Transgender People in Spiritual Direction

Part 2 of 3

Author’s Note: This article is reprinted with permission by Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction, December, 2013, v. 19, n. 4, pages 52-59, by Laura Thor.

“Made in God’s Image” and “Male and Female He Made Them”

What spiritual foundation allows these two directees to trust their own unfolding? How do both Linda and her priest know who Linda is in God’s eyes, and that God continues to call to ministry a person who had a surgery that her own religion’s teachings do not condone? Spiritual presence with transgender clients focuses on the core issue of one’s spiritual integration of all aspects of one’s identity. Our work knits together one’s essential biological, psychological and spiritual identities as God-given: at our core selves, we are all Betzelem Elohim, (in the Hebrew), Made in the image of our God (Bereshit/Genesis 1:27a). The full meaning of this claim provides profound affirmation for the transgendered: as Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig writes, this sentence in Genesis concludes with “a challenging second half: ‘male and female [italics mine] God created them’ (Genesis 1:27b).” She points out that the original text contains a linguistic merism, a “common Biblical figure of speech in which a whole is alluded to by some of its parts.” She explains,

When the Biblical text says, “There was evening, there was morning, the first day,” it means, of course, that there was evening, there was dawn, there was morning, there was noon time, there was afternoon, there was dusk in the first day. “Evening and morning” are used to encompass all the times of day, all the qualities of light that would be found over the course of one day. So, too, in the case of Genesis 1.27b, the whole diverse panoply of genders and gender identities is encom- passed by only two words, “male” and “female.” Read not, therefore, “God created every human being as either male or female” but rather, “God created human kind zachar u’nikevah male and female and every combination in between.” (p.16)

Indeed, studies of transgender people demonstrate that gender (ones “felt,” or psychic or mental identity) and sexual identity (as determined by reproductive organs, both inner and outer), exist on a spectrum between “male and female.” Because not all transgender people have gender dysphoria and therefore do not present to medical clinics, prevalence studies can count only those who seek medical attention and transition; these are the only transgender people properly called transsexuals, like my two spiritual directees. Ten studies in eight countries suggest a prevalence of male-to-female transsexual individuals ranging from 1:11,900 to 1:45,000. Prevalence of female-to-male transsexual individuals ranges from 1:30,000 to 1:200,00 individuals. (WPATH, p. 7.)

Therefore, a strict binary, “either/or” categorization of gender is inadequate in that it excludes a great many people. (Even in the animal world, a binary view of biological sex is inadequate, if sex is defined in simple biological terms as how an animal reproduces.) Theories of causation range from the negative to the positive, such as birth defects due to uterine changes during pregnancy’s precarious early trimesters, or chromosomal anomalies that occur at conception.

On the other hand, perhaps there no “birth defect” in being born transgender. The study of biodiversity attests to apparently naturally occurring variations in gender among several animal species, including humans. (Roughgarden) In any case, Moers Wenig correctly interprets the Genesis narrative as purposely inclusive and accounting for the fact of more than two opposite sexes in Creation: the text does not say “male or female He created them.”

I ask my spiritual directees to listen contemplatively to the Creation narrative of the first day, to hear the range from darkest night to brightest day, and to imagine the finest increments between the two extremes: midnight, pre-dawn, dawn, noon, late afternoon, dusk, twilight, evening, night. Then I read the narrative of the sixth day, when God made human beings, and ask for biological traits of males or females, and then of intersex people. Sometimes I offer humor: spreading my arms between the two poles of male and female, I might say, “Name every kind of gender expression you can think of between a G.I. Joe doll here” (waving my left arm) “and Barbie, over here,” waving my right. And they do, giggling at the silliness of two dolls that signify, but falsely, the difference between men and women and leave out all that’s between. (I have yet to introduce my daughter’s childhood doll from her Waldorf kindergarten, which doesn’t have a face and is therefore gender-secretive.)

A Theological Anthropology of Being and Becoming

Moers-Wenig’s insight provides a spiritual and pastoral means of “placing” and including people whose sex and gender are ambiguous or discordant. Although the inherent dignity of every human being is a chief religious claim, the dignity of transgender people is not always protected by a cursory reading of this and other relevant Judeo-Christian scriptural passages. I believe the writer of Genesis 1:27ab makes an implicit, foundational assertion that the human person is already and intrinsically created to unfold toward his or her own becoming. There is nothing static in nature. Transsexuals form their gender identity by moving though ambiguity until coming to rest; their becoming is a process of “already and not yet,” like the rest of us, only more obviously so.

All created beings unfold as they must, in commitment to life itself. Our being reaches toward Ultimate Being; to do so is etched in our divine blueprint, a kind of spiritual DNA. Like Abraham and Sarah, we strive to know God, and contribute to God’s joy in Being, in the process of knowing and becoming our selves in the parallel dynamic of “going to” oneself so as to find God. “Lech lecha!”

The Torah narratives of the Hebrew scriptures demonstrate how psychological identity and self-knowledge unfold over time. Abraham is first called Abram, then God calls him Abraham and sends him on his mission of becoming Abraham; even with his new name Abraham must grow into the fullness of being Abraham. This is God’s way with us. Yes, there are sometimes flashes of insight, of revelation, as when God confronts Moses with the burning bush; it is in this encounter that Moses can see and hear his destiny. Moses is commanded to tell Pharaoh to let God’s people go free from Egyptian slavery. But even with God calling to him in power and fire, Moses cannot understand either God or himself. He tries to refuse God at first, for he has a speech impediment; he is afraid to fail in his mission, and perhaps fears humiliation too: he asks God to use his more articulate brother Aaron. But perhaps he was meant for this all along, before he recognized it; perhaps God wants his inarticulate speech so that Moses will rely on God’s speech rather than his own. Or maybe Moses is chosen simply because of the circumstances: between his free will and his destiny lies his circumstance. He alone understood both, in the terrible moment when he murdered the Egyptian master for beating a Hebrew slave. God could make use of his transitional life between two adversarial peoples. How might God “make use” of the transgender person? Of anyone? We are most open to direction when vulnerable, and we are most vulnerable when we stand between worlds.

Like Moses, we cannot not hear God. (Isn’t this what our ministry as spiritual directors counts on?) In the main, we are created to recognize our Creator, and to partner with God in our becoming. But God always has to push and pull us along into the fullness of our own being, for we are too afraid of the cost. So are transsexuals.

In her book, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections of the Biblical Unconscious, Jewish biblical scholar and teacher Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg demonstrates how Biblical language shows layers of deepening awareness of what God is doing with us, and to us. This is the way we come to recognize God. The story of the patriarch Jacob demonstrates this: Jacob is born so closely after his twin brother Esau that his name means “heel-grabber,” a foreshadowing of his nascent or intuitive knowledge that he was meant to be the firstborn, had his bigger brother not pushed him out of order. He is the smaller child who prefers “hearth and home” in the tents to the hunting and outdoor activities of Esau (a “man’s man”), and his gentleness further hides his divine mission from everyone’s awareness. Absent all these hints, we plainly know that as the second son, Jacob will inherit neither his father’s wealth nor his leadership role in the community. But during her pregnancy Rebecca received a dream that foretold otherwise. She does not tell her sons and, like all unlikely heroes, Jacob does not recognize his destiny. As the brothers grow up, the difference in wisdom between them becomes clear when Esau offhandedly offers his birthright for some of Jacob’s stew, demonstrating his lack of sense to lead a nation. Finally the day comes when their father Isaac, old and blind, must bestow the blessing that will establish Esau in his place. But Rebecca knows it is not meant to be, and she tells Jacob to put on his brother’s clothes and some animal skins, and go to his father, knowing Isaac will mistake Jacob for his more firstborn and give the blessing. Once it is done, Jacob flees his brother’s rage and finally comes to the mountain where he collapses in sleep with only the energy to find a rock for under his head, and dreams of angels floating first up, then down a ladder planted in earth but reaching into heaven. The angels are upset, flying at each other from here, from there, as if parodying Jacob’s inner confusion at his actions.

In the morning Jacob wakes, remembers the dream and is astonished that God has been afoot all along: “Surely God was in this Place, and I, I did not know.” Gen. 28.16) Gottlieb-Zornberg explains that in mystical texts, the Hebrew words va-anokhi lo yadati show Jacob’s new ability for self-reflection; anokhi means self-awareness, as in saying, “ I myself, I did not know.(pp 277-78) Through the family crisis of identity and birthright, God has revealed Jacob to himself. Now Jacob is struck with the realization that he is on sacred ground, which he had not sensed before the dream of the previous night: the idle desert where he slept is also a living Place (rendered in Hebrew as HaMakom, meaning The Omnipresent, one of the many names of God in Judaism), so Jacob pours sanctifying oil on the stone that is first his pillow, now a totem. He begins to understand his situation by knowing where he stands, but as of yet, he does not fully know who he is to become. This self-knowledge is fulfilled twenty years later when Jacob, coming home to face his brother, is attacked in the night by a Being understood as God. The Being refuses to name himself, but declares a new name for Jacob, blesses him, and before leaving him, inexplicably wrenches his hip. In the morning Jacob awakens as Israel, meaning “God-wrestler,” one who can withstand, and stand with, God. But Israel, like all heroes, and all of us, comes into his destiny accompanied by a wounding that grounds and centers him in the human condition as creaturely, and therefore dependent on the Creator’s lead to become exactly who he is meant to be. Can the woundings and losses of transgender people be signposts accompanying their journeys to their becomings, and to God?

Transgender people uncover layers of self-knowledge in the same way, and at great cost. Just as Jacob spent his youth with little self-awareness until a crisis launched his flight from a limited understanding, even a person taking the opposite-sex hormones to alter the body will feel she exists somewhere between “no longer” and “not yet.” She is a revelation in progress and lives in a liminal state. Our task as directors is to witness what is happening, who she is becoming.