Misrecognitions and re-recognitions of Malaysian trans-modified bodies: Possibilities for theopastoral ameliorations through a hermeneutic of the risen Christ

Abstract

In proposing a parallel between the early disciples’ initial misrecognition of the resurrected Jesus and contemporary conservative churches’ condemnation of Gender Affirmation Surgery, I argue in this article that a hermeneutic of the risen Christ can suggest reasons behind conservative Malaysian churches’ transnegative attitudes towards surgical modification and serve as an alternative interpretive lens to remap more affirming theopastoral strategies for transgender Christians. To this end, I highlight and elucidate cisheteronormative elements in the theological discourses of three Malaysian Christian leaders and showcase counterarguments from transgender theologians before I engage with analogous interpretations of the risen Christ’s appearances and the bodies of transgender women. I suggest that akin to the early disciples’ re-recognition of Jesus which enabled them to witness unprecedented divine marvels, contemporary churches’ re-recognition of trans-modified bodies can allow them to experience God’s own sense of justice, inclusion, and creativity in hitherto unfamiliar ways, reappreciate creation as a collaborative human-divine process, and respectfully value human persons as the ultimate authorities of their own lives.

Keywords

church Gender Affirmation Surgery Malaysia resurrection theopastoral transgender LGBTIQA+

This article unapologetically and unreservedly advocates an unconditional acceptance and affirmation of transgender people, namely transgender women who have undergone surgical modifications in the context of conservative Malaysian Christianity.¹ To this end, a major section of this work is dedicated to examining selected accounts of the appearances of the risen Jesus to his disciples in the gospels of Luke and John as a framework with which to interpret the categorical rejection of trans-modified embodiments by non-affirming churches. I do this by drawing a parallel between the misrecognition of both the resurrected body of Christ and transgender bodies, namely transgender women’s bodies. Thereafter, I consider how these initially veiled visions ultimately yield to a growing re-recognition of Jesus when he prompts them to regard him with greater attentiveness. Consequently, I submit that it is incumbent on churches to advance steadily towards a clear, unclouded recognition of transgender people whose heartfelt entreaties for acknowledgement and affirmation from their faith leaders and communities have either been rebuffed on the alleged basis of sinful wrongdoing, and/or remained unheeded. My main argument is that a hermeneutic of the risen Christ is helpful in laying bare reasons behind a distrustful and even hostile posturing towards surgical amendments to transgender bodies, as well as furnishing possibilities of redress and reform that can undergird theopastoral ameliorations towards the benefit of transgender Christians.

I deploy “transgender” as an adjectival descriptor of dignity and empowerment for people whose lived gender identities do not cohere with the gender identities that were assigned to them at birth based on their biological sex. By “transgender women,” I am referring to individuals who were designated male at birth but identify, live, and express themselves as women. This term encompasses those who are undergoing Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy and/or Gender Affirmation Surgery, and those who circumvent any of these procedures. While some Malay-Muslim transgender women have reclaimed the term “mak nyah” for themselves (Slamah 2005), others want to be identified simply as “trans women.”² In this article, “trans-modified bodies” and its correlates refer specifically to transgender women who have undergone Gender Affirmation Surgery, and who thus become particular targets of theological and ecclesiastical disapproval. I use “theopastoral ameliorations” to express the need for “pastoral theology and the practice of pastoral care … to promote human flourishing [which] must … be attentive to gender” (Kummer 2022, 116), to prioritize healing and empowerment in light of trans-dismissive and trans-ignorant pastoral trends that create vulnerability and precarity for transgender people in most Malaysian churches.

Fusing transgender studies, theological studies, pastoral care studies, and biblical interpretation, I park my interdisciplinary article within a growing body of literature which links transgender lived experiences and insights with a range of theologies, spiritualities, and religions. Despite the reality that transgender people experience conflicts with religious institutions (Levy and Lo 2013; Subhi, Mohamad, and Hamid 2013), they also draw fortitude and inspiration from spiritual, religious and scriptural resources (Ashraf, Pianezzi and Awan 2021; Beardsley and O’Brien 2016; Etengoff and Rodriguez 2020; Goh 2021; Heidari, Abdullahzadeh, and Naji 2021; Leung 2015; Maggard 2014; Reay 2009; Rodriguez 2019), and in maintaining a strong affiliation with their religious institutions (Best and Weerakoon 2021; Goh 2020b). Transgender people of faith envisage themselves as mirroring the image and likeness of God (Cornwall 2009; Hipsher 2009; Ladin 2019), who they sometimes reimagine from radical trans-affirming perspectives (Goh 2021). They intuit gender-affirming transitioning as God’s invitation to them to participate in God’s project of creation and flourish as human beings (Hero 2012; Sabia-Tanis 2003). Transgender people are also lauded as contributors of unique gifts to their faith communities (Lowe 2017; Mollenkott 2009). As a cisgender gay man and transgender ally, I see my scholarly efforts as accompanying rather than usurping transgender scholarship by transgender scholars.

I suggest that an understanding of local Christian ambivalence with transgender identities and disapproval of transgender embodiments can benefit from knowledge of the broader Malaysian context, namely “the specificity of place in shaping and giving meaning to transgender cultures as they are lived in local contexts” (Martin and Ho 2006, 185). In spite of the fact that non-normative genders and sexualities were accepted—or tolerated at the very least—in the Malay Archipelago well into the late twentieth century (Peletz 2011), Julian C. H. Lee (2011) contends that the effects of colonization, growing Islamization, changes in economic and social structures due to industrialization and urbanization, and transnational flows gave rise to moral panics which contributed to an unprecedented policing of gender and sexuality in the country, including the disavowal of non-normative genders and sexualities.

As an example, mak nyah can be arbitrarily arrested for “indecent” behavior under The Minor Offences Act of 1955 (for instance, The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia 2006a, sec. 27(b); see also Slamah 2005). Although still unreported to this day, mak nyah who participate in consensual sexual activity with men can hypothetically be prosecuted in accordance with the Malaysian Penal Code (The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia 1997, sec. 377A-B). The Syariah Criminal Offences (Federal Territory) Act 1997, which ostensibly only impacts Muslims, also criminalizes man-on-man (liwat) and woman-on-woman (musahaqah) sexual activity (The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia 2006b, secs. 25–26). It penalizes a “male person … in any public place [who] wears a woman’s attire and poses as a woman for immoral purposes” (The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia 2006b, sec. 28). In the Malaysian states of Perlis, Pahang, and Sabah, Syariah laws impose fines on and imprison women who appear as men (Legislature of the State of Pahang 2013; Legislature of the State of Perlis 1993; Legislature of the State of Sabah 1995). With the exception of Good Samaritan Kuala Lumpur and the Antioch Mission in Asia—diminutive local Christian communities which are largely dismissed by mainstream churches—Malaysian Christian churches officially disapprove of gender and sexual diversities on various fronts. Hence, both secular and Islamic laws inadvertently resonate with non-affirming Malaysian Christian doctrines, theopastoral attitudes, and community sentiments.

In what follows, I draw on, analyze, and interpret selected sources³ to unpack elements of a key conclusion which non-affirming Malaysian Christian leaders have made about transgender women before I provide some important counterarguments from transgender theologians. Thereafter, I engage with analogous interpretations of the resurrected Jesus’s manifold manifestations and transgender bodies, and offer some thoughts on theopastoral ameliorations. My theological musings do not lay claim to an essentialized “Malaysianness” despite being grounded in Malaysian Christian specificities. I am hopeful however, that these reflections will elicit theopastoral conversations within and beyond my geo-religious parameters.

Malaysian Christianity on transgender women: The trans-modification of bodies as an affront to God

In the early 2000s, Malaysian criminologist and sociologist Teh Yik Koon interviewed Malaysian religious leaders on their “religious interpretation[s of] transsexualism” (2002, 109) for her monograph The Mak Nyahs: Malaysian Male to Female Transsexuals (2002).⁴ Teh was interested in the lived experiences of transgender women whom she referred to as “transsexuals,” “male to female transsexuals,” and “male transsexuals” (2002, 11), and their keen desire for Gender Affirmation Surgery.

In this section, I feature portions of interview summaries which were compiled by Teh in her book after speaking with a few religious leaders, including two prominent Malaysian Christian clergymen (2002, 112–17). The first was Reverend Wong Kim Kong, then Secretary-General of the National Evangelical Christian Fellowship (NECF), an alliance of evangelical churches in the state of Selangor. The second was the late Most Reverend Anthony Soter Fernandez who served as the Roman Catholic (hereafter “Catholic”) Archbishop of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur from 1983 to 2003. Prompted by Teh, both respondents focused on the issue of Gender Affirmation Surgery involving “transsexuals.” Both Wong’s and Fernandez’s shared opinion “that the bible is silent on the issue of transsexualism and has to be interpreted” (cited in Teh 2002, 115), in tandem with pertinent scriptural teachings, harkens to Fraser Watts’s (2002, 83) early postulation that “theologically, it is difficult to see clearly how general principles should be applied to transsexualism, and there is no consensus about what view to take.”

Some years after these interviews transpired, the National Evangelical Christian Fellowship Malaysia, 2005 officially stated on its website that transgender tendencies reflect “a fallen condition” and “distortion in God’s pattern for living, including biological abnormalities and psychological disorders”—clearly an allusion to postlapsarian squalor. It also concluded that “authentic change from a person’s birth sex is not possible and an ongoing transsexual lifestyle is incompatible with God’s will as revealed in Scripture and in creation.” In 2003, an undefined “doctrinal congregation” of the Vatican announced that a “(transsexual) surgical operation is so superficial and external that it does not change the personality[, and i]f the person was male, he remains male” (quoted in Norton 2011). In 2008, the late Pope Benedict XVI stated that “the need to save mankind from a destructive blurring of gender roles is as important as saving the rainforests” (quoted in BBC News 2008). A few years later, he condemned “‘gender’ as a new philosophy of sexuality” and “profound falsehood” (2012). Pope Francis spoke forcefully against “gender theory” as an ideological instrument that “seeks to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it” (2015). The opinions of Wong and Fernandez are commensurate with the official pronouncements that emerged after their interviews.

I also showcase excerpts from reports of the talks delivered by Pastor Edmund Smith of the Real Love Ministry Fellowship church in the state of Malacca when he spoke at the Full Gospel Assembly Kota Damansara church and Community Baptist Church Kota Damansara in the state of Selangor in 2013 and 2014 respectively. These reports were published on the Christianity Malaysia website. During the talks, Smith confessed to having embraced a combination of homosexual and transgender lifestyles in the past although he “never lived his desire to be a transsexual” (cited in Lum 2014). Another admission, that of “a homosexual lifestyle … at a tender age of 13 years” (cited in Lum 2013a) most probably signaled the start of same-sex activity. A “transgender lifestyle” (ibid.) which began when he was four years old was marked by a fondness for dolls, dresses, and long hair. For Smith, same-sex attraction and cross-dressing are mutually constitutive.

Smith did not elucidate what he meant by “to be a transsexual,” but I suggest that this was a more invested project, a logical progression from “transgenderism” (cited in Lum 2014) which may have necessitated Gender Affirmation Surgery in order for him to become a woman. He was impeded from progressing along this trajectory “due to … his mother, who stopped his transgender lifestyle as he grew older” (cited in Lum 2013a). Smith eventually abandoned these “lifestyle[s]” and developed a relationship with Christ. Despite the fact that Teh’s book was published more than twenty years ago (with its attendant terminology and ideas), and Smith’s talks date back about a decade, my recent research at the interface of faith and diverse genders and sexualities reveals that the views of non-affirming churches in Malaysia on transgender communities have changed little.

By drawing on a variety of Christian scriptures, such as Genesis 1:27-28; 2:21-24; 19, Romans 1:26-32, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; 11:14-15 and Ephesians 5:28, the key conclusion of all three ministers is that any form of surgical intervention is grossly misaligned with God’s plans and thus sinful. More so than Smith, Wong and Fernandez seem to concentrate on the first two chapters of the book of Genesis that treat the matter of divine creation. Human beings are created in God’s likeness as “male and female” (Genesis 1:27). Woman was created as a “helper” and “partner” for man (Genesis 2:18). As such, it is preordained and natural that “a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Wong is certain that “any change of gender by surgery is a violation of God’s intentions and a dishonour or disobedience to God” (cited in Teh 2002, 113; added emphasis)—in short, a disrespectful act that defies divine dictates on gender, sex, and sexuality. Fernandez adheres to similar ideas:

God gave a body as well as a spirit to the body. This spirit would give the body identity as a male or female. Therefore, the male transsexuals[’] definition of themselves as a “female soul being trapped in a male body” contradicts God’s intention. It is the responsibility of human beings to grow to the full stature of humanity as either male or female as intended by God to carry out God’s plan. (cited in Teh 2002, 116)

I contend that Fernandez’s indignation with what he perceives as body tampering is founded on a biblio-theological interpretation that each corporeal “body” is infused with an invisible “spirit” or God’s “breath of life” (Genesis 2:7) which vivifies this body, as well as on the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Catholic, 1997, sec. 364) that the body is human “precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul.” This spirit causes the body to be perfectly replete with interlocking gendered, sexed, and sexual components as a divine endowment for human destiny. In Fernandez’s mind, a transgender woman’s claim that she possesses a “female soul … trapped in a male body” is completely unfounded as it “contradicts God’s intention” for the male body to develop into male humanness by virtue of a male spirit. To turn one’s back on one’s biological and gendered “destiny” is to turn one’s back on an optimal experience of humanity, and is thus a gross display of human pathology. Smith amalgamates homosexual and transgender lifestyles, and holds that being “transsexual”—the forging ahead of Gender Affirmation Surgery—is the ultimate expression of this twofold “lifestyle.” He avers that “God does not condemn … orientation towards the same gender, but [condemns] engagement in a homosexual lifestyle” (quoted in Lum 2014). Hence, anyone who is assigned male at birth but actively succumbs to the pursuit of a womanly appearance and attraction to men warrants God’s reprimand.

These Christian leaders are unequivocally clear that any deliberate bodily alteration is simultaneously an amendment of gender. As they meddle with divinely conferred ontologies, trans-modifications are acts of blasphemous insolence, of flinging God’s gifts back at God’s face. In summary, because “a created binary gendered order [is] ‘natural’ and the utilization of biotechnology [is] ‘unnatural,’ [and] thus against creation” (Hero 2012, 156), Gender Affirmation Surgery is a sinful act. What emerges to the fore here is the premise of a biblically informed anatomical framework. This is an unmitigated belief that genitalia determine gender which then becomes the sole optics through which they appraise transgender experiences. This framework underpins several key elements that influence the ways in which they perceive, understand, and interpret transgender bodies from theological, biblical, and pastoral perspectives.

First, they operate from the standpoint that transitioning must not and does not alter the primordial gender identity which is irrevocably assigned at birth in accordance with biological sex. Wong’s opinion that “if a male transsexual has a sexual relationship with another male, it is considered as same sex relationship” (cited in Teh 2002, 114) is shared by Fernandez (see Teh 2002, 117). Wong’s misgendering of transgender women by referring to them as “male transsexual[s]” is not uncommon among clergypersons who are uninitiated in transgender matters. For both clergymen, sexual activities between two people who were assigned the same gender at birth constitute homosexual relations, even if one of them has undergone Gender Affirmation Surgery. Additionally, resolute objections to any attempts at gender modification by Wong and Fernandez (quoted in Teh 2002, 112–17), and Smith’s certainty of an “underlying sexual design in a male and female [whereby] one may act outwardly opposite to his or her gender, but their inner needs would still remain the same” (cited in Lum 2013b) gesture towards their reverence for an abiding, immutable, and essential nature of gender.

Second, all three regard sexual difference and gender complementarity as oriented towards conjugal pleasure and the generation of offspring as “the intrinsic meaning of being human and sexual” (Vechoor 2015, 122). Wong’s belief that “God intended human beings to be either males or females for specific purposes” (cited in Teh 2002, 113), with which Fernandez concurs (quoted in Teh 2002, 115), is an allusion to the procreative sexual act and is unambiguously illuminated in Smith’s brazen retort that “a female’s sexual organ, a vagina, is designed to accommodate a male’s sexual organ, a penis” (cited in Lum 2013a). He continues by referring to God as “not a ‘cincai’ God” but is instead “perfectly particular [as] he gave woman to man for a beautiful reason” (ibid.).

I propose that while the representatives of the NECF and Catholic Church may be expounding on biblio-theological perspectives of sexual difference and gender difference as implied by their rather formulaic and subtle responses, the more explicit remark by the ex-gay/ex-transgender pastor could indicate something a tad more personal. What comes across as a rather excessive description of biological components and functions may well be a forceful recommitment to his post-conversion direction in life, namely a heterosexual marriage and children (Lum 2013a). The use of the colloquial Chinese term “cincai,” which denotes arbitrariness, randomness, and carelessness⁵—traits which he adamantly maintains are in contradistinction to God’s personhood—serves as a theological apparatus to magnify the designs of God that are neither haphazard nor thoughtless. Instead, God is meticulous and thoughtful, and entrusts men and women to each other for loving companionship and progeny, just as God did for Smith and his wife. In re-anchoring himself in this assurance, Smith finds stronger justification for shepherding himself and others away from “sinful lifestyles.”

Third, and closely related to the first two premises, these Christian ministers uphold an imperative of cisheteronormative performances. Cisheteronormativity is an ideology that valorizes heterosexuality in its realization of marriage and procreation. It extols the thesis that gender derives from biological sex and is validly taxonomized only in terms of a rigid man/woman binary (see Chevrette and Eguchi 2020; Kinitz and Salway 2022). Cisheteronormativity is echoed in Fernandez’s statement that “to be born a male or female is a gift from God” (quoted in Teh 2002, 115), Wong’s conviction that “God clearly distinguished between a male and a female and also their roles” (cited in Teh 2002, 112), and Smith’s assertion that “heterosexuality is God’s plan” (quoted in Lum 2013a).

Presuppositions of a core gender, an accentuation of sexual difference and gender complementarity, and the endorsement of cisheteronormativity correspond to Judith Butler’s theory of the:

heterosexual matrix [which] designate[s] that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized … a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender … that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality. (2006, 208, note 6, original emphasis)

In other words, this assumption of an ontological alignment between (unambiguous) genitals, (cis)gender identity, and (hetero)sexual attraction also obliges a display of static gendered and sexual functions and behaviors that must bend to the rubric of socio-culturally discernibility if one is to achieve legitimacy of life. When these premises are declared as godly in origin, and/or as biblio-theologically sound, they bestow an infallible authority upon the proclamations of those who claim them, which in turn affords them considerable latitude for the excoriation of any deviation from gendered and sexual normativity. This is the authority with which these Christian leaders speak.

Transgender-affirming theologians talk back

Christian theologians who are either transgender people or transgender allies offer cogent counterarguments in response to theological vilifications that portray trans-modified bodies as encapsulations of insubordination to divine ordinance. In addressing the book of Genesis as the foundational text against gender and sexual diversity, Justin Sabia-Tanis understands the creation of man and woman as a mythical exposition on “the plurality of God’s own being—male, female, and beyond—which is broader than what can be understood in a single term or gender” (2003, 57), the myriad possibilities of which God shares with human beings. Sabia-Tanis also links creation to resurrection, based on his experiences of listening to “a number of transsexuals [who] speak about experiencing a sense of resurrection as one part of them dies and another is reborn in their new gender” (2003, 142). In this sense, resurrection constitutes and/or represents new creation, just as gender transitioning can constitute and/or represent new life.

Furthermore, rather than advocating the role of woman as naturally complimentary and subservient to man, Sabia-Tanis interprets notions of “helper” and “partner” (Genesis 2:18) as God’s remedy for “isolation from love, connection, and relationship” (2003, 62) through the forging of life-giving human relationships that are not confined to normative forms of gender complementarity. In so doing, Sabia-Tanis dismantles the notion that sexual differences justify hierarchies of superiority in human existence.

Some theologians understand transgender people as an integral part of human existence, and by extension, the craftings of Christian theology. James and Evelyn Whitehead underscore the fact that “ongoing research—physiological and psychological—confirms that gender is experienced and expressed along a wide spectrum” and that “the life experience of transgender persons also draws us into this story of God’s extravagance” (2014, 173, 174). B. K. Hipsher calls for a theological strategy which supports “a liberative imago Dei that has the capacity to include the multiplicity of human reality … the range of skin colour, cultural identity, and gender construction and performance” (2009, 92; original ellipsis). For Sabia-Tanis, it is a matter of “seeing ourselves as part of something larger than we are, part of the creation itself … We become part of the Creator’s plan, rather than an individual person making individual choices” (2003, 53).

These theologians also insist that God’s creation of human beings is an interminable development of co-creation rather than a singular instance of divine accomplishment. For Jakob Hero (2012, 144), “any person, transgender or cisgender, actively participates alongside of God in the lifelong project of creation.” Moreover, “humanity not as a thing created in the past, but as an ongoing process itself … the work of creation is never complete [as c]reation was not a onetime event that living beings simply experienced as passive recipient” (2012, 156). In seeming agreement with Hero, Sabia-Tanis posits that creation is a primordial collaborative endeavor with the creator:

God also implies a sense of co-creativity … that from the beginning humanity has been invited by God to participate in the creation process. The development of our lives, our minds, our bodies, and our spirits, over the course of our lifetimes, has been given to us as a responsibility from God … the ways in which we have learned to modify our bodies to reflect our spirits could be part of this creative process that has been ongoing from the origins of humanity. We share, with God, the responsibility for creating our lives; God designed creation in this fashion (2003, 59)

Hence, gender is not passive resignation to divinely determined biology, nor a solipsistic venture, but an extraordinary responsibility of gendered and sexual beings to cooperate with God towards becoming themselves. This shared task of self-realization extends to the development of gender identities and expressions, including the various modes of gender transitioning. For a transgender person who participates in bodily modifications, “[a] transsexual status is not a mistake of creation; it is a call to a continual process of transformation” (Hero 2012, 156). Concurring with these theologians on numerous fronts, I see notions of essentialized gender, hierarchical sexual difference, and contrived gender complementarity as myopic ideologies that fail to appreciate the diversity of humanity as designed by God, and as insidious biblio-theological devices that cast transgender people who undergo Gender Affirmation Surgery as iniquitous and anomalous. Having made this statement, I also admit that this transnegative demeanor does not necessarily come from a place of moral superiority or vindictiveness, nor does it need to be articulated as such. I will explain further in the ensuing final section.

Misrecognitions (and re-recognitions) of the risen/transgender body: Toward theopastoral ameliorations

I draw on Mark D. Jordan’s (2012) notion of “misrecognition” to engage with analogous interpretations of reactions/responses to the resurrected Jesus’s manifold manifestations and transgender women’s bodies. There are numerous biblical tropes which are utilized to think through transgender identities and embodiments. Justin Sabia-Tanis (2003), as discussed in the previous section, draws a parallel between the resurrection and creation for transgender theology. Cary Howie (2013) discerns in Christ’s transfiguration a theological articulation of transformation and corporeal fluidity. Michelle Wolff (2019), who also subscribes to the notion of misrecognition, frames the transfiguration in terms of divine revelation through transgender bodies, and understands Christ as queering human categorizations. My own deployment of the notion of misrecognition, based on the resurrection rather than the transfiguration wishes to emphasize the strong interplay between suffering, fortitude, integrity, self-reflexivity, and self-actualization that I see in both the resurrected Jesus and transgender people. I also find Jordan’s ecclesiological reading of the misrecognized risen body particularly useful for my development of theopastoral ameliorations involving transgender people as integral members of the church, and by extension, the body of Christ.

My synoptic reading of scriptural and bodily texts adopts Max Strassfeld’s (2018, 52) methodology of “transing religion” which “holds forth the potential for liberation or, put another way … to imagine alternate modes of both religion and divinity” in liberating ways “rather than positioning trans (bodies, people, cosmologies) as external correctives to religion.” Building on the original notion of “transing” by Paisley Currah, Lisa Jean Moore, and Susan Stryker (2008), transing religion re(defines), (re)distributes, (re)arranges, and (re)assigns interconnecting constituents and techniques of gendered livability in particular relation to theologies and religiosities.

Transing religion is an approach for embracing transgender embodiments, knowledges, experiences, and worldviews as integral rather than antithetical to the diversity of theological and religious projects—a practice which may even reconfigure and/or re-sequence the purportedly inherent and immutable structures of the latter. As someone who researches in transgender theologies and spiritualities, I concur with Strassfeld (2018, 53) that “if we do not trans religion, we remain complicit in a logic that diminishes the possibilities of how we understand both trans and religion,” and unwittingly conspire with dominant logics of power that exclude transgender people.

Jordan’s queer act of both distinguishing between, and yet conflating the battered pre-resurrection and the glorious post-resurrection body of Christ indicates that the latter is not, as Sandra Schneiders (2013, 13) suggests, “a natural, physical body such as Jesus had before his death, which was visible to anyone who was present where Jesus was present and who was recognizable by his physiognomy as any other mortal is.” At the same time, the risen body, which “can cross boundaries, ethnic boundaries, gender boundaries, socio-economic boundaries” (Ward 2000, 103), is a “mode of presence” in which Christ is “personally and identically (i.e., numerically) himself in the full integrity of his humanity” (Schneiders 2013, 22, 27). In other words:

The glorified Jesus, as he appears to his disciples, is a singular, personal, and perceptible agent who is numerically identical with the One who died on the cross on Good Friday and who interacts with his disciples who are still in this world and subject to the conditions of historical existence. (2013, 14)

After the resurrection, Jesus is no longer Jesus but paradoxically still Jesus as “the remembered body and the resurrected body do not disavow the memory of what was done to them—of traumas before new life” (Jordan 2012, 28). “Jesus’ body,” as Reina Ueno (2020, 128) affirms, “is a body of resurrection, leaving behind the wounds inscribed by the cross.” By linking the itinerant preacher and the risen Christ, Jordan gestures towards to a contiguity between the finite corporeality of Jesus and his unlimited, open body that is no longer bound by space and time, or by ecclesiastical boundaries. If the church is the body of Christ, he further suggests, the church must thus be the body of the unconstrained, open body of the glorified Jesus. More importantly, “to avow that the church is an open body is to remember that the point of having churches is to prepare encounters with the God who is never confined to churches” (Jordan 2012, 28). In considering this ecclesiological notion of the open, resurrected body, Jordan draws attention to biblical narratives which present the risen Jesus as unfamiliar and strange to those who knew him before his brutal death.

The Lukan gospel recounts how the “eyes” of the disciples who were en route to Emmaus “were kept from recognizing him (Luke 24:16)”, so much so that they asked Jesus if he was “the only stranger in Jerusalem who [did] not know the things that [had] taken place there” (Luke 24:18; added emphasis). Later that evening, upon reuniting with “the eleven and their companions” and recounting their experiences, the appearance of Christ among them caused them to feel “startled and terrified, and [they] thought that they were seeing a ghost” (Luke 24:37; added emphasis). When the risen Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene, “she did not know that it was [him]” (John 20:14), and “supposing him to be the gardener” (John 20:15; added emphasis), pleaded with him to reveal where he had relocated the body of her slain leader.

Jordan’s reflections divulge how transformed embodiment can sometimes elude immediate recognition. Jesus, who is different and yet the same, is mistaken for a stranger, a ghost, a gardener and possibly a body snatcher! Jordan calls such instances “misrecognitions of the risen body” (2012, 28), in which the transformed Jesus now appears in a form with which they are unaccustomed, perhaps one that is bizarre or even freakish to them. As churches become increasingly open to and welcoming of reforms and revisions in their capacity as “the body of the risen Christ,” their “forms might be as unusual as that risen body—and as liable to be misrecognized” (2012, 28). It is easy to mistake a recalibrated church for an alien entity, instead of one that has undergone tremendous transformation in order to be truer to itself and to the vision of Christ. Nonetheless, it is not the misrecognition of a renewed church that captures my attention here. It is the reality that certain human beings who do not abide by normative emblems of human recognizability can just as easily be misrecognized by Christian institutions that selectively reject reform, revision, and renewal which they perceive as threats to time-honored tradition and theological integrity. Misrecognition misses the point which Sabia-Tanis makes, that just as the Risen Christ “is both the same and different” (2003, 143), so too are pre-transitioned and post-transitioned transgender people.

When the criteria of a cisheteronormative rubric are met within specific embodiments, churches are able to translate such embodiments as “naturally” intelligible, and therefore socio-culturally, ecclesiastically, and theologically recognizable. The exercise of recognizability is obviously a more facile endeavor within the realm of the normative. Conversely, when a presumed cisheteronormative alignment is disrupted and rearranged, as in cases of Gender Affirmation Surgery when appearances, comportments, names, and ways of living are radically altered, churches begin to misread and misrecognize flesh-and-blood persons. This misrecognition does not come about because the meaning-making processes of churches are clouded by the physical changes that unfold before them, but by biases that are firmly entrenched in the unassailability of a gendered core, sexual difference, gender complementarity, and cisheteronormativity.

Conservative Malaysian Christianity evidently sees the trans-modification of bodies as an insult to God who is assumed to have created genders, sexes, and sexualities as permanent states of being. Christian leaders support ideas of a core and immutable gender, the superficiality of Gender Affirmation Surgery, the “naturalness” of sexual difference and gender complementarity, and the supremacy of cisheteronormativity. The desire of transgender people to pursue surgery is thus vilified as either a creative fabrication of iniquity in contemporary times that requires repentance, or an ill-fated pathology that is urgently in need of a cure. Through these unbending ideologies which collude with state-sanctioned transnegativity, churches belittle the agency of transgender people and dismiss their authority as informed contemplatives of their own lives. Churches commit gender violence when they denigrate the efforts of those who labor tirelessly to live their truths, and denounce their efforts to flourish as gendered and sexual human beings.

Nevertheless, I recognize that accusatory terms such as “iniquity,” “pathology,” “ideology,” “transnegativity,” “belittlement,” “dismissiveness,” “violence,” “denigration,” and “denouncement” may sometimes be unhelpful, even when levelled in the name of greater justice against non-affirming churches. Instead, perhaps a re-articulation of these terms as “misrecognition” can prove to be productive in attempting to make sense of biblio-theological antagonism towards those who actively pursue re-organizations of gender, sex, and sexuality. It can also facilitate the reforms, revisions, and renewals of churches that intuitively sense and trust in their own inclination towards an affirming openness with regard to transgender people, as these churches are now equipped with more appropriately constructive and healthier theopastoral language with which to reflect on and speak to this inclination. Misrecognition suggests that such non-affirming attitudes towards surgical modifications are not borne of pure vitriol, but that Christian leaders “may be, from their perspectives, acting out of the best of intentions [without realizing that] their actions have far-reaching destructive consequences on those who interiorize the execution of these intentions” (Goh 2020a). Misrecognition displays the irony that churches can recognize the pre-paschal Jesus and the glorified Christ as different and yet the same, but deny themselves permission to recognize pre-transitioned and post-transitioned transgender people as different and yet the same. Misrecognition offers opportunities for churches to revisit their outlook on transgender people and Gender Affirmation Surgery. Their current non-affirming stance is not theopastorally irremediable.

Misrecognitions are intentionally incorporated into the resurrection stories for the purpose of dramatic displays of re-recognition when Christ chooses to reveal himself to his disciples as the fulfilment of salvific prophecy, and when they finally accept that his glorified, borderless body is capable of appearing in a diversity of ways. Jordan (2012, 29) says that “the open body of the Lord, the body resurrected with its wounds, the body into which we are incorporated, is a body difficult to recognize until it declares itself.” Such declarations manifest themselves in myriad ways. For the disciples who were journeying with a “stranger” to Emmaus, “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” when Jesus revealed himself “at the table with them, [and when] he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them” (Luke 24:30-31). Mary Magdalene was only able to re-recognize her “Rabbouni” and profess him as “the Lord” when the “gardener” and (presumed) cadaver thief revealed himself to her by calling her name (John 20:16, 18), at which point she “converted from her despair to recognition of him as indeed the ‘teacher’ she had known in his pre-paschal life” (Schneiders 2013, 48). Michael Sepidoza Campos (2019, 51) provides an apt description that this “moment of ‘witness’ heralds an instance of awe, a destabilizing encounter with other-ness where Jesus is simultaneously seen and mis-represented (because the ‘old body’ could no longer contain the fulness of the resurrection).” When these disciples comprehend that “Jesus’ body was changed, both by becoming alive after death and in ways that made him appear different to those who knew him; at the same time, he was the same Jesus who had been among them” (Sabia-Tanis 2003, 142), that Jesus is somehow no longer Jesus but still Jesus, their incredulity and terror dissolve and transform into joyful acceptance. Pre- and post-transformed bodies are synoptically recognizable for those who see through eyes of loving respect and genuine appreciation.

The timings associated with concealment and revelation are particularly noteworthy, as “the purpose of these self-manifestations or self-revelations was to confirm the faith of his disciples and to commission them to share that faith with the whole world” (Schneiders 2013, 12). Misrecognition and re-recognition are, as intended by the authors of the gospels, critical kerygmatic strategies that propel believers towards a deeper discipleship of the glorified Christ. However, I would like to read such moments of veiling and unveiling a little differently. Jesus’s interplay of obscuring and divulging his transformed self is very similar to the prudence with which transgender people negotiate the sharing of knowledge pertaining to their bodily changes. Perhaps this interplay is reflective of the tentativeness and precarity that plagued the post-paschal Christ’s own sense of self in appearing as an unfamiliar face to familiar faces. What if the risen Jesus’s self-recognition extended beyond divine self-understanding and self-awareness to community cognizance? Perhaps the recognition of friends and family mattered to him as much as his own recognition and acceptance of who he was. I suggest that similar apprehensions persist for many transgender people, especially those with obtrusive bodily enhancements. If surgical modification is the linchpin for ecclesiastical rejection or acceptance, individuals who have undergone Gender Affirmation Surgery will understandably not be forthcoming with any personal information.

The instructional quality of the paschal mystery is that misrecognition is not fait accompli. The good news is that churches are not obliged to cling unproblematically to existing notions of transgender people. More importantly, there is a way for churches to revise their narratives without “losing face,” or portraying themselves as purveyors of an embarrassing theopastoral faux pas regarding transgender people. A parallel reading of the text of transformed transgender bodies and the text of the transformed body of Jesus opens up possibilities for a steady supplanting of misrecognition with re-recognition for transgender people, and in this particular context, for post-surgery transgender women. It is possible for churches to relinquish an outdated and a simplistic “biblically informed” anatomical framework by which they approximate transgender bodies and lives. It is equally possible for churches to respectfully acknowledge and affirm any verbal disclosure and/or physical presentation by transgender people as the declaration of an authentic self without the need to proceed with inordinate intrusion into their private lives.

Re-recognition pays homage to a long-standing ecclesiastical tradition which not only confesses Jesus as the human embodiment of God, but identifies him in his manifold forms as “Christ” (Matthew 16:16), “Lord” and even “God” (John 20:28), “Rabbi” (Mark 9:5), “Son of Man” (Luke 5:24), “Son of God” (Matthew 14:33), “Son of David” (Mark 10:47), “Lamb of God” (John 1:29), “prophet” (Matthew 14:5), and “Word” (John 1:1). Lisa Isherwood aptly traces the fluidity of Jesus:

From man to risen friend who even travelled to the depth of hell to become the risen assurance of transformed life and to ascend as companion in the struggle and from there to the altars of much of the Christian world as the real presence in bread and wine, transformations across a wide range of material substances and through various manifestations. (2009, 2)

Re-recognition allows churches to behold in Jesus, borrowing Damián Nicolás de la Puente’s words, “a God who laughs and finds pleasure in God’s divine destiny of transgressive justice, the God who dismantles the cis-heteropatriarchal laws and who finally makes us disciples and lovers” (2020, 92). Re-recognition exposes the resurrection as renewed, re-affirmed, and resumed creation—as the deepening of human life with its attendant meanings. Re-recognition enables churches to remedy the misrecognition of trans-modified bodies as antithetical to their “original selves” and embrace the idea that bodies are tasks which are begun rather than accomplished at birth. Re-recognition concedes to a new theopastoral vision which treat transgender people as, borrowing Gabriele Lucius-Hoene’s words, “experts for the predicaments of their situation” (2000, para. 3). Additionally, transgender people become partners with God in the unceasing process of co-creation (Hero 2012; Hipsher 2009; Sabia-Tanis 2003) and crucial contributors to theopastoral pursuits (Lowe 2017; Mollenkott 2009).

Such a radical and affirmative direction in favor of transgender people need not be impetuous or instantaneous. Churches will struggle with perplexities, disorientations, and deadlocks once they become more attentive and deferential to transgender lives. Their theological and socio-cultural understanding of what “normal” means will be enshrouded by vagueness, and their theopastoral blueprint may become obsolete. As Susan Stryker (1996, 210) aptly says:

To encounter the transsexual body, to apprehend a transgendered consciousness articulating itself, is to risk a revelation of the constructedness of the natural order. Confronting the implications of this constructedness can summon up all the violation, loss, and separation inflicted by the gendering process that sustains the illusion of naturalness.

Moreover, the gospels demonstrate how the mounting tension of unknowability which seemingly yields to the relief of identifiability—that the glorified Christ whom they see before them is/not the same Jesus whom they knew and loved before he was put to death, that his “bodyself is both continuous and discontinuous with the One they had known” (Schneiders 2013, 49)—is more pronounced and immediate in some stories than others. Upon realizing that the “ghost” who “showed them his hands and his feet” and bade them to touch him (Luke 24:39-40) was Jesus, the larger cohort of disciples were filled with “joy” but this joy was not experienced in any absolute or instantaneous way. The happiness of reuniting with Christ was tinged with doubt and confusion, as these disciples were “disbelieving and still wondering” (Luke 24:41).

Deep contemplation, reflexivity and discernment, as well embarking on bold decisions and weathering unfavorable aftermaths are as transformative for churches as moments of pause, confusion, disillusionment, contention, and suffering, insofar as they are imbued with an attitude of “love seeking understanding” and therefore occur along a purposefully conscious trajectory of transgender affirmation. Such are the dynamics along which the Spirit of God operates when churches embrace a critical examen of themselves through a hermeneutic of the risen Christ, and seriously consider renouncing misrecognition for re-recognition. “In the rising of Jesus,” says Luis Antonio G. Tagle (1995, 9), “the God of life makes it known that life has the final word in history.” It is only when churches evince credible, trustworthy, and life-giving theopastoral ameliorations that they can become true pathways of unconditional acceptance, affirmation, and inclusion for transgender people, as befitting of those who are charged with bearing the legacy of the risen Christ.

Dedication

Terima kasih to transgender activists and allies in Malaysia. Memperingati Rev. Stephen Suleeman (d. 2021) of Jakarta Theological Seminary, Rev. Borah Lim (d. 2023) of Soemdol Hyangrin Church, Rev. Myke Sotero (d. 2023) of Northern Sanctuary MCC, and their indefatigable efforts to champion LGBTIQA+ rights in church and society.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia; Internal Research Grant, Project No. 211.

ORCID iD

Joseph N. Goh

Notes

Author biography

Joseph N. Goh (he/they/any) is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. He holds a PhD in gender, sexuality, and theology, with research interests in queer and LGBTI studies, human rights and sexual health issues, diverse theological, spirituality and religious studies, and qualitative research. Goh is the author of numerous publications, including Doing Church at the Amplify Open and Affirming Conferences (2021), Becoming a Malaysian Trans Man (2020), and Living Out Sexuality and Faith (2018). He owns a personal website at .

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