This violence, though, extends beyond repressive legislative measures surrounding gender transition care or the like; indeed, in places like Florida, it has meant a near-total epistemic silencing, an archaic censoring, of discussions of transness. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, has placed bans on discussing gender identity in the classroom—just as he has with so-called critical race theory—expanding logistical bans on care for trans* youth into a much larger metamorphosing of trans*ness into taboo.⁵

This is all happening amid disproportionate numbers of physical and sexual assaults against trans* people of color; the Human Rights Campaign has stated that between 2013 and 2021, 84 percent of instances of fatal violence against trans* folk were against people of color, of which 85 percent were trans women and 66 percent were Black trans women.⁶ And finally, as if all this isn’t already enough, this dehumanization and violent public discourse against trans* folks has led to trans* people having some of the highest rates of suicide in the country: according to a 2022 study, 82 percent of trans* people have considered suicide, and 40 percent of them have actually attempted it.⁷

I should mention, though, that it’s fair to ask which trans* people and trans* communities evade the signification these policies attempt. In other words, it seems that the trans* populations these pieces of anti-trans* legislation most directly affect are often white, middle-class ones with the financial and familial stability to access “official” medical transition resources. As I read it, the New York Times seems to think that the religious right’s fixation on trans* rights is temporary at best, disingenuous at worst.⁸ If this is the case, what struggles are being obscured by this—albeit valid—mainstream focus on trans* rights, and what is lost in the naming of this violence as specifically anti-trans* violence?

Aren Z. Aizura’s Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment (Duke University Press, 2018) is a great exploration of trans*gender identity, colonization, whiteness, and the European liberal imaginary, and how notions of mobility tie all three of these together. Jasbir K. Puar’s book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press, 2017) also has a chapter (“Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled”) that touches in part on how the national political focus on trans* rights frequently obscures the struggles of trans* of color communities. In at least two ways, the anti-trans* bills don’t paint the full picture.

I’m exploring trans*gender religiosity in my academic program right now, so these propositions are still being developed. And I’m also a young, white, Jewish trans woman—my viewpoint is necessarily limited. I hope my research will be applicable enough to other, non-Western and/or non-Abrahamic faith traditions, lived experiences, and embodiments of non-cis gender variance, but I also hope my work will open the door to a wide range of research and perspectives beyond my own.

One of the most interesting and lively currents in the study of religion today (though maybe I’m biased) is the observation of trans* folks practicing religion and spirituality—whether that be through a new faith or one they grew up with. Thinking about what “trans*gender religion” means, and can mean (academically or not), is oftentimes a powerful example of reappropriation and subversion, especially of and to religious traditions and congregations that either rejected these trans* folks individually or shunned the group categorically. For example, there is an annual one-week immersive “Talmud summer camp” for queer and trans Jews, offered by the Jewish “traditionally radical” yeshiva Svara.⁹ This is one powerful example of the productive and fortifying ways in which religion, in whatever capacity and to whatever level of devotion and belief, can and does have a positive benefit for trans* people.

Similarly interesting are the cases of trans* folks finding new faith traditions, perhaps converting at or around the same time they transition genders (or leave gender altogether). Trans* religiosity, seen this way, can be read as going beyond a lived state of devotional affairs and rather as a kind of talking-back, an embodied and shifting relation to rituals, traditions, communities, and the like that are themselves empowering to “the” trans* individual and to the articulation of that trans*ness in the first place. In other words, for many trans* folks, their religion—and the way they live it out—is anywhere from central to crucial to the ways they speak about their identity(ies) in the first place.

These kinds of discourse-changing efforts aren’t limited to the individual, personal sphere. Despite the valid critique of the over-corporatization of Pride, it is interesting to note the surge in religious groups’ presence at Pride celebrations across the country this year—especially since this was the first “real” set of Pride celebrations since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.¹⁰

And in the academic sphere, there’s a whole host of exciting research going on in the world of trans* religious studies. To give a small sampling: Transgender Studies Quarterly’s “Trans*/Religion” issue is an important collection of trans* religious studies work in a variety of subdisciplines and methodologies. Religious studies scholar Siobhan Kelly also published an important literature review of trans* studies in religion in 2018.¹¹ And UC Riverside plans on publishing a queer and trans* religious studies journal called QTR: A Journal of Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion.¹² This work and these researchers have been formative of my own work, and I am grateful for their intellectual heritage.

What I believe this scholarship makes clear is how fragile, fluid, and messy these categories, loosely construed—gender transition, religious conversion, assumption, and enactment of religion—can be. Would it be possible to claim that a trans* person who transitions genders while remaining within the same faith tradition is “really” living that religion in the same way after? Is that a transition in itself—almost incidentally? Would religious conversion, then, in this sense, depend on changes in gender in certain ways?

These questions are urgent and pressing, and in any discussion of increasing legislative political and social hostilities against trans* people—especially as it oftentimes, though not exclusively, comes from religious organizations and communities—I’m of the opinion that you can’t really talk about trans* current events without religion, just as a good-faith contemporary discussion about religion would run regrettably short of the mark if it were to elide trans*ness.

My research has attempted to push this gendered and religious fluidity to the max. In looking at transition-conversion, I’ve been trying to figure out what happens in this intersection—that is, where and how transition and conversion, both often cataclysmic changes in one’s self, interact, brush together, maybe even combine. I’m also trying to figure out whether the results of such change end up being “larger” than the factors that went into it in the first place—and what semblances of a subject cohere throughout these near-total changes. In other words, what do we make of two simultaneous and ongoing drastic forms of spiritual and somatic change? What remains? And who names what remains?

Some of the most important things I’ve learned hold water in general terms for any inquiry into gendered and religious change—and here, I hope, for trans* religious studies writ large. Before doing any of this research, however, it is imperative to understand the multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings “gender,” “religion,” and other identities like “race,” “class,” and “ability” can and do have for various populations across the United States.

What my research focus on identity-category fluidity has revealed is the constantly shifting nature of these categories. Maybe these labels are epiphenomenal—or maybe they’re just too static to do justice to transition-conversion. Could there perhaps be a more accurate way, methodologically, to do justice to this intersection?

I have come to think that an important positive way to think about trans*gender religion would be through senses—affects, if you will—rather than as a set of discrete identities that practice and live faith. That is, how does non-cis religion feel, what does it alleviate (or not—dysphoria?)—in so many words, what does it do? Maybe it’s a trans woman praying, or maybe it’s the lack of prayer altogether—or even waiting in line for your hormone replacement therapy medication, struggling with your insurance (or lack of it) to get a consultation with a surgeon. Trans artist Nicki Green and religious studies scholar S. J. Crasnow published a beautiful interview about this that explores the seemingly banal practices of trans* life that themselves take on ritual and religious significance.¹³ Maybe this is the attitude we should take to the often too-rigid distinctions drawn between “trans*” over here and “religion” over there—the two being too often seen as vehemently opposed.

I want to suggest that one of the important things we must do in this political moment in the face of anti-trans* violence and erasure is to make space for the ways trans* people “do” religion—or more profoundly, the way they make it work for them. This is to pay attention to the modes of trans*ness that often fly under the radar or might even seem plainly antithetical. That said, I don’t want to naïvely advocate such an embrace without a simultaneous incitement to make material change. I don’t think we can just pray the DeSantis away.

After all, one of the most dangerous and movement-defeating things one can do is to ignore certain paths of inquiry and swaths of one’s own demographic makeup. This kind of productive looking-at I’m describing here, the tracing of these hopeful lines through observation, could be a crucial methodological first step to a political program that works to save the lives of trans* people in the face of impending erasure. These are limited responses, I know; there are so many raced, classed, gendered, and abled components that factor into the ways and forms non-cisness is lived out—listing them all here would be impossible and would also be a problematic limiting of what we can even think this kind of faith, religiosity, might be in the first place. (And are those two terms even stable enough for this question?)

My aim here is simply to point in a fruitful direction in an act of hope, desperation, anger, and fear about the current state and treatment of trans* people in the United States. Maybe something worse is coming—the least we can do is wonder. This is our ethical imperative; this is what we must do to survive. And in the academic sphere, I can insist that I am a source, and I can do the kind of research that will “count” as a source for others to build upon, to try and subvert the all-too-real attempts to erase people like me—like us.

Nicole Malte Collins is a second-year master of theological studies candidate at HDS, where she is studying trans*gender religiosity in the contemporary United States, with a particular focus on the intersection of gender transition and religious conversion.