Jennifer Finney Boylan on Reclaiming Faith as a Transgender American
This excerpt from my interview with Jenny Boylan (@jennyboylan_97964) was cut from the final draft because, well, we just didn’t have enough room. I think it’s a topic that’s well worth discussing, though, so here is the unedited transcript of my question and her response.
I enjoyed hearing you talk about queer representation [at the 2017 PEN World Voices Festival], but the discussion that followed on queerness’ compatibility with faith was really fascinating. As you and Joy Ladin were commenting on how trans bodies are often less than welcome in modern religious contexts, I was reminded that it wasn’t always like that. Native American cultures have had well-established roles for people like us, and even going all the way back to ancient Sumer, some of the first known poems mention what we would call trans people as priests and priestesses of the goddess Inanna. Speaking from a Western context, do you think that trans people can recapture that in any way? Can we reestablish ourselves and our value?
Hmm. Well, I think what I’ve seen…most trans people I know who are not Native American, which is to say people in the Judeo-Christian faith[s] — most people I know in that cohort are people whose experience…it seems like three things happened: They were raised in a community of faith and there was no place for them and in some cases it was really horrible; and so that led to an alienation from the church or synagogue or whatever their belief happened to be; and some people have found their way back to a new church or found their own sense of spirituality. I know a lot of trans people who were traumatized permanently by their experiences in congregations that were preaching hatred and who internalized a sense of themselves as unworthy or unlovable. And it’s really powerful when you see people claiming not just their own right to exist within bodies that feel right to them, but also willing to be counted as another instrument for the love of God, and that we are people who are not only deserving of that love but people who are able to be agents of that love.
It takes a pretty big heart to be able to turn back to a culture that has beaten us down and denied us basic human rights. It takes a pretty big heart to be able to turn to that culture with open arms and forgiveness, but I see it a lot of the time and it’s really powerful. My sense is that most of the transgender people I know have something pretty deeply spiritual going on within them, whether it’s through an organized religion or not. I think to be born with this sense of the self is to be born into a philosophical puzzle and to be aware of the mind-body problem from as early as five years old. There are transgender people [who] are thinking as children about issues that adults still can’t figure out. So in my experience, either they become deeply spiritual or else they develop a tremendously wicked sense of humor. [laughs]
Can we reclaim an ancient sense of spirituality in the tradition of Native American two-spirits and other cultures — the Fa’afafine of Samoa or…well, I don’t even want to get into the issue of the hijra in India, which is a whole other thing. But can we reclaim that? I don’t see why not, but I also think we need to be respectful of indigenous cultures and we need to make sure we aren’t co-opting ancient sacred systems of belief and kind of Westernizing them for our own peace of mind. I mean really, any spiritual inquiry has to begin with a sense of humility. Where will this lead, I don’t know.
The funny thing is, being trans and, I think, being religious — both of these begin as fundamentally private experiences. My experience was, I had a profound sense of God before I ever really was in a church where that sense of God was reified. I had a profound sense of myself as female long before I met another transgender person. And yet if we begin these experiences in meditation and solitude and sometimes sadness and melancholy, we sometimes find those experiences will lead to a community, to something outside of ourselves, something bigger than ourselves, and to the lives of people who are fundamentally not us. So I now know a lot of transgender people who I don’t have that much in common with and our senses of being trans are not all that similar, and yet they are my family. I might have a harder time joining hands with a lot of Christians, because a lot of those Christians are still people who seem hell-bent on keeping me down.
But I’m always eager to have the conversation. I was one of the people who prayed [with] that son-of-a-bitch minister in Texas with Caitlyn Jenner — you know, the guy who helped lead the anti-trans movement in Houston — and we prayed with him, and we were roundly criticized for that. But I think people who criticize that may have thought that we had somehow come to agree with him. The prayer, which Kate Bornstein and I and Caitlyn had with that minister was “Dear God, please open this son-of-a-bitch’s heart.” That’s a prayer I would be happy to pray again and say with anybody.
Jennifer Finney Boylan’s latest book Long Black Veil is on sale now. Click here for the full interview.
