Transexual ⚧︎ Theology
When you spend so much time hating your body, and therefore yourself, and when you feel it is righteously deserved, there is little space for God in your life. Or, rather, when I was utterly disconnected from myself I could not access my spirituality. Totally dissociated and miserable, for years I was keenly aware of my inability to “tap in” to the beauty and divinity that I knew was inherent to the world. If depression is the absence of vitality, then the medical transition that lifted me from that place felt like abundance. Like God.
My desire to medically transition stemmed from the same impulses for sex and God: an appetite for embodiment, an integration of the spiritual and the physical. After a few months on T, the commonplace phrase “you are made in God’s image” suddenly struck me as profound and transformative. What did this say about me? What does this say about God? If I am made in God’s image then I, too, hold meaningful and powerful energy. I, too, have the ability to affect change in my own body and life. I felt a magical oneness with self, seeing my transness as something that connected me to a harmonious whole, rather than denying me peace and personhood. My transition was a necessary step towards spiritual alignment because, like God, I exist beyond binary categorization and beyond a body. To be transsexual is to acknowledge the malleability of the self, to know that we are made up of chemicals whose delicate balance can be swayed. Transness is a shattering of the ego, or the conception of a fixed “self” which separates us as individuals from oneness with God.
In the ongoing culture war against trans people, there is a camp of conservative and religious people who see transness as an unholy abomination, as denying God’s will. I look at these people and think they do not know God. Their version is a man in the sky, a binary individual, a replica of what they know. They impose human limits on God rather than accepting that being made in God’s image means we are limitless. My connection to a greater power has allowed me to connect with my transness outside the reach of pathology, politics, and diagnosis, a place where only God and I can go.
December 2025