Why I love the metaphor of trans Jesus, actually

“…and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.”

Actual photograph of Jesus. Just kidding, generated by AI.

The following is a guest post by Syl, a prior contributor and self-described “witness to the Internet.” Like me, she has thoughts on identity, religion, the crisis of meaning and the intersection of these themes.

Photo captions by Shannon.

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“We’ve had enough exhortations to be silent. Cry out with a thousand tongues - I see the world is rotten because of silence.” -St. Catherine of Siena

Today is the feast day of my confirmation saint, St. Catherine of Siena. I always say that I didn't choose her, she chose me. Twenty-five years ago when I was preparing to be confirmed, I told my confirmation sponsor I wanted St. Catherine of Labouré. She wrote down St. Catherine of Siena. I tried to correct her, but my sponsor was hard of hearing, and I couldn't get her to understand me. So St. Catherine of Siena it was. Years later, when I learned more about her and the similarities between the two of us, I felt like she'd reached out of heaven to claim me.

Catherine, this one's for you.

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This year Easter and Trans Day of Visibility happened to coincide. This, though not intentional, caused an uproar in certain quarters. Well, of course. The tensions between traditional Christianity and the ideology known variously as Critical Social Justice, Wokeness, Successor Ideology, the Identity Synthesis, among other names, have been mounting. As a result, even prominent atheists have been reevaluating their relationships with Christianity.

The mess we’re in is also a spiritual crisis, that is: a crisis of meaning. It’s been noted that while critical social justice superficially resembles traditional liberal social justice, it is in fact antithetical to liberalism. Along those lines, the religious aspects of critical social justice are also superficially similar, but in fact antithetical to Christianity, which forms much of the underpinnings of Western thought. The thing which resembles the thing but is not the thing; a deception. 

Which brings us to the idea of trans Jesus. This reading of Jesus has exploded in popularity in queer and queer-affirming communities both Christian and secular in recent years. Yet it’s often pointed to by the opposing side as blasphemous and absurd on its face, an example of bizarre trans activist over-reach and historical revisionism. Why is that? Ignorance? Fear and insecurity? Christian pride, the sense that Jesus Christ could never be like those people? Or perhaps a deep sense that all might not be quite as it seems? I posit that the queer reading is popular because it is reaching towards something true. The idea of trans Jesus, or to be more precise, of Jesus having both male and female traits, is supported by centuries of symbolism within Christian art and mystic literature, and in my opinion, is a reading of Christ that is spiritually relevant to our current quagmire. 

What is the central symbol of Christianity? The crucifix. The body of Jesus Christ on the cross. The image of a man who achieved salvation for the sins of the world through mortification of his flesh, death by crucifixion, and resurrection. Redemptive transformation through degradation. 

Does this remind you of anything? 

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One of the most recent times I attended a Catholic mass was on the feast of Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, probably a little over a decade ago. In the priest’s sermon, he kept using the phrase “marital act” to refer to the act of receiving communion. Sandwiched in a pew between my father and grandfather, I felt deeply uncomfortable. Did he need to talk about receiving the body of Christ in the Eucharist with such sexual overtones?

But he had a point. Christ is the universal bridegroom of the Church. Jesus chose all Christians to be his bride. As everyone knows, the first rule of Christianity is: it's not gay if it's Jesus. That's definitely not the first rule of Christianity. Mm, agree to disagree.¹ 

Some people have made the argument that because of the virgin birth, because Jesus had no human father, he was produced by parthnogenesis and therefore must have been female. While I can appreciate that, there is Biblical evidence for Jesus being male. He had a penis and was circumcised in accordance with Jewish tradition. 

As the medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum wrote in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays in Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, “The major context in which Christ’s maleness was theologically relevant was the circumcision. But sermons on the circumcision did not discuss Christ’s sexuality or his gender. In the scores of texts we have on this topic, blood is what is emphasized - blood as covenant, in part, but primarily blood as suffering. What the texts say is that the circumcision foreshadows the Crucifixion. Thus, blood is redemptive because Christ’s pain gives salvific significance to what we all share with him; and what we share is not a penis. It is not even sexuality. It is the fact that we can be hurt. We suffer.”

So yes, Jesus had a penis. How else could he have given my homegirl St. Catherine his foreskin as a wedding ring during her vision of their mystical marriage? According to Bynum, “[S]he associated that piece of bleeding flesh with the eucharistic host and saw herself appropriating the pain of Christ.”

Please stop talking about Jesus’s penis.

Would you rather I talked about his vagina? The final wound Christ received during the crucifixion was the piercing of his side by the Lance of Longinus to make sure that he was dead. This wound is sometimes depicted in medieval Catholic art as having a yonic aspect. Sometimes, he is depicted as giving birth through it. If one were so inclined, you could call it Jesus’s vagina. Certainly puts a different spin on the story of Doubting Thomas, anyway.

But I’m being a bit sensationalistic. It was more common for medieval writers to refer to the wound in Christ’s side as a lactating breast. St. Catherine wrote of it,

“We cannot nourish others unless we nourish ourselves at the breasts of divine charity… We must do as a little child does who wants milk. It takes the breast of its mother, applies its mouth, and by means of the flesh it draws milk. We must do the same if we would be nourished. We must attach ourselves to that breast of Christ crucified, which is the source of charity, and by means of that flesh we draw milk. The means is Christ’s humanity which suffered pain, and we cannot without pain get that milk that comes from charity.”

Christ was frequently depicted as a mother in medieval art. Parallels were repeatedly drawn between Mary’s breast and Jesus’s wound. His body provided nourishment, both in the form of the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and as that of a mother nursing her child. From Bynum again, “Medieval texts and medieval art saw the Church as the body of Christ. And ecclesia was, of course, feminine, as a noun and as an allegorical personification. Thus, Church was depicted in medieval art as a woman - sometimes as Christ’s bride, sometimes as a nursing mother.”

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The analogy of transition to Christ’s crucifixion is a fertile one. Isn’t that also in a sense the destruction and rebirth of the self in hopes of salvation, a relief from suffering, which may or may not be forthcoming? 

Christianity is not, and never was, some limp, bloodless thing, and neither is transition, despite what we may have forgotten and how we might be instructed to soften our words to gloss over the underlying realities. Consider the difference between a crucifix and a cross, or a sex change and gender-affirming care. These are matters of flesh and blood. 

With regards to youth gender medicine, the comparison seems especially pointed: We need to crucify these children! They want to be saved! If we don’t, they’re going to go to Hell! There is no scientific evidence that the Hell you’re referring to is real. But they're suffering. Well, who was it who taught them to fear that Hell in the first place?

There are those who have been through the process and suggest that maybe no one else needs to be crucified, but those people are extremists, and we definitely shouldn't listen to them.

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I was on Tumblr a little over a decade ago, during the period which is now often noted as a turning point for American politics. My little sister was trans-identified at the time and we were mutuals, so I refrained from participating much in the discourse myself. I didn’t want her to hate me. So instead, I observed. I saw the mass adoption of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s Three Great Untruths, that is, that way of thinking about the world that seems to maximize internal distress and dissonance, all in the name of social justice. I saw the wall of silence form and the unpersoning of the “TERF.” On the topic of gender, I read widely from different perspectives: intersectional feminist, radical feminist, transfeminist, not claiming to be feminist at all - though that was certainly harder to find there. Feminism, it seemed, could be anything and everything.

As I incessantly scrolled Tumblr, I felt haunted by a particular Bible verse. “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:15)  A constant refrain. Enmity between you and the woman. It seemed to capture the heart of what I was witnessing.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s a very theologically significant Bible verse in Christianity. It’s known as the protoevangelium. This is the first verse of the Bible that prophesizes the coming of Jesus Christ and the salvation of humanity. Like all Biblical verses passed down to us through translation in various languages, it has been translated in a variety of ways. One relevant translation note is that the Latin Vulgate uses feminine pronouns for the second half of the verse, and this carries through to some English translations that use it as their source. For example, the Douay-Rheims translation of this passage is: "...she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” 

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The protoevangelium is spoken by God to the Serpent, after the Fall in the Garden of Eden.

Bing Copilot AI is also ashamed of Eve’s nakedness

Here it is in context in Genesis:

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” 

The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock
    and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
    and you will eat dust
    all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.”

To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
    with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.” (Genesis 3:6-20)

What were the first fruits of the Fall? Self-consciousness. Alienation from the body. Shame.

One might even say gender.

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To channel Andrea Long Chu for a moment, the postlapsarian state is female. (On some level, this is what the book Females: A Concern is about.) But to in turn channel St. Catherine of Siena, to take on the sins of the world and secure humanity’s salvation through your death and resurrection - that is, to be Jesus Christ, divinity made flesh - is also female.

Going back to Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays in Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion for more context about the time in which St. Catherine lived and wrote, 

“The positive image of woman in the later Middle Ages must be understood against the background of the fierce world-denial that characterized the period. [...] Since religious conversion meant the reversal of all earthly values, men enthusiastically adopted images of themselves as women - that is powerless, poor, irrational, without influence or authority. If God was male and the soul was other than God, woman was a natural image both for what God redeemed and for what the powerful, successful male became when he renounced the world. In revering female saints, worshiping the Virgin Mary, attracting female followers, holding up saintly women as a reproach to worldly prelates, and describing themselves as women and fools, medieval men were in one sense ignoring the negative side of the earlier medieval image of woman. But in another sense, asymmetry was implicit in the very notion of reversal.

Such gender images were, in any case, as problematic to religious women as the notion of woman as lust. If reversal and renunciation were the heart of religious dedication, women, who were already inferior, did not have much to offer. Moreover, neither maleness nor femaleness could serve for them as an image of renunciation. 

Women thus asserted and embraced their humanity. They asserted it because traditional dichotomous images of woman and man opposed humanity-physicality-woman to divinity-rationality-man. Women stressed their humanity and Jesus’ because tradition had accustomed them to associate humanity with the female. But humanity is not, in the final analysis, a gender-related image. Humanity is genderless. To medieval woman humanity was, most basically, not femaleness, but physicality, the flesh of the “Word made flesh.” It was the ultimate negative - the otherness from God that the God-man redeemed by taking it into himself. Images of male and female alike were insipid and unimportant in the blinding light of the ultimate asymmetry between God and creation. 

If religious women spoke less frequently in gender terms than did religious men, it is because they understood that “man…signifies the divinity of the Son of God and woman his humanity.” And they understood that both equations were metaphorical. But, given the ultimate dichotomy of God and creation, the first was only metaphorical. Man was not divinity. The second was in some sense, however, literally true.”

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In the first guest post I wrote for Shannon last summer, I said of this ideology, “In a sense, you could say it is a Christianity without Christ.” The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve come to agree with it. 

Where does pride come from? Well, one source is shame, that original fruit of the Fall. Shame is pride’s mirror image. The deeper the shame, the greater the temptation to pride is to counter it. And as CS Lewis said in Mere Christianity, “Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.” Pride is enmity, the opposite of grace. Always. And once it’s established, enmity exacerbates both shame and pride, which likewise exacerbate enmity; the vicious cycle by which evil metastasizes. 

There can be no possibility of grace without humility. Humility is the salve that dissolves the mirrored illusion of pride and shame. That is - thinking of yourself less, or having an understanding of yourself exactly as you are. Our prelapsarian state, before the Serpent’s deception, was in a way one of effortless humility. We were humble as a lily or a sparrow is, because we didn’t know how to be otherwise. Once our eyes became open, once we had known self-consciousness and shame, humility became much more difficult to attain. 

In Christianity, the primary religious influence on Western Civilization, Jesus Christ himself is considered the ultimate example of humility, and it was through him that humanity received the ultimate grace.

Consider this: What is Christianity without Christ? What is Christianity with humankind taking the place of God? What is Christianity with the beginning of all virtue replaced by the greatest vice?

In symbolic terms, I doubt we could have created a more perfect inversion of Christianity had we set out to design one intentionally. Perhaps I should tell you now that my preferred term for this ideology, the one I use in private correspondence with my sister, is “The Beast With Many Names.”

Of course, by this standard, much of the so-called Christianity that exists in the world is not necessarily that Christian either. This also doesn’t preclude this ideology from being in opposition to many, possibly all of the other standard world religions. My secular atheist mind reminds me that religions generally are about providing communal frameworks to cope with the struggle of being the human kind of animal. As I was writing the previous paragraph about humility, the closest concept I was grasping toward was that of “no self” in Buddhism. Our ancestors weren’t stupid; certain approaches and narratives work better than others, and therefore common themes have emerged. My secular atheist mind is reluctant to publish this at all. 

But my mystic heart has taken up a new refrain:

Quis ut Deus?

1.  Well, what is “gay,” and when and to whom? From Bynum, “Despite recent writings about ‘gay people’ in the Middle Ages, it is questionable whether anyone had such a concept.”