This paper contextualizes recent works of trans studies in religion within ongoing conversations around secularism and political theology. Max Strassfeld (Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature [Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022]) and Colby Gordon (Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024]) have performed "bad" literal readings of sexed religious materials to resource trans possibilities within religious traditions. These literal reading strategies, however, are not universally acclaimed by historians of sexuality and gender. Thomas Lacquer is identified by both Strassfeld and Gordon as exemplary of contemporary critiques of such readings as "unconscionably external, ahistorical, and impoverished" (Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990], 7), while Strassfeld further identifies logics internal to feminist and queer theory by which "transgender replaces transsexual (women)," who are identified as the paradigmatic bad/literal readers of sex (Strassfeld, Trans Talmud, 18).
Interestingly, Strassfeld and Gordon find rhetorical similarities between these contemporary suspicions of such literal reading strategies and religious polemics within their periods of study. Strassfeld links such critiques to early Christian polemic against Jews for "reading the sources stubbornly, literally, and materially" and "insist[ing] on literal circumcision instead of metaphorical circumcision" (Strassfeld, Trans Talmud, 19), while Gordon finds ongoing resonance with medieval afterlives of Eusebius' accusation of Origen's "'too literal and extreme' interpretation of Matthew 19:12" in his alleged self-castration (Gordon, Glorious Bodies, 21-22). This paper further develops the connection Strassfeld and Gordon have made between queer/feminist suspicions of trans literalism and historical religious discourses by situating this convergence within what Saba Mahmood describes as the semiotic ideology of modern secularism ("Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?" Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 [January 2009]: 836-862). Mahmood describes this semiotic ideology as unable to receive or articulate Muslim grievances against cartoon depictions of Mohammed because it presupposes the ultimate arbitrariness between religious sign and what it signifies. Secularism’s semiotic ideology renders Muslim responses to this depiction as "exhibit[ing] an improper reading practice, ... a fundamental confusion about the materiality of a particular semiotic form that is only arbitrarily, not necessarily, linked to the abstract character of their religious beliefs" (Mahmood, "Religious Reason", 844). The bafflement with which these grievances were met as described by Mahmood, then, might apply mutatis mutandis to the similar baffled responses surveyed by Gordon and Strassfeld to a trans literalism that appears to confuse the arbitrary link between the sign of gender and its arbitrary link to the signified of sex.
This analysis further suggests that this secular semiotic ideology helps make sense of the surprising convergence of historical religious polemic, feminist and queer scholarly suspicions of bad/literal reading, and the contemporary political movements that demean trans life as a supposed kind of irrational religiosity. This paper will then analyze this fraught nexus to ask how a theological response might follow Gordon's proposal to "lean into the charge ... that trans life is a nonsecular phenomenon, that its meaning is not exhausted in the secular reason of medical science and the endless taxonomizing of the sexologists" (Gordon, Glorious Bodies, 168). This paper will thus argue that contending with this semiotic ideology that underpins the strange convergence outlined above is a necessary precondition for resourcing theological projects of trans freedom amid executive orders and political movements against so-called “gender ideology” that seek to banish trans life from the domain of proper rationality via the discipline of the secular state.
Recent works within trans studies in religion by Max Strassfeld and Colby Gordon have performed "bad" literal readings of sexed religious materials to resource trans possibilities within religious traditions. In addition, these thinkers have argued that contemporary critiques of such readings resonate with historical Christian polemics for allegorical, spiritual readings over material, literal readings. This paper develops this connection further with Saba Mahmood's description of the semiotic ideology of modern secularism in which "proper" religious reading practices must not collapse the arbitrary distinction between sign and signified. Therefore, current suspicions and critiques of trans literalism both as a reading practice and as an ongoing political commitment to the materialities of changing sex can be understood as one way in which transness (in current political parlance, "gender ideology") is marked as outside the bounds of proper secular rationality.