transing was defined by the editors of a special issue of Women’s
Studies Quarterly on trans studies. In their introduction to the issue, Paisley
Currah, Lisa Jean Moore, and Susan Stryker define transing as:
a practice that takes place within, as well as across or between, gen-
dered spaces. It is a practice that assembles gender into contingent
structures of association with other attributes of bodily being, and that
allows for reassembly. Transing can function as a disciplinary tool when
the stigma associated with lack or loss of gender status threatens social
unintelligibility, coercive normalization, or even bodily extermination. It
can also function as an escape vector, line of flight, or pathway towards
liberation.36

In other words, transing helps us unpack the mechanisms by which bodies are
formed (and reformed) through contingent collections of bodily attributes and

34
  I have found the writings collected on the websites transfaithonline.org and transtorah
.org particularly helpful in my own work. There are, of course, many more online resources of trans
people writing about religion.
35
  Aoki, “Magical Realism, Magic, and Trans Identity.”
36
 Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore, “Introduction,” Women’s Studies
Quarterly 36, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2008): 11–22, quotation on 13. The first use of the term
transing should be credited to Joanne Meyerowitz and her talk at the symposium “Trans/forming
Knowledge,” held at the University of Chicago, February 16–17, 2006.
52 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.1

can describe the ways in which gender functions as a biopolitical set of practices
to both discipline and manage populations. At the same time, transing also holds
forth the potential for liberation or, put another way, for us to imagine alternate
modes of both religion and divinity.37
In the understanding of transing as liberatory, many trans activists, academ-
ics, theologians, and religious leaders have been working to trans their religious
traditions. In this piece, I have analyzed deep (and for me at times painful)
transphobia and transmisogyny both within our field and the US political/
religious landscape. My hope is that this analysis has been in service of the field
collectively taking responsibility for our legacy of transmisogyny and transpho-
bia and in making room in religious studies (and beyond) for new trans visions
and analyses.
I want to give one final brief example of transing religion. Ladin takes up
the question of trans theology in her writing, in particular exploring the creation
stories in Genesis. She meditates extensively on the entirety of the creation
narratives, but I want to draw our attention to her explication of the concept of
tzelem Elohim (creation in the image of God):
That question—what aspects of humanity reflect our kinship with our
bodiless Creator?—is at the heart of what I now recognize as my per-
sonal version of trans theology, not because it is a question specific to
transgender people, but because being transgender forced me to search
for aspects of my own humanity that weren’t dependent on my body or
the meanings others gave it. To me, whether or not we are transgender,
we engage in trans theology whenever we try to look past sex and gen-
der, bodies and binaries, to understand what in humanity reflects the
image of God.38

Ladin roots her trans theology within her tradition, rather than positioning
trans (bodies, people, cosmologies) as external correctives to religion. Trans
theology, in her argument, rehearses classical theological questions from a dif-
ferent vantage point. Scholarship in religious studies is partially responsible for
creating transwomen in the image of monsters. As a corrective, Ladin’s theol-
ogy invites us to rethink the question of tzelem Elohim and the creation story
from a trans perspective. How crucial that we begin to engage these voices as
a field.
Must religion be cisgendered? If we accept the underlying assumption that
religion and trans bodies are in some way mutually incompatible, we inherit a

37
  Here I do not mean to privilege divinity (and theology) as more central to the study of
religion. I offer Aoki’s words (and Ladin’s work below) as examples of transing religion, particularly
as a response to the anti-trans theologies put forward by HB 1523 that are based on the Genesis
creation narratives.
38
  Joy Ladin, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective
(Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, forthcoming), 26.
 Roundtable: Toward a Transfeminist Religious Studies 53

deeply impoverished discipline and collude with the same logics that govern
the regulation of trans bodies; the creation of publics as white, able-bodied, and
sex-segregated spaces; and cosmologies that write trans people out of existence.
We collude with the logics of transmisogyny that render transwomen monsters,
or jokes, and always something less than human. If trans/religion is an oxymo-
ron, we recapitulate religion as anachronistic, hostile to women, and solely
misogynistic, thus preserving secularism as the realm of neoliberal choice and
“progress.” In short, if we do not trans religion, we remain complicit in a logic
that diminishes the possibilities of how we understand both trans and religion.
I close with a quote from the end of Stryker’s essay, which offers those of
us who are at war with nature a blessing: “If this is your path, as it is mine, let
me offer whatever solace you may find in this monstrous benediction: May you
discover the enlivening power of darkness within yourself. May it nourish your
rage. May your rage inform your actions, and your actions transform you as
you struggle to transform your world.”39 Stryker’s closing passage is both ben-
ediction and prophecy, illuminating a pathway for those of us who are pushed
into the category of not-quite-human. She understands trans monstrousness
and rage as powerful transformative forces in the world. May we trans religious
studies to engage the depths of trans religiosity. May her words sow the seeds of
transfeminist religion. How much richer will all our study of religion be, when
we fully take up these critical questions.

Max Strassfeld is assistant professor of religious studies at the University

of Arizona. They are currently working on a book manuscript entitled
“Transing the Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature.”
mstrassfeld@email.arizona.edu

In The Image of God, God Created Them: Toward Trans Theology

Joy Ladin

Keywords: theology, transgender, trans theology

Toward the end of Max Strassfeld’s groundbreaking “Transing Religious

Studies,” he refers to the approach to trans theology I am developing in

39
  Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” 257. I hoped to write about the use of religious
language in Stryker’s writing, but space precluded a closer analysis of the larger function of religion
in her essay.

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.1 (2018), 53–58

Copyright © 2018 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.  •  doi: 10.2979/jfemistudreli.34.1.06