‘Our transness comes to us from the Real’: Xandra Metcalfe’s primordial transsexuality and Gregory of Nyssa’s imago dei

In ‘“Why Are We Like This?”: The Primacy of Transsexuality’, psychoanalytic trans communist Xandra Metcalfe adopts a consciously ‘transpositive viewpoint’, rejecting the cisnormative insistence that trans identity—as opposed to cis identity—particularly requires explanation. Cissexuality, Metcalfe proposes, should not be seen as an original condition—with transsexuality thus an aberration—but rather as itself warranting a psychoanalytic aetiology. She finds this in the Oedipal conflict, positing the origin of binary gender in ‘the installation of the phallus as the privileged signifier of sexual difference’. Yet Metcalfe, following Lacan, holds Oedipus not as a universal Real condition but a ‘socially contingent phenomenon’. She thus suggests a Real ‘primordial transsexuality’, prior to the violence that heterosexuality enacts upon the human subject.[1] 

Metcalfe draws this concept of ‘primordial transsexuality’ from Mario Mieli, who uses ‘transsexuality’ to refer to the ‘original and deep hermaphroditism of every individual’.[2] Metcalfe clarifies that primordial transsexuality is not ‘primordial bisexuality’—not ‘male and female’ in one subject—but rather an original condition before the binary which has now been lost. She frames this in explicitly theological language, evoking the Fall narrative to describe our decline into phallocentric cisnormativity. Through the abolition of gender, humanity might return to its original condition. However, Metcalfe then problematises this narrative, rejecting the ‘fantasy’ of ‘a pre-existing One of harmony and self-identity’. Instead, she characterises trans identity as expressing a primordial absence, a ‘traumatic-Real’ which disturbs the symbolic order. The cis transphobe is confronted—in the trans subject – with the presence of ‘a radical Other or Outside’; that is, with their own primordial transsexuality, ‘who they were’ behind the ‘veil’ that gender discourse places over the Real.[3]

This paper brings Metcalfe’s Lacanian proposals into dialogue with Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory has long been recognised as offering a resource for contemporary queer theology, such that in 2018 Linn Marie Tonstad could write that ‘Gregory of Nyssa is the most influential early Christian writer for queer theologians’.[4] While there has generally been a lack of engagement with trans authors themselves in Gregory scholarship (an absence my own research addresses), various scholars suggest the relevance of Gregory’s approach for questions around gender identity, including Sarah Coakley, in her article on Gregory and Judith Butler,[5] and Michael Nausner, in his article on ‘Gregory of Nyssa's Transgendering as Part of his Transformative Eschatology’.[6]

Gregory holds that ‘male and female’ sexual difference is not original to humanity’s creation, but a degraded state introduced in anticipation of the Fall. For Gregory, the imago dei—which is an ineffable representation of an unrepresentable God—is without sexual difference, which belongs only to mortal embodiment. He holds that in the eschatological body of Christ there will be no more ‘male and female’ (Galatians 3.28). The effect of this eschatology is felt across his writings, for instance in the dizzyingly fluid gender and sexual imagery in his Homilies on the Song of Songs,[7] his presentation of his sister Macrina as transcending her gender,[8] and his theme of universal spiritual pregnancy.[9]

As well as lively discussion around Gregory’s approach to gender, there are also open dialogues between Gregory scholarship and poststructuralist philosophy. Michel Foucault wrote on Gregory,[10] Alden Mosshammer characterises Gregory as a ‘deconstructionist’;[11] Scot Douglass sees similarities between the Cappadocians and Jacques Derrida,[12] and so on. The significant resonances between Gregory and Lacan, however, have generally gone unrecognized (a rare exception being Jin Sook Kim’s article on Gregory and Judith Butler, which employs Lacan’s theory of death as an analytic tool).[13]

Meanwhile, many outside Gregory scholarship have identified Lacan as a valuable resource for theology. Tina Beattie, for instance, ambitiously synthesises Lacan and Thomas Aquinas, seeing both as concerned with the ‘purification of theological desire’, and considering Lacan to offer a corrective to Aquinas’ gendered Aristotelian ontology.[14] I suggest that Gregory offers a more promising interlocuter for Lacan than does Aquinas. Gregory has a vivid account of the human’s endless desire for God, which (contra Aquinas’ beatific vision) has no determinate limit. Moreover, there are resonances between Lacan’s account of the Real as that which ‘resists symbolisation absolutely’,[15] and Gregory’s apophatic characterisation of the Divine Essence as unnameable.

For Metcalfe, primordial transsexuality disturbs the heterosexual symbolic order, confronting us with the extradiscursive Real. I will argue that the imago dei occupies a similar place in Gregory’s theology. The gender-transcendent image of God, in which humanity is first created, radically destabilises gender language throughout Gregory’s writings, confronting the reader with the alterity of the unnameable God.

Endnotes:

Title quotation from: Xandra Metcalfe, ‘“Why Are We Like This?”: The Primacy of Transsexuality’ in Transgender Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 219-229; 227.

1. Metcalfe, ‘“Why Are We Like This?”, 219-223
2. Mieli, Towards a Gay Communism, trans. Fernbach and Williams (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 6.
3. Metcalfe; “Why Are We Like This?”, 221-227.
4. Tonstad, Queer Theology (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018), 41.
5. Coakley, ‘The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation, and God’ Modern Theology 16, no. 1 (2000).
6. Nausner, ‘Toward Community Beyond Gender Binaries: Gregory of Nyssa’s Transgendering as Part of his Transformative Eschatology.’ Theology & Sexuality 8 (16) (2002): 55-65.
7. Gregory, Homilies on the Song of Songs, trans. Norris (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2012)
8. Gregory, Life of St Macrina trans. Clarke (London: SPCK, 1916).
9. See: Verna Harrison, “Gender, Generation, and Virginity in Cappadocian Theology” Journal of Theological Studies, 47 (1996).
10. Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh. ed. Gros, trans. Hurley. (London: Penguin Books, 2021), 135-157.
11. Mosshammer, “Disclosing but Not Disclosed: Gregory of Nyssa as Deconstructionist.” In Studien Zu Gregor von Nyssa Und Der Christlichen Spätantike, 12:99–123 (1990)
12. Douglass, Theology of the Gap (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005).
13. Kim, ‘Performing Gender and the Death Drive’ 종교와 문화 Vol. 27 (2014), 119- 145.
14. See: Davis, Pound, and Crockett, eds. Theology after Lacan (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2015).
15. Beattie, ‘“Deforming God: Why Nothing Really Matters. A Lacanian Reading of Thomas Aquinas’ New Blackfriars 95, no. 1056 (2014): 218.33. 
16. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1, ed. Millar, trans. Forrester (New York: WW. Norton, 1991), 66.