Friday, August 26, 2016

Transgender Saints: The Imitatio Christi of St. Marinos the Monk


“Do you wish to save your own soul 
and see mine destroyed?

Life of Saint Marinos
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As genre of writing difference, trans hagiography’s goal is to offer an image of sacred life that inspires imitation. In “Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex,” Stephan Davis offers Marinos as epitomizing Imago Tranvesti as a transition that leads Imitatio Transvesti through the establishment of a model of Christian imitation, "it should also be noted that the story of Mary/Marinos is primarily a drama of elaborate personal transformation, a grand exchange of otherness." The “grand exchange of otherness” is one respect concerns Marinos’s gender transition and his transition from worldly margins to God as the center of Creation. In another way, this grand exchange of otherness is the effect of producing Imitatio Tranvesti in society, the creation of trans likeness in different people. A model for trans and cis communities alike, the trans saint offers models by which cisgender limits on God’s creation can be liberated and the damage it has done healed.

Images inspire imitations, Imitatio Christis from Imago Deis, Imitatio Transvestis from Imago Transvestis. While Imitatio Christi has a long tradition in Christian thought, imitation of God has roots in the Image of God from Genesis. The etymology of Imitatio demonstrates a fairly old and consistent meaning, imitation. The word derives from the Latin root, “imitari” from the Proto-Indo-European, “h’eym “ (*aim) from which the word Imago, or image, is derived (Online Etymology Dictionary). Imitation is the production of the same in the difference, the self in the other, in a line that connects Creation to creation. Imitation is the process that produces images. If these images, such as Imago Transvesti, effectively encourage Imitatio Transvesti, then the result will be more images of the trans saint. Consequently, Imitatio Transvesti will be the affirmation of more transgender lives and the transformation of non-trans lives into engines for trans justice as a way of following the way of the Imitatio Christi and becoming an Imago Dei. 

The Imitatio Christi, or imitation of Christ, is a central thesis in Christianity even as its language and doctrines were being developed. Indeed, the name the early Church gave themselves, “The Way,” and the later name, “Christians,” function to transform each devotee into an image in imitation of Christ. In the Book of Ephesians, St. Paul calls the “sanctos,” i.e. “God’s holy people” (NIV) or “saints” (RSVCE), to live in imitation of God. Paul writes, “estote ergo imitatores Dei sicut filii carissimi” (Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.. 5.1. NIV). According to Paul, saints are those who live Imitatio Christi. As will be shown, this imitation, whether Imitatio Christi or Imitatio Transvesti, is characterized by acts of extraordinary love and sacrifice that inspires others to love and sacrifice. 

In the early Church, roughly a century before the Vita of St. Marinos, Augustine of Hippo published his confessions where he likewise argued that the way of the saint is one of Imitatio Christi which in turns prompts others to follow in likewise imitation. In Book II, Augustine writes, “perverse te imitantur omnes …. sed etiam sic te imitando indicant creatorem te esse omnis naturae, et ideo non esse quo a te omni modo recedatur” (All things thus imitate thee--but pervertedly… But, even in this act of perverse imitation, they acknowledge thee to be the Creator of all nature, and recognize that there is no place whither they can altogether separate themselves from thee. Augustine II. Vi). There are distortions of the Imitatio Christi in any creature, including the Imitatio Transvesti, but God transforms each division from the divine into a new light and road back to the origin. In the end, innovations in the Imitatio Transvesti will be reclaimed as the trans saint’s co-creative (or subcreative) imitation of God the Creator in acting actualization of their life.

When the Vita of St. Marinos the Monk began to be circulated it soon inspired imitators and other images of trans saints with their own trans hagiographies. By the late middle ages, an evident Imitatio Transvesti has arisen around St. Marinos, being enfolded in the work of St. Thomas Aquanas. In a study of Marinos’s effect on medieval theology, Stephen Davis notes, "In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquanus considered the case of Joan of Arc in reference to St. Marina/St. Marinos. Aquanas writes... if the brave virgin Marina pleased God in the habit of a spiritual man, how much less does this prophetic virgin in warlike arms offen; rather she will be able to fight to defend and protect the state and the common good," (Davis 56). Rooted in the origins of the early Church, Marinos becomes a narrative and material foundation for later trans saints to be built upon. On this rock, Christ builds his transgender church. 

If early Christian saints follow St. Augustine assertion, “Let them be an example unto the faithful by living before them and stirring them up to imitation,” then I argue that the Imitatio Transvesti as a key feature of trans hagiography must work to at once imitate Christ and call on others to follow through imitation of the saint (XXI.xiii). The trans life turns from something that is supposed to imitate cisgender life into a model of imitation for trans and cis people alike. There is something authentic that inspires copies. In the first case, Imitatio Transvesti occurs to bring justice for the trans community. Like the sacrifice of Christ brings others to feel the passion and suffering they endured so too the sacrifice of trans lives encourages the renunciation of sinful systems they underwent. In the second case, Imitatio Transvesti occurs for the improvement of cis community, to liberate them from their own destructive divisions and limits. In both cases, imitation is enacted for the glorification of the truth and creativity of God.
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The Relics of Alliance

In the Poetics, Aristotle names empathy, solidarity, and catharsis as key features of imitation, especially in tragedy. “Tragedy,” writes Aristotle, “is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity” (I.xi). In other words, it is not enough that the work of the tragic figure is taken on but the trouble of the imitated, such as the trans saint, becomes the trouble of other subjects. Before Aristotle, Plato called empathic solidarity, inspiration or divine madness. In Ion, Plato defines inspiration as “a divinity moving you… For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed” (Ion). In a way, through the Imitatio Transvesti, the trans saint as well as his devotees are drawn into a divine madness brought on Imitatio Christi. The wondrousness and marvelousness of trans saints in turn points back to the Creator of all wonders, the Imago Dei.

After Marinos's death, the body of the saint is revealed for the monastery, causing great commotion. A chorus of cries arises in the monastery response to the saint’s body. The effect of these cries is a spreading of the disturbance. Elsewhere in the monastery, records the Vita, "The superior, hearing their cries, asked them, 'What troubles you so?'" The first response to the trans body is inarticulate emotion. Nonetheless, the reaction draws others in to go deeper into the mystery. This is followed by a question. Yet the question is not concerning the trans body but the disturbance itself. What is it exactly that disturbs those who regard the trans body? What is it in the world that makes the revelation of transgender such a cause for outcry. And they said, “Brother Marinos is a woman.” The trouble that is inspire in the community arises in no small way from the realization of the suffering the trans person endured in life which now they share.

The power the trans body has the ability to transform a community’s posturing divisions and relations with trans bodies. The leader is described, "[d]rawing near and seeing" (Vita). The monks held the trans brother at a distance and did not see him for the blessing that he was. The trans body reverses this marginalization, not by changing Marinos but by drawing the community to the margins. The saint does not need to move, he is "set apart" in a way that brings him closer to God. As the other Christians desire that closeness to truth and love, go to where he is to see the truth he knew and embodied. The Vita says that leader, "cast himself down at [Marinos's] feet," (Vita). While the superior once cast out the saint, setting him below the lowest in the monastery, the gesture inverts the relations of the world. The leader is caught in an overwhelming desire to prostrate himself lower than the lowest part of the trans monk's body. Whereas in life, the trans saint was subjugated, in death he is held up in honor.

Even in death, the dead trans monk drives others to allyship. On his knees before Marinos as his confessor, the superior cries, “Forgive me, for I have sinned against you. I shall lie dead here at your holy feet until such time as I hear forgiveness for all the wrongs that I have done you.” Too often society is better at mourning the dead than they are caring for or vindicating the truth of trans persons when they are alive. Yet the superiors tears extend the hope that death is not too late to ask for justice. The superior feels his sin and the sin of his community as a pain is his body as it had effects on Marinos, affirming an Imitatio Transvesti. In modern terminology, the superior enacts a kind of allyship. As with Marinos, so with him. If injury (even death) is done to Marinos, then so with him until the trans person releases him. In one way or another, the body of the trans saint become an impetus for more trans or trans-like sainthood.

For medieval theologians and hagiographers, imitation was a form of devotion to first Mover and Creator of all images. In Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, Gunter Bebauer and Christoph Wulf offer a variety of meanings for Mimsesis in the history of Western thought, “including the act of resembling, of presenting the self, and expression as well as mimicry, imitation, representation, and nonsensuous similarity” (1). If not all then many of these meanings were active in some way for medieval understandings of imitation and sustained a tension between authenticity and artifice. In some ways, difference remains between an ally and the target community, there is still a presentation of the superior’s self as cisgender. However, like an ally in war imitation declares that what happens to one, such as an attack, will be answered by the ally “as if” it were occurring to them. Once again, the phrase “as if” remains an active and critical idea in Imitatio Tranavesti.

Imitatio Transvesti functions by making copies. By creating likeness in difference Imitatio is a form of production and reproduction that uses trans and non-trans bodies alike. After the discovery of Marinos's body in the monastery, more and more people are drawn to Marinos, including those who slandered him, to learn his embodied truths. "Hearing this, the innkeeper was astonished and wondered greatly at his words," recounts the Vita, "And the superior took the innkeeper and showed him that was a woman. At this began to lament and to marvel at what had happened." The text uses various words with the meaning of wonder or marvel. These are reactions to phenomenon with great differences, sacred or profane. In this case, the wonder has the ability to draw people to Marinos, like a relic, and affect them; one may say, infect them. By each new devotee, word spreads and more will be drawn to the trans saint and caught by Imitatio Transvesti. In the end, the distinction between trans and non-trans bodies becomes blurred.
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The Miracle of Liberation

Trans hagiography embodies the radical idea that Imitatio Transvesti is a form of Imitatio Chrisiti, that the affirmation of the transgender is not only actualization of Imago Dei but that by affirmation comes liberation from the worldly constrains of cisgender. Through the truth of imitation society will be set free and lives will be healed. In the medieval hagiographic tradition, liberation and healing usually are marked as miracles. Hagiographies generically feature miracles as signs of God's glory and of the grace embodied by the saint. The Vita of Marinos the Monk boast a series of miracles usually expressed as the liberation from demons; signs which occur in death as in life perhaps sin an anticipation of turning the saint’s body into holy relics. In the first case, these demons may be the sufferings of particular lives while the second case suggests a wider liberation of society from cisgender divisions back to the diversity of Imago Dei.

The first miracle affirms the life giving power of the Imitatio Transvesti. Shortly after Marinos's father died, the saint receives from God, "the gift of healing those who were troubled by demons." In the Church, demonic possession signified many different conditions. A clue to the demon’s meaning comes when the text description of release as healing, "For if she placed her hand upon any of the sick, they were immediately healed." The materiality of the contact and the illness undercut ideas that Imitatio Transvesti is only a play of signs. For many, trans embodiment is a liberation from the demons of cisgender. The laying on of hands was a common trope in hagiography where saints physically touched those suffering an illness. From this contact with the hands of St. Marinos, people became freed from their demons and healed. To this day, one of the hands of the saint remains venerated as a relic with the power to heal lives.

The second reference to Marino's miraculous materiality has more dispersed effects as it works to liberation the community from destructive cisgender norms. The miracle comes after when the saint's dead body is on display and the women who accused him of sexual impropriety, "appeared, possessed by a demon." What marks the woman as possessed by demons is unclear, yet signs were immediately visible. Coming to see his remains, the truth of his flasehood and prejudice against Marinos is revealed. She admits, before Marinos's body, that the saint did not (indeed could not) impregnate her. Instead, she admits that she falsely slandered the trans monk, "confessing the truth." This miracle then not only set the stage of another healing miracle but complete the concluding second motion of a hagiography: provided a narrative that made sense of and glorified the body. In death, as in life, the trans monk inspires liberation from cisgender untruths.

The revelation of the trans saint’s embodied truth unbinds the community from lies yet also directs cis and trans persons alike towards other ways to live out gender. When the woman tells the community, “she had been seduced by the soldier,” she illuminates the exchange of a soldier for the monk as the father of the child. A soldier is a man of the violent materiality of the world. Yet while he was the child's biological father, giving material life to the child, Marinos become the child's present father, giving him spiritual life. In yet another way, Marinos lived as a man and father in a way exceeding other cisgender men. Although the materiality of the saint confessed this already, the miracle of the woman's appearance provides the narrative that clarifies the embodied truth and the truth of other bodies. The father of the child has much to learn from the trans monk who lived as a father even though he was born without a phallus. Imitatio Transvesti is not only for trans faithful, also liberating cisgender men and women.

After the woman's miraculous appearance and confession before the body of St. Marinos, she is healed from demons and brought closer to God. The healing occurs sometime later, yet instantaneously, " at the tomb of the blessed Mary" (Vita). Unlike the laying on of hands performed during Marinos's life, here the healing occurs indirectly. After the woman was healed, the Vita describes, "everyone glorified God because of this sign, and because of patient endurance, for [St. Marinos] vigorously endured until death, refusing to make herself known." This is much like the need for confession to restore a believer to a state of grace before they receive communion. Before the woman can approach the shrine of Mary (often associated with the spiritual life of women) she must confess her sin against the saint. In other words, in order for the woman to move closer to a grace-filled womanhood, she must repair her relations with the trans community.

In life and death, Christ drove out demons and laid hands on the sick in what is traditionally called miracles but which scripture, especially the Gospel of John call signs. As signs, these acts that inspire many to imitate Christ, point to an Imago Dei that Creates and re-Creates the world in diverse and dynamic ways through human contact. Trans hagiography follows the generic function of saints lives to produce the protagonist as an Imago Dei that is then reproduced through the Imitatio Transvesti of followers. The relation of the object, an image of God, into an action, the imitation of God, from a common root word (as well as a common divine Word) affirms an image of Creation that is ongoing and collaborative. One is not merely born a transgender saint but becomes one and that this transition always occurs in community. Thus naming saints “those set apart” is important to the social movement that directs society away from normative centers towards the margins and revaluation of trans lives that may heal and liberate the world.

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Friday, August 19, 2016

Transgender Saints: The Imago Dei of St. Marinos the Monk


“The one who saves the soul 
is like the one who created it

Life of Saint Marinos
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Imago Dei

One is not born a transgender saint, one must be created. A look at iconography of trans saints such as St. Marinos the Monk evidences a divinely inspired life that challenged the limits of the world in which is grew and the limits of its own creation. Certain elements of the saint’s image are common to others who are marked in like ways as “set apart,” such as the long monk’s robes, suggesting an orientation away from the world, and a blazing halo behind him, suggesting an orientation towards God. Yet other elements of his image and story mark Imago Transvesti as a peculiar form of Imago Dei. St. Marinos is gender ambiguous. His contemporaries thought him an eunuch. Yet he also is shown supporting a child which he fathered by choice if not by birth. In this and many ways, the image of the trans saint announces a difference that is marvelous and sacred. These differences remain challenging to some as they are inspiring to countless others.

The Imageo Dei arouse in the Church from the scriptural assertion that the creatures of the world are made in the image of the Creator. In Genesis 1.27, God creates humanity, "et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam ad imaginem Dei creavit illum masculum et feminam creavit eos" (So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them, NIV). For many trans, intersex, and non-binary persons, the Imago Dei of Genesis is used as a weapon against them by those who insist that divine intention is only reflect in the symmetry of cisgender men and women. Yet the scripture does not say that God created humanity in only one way or that God only created cisgender binary people. In the early Christian and medieval Church, the salvation story of the gospels and diverse saints lives testify that the work of creation and recreation is ongoing in a dynamic and diverse Imago Dei.

Of the trans hagiographies that reflect a wider envisioning of the Imago Dei, among the earliest and most influential accounts was that of St. Marinos the Monk. To keep close to the original text, the version of the life of St. Marinos analyzed here comes from Alice-Mary Talbot's translation of the Vita Antiqua, which Talbot claims, is "the version closest to the original Life of the sixth or seventh century " (Talbot). Given the difficulty with setting an exact date shows its wide range of influence. Time and time again, the transgender Imageo Dei narrated in trans hagiography continues to be craved by a society that continually slips back into a fixed and reductive vision of creation as cis male and female. A significant feature of the Vita Antiqua’s Marinos is that it contains culturally rich and theologically instructive dialog not found in some later condensed versions. As Talbot describes, "The anonymous author writes in a simple and vivid style, making extensive use of dialogue and omitting the characteristic prooimion."

Out of this near original version's dialog, comes not only an image of a trans saint but through him to the God that created him as an Imago Dei. When Marino's father tells him that he cannot enter the monastery because he is not a cisgender man, he responds that his soul is on the line in this matter and that the making of Marinos as a man of God is like God's making of Marinos the man, “The one who saves the soul is like the one who created it.” Who is the one who made Marinos into the saint he is? Who is the one who saves Marinos? I argue that the narrative offers answers nestled in one image: the Imago Transvesti. In this short essay, I unpack the Imago Dei of St. Marinos by focusing first on how the marginalization of the saint contrasts with the worlds sexist and transphic reduction of gender’s diversity, then how the transition of the saint as an act of salvation that embodies the creative, transformational, and reforming image of the Creator.

Early Christian concepts of Imago Dei affirm a diverse and dynamic Creation. A contemporary treatise on Imago Dei is found in "De Trinitatae,” by Augustine of Hippo from the fifth century would still have been in circulation by the time of Marinos. In it, Augustine argues that creation begins as a seed within each soul. Life, Augustine writes, “if it is made after the image of God … then from the moment when that nature so marvelous and so great began to be, whether this image be so worn out as to be almost none at all, or whether it be obscure and defaced, or bright and beautiful, certainly it always is.” Often one’s Imago Dei is hidden, yet as that person grows it is revealed. The process of constructing the self, then, can be a co-creative act of affirming the Imago Dei. Augustine writes, “in the soul of man, i.e. the rational or intellectual soul, [is] that image of the Creator.” From a seed, this Imago Dei is not actualized from birth but is revealed when each person affirms the special (set apart/sacred) Reason of their creation.

Granting the Imago Dei as an act of creation and not merely a set of created things it is easier t understand how Imago Tranvesti arouse within Trans Hagiography as testament to the divinely reasoned diversity and dynamism within God’s creation. Indeed, within an Augustinian Imago Dei and Marinian Imago Transvesti, marginalization and transition function to affirm the holy creation of one’s life in contrast to worldly designs. In later discussions, the work of Imago Tramsvesti on the world itself, in resisting and changing systems of gender will be explored as a form of Imitatio Christi, what I call the Imitatio Transvesti. As liberation theologian Thomas Reynolds affirms this in his book, Vulnerable Communion, “The Imago Dei is a Imitatio Dei.” To be an image is both to reflect the substance of the reflected but also the action. Imago Transvesti embodies that sacred dynamism that continually grows and challenges the limits of creation’s seedlings.

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Saints: Those Set Apart

As embodiment of Imago Dei, trans saints offer alternatives to a patriarchal cisgender society that divides, reduces, and constrains God’s dynamic creation. A core power within hagiography as writing about holiness is that sacredness shows the flaws of the world through the contrast of divine differences. In "The Centrality of Margins," Amy Ogden argues that the Imago Dei of saints, including the Imago Transvesti, are framed the margins, marking them as set apart. The saint, Ogden writes, "calls attention to the profoundly marginal identity of all saints: from a terrestrial, political standpoint, their behavior relegates them to the edges of society, while from a spiritual perspective, it locates their identity in the overlap between the human and the divine" (Ogden 8). By persevering through cis models of embodiment and oppression, trans saints offer an image of God’s sacred otherness, an alternative way of life that resists a damaging world

The problem of the world is presented and represented by Marinos's father. The retired man he tells his child that he must go to a monastery to become a monk. Rejecting his worldly life, the father gives it to his child. “My child," says the father, "behold, all that I own I place in your hands, for I am departing in order to save my soul.” The transfer of possessions is likely meant to be a gift. The child will be orphaned but will be cared for by the remnants of the father's inheritance. The circumstance of many trans youth follow just such a similar narrative. The older generations maintain a world full of sexism, homophobia, patriarchies, transphobia, and gender binaries which at a certain age they may condemn but nonetheless despair of changing. Something about the world he regards as impeding his spiritual life. He rejects the sin (the spiritual distance from God) and gives it to the child. As a result, younger generations inherit the sins of the father.

As a savvy trans youth, Marinos is aware that the world he inherits will lead to his destruction and calls out his father for leaving him such a burden. Turning the exchange back on his father, Marinos calls out the gift for what it is. “Father," says Marinos, "do you wish to save your own soul and see mine destroyed?" The father is eschewing the gender of the world for a gender set apart. The child, likewise wants to eschew the gender the world assigned and accept a gender set apart. If the worldly gender is not good enough for the father, why for the child? The trans saints life is a mirror for the father to see how he only continues on a lineage of destructive systems, an inheritance of sexism and transphobia. The trans saint's life serves as a mirror for all readers to contemplate. Too often, social justice movements allow one marginalized group to escape from its system of oppression while leaving other populations (even former allies) at risk.

As an Imago Dei, the destruction of the Imago Transvesti has grave repercussions. In Marinos's Christian context, to be prevented from transitioning to a spiritual life as a monk is to risk the natural as well as the supernatural death of the transgender soul. The sins of the patriarchy work to keep him tethered to it: the reduction of sexual diversity to a gender binary, the reduction of gender to genitals and procreative ability, and the social limits that inhibit the reassignment of gender. To bring the trans child into the monastery as a monk is to be like the Good Shepherd of scripture. "Do you not know what the Lord says?" Marinos asks his father. "That the good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep?” There are dangers in allowing Marinos to transition but the risks are necessary if the father is to save his child. Put another way, Marinos is asking, "would you rather have a dead and damned daughter or a living son?" Or again, "is it not worth the risk accepting your sons transition if that is what saves not only his life but also his soul?"

The patriarch’s worries are continued by the monastery’s superior when he ejects Marinos from the community, following accusations of impregnating a local girl. When questioned, Marinos confesses to the patriarch, “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned as a man.” Readers know that Marinos does not have the genitals to impregnate the woman but the monk decides that protecting his manhood from question is more important than divulging truths that would prove him innocent. The Father hears Marinos saying that "as a man" he has sinned in impregnating the woman, while Marinos means that he has sinned by not being fully forthright in what way he exists, "as a man." Misunderstanding and sexual misconduct causes trouble for Marinos. The one corporate sin extends from another. If not for conventions of prejudice against trans men and women, Marinos would not be in trouble. In this critical way, the Vita tells Marinos that for the Trans Saint there may not be any home for them in a sexist world with so few positive images.

In various ways, the trans saint is marked to continually face off against worldly sins of sexism and transphobia. Hotchkins identifies the repeating feature of the trans saint’s battle between center and margins, "elements of flight, disguise, calumny, and dramatic anagnorisis” (15). As an imago Dei, the trans saint of hagiography embodies a divine model that will continually contrast the concerns of the world. Yet hagiography does not merely mark these differences and conflict but turns them into positive meaning. If, as Hotchkiss writes, "transvestite saints reveal much about gender definitions and cultural biases based on gender," then trans saints also embody an alternative vision of gender that stands in sacred contrast to the sexist and transphobic systems of the world (16). In other words, the Imago Transvesti uses the margins that frame it in order to highlight the powerful message of personal and social transformation it embodies.


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Becoming a Monk

Imago Transvesti is an image of transition as a form of becoming Christian. In the Middle Ages, Christian salvation focused on introducing radical changes into individual and collective lives in order to bring out the hidden Imago Dei in creation. Especially for transvestites, the transgender affirming processes focused on clothing recreates many of the central elements of baptism. In “Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex,” Stephan Davis writes, "the act of changing garments evokes… the Pauline baptismal formula of Galatians 3.27-28: 'As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ " (Davis). While God makes all people Imago Dei, the baptism ceremony acknowledges that the life the world assigns is not the one God intends for it. Much as how many trans persons assert that sex change processes are in fact gender affirmation, changing clothes, therefore, is a transformation that is also a reformation of imago transvesti and imago dei.

The Image of God and Gods image of the trans saint is not always readily visible to the world. Arriving at one's authentic self often involves battling the gender divides and demands of a cisgender world. A monastery is a location that divides men and women from one another, even certain kind of men from other kinds of men: monks. Affirming monastic exclusivity, Marinos's father asks, “Child, what am I to do with you? You are a female, and I desire to enter a monastery. How then can you remain with me?" Calling Marinos his child, he begins by affirming their familial bonds, yet ends with the implicit rejection of this bond once he enters the monastery. A father cannot be a father when he is a monk and Marinos will not be welcome. This is a bit of dramatic irony, a thesis that the Vita will argue against. Marinos will prove that he can be accepted as this exclusive form of man, a monk, and as another form of man, a father.

Before gender reassignment moves forward, Marinos must reframe the problem from one of body to one of relation. Reflecting a patriarchal anti-trans, anti-woman bias, Marinos's decries, “it is through the members of your sex that the devil wages war on the servants of God.” While the life of a man, especially an abstinent monk, has very little to do with genitalia, they are devices through which cisgender exclusivity is enacted. The patriarch ignores the way in which his child would use his body, treating him as a passive object for another's agency. The devil wages a war and Marinos is merely a medium. Following Aristotle's theory of sex, the patriarch treats women's genitals as instrumental substances on which active male genitals asserts form. Marinos does is not expected to have agency, consent, or control over his genitals. By insisting on this powerlessness, he is once again asserting his role as a member of the patriarchy to define Marinos's gender.

Marinos responds that changing his genre of embodiment is much easier if one focuses on the more relevant parts of the body and eschew concerns over the genitals. "I shall first cut off the hair of my head, and clothe myself like a man," he says. There are differences in the culturally defined genres of medieval manhood and womanhood. There were styles of hair coded masculine and those coded feminine. Even among men, monks wore their hair differently than other men. Yet hair is changeable. Therefore, gender is changeable, not only in society but in the body. One can change the body to change how society treats that body. Agency is reclaimed by the body that is revalued by the patriarchy. Following a tradition of feminist thought, Judith Butler insists that one is not born a woman but becomes a woman. Likewise, in medieval monastic culture, one is not born a monk but becomes a monk. Rejects cis assumption that gender is unchanging, Marinos declares he will be able to "enter the monastery with you" and become a monk.

In fact, the subtle differences in Marinos's body are well within the diversity of medieval masculinity. "After she lived thus for a few years in the monastery," records the Vita, "[they] considered her to be a eunuch, for she was beardless and of delicate voice." Because of their respective inability to impregnate a woman unaided by modern science, a medieval trans man and eunuch are effectively abstinent from this kind of reproduction; while both may engage in sexual acts. In the end, the monastery not only accepts Marinos as a man but regards the trans man as exemplary. Many regarded the particularities of his trans monkhood as a natural extend of monkhood, "the result of her great asceticism." Being a monk or eunuch is not a masculinity into which one is born. All are men set apart artificially to become a new kind of men. "Day by day, the child advanced in all the virtues, in obedience, in humility, and in much asceticism," the Vita records. A tran monk knows, perhaps more than most, that one is not born a monk but become a monk.

To conclude, the image of God in the Imago Transvesti is a reformation of a divine image through sacred transitions marked by the changing of clothes. By setting aside the clothes and habit of a woman, then taking on the monk’s robes, Marinos not only is affirmed as a man but a sainted Christian. As image of early Christianity, the trans saint embodied the radical changes to which all Christians are called. "The Pauline metaphor appears to have been incorporated into the earliest baptismal ceremonies," writes Valerie Hotchkiss in Clothes Make the Man, "in the removal of clothing and, after immersion, the putting on of new white robes…. The initiate is described as transformed, reborn, and united with Christ." An escape from the worldly constraints of womanhood, ends for Marinos in being reborn as an exemplary man of Christ. As an image framed by margins, Imago Transvesti is nonetheless central to a medieval image of God’s creation.


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Friday, August 12, 2016

Those Set Apart: Hagiography as a Genre of Transgender Literature


“The Passion of Christ is particularly 
embodied in the transvestite gesture itself

Stephen Davis
Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex
_________________________
_________________________


The canonization of Mother Theresa as a twenty first century embodiment of womanly virtue and the comments from Pope Francis that continue to alienate and marginalize the trans community raise questions of the relationship between transgender and the Church. While modern Catholicism opposes non-cisgender, non-binary genres of embodiment, forms of transgender life, narrative, and spirituality grew in the medieval Church. It may be surprising to some, that the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church has long revered transgender persons as saints, replete with their own hagiographies, relics, shrines, and holy feast days. One scholar lists the number of transgender hagiographies as no less than eleven. A review of these stories reveals a vast number of generic similarities between the saints lives and between the medieval and modern trans community.

Hagiography is a deceptively simple genre. Literally it means, holy writing, "hagio-" (adj.) holy- and "-graphy" (noun) -writing. Or else it means, writing about the holy ones, "hagions-" (noun) holy ones and "-graphy" (noun) -writing about. Yet when the root, "hagio" or "hagion," is examined more in depth, the meaning becomes more amibiguous. In Greek, hagio meant sacred or holy. Yet a still older meaning for hagio is different or set apart. The transformation from the one to the other is easy to grasp. The sacred is that which is set apart and different from the mundane or worldly. This has led to the common definition of saints in the twenty-first century Church to define "saints" as "those set apart." In this context, hagiography is not only "holy writing" or "writing about the holy ones" but "the writing of difference" or "writing about those set apart." By this definition, hagiography is about those who do not fit into the world as we know it.

What is trans hagiography? What are its generic qualities and social function? Many of these stories offer few examples of miracles and martyrs, focusing its argument for the trans person sainthood on their extraordinary gender and how the faithful pursuit of their authentic gender brought them closer to God. This project to examine the qualities of the trans hagiography and the trans saint as medieval genre of embodiment marks a critical intervention in the perceived history and place of transgender in the Church as well as offers a model by which we may understand current day transgender lives and narratives. In particular, I will take the case of the Vita of Saint Marinos the Monk (also called Marina, Marine, and Marinus) as it was engaged in various medieval texts and traditions to demonstrate how the oppressive setting apart of trans lives can be reclaimed as a move towards alternative forms of embodiment, narrative, and faith.

The question then arises: what forms of difference are markers of sacredness? Can the image and practice of transgender life be honored as pointing toward truth and grace? I argue, yes. As will be shown, "transvestitism” (or transition) “is the unmistakable ‘sign’ or image that links this group of hagiographical narratives," that has a central place in Christian theology even as it is marginalized (Davis 15). As a genre of embodiment that continues into the current day, trans hagiography constructs persons as particular images of divine truth (under the Imago Dei) and (through a form of Imitatio Christi) spurring the transformation of society so as to allow for and produce trans lives. If scholarship is to make the necessary assertion that transvestism in hagiography provided first, an image of God in the particularity of the trans experience, an imago transvesti is discernable in the shape of the genre, and second, as a model of Christian sainthood, readers should be able to derive this imitatio transvesti by an examination of the genre’s key features.

This argument responds to trends in scholarship on "transvestite saints" that tends to undermine the binding of trans "difference" and "sacredness." These arguments, often following TERF agendas, fight against the notion that medieval hagiographers might find something sacred in the difference of trans figures. Critiques waged against "transvestite saints," who they call "women disguised as men," is that they only reinforce the male supremacist notion that women are only holy when they are like men. The reading of the saint as a "trans man" is sacrificed for the reading of him as a "woman forced by society into the role of a man." TERF readings see transition as the entrance into a deeper prison for women rather than as an escape from cis womanhood into trans masculinity. Rather than admitting transvestism but focusing on male supremacy, I call that we admit that context of male supremacy but focus on the sacred difference of medieval trans saints.

Contrary to modern expectations, the transvestism of the saint was not something to be explained away or excused or overcome. As
Stephen Davis writes in "Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex" (2002), "[i]n many of these Lives the heroine's change of dress is virtually left unexplained … suggest[ing] that the hagiographers actually presumed that their ancient readers were already acquainted with other 'texts' — other discourses — that would have helped make sense of the transvestite motif within these saints' lives" (Davis 16). Readers of hagiographers knew what a trans person was or has some way of knowing. Furthermore, they would likely have become familiar with the trans hagiography as a genre and the trans saint as its key feature. Davis writes, "in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries there was a revival of the genre," noting, "at least eleven vitae of transvestite female saints were published during this period" (Davis 4). All this is more than saying that a transvestite merely hagiography included transvestites, rather the transvestism became a central mechanism in the working of the holy writing.
_________________________

_________________________


Imago Tranvesti

So what is the image of the transgender saint that makes them an image of God? The answer depends on how one looks at that image. Framed within the gender binary, the divisions of the world will be highlighted. From a patriarchal perspective, the trans monk embodied the division and dysphoria generated by the patriarchal exclusivity, what Davis calls, "the palpable tensions between... monastic hostility toward women as the source of their sexual desire, and... the monks' suppressed longing for female presence." (Davis 7-8). From within a patriarchal frame of reference, if trans saints did not exist then hagiographers would imagine them to relieve tensions and failings in cisgender binaries. For scholars concerned with reaffirming patriarchal structures of gender, Davis writes, "[t]he transvestite female saint is understood as the literary product of this tension." (Davis 8). The self-interested limits of patriarchal scholarship go a long way in explaining why the image of the trans saint as a living subject in itself has long been deflected.

Yet patriarchal cisgender approaches are only one side of the dice. Alternatively, from a feminist perspective, the trans saint embodies a relief of tensions for women. Davis observes, "the central motif of transvestitism would have challenged late antique social models of male authority and female subjection. The image of the transvestite saint was an image of female independence and autonomy" (Davis 9). For men, trans monks were acceptable exceptions to the rule of gender exclusivity. For women, trans monks were a defiant crossing of that exclusivity. The problem with both of these readings is that they reduce transgender to a product and solution for cisgender problems, ultimately ending with the return to cisgender binary. A critical reading of the trans hagiography represents that if one is to become a saint, to be set apart, this means radical change that will make a replacement of things back to where they were impossible.

Exploring the theological scholarship on trans hagiography, Davis concludes, "the Passion of Christ is particularly embodied in the transvestite gesture itself." Indeed, the flight from oppressive social and physical conditions, through a period of transition, and ending in a state of revealed truth is at once very trans and very Christian. Transgender transition, Davis observes, can be seen as a form (a genre) of a transition all Christians undergo: baptism. Davis writes, "the act of changing garments evokes… the Pauline baptismal formula of Galatians 3.27-28: 'As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ… there is no longer male and female; for you all one in Christ Jesus'" (Davis). Through the transition at the heart of trans hagiography, the trans monk is clothed at once in his own material and social manhood as well as the spiritual manhood of Christ which is beyond the cisgender binary of the world. 

The willingness to undergo suffering to live as one's imago dei becomes a form of martyrdom in the imitatio Christi. Hotchkiss calls this, "[the] willingness to suffer for the sins of others [which] obviously evokes the figure of Christ" (25). In medieval theology, in the incarnation, Christ too engaged in becoming embodied and becoming man. This came with privileges but also with costs. Some of the costs are evident in the passion encountered for being his authentic self. In the case of trans male saints, Hotchkiss observes, "[d]espite the governing precept of male superiority… disguise emerges, paradoxically, as a sign of humility, since it reflects a voluntary disregard for the self in favor of serving God" (Hotchkiss 25). Whether disguise of transition, receiving the benefits of male privilege demands a sacrifice of truth about past embodiments and struggles. Or else the trans men confess both the trans and male aspect of their lives and deal with cis male rejections. Either way, privilege and manhood comes with a cost. 

The transition of embodiment enacts baptism in many ways. Embodying a trans narrative can be one way toward grace and sainthood. Hotchkins, writes, "cross-dressed women [trans men] symbolically depict the power of Christianity to 'transform' its adherents… Radical transformations - water to win, death to life, male to female - informs Christian doctrine on many levels" (19). Indeed, the process of embodying manhood for trans masculine saints in many ways mirrored Christ's the incarnation of manhood and the initiates entrance into the body of Christ. As Hotchkiss writes, "she cuts her hair and puts on male clothing, thus realizing the symbol of the baptismal robe as the sign of the new man in the male image of God," (22). The use of the language and concepts of baptism making you a "new man" marks trans masculine hagiography is in many ways a natural extension of traditional Christian narratives and theology. 

The use of the baptismal robe in early Christian traditions further tied transvestite transitions to sacramental transformations. "The Pauline metaphor appears to have been incorporated into the earliest baptismal ceremonies," writes Hotchkiss, "in the removal of clothing and, after immersion, the putting on of new white robes, apparently the same for men and women. The initiate is described as transformed, reborn, and united with Christ" (20-21). The use of the word “incorporated” is significant in Hotckiss’s statement. Far from being merely a play of signifiers, where appearances cover an unchanging essence, Christian baptismal robes signified that changing clothes can mark an ontological change in the person. In contemporary trans Christian culture, trans people engage in baptisms as part of their transition process where they become named, blessed, and accepted into the body of the Church as their authentic self. In this way and others, trans narratives not only mirror or use Christian tradition but alters the way we understand those traditions. 


_________________________

_________________________


Imitatio Transvesti

"The hagiographers are not advocating transvestism," one scholar stubbornly insists, while acknowledging, "these characteristics convey the saints' extraordinary natures" (Ogden 8). For decades, a contradiction exists in medieval scholarship on trans hagiography, where academics (who sometimes seem more uncomfortable if also more pitying of trans subjects than the medieval writers) insist that although hagiography’s function is to create an imitation Christi, a way of living that brings one closer to God, there is a persistent belief (perhaps more modern than medieval) that trans-ness must be a negligible or negative trait that holiness overcomes. Nonetheless, in the 1990s, reflecting a trans affirmative counter history, Valerie R. Hotchkiss in Clothes Make the Man (1996) asks the pressing question, "If disruptions of gender hierarchy were not encouraged, why then do so many hagiographers write about women disguised as men?" 

If as Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey argue, "all early Christian hagiography... was motivated by an ethic of imitation," then Davis wonders, "Were ancient readers called to seek out the example of Christ in the lives of transvestite saints?" The answer must be that there was something virtuous, saintly, and even Christ-like in being trans. In "Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex" (2002), Davis offers a useful survey of the genre’s texts and contexts. While Davis acknowledges, "the image of the transvestite female saint was certainly full of contradictions," he affirms this trait of trans hagiography as central to its purpose. "The transvestite female saint was (quite literally) the embodiment of various oblique cultural discourses—an intertextually constructed body,” writes Davis. Perhaps leading to its divergent readings, trans hagiography arises as a limit testing of discourse of sex and gender, worldliness and holiness, constancy and change that become inscribed into the trans saint as an embodiment produced through the genre. 

The trans saint’s work of embodiment is critical to the work of trans hagiography. While other genres offer ideal values, hagiographies are distinguished by moves towards wonder from the materiality of everyday life. “The body is thus the primary tool for conveying the narrative's meaning, which contributes to the saint's imitatio Christi," writes Amy Ogden in "The Centrality of Margins" (8). As images of God, saints are closer to a historical Christ than abstract ideals. If saints bleed like Christ, they also bleed like you and me. Embodying the transitional crossroads between the world and God, hagiography, "calls attention to the profoundly marginal identity of all saints: from a terrestrial, political standpoint, their behavior relegates them to the edges of society, while from a spiritual perspective, it locates their identity in the overlap between the human and the divine" (Ogden 8). Far from being incidental, the contradictions and marginalization that trans saint’s embodied brought them closer to readers and to God.

As an embodiment of limit testing, the trans saint imitates Christ by moving between cultural centers and margins, drawing followers to revalue the marginalized. By aligning the imitatio transvesti with imitatio Christi, the transitional movement of trans saints participates in the Christian project of reframing margins as central to spiritual life. "Their essential liminality," writes Ogden, "points to a fundamental and paradoxical quality of hagiography: namely, the centrality of margins" (Ogden 8). Hagiography generically selected someone who the world rejected to become a saint. Indeed, this feature of hagiography illuminates its immense social power. Through trans hagiography, readers are accustomed to see something "trans" then about all saint's lives where persons are oppressed or marginal for the living out of their beliefs (much like trans folk) and also existing in a liminal (i.e. trans-) position between body and spirit, this world and the next. 

Because crossroads frequently involve conflict, as an embodiment of transition, the trans saint becomes is materially and spiritually formed by the suffering they undergo. Giving the saint’s life a “highly literary quality,” Hotchkins writes that trans hagiography draws positive meaning from the conflicts experienced during transition, "elements of flight, disguise, calumny, and dramatic anagnorisis” (15). Undergoing transition contrary to the limits of the world, often means that one will face some form of opposition. This "calumny" can be limit tests where social sins can be reveal and the trans life can prove its virtue. The exchange of clothes (more a ‘transition’ than a ‘disguise’) signals that the trans saint is more than the world understands, a man of the world and a man of God. The struggle of a trans saint, can cause scars that embody the spiritual virtue of transness and sacredness; an imitatio transvesti that cooperates with an imitatio Christi.

The crossroads that the saint embodies is the cross of Christ, a revelation of a broken world does to one that calls for radical changes that bring a higher justice. As Hotchkiss writes, "transvestite saints reveal much about gender definitions and cultural biases based on gender" (16). Embodying the conflict between the world and God’s truth, traditionally called sin, but which in secular terms may be called transphobia and sexism, reveals social structures that inhibit readers from seeing the image of god in trans lives. Thus, argues one scholar, by embodying of the transition process, "the transvestite female saint ultimately embodies the theological paradox of redemption." In the end, the imitatio transvesti is not tangential to the function of hagiography but a form and limit test of the imitatio Christi. For all the prejudice and marginalization of trans people face, perhaps the greatest gift that trans hagiography offers them (and other oppressed people) is the message that that suffering matters and can be used to bring more grace into the world.
_________________________

_________________________
_________________________

_________________________

Those Set Apart: Hagiography as a Genre of Transgender Literature


“The Passion of Christ is particularly 
embodied in the transvestite gesture itself

Stephen Davis
Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex
_________________________
_________________________


The canonization of Mother Theresa as a twenty first century embodiment of womanly virtue and the comments from Pope Francis that continue to alienate and marginalize the trans community raise questions of the relationship between transgender and the Church. While modern Catholicism opposes non-cisgender, non-binary genres of embodiment, forms of transgender life, narrative, and spirituality grew in the medieval Church. It may be surprising to some, that the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church has long revered transgender persons as saints, replete with their own hagiographies, relics, shrines, and holy feast days. One scholar lists the number of transgender hagiographies as no less than eleven. A review of these stories reveals a vast number of generic similarities between the saints lives and between the medieval and modern trans community.

Hagiography is a deceptively simple genre. Literally it means, holy writing, "hagio-" (adj.) holy- and "-graphy" (noun) -writing. Or else it means, writing about the holy ones, "hagions-" (noun) holy ones and "-graphy" (noun) -writing about. Yet when the root, "hagio" or "hagion," is examined more in depth, the meaning becomes more amibiguous. In Greek, hagio meant sacred or holy. Yet a still older meaning for hagio is different or set apart. The transformation from the one to the other is easy to grasp. The sacred is that which is set apart and different from the mundane or worldly. This has led to the common definition of saints in the twenty-first century Church to define "saints" as "those set apart." In this context, hagiography is not only "holy writing" or "writing about the holy ones" but "the writing of difference" or "writing about those set apart." By this definition, hagiography is about those who do not fit into the world as we know it.

What is trans hagiography? What are its generic qualities and social function? Many of these stories offer few examples of miracles and martyrs, focusing its argument for the trans person sainthood on their extraordinary gender and how the faithful pursuit of their authentic gender brought them closer to God. This project to examine the qualities of the trans hagiography and the trans saint as medieval genre of embodiment marks a critical intervention in the perceived history and place of transgender in the Church as well as offers a model by which we may understand current day transgender lives and narratives. In particular, I will take the case of the Vita of Saint Marinos the Monk (also called Marina, Marine, and Marinus) as it was engaged in various medieval texts and traditions to demonstrate how the oppressive setting apart of trans lives can be reclaimed as a move towards alternative forms of embodiment, narrative, and faith.

The question then arises: what forms of difference are markers of sacredness? Can the image and practice of transgender life be honored as pointing toward truth and grace? I argue, yes. As will be shown, "transvestitism” (or transition) “is the unmistakable ‘sign’ or image that links this group of hagiographical narratives," that has a central place in Christian theology even as it is marginalized (Davis 15). As a genre of embodiment that continues into the current day, trans hagiography constructs persons as particular images of divine truth (under the Imago Dei) and (through a form of Imitatio Christi) spurring the transformation of society so as to allow for and produce trans lives. If scholarship is to make the necessary assertion that transvestism in hagiography provided first, an image of God in the particularity of the trans experience, an imago transvesti is discernable in the shape of the genre, and second, as a model of Christian sainthood, readers should be able to derive this imitatio transvesti by an examination of the genre’s key features.

This argument responds to trends in scholarship on "transvestite saints" that tends to undermine the binding of trans "difference" and "sacredness." These arguments, often following TERF agendas, fight against the notion that medieval hagiographers might find something sacred in the difference of trans figures. Critiques waged against "transvestite saints," who they call "women disguised as men," is that they only reinforce the male supremacist notion that women are only holy when they are like men. The reading of the saint as a "trans man" is sacrificed for the reading of him as a "woman forced by society into the role of a man." TERF readings see transition as the entrance into a deeper prison for women rather than as an escape from cis womanhood into trans masculinity. Rather than admitting transvestism but focusing on male supremacy, I call that we admit that context of male supremacy but focus on the sacred difference of medieval trans saints.

Contrary to modern expectations, the transvestism of the saint was not something to be explained away or excused or overcome. As
Stephen Davis writes in "Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex" (2002), "[i]n many of these Lives the heroine's change of dress is virtually left unexplained … suggest[ing] that the hagiographers actually presumed that their ancient readers were already acquainted with other 'texts' — other discourses — that would have helped make sense of the transvestite motif within these saints' lives" (Davis 16). Readers of hagiographers knew what a trans person was or has some way of knowing. Furthermore, they would likely have become familiar with the trans hagiography as a genre and the trans saint as its key feature. Davis writes, "in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries there was a revival of the genre," noting, "at least eleven vitae of transvestite female saints were published during this period" (Davis 4). All this is more than saying that a transvestite merely hagiography included transvestites, rather the transvestism became a central mechanism in the working of the holy writing.
_________________________

_________________________


Imago Tranvesti

So what is the image of the transgender saint that makes them an image of God? The answer depends on how one looks at that image. Framed within the gender binary, the divisions of the world will be highlighted. From a patriarchal perspective, the trans monk embodied the division and dysphoria generated by the patriarchal exclusivity, what Davis calls, "the palpable tensions between... monastic hostility toward women as the source of their sexual desire, and... the monks' suppressed longing for female presence." (Davis 7-8). From within a patriarchal frame of reference, if trans saints did not exist then hagiographers would imagine them to relieve tensions and failings in cisgender binaries. For scholars concerned with reaffirming patriarchal structures of gender, Davis writes, "[t]he transvestite female saint is understood as the literary product of this tension." (Davis 8). The self-interested limits of patriarchal scholarship go a long way in explaining why the image of the trans saint as a living subject in itself has long been deflected.

Yet patriarchal cisgender approaches are only one side of the dice. Alternatively, from a feminist perspective, the trans saint embodies a relief of tensions for women. Davis observes, "the central motif of transvestitism would have challenged late antique social models of male authority and female subjection. The image of the transvestite saint was an image of female independence and autonomy" (Davis 9). For men, trans monks were acceptable exceptions to the rule of gender exclusivity. For women, trans monks were a defiant crossing of that exclusivity. The problem with both of these readings is that they reduce transgender to a product and solution for cisgender problems, ultimately ending with the return to cisgender binary. A critical reading of the trans hagiography represents that if one is to become a saint, to be set apart, this means radical change that will make a replacement of things back to where they were impossible.

Exploring the theological scholarship on trans hagiography, Davis concludes, "the Passion of Christ is particularly embodied in the transvestite gesture itself." Indeed, the flight from oppressive social and physical conditions, through a period of transition, and ending in a state of revealed truth is at once very trans and very Christian. Transgender transition, Davis observes, can be seen as a form (a genre) of a transition all Christians undergo: baptism. Davis writes, "the act of changing garments evokes… the Pauline baptismal formula of Galatians 3.27-28: 'As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ… there is no longer male and female; for you all one in Christ Jesus'" (Davis). Through the transition at the heart of trans hagiography, the trans monk is clothed at once in his own material and social manhood as well as the spiritual manhood of Christ which is beyond the cisgender binary of the world. 

The willingness to undergo suffering to live as one's imago dei becomes a form of martyrdom in the imitatio Christi. Hotchkiss calls this, "[the] willingness to suffer for the sins of others [which] obviously evokes the figure of Christ" (25). In medieval theology, in the incarnation, Christ too engaged in becoming embodied and becoming man. This came with privileges but also with costs. Some of the costs are evident in the passion encountered for being his authentic self. In the case of trans male saints, Hotchkiss observes, "[d]espite the governing precept of male superiority… disguise emerges, paradoxically, as a sign of humility, since it reflects a voluntary disregard for the self in favor of serving God" (Hotchkiss 25). Whether disguise of transition, receiving the benefits of male privilege demands a sacrifice of truth about past embodiments and struggles. Or else the trans men confess both the trans and male aspect of their lives and deal with cis male rejections. Either way, privilege and manhood comes with a cost. 

The transition of embodiment enacts baptism in many ways. Embodying a trans narrative can be one way toward grace and sainthood. Hotchkins, writes, "cross-dressed women [trans men] symbolically depict the power of Christianity to 'transform' its adherents… Radical transformations - water to win, death to life, male to female - informs Christian doctrine on many levels" (19). Indeed, the process of embodying manhood for trans masculine saints in many ways mirrored Christ's the incarnation of manhood and the initiates entrance into the body of Christ. As Hotchkiss writes, "she cuts her hair and puts on male clothing, thus realizing the symbol of the baptismal robe as the sign of the new man in the male image of God," (22). The use of the language and concepts of baptism making you a "new man" marks trans masculine hagiography is in many ways a natural extension of traditional Christian narratives and theology. 

The use of the baptismal robe in early Christian traditions further tied transvestite transitions to sacramental transformations. "The Pauline metaphor appears to have been incorporated into the earliest baptismal ceremonies," writes Hotchkiss, "in the removal of clothing and, after immersion, the putting on of new white robes, apparently the same for men and women. The initiate is described as transformed, reborn, and united with Christ" (20-21). The use of the word “incorporated” is significant in Hotckiss’s statement. Far from being merely a play of signifiers, where appearances cover an unchanging essence, Christian baptismal robes signified that changing clothes can mark an ontological change in the person. In contemporary trans Christian culture, trans people engage in baptisms as part of their transition process where they become named, blessed, and accepted into the body of the Church as their authentic self. In this way and others, trans narratives not only mirror or use Christian tradition but alters the way we understand those traditions. 


_________________________

_________________________


Imitatio Transvesti

"The hagiographers are not advocating transvestism," one scholar stubbornly insists, while acknowledging, "these characteristics convey the saints' extraordinary natures" (Ogden 8). For decades, a contradiction exists in medieval scholarship on trans hagiography, where academics (who sometimes seem more uncomfortable if also more pitying of trans subjects than the medieval writers) insist that although hagiography’s function is to create an imitation Christi, a way of living that brings one closer to God, there is a persistent belief (perhaps more modern than medieval) that trans-ness must be a negligible or negative trait that holiness overcomes. Nonetheless, in the 1990s, reflecting a trans affirmative counter history, Valerie R. Hotchkiss in Clothes Make the Man (1996) asks the pressing question, "If disruptions of gender hierarchy were not encouraged, why then do so many hagiographers write about women disguised as men?" 

If as Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey argue, "all early Christian hagiography... was motivated by an ethic of imitation," then Davis wonders, "Were ancient readers called to seek out the example of Christ in the lives of transvestite saints?" The answer must be that there was something virtuous, saintly, and even Christ-like in being trans. In "Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex" (2002), Davis offers a useful survey of the genre’s texts and contexts. While Davis acknowledges, "the image of the transvestite female saint was certainly full of contradictions," he affirms this trait of trans hagiography as central to its purpose. "The transvestite female saint was (quite literally) the embodiment of various oblique cultural discourses—an intertextually constructed body,” writes Davis. Perhaps leading to its divergent readings, trans hagiography arises as a limit testing of discourse of sex and gender, worldliness and holiness, constancy and change that become inscribed into the trans saint as an embodiment produced through the genre. 

The trans saint’s work of embodiment is critical to the work of trans hagiography. While other genres offer ideal values, hagiographies are distinguished by moves towards wonder from the materiality of everyday life. “The body is thus the primary tool for conveying the narrative's meaning, which contributes to the saint's imitatio Christi," writes Amy Ogden in "The Centrality of Margins" (8). As images of God, saints are closer to a historical Christ than abstract ideals. If saints bleed like Christ, they also bleed like you and me. Embodying the transitional crossroads between the world and God, hagiography, "calls attention to the profoundly marginal identity of all saints: from a terrestrial, political standpoint, their behavior relegates them to the edges of society, while from a spiritual perspective, it locates their identity in the overlap between the human and the divine" (Ogden 8). Far from being incidental, the contradictions and marginalization that trans saint’s embodied brought them closer to readers and to God.

As an embodiment of limit testing, the trans saint imitates Christ by moving between cultural centers and margins, drawing followers to revalue the marginalized. By aligning the imitatio transvesti with imitatio Christi, the transitional movement of trans saints participates in the Christian project of reframing margins as central to spiritual life. "Their essential liminality," writes Ogden, "points to a fundamental and paradoxical quality of hagiography: namely, the centrality of margins" (Ogden 8). Hagiography generically selected someone who the world rejected to become a saint. Indeed, this feature of hagiography illuminates its immense social power. Through trans hagiography, readers are accustomed to see something "trans" then about all saint's lives where persons are oppressed or marginal for the living out of their beliefs (much like trans folk) and also existing in a liminal (i.e. trans-) position between body and spirit, this world and the next. 

Because crossroads frequently involve conflict, as an embodiment of transition, the trans saint becomes is materially and spiritually formed by the suffering they undergo. Giving the saint’s life a “highly literary quality,” Hotchkins writes that trans hagiography draws positive meaning from the conflicts experienced during transition, "elements of flight, disguise, calumny, and dramatic anagnorisis” (15). Undergoing transition contrary to the limits of the world, often means that one will face some form of opposition. This "calumny" can be limit tests where social sins can be reveal and the trans life can prove its virtue. The exchange of clothes (more a ‘transition’ than a ‘disguise’) signals that the trans saint is more than the world understands, a man of the world and a man of God. The struggle of a trans saint, can cause scars that embody the spiritual virtue of transness and sacredness; an imitatio transvesti that cooperates with an imitatio Christi.

The crossroads that the saint embodies is the cross of Christ, a revelation of a broken world does to one that calls for radical changes that bring a higher justice. As Hotchkiss writes, "transvestite saints reveal much about gender definitions and cultural biases based on gender" (16). Embodying the conflict between the world and God’s truth, traditionally called sin, but which in secular terms may be called transphobia and sexism, reveals social structures that inhibit readers from seeing the image of god in trans lives. Thus, argues one scholar, by embodying of the transition process, "the transvestite female saint ultimately embodies the theological paradox of redemption." In the end, the imitatio transvesti is not tangential to the function of hagiography but a form and limit test of the imitatio Christi. For all the prejudice and marginalization of trans people face, perhaps the greatest gift that trans hagiography offers them (and other oppressed people) is the message that that suffering matters and can be used to bring more grace into the world.
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More on Transgender Saints
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