Transgender Icons: Queer Christian Images of Marinos the Monk

"The One Who Saves the Soul
Is Like the One Who Created It"

The Vita of Marinos the Monk

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Assignment Overview

In this exercise, the seminar will produce a series of icons of St. Marinos the Monk based a variety of attributes that characterize saints: Imago Dei, Imitatio Christi, Christus Medicus, Baptism, and Sainthood. These traits all have corresponding qualities in the lives of transgender people in general: authenticity, living your best lives, service to the community, transition, and remembrance. By focusing on these traits, this assignment eschews debates at to whether St. Marinos the Monk is a man (he lived as a man), transgender (he lived a transitioned life from his youth to his death), should be called transgender because he did not use the word (he wouldn't use any of our words, given that he did not speak English), or if he can be holy and transgender at the same time (he is a trans saint). I have addressed these considerations have been made in other posts and forthcoming peer-reviewed articles. Thus they may be reviewed in a lecture. This assignment challenges students to engage not in skepticism but in celebration. How might a trans life be honored as sainted?

By focusing on these positive traits, this exercise turns students away from the testing and skeptical tone that dominates cisgender society and the grim and negative tone that tends to surround queer allies when discussing transgender lives. The Vita of St. Marinos the Monk testify to the positivity and virtues of a trans life as much as they recounting anti-trans prejudices. A few of these negative prejudices include the tendency among hagiographers, icon makers, translators and scholars to deadname as well as misgender Marinos the Monk. He was known as a male, a monk, during life and this should be respected. He called himself Marinos and this should be respected. Additionally, the inability of local early Christian communities to recognize and name trans identities testifies to the ingrained ignorance and dominance of cisgender mindsets. Had society been more aware and accepting, Marinos might have been able to come out during his life instead of after his death. All these negative circumstances may be considered but at the center of the story is Marinos the Monk, a figure of positive traits that overcame these conditions to live a sainted trans life.

The task of assignment is to create an image with a name, a description -- write, St. Marinos the Monk, Patron Saint of [Fill in the Blank] -- and then provide a summary based on close reading the text alongside additional research. These icons will be made in small groups and then shared with the rest of the class.

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Sample Groups

Group 1: St. Marinos the Monk
 and the Imago Dei

Consider the argument between Marinos and his father. Although it seems as though he is calling on his father to save his soul by letting him also join the monastery, take a moment to ponder how Marinos himself might be living out his Imago Dei: saving his soul by transitioning into the image of a monk God made him to be. By affirming his gender (monk), how might Marinos be like the one who created him to be a monk?

"Father, do you wish to save your own soul and see mine destroyed? Do you not know what the Lord says That the good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep?" And again she said <to him>, "The one who saves the soul is like the one who created it?"

Terms to research: Imago Dei, living authentically, suicide rate for transgender youths.

Group 2: St. Marinos the Monk
and Baptism

Consider the argument between Marinos and his father. How does Marinos's father misunderstand his trans son's gender? How does living authentically as a monk answer Marinos's father's concerns? How is transitioning and taking monk's vows like baptism?

"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? For it is through the members of your sex that the devil wages war on the servants of God."

To which his daughter responded, "Not so, my lord, for I shall not enter <the monastery> as you say, but I shall first cut off the hair of my head, and clothe myself like a man, and then enter the mastery with you."

Terms to research: baptism, becoming a monk, monk's habits, coming out to your parents as transgender, gender versus sexuality, asexuality, abstinence and chastity.

Group 3: St. Marinos the Monk
and Imitatio Christi

Consider the ways in which Marinos is living his best life after he is able to transition. How does living an authentic life make one more successful as your work, relationships, and even prayer? How does the comment about Marinos being an eunuch relate to early Christian and medieval understandings of transgender?

"Day by day, the child advanced in all the virtues, in obedience, in humility, and in much asceticism. After she lived thus for a few years in the monastery, <some of the monks> considered her to be a eunuch, for she was beardless and of delicate voice. Others considered that <this condition> was instead the result of her great asceticism, for she partook of food only every second day."



Terms to research: authentic lives, best lives, eunuchs, gender euphoria.

Group 4: St. Marinos the Monk
and Christus Medicus

Consider Marinos's ability to heal with his touch. How does the Monk's authentic life serve to heal others beyond having miraculous powers? How might his authenticity, trans identity, perseverance and sainthood (being set apart) serve to heal who encounter him?

"Eventually it came to pass that her father died, by <Mary, remaining in the monastery>,<continued> to progress in asceticism and in obedience so that she received from God the gift of healing those who were troubled by demons. For if she placed her hand upon the sick, they were immediately healed."

Terms to research: Imitatio Christi, gender dysphoria, gender euphoria, Christus Medicus.

Group 5: Marinos the Monk
and Sainthood

Consider the reaction of Marinos's community after discovering he was trans after death. How does the Superior's reactions mirror those of friends and family after an oppressed transgender person dies? How does death feed into advocacy? Is there a critique to give communities that are better at mourning the dead than helping the living?

"Drawing near and seeing <for himself>, the <superior> cast himself down at her feet, and with many tears cried out, "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."

..."The superior thereupon send <word> to the innkeeper to come and see him. When he arrived, the superior said to him, "Marinos is dead."... "You must repent, brother, for you have sinned before God. You also incited me by your words, and for your sake I also sinned."

Terms to research: ally, advocate, transgender day of remembrance, deadnames, suicide rate for transgender people, homicide rate for transgender people.

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Starter Questions

1) What core concept did your group examine? How did you translate the theological term into current English? What are other words you consider?

2) How does your passage demonstrate the principles of the concept? In what ways does it address transgender life? In what ways does it address gender Christian life?

3) How did your group visualize the concept and passage? What associations and images are you using to translate the trans Christian sainthood?

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Eunuch Facta: Denaturalizing Sex in the Transformation

"If I still could 
have the choice..."

The Transformation

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The following is part 2 of an ongoing series
on Exemplum and Eunuchs
focusing on the Transformation (1994)
a documentary by Susan Aikin

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The Facta of the Eunuch

"Now what's really important is that you need to practice your English," the preacher tells Ricardo in a ministry planning session. "You see, I can tell people what you went through, but you went through it, you lived it. You see what I'm saying? I can tell them about it from my point of view but it's not as good as you." While Ricardo already speaks Spanish, recalling in his the voice of his history as Sara, Terry insists that in order to be a proper facta for his Texan, Christian message, Ricardo must be made to speak his words in English. As in any exemplum, a concept is defined in advanced and then a body is grabbed hold of as an example; then it begins to take shape as its exempla. The body is foreign to the English language of “eunuch” or “transsexual” (or any language) yet by cooperation takes on its shape as it is made readable and as it comes to articulate itself by the expected forms of the genre. [i] This means the body must be inscribed with verbal language (English scientific terms) as well as visual language (male clothing).

By conceding his need for Ricardo to tell his own story, Terry admits the subversive aspect of using exempla that threatens to invert the power dynamics of their relationship. The examplum depends on the inarticulate material facta of the trans body to ground its dicta, yet also needs it to speak back the dicta, the Word, the Logos, that frames and forms it. This agency is nonetheless contingent. The trans body exerts its power by co-operating with the authorities making an example out him. As a part in the operation of sharp-machines, the choices of the facta are dependent on how they meet with their associated dicta. Thus agency is not free, but contingent. It arises along point of the meeting, contact, even the violent edge where authorities work like a knife pressing against the skin of the trans body to carve out the form dictated by the exempla. 

Given that exemplum function as operations in social discourse, the sacrifice of Sara is at once physical and narrative. In one direction, the story of the eunuch cannot be told without the exchanging of finances and material resources. First, Ricardo needed to be brought on board. But moving Ricardo takes further exchanges. "Ricardo, as soon as they actually sign over the deed to the land to us,” says Terry, referring to a facility he is buying to house more trans converts to his mission, “we are going to be traveling to raise money for the buildings.” After Ricardo’s transformation, Terry has tapped a certain stream of resources that need to replenished and expanded if his operations are to continue. More space and more money are going to be needed for Christus Medicus to keep working his supposed miracles on new converts. More converts are necessary, given that Terry was able to convince Ricardo to join him primarily because he took advantage of Sara’s vulnerable physical and social position after finding out she was dying of HIV.

In another direction, the movement of money and bodies are dependent on the effectiveness of the story that Terry dictates and Ricardo evidences. “You," says Terry pointing at Ricardo, "are coming with me so you can tell it from your perspective." The authority he has as a preacher is itself contingent on the continual co-operation of storyteller and audience, preacher and layperson, dicta and facta. Terry cannot move around without Ricardo. This is why it is critical that Terry gets Ricardo on board. "Understand?" Terry asks, "You are going to be traveling all around the United States to tell people where you came from and help us raise money for the buildings. Understand?" The repetition of the question, "understand?" functions at first as an assertion of his authority, as the speaker of the dicta. This insistence also shows his need for Ricardo to consent his power, as facta. The authority needs to be understood. 

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Co-Operating Power

The power of facta is not that they understands repeats the dicta in the same form, if that was the case than the dicta would be sufficient on its own, but that the materiality of the trans body can represent the doctrine in other modalities, especially visually. Terry does not just need people to hear about Ricard's transformation but to see material facts. For this, he not only needs Ricardo to work for him, he needs Sara. "We are going to send out a brochure - do you remember Sara?" Terry says to Ricardo showing him a picture of himself as he appears now. "This is going to be what's on the other side," he says pointing to a picture of Sara. "That's going to blow people away." For Terry's exemplum in the Transformation to work, he needs to show transformation. That means that he does not simply need any body. Terry’s cis-male body is not sufficient. Nor is Ricardo’s body. He needs the trans body to repeatedly perform its trans-formation. The new whole, the eunuch, needs the part that is cast away by the authority, to enact power. Sara must be repeatedly killed in sacrifice and resurrected to give Terry authority as Christus Medicus. 

The power and material resources that buy Ricardo’s cooperation, Terry in turn uses him to procure. "To me this is like a dream. I am a poor man. The poorest of the poor," admits Ricardo. "When I was a transvestite, people would say to me ‘Sara you are so beautiful.’ But they didn’t know how hurt I was inside; how much I wanted a home," says Ricardo. "But now I feel rich… rich in love. I’ve always had love, but life has been so hard on me." Ricardo is rich now, to which he adds (or corrects), “rich in love.” Far from being an abstract, transcendent belief in a cosmic force, Ricardo’s love is manifest in the riches that brought him off the street, given to him by Terry and his new wife, Betty. Ricardo’s new life comes into being out of this exchange of properties. Sara’s love and beauty are sacrificed to buy Ricardo new kinds of love: a home and finances.

Despite the church’s exploitation of Cbristus Medicus’s dicta and Ricardo’s facta, the dangerous contingencies that Terry’s mechanisms view as a threat and try to contain, are embraced by Betty who offers different approach to love than either eunuch or pastor. “Betty, there can be nothing between us,” Ricardo recounts saying to Betty. “Because I was a Transvestite for many years. I even have breasts still. And I am HIV positive.” Ricardo is well aware of the precariousness of his life. Parts of his life, particularly HIV, mark him as a threat to social wholeness. The potential life and love from Ricardo and Betty's bond would be terminal. “Are you sure you don’t mind my being HIV positive?” Ricardo asks Betty before the wedding, stressing the danger of sharing properties, including body fluids. Betty embraces the facts of his life, open to share her resources and allowing him to affect her. They do not have frequent sex, Betty admits. When they do, she too contacts the lasting material and social effects of hormones, heroin, and HIV. 

While not “transgender,” insofar as she binds herself to Ricardo, his vulnerability becomes her vulnerability as she shares in trans experiences of rejection and subjugation. When the couple went to get married, they are told, “you can’t get married in the church." When asked why they are being turned away the church tells him, “because of your past.” “We all have a past,” Ricardo replies. “Don’t you guys say that Christ cleanses us of our sins?”[ii] Like a surgeon cutting away parts of the past, baptism serves as ritual exemplum where the material washing in water signifies the spiritual dicta of being “born again.” Despite baptism’s ecumenicalism, the material facts of trans bodies allows for public challenges to the dicta, what “you guys [Christians] say,” of Christus Medicus’s power to mark an absolute separation of part and whole, of before and after. Opening the body of Christ to the facts of Ricardo and Betty’s love means cooperating with all parts of them.

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Destabilizing Power

Contingency stresses precariousness and uncertainty because it acknowledges that truth is not absolutely in either the eternal, lasting dicta or the immediate, mutable facta. Rather, contingent operations and cooperation function through the contact of different genders, matters, beliefs, and temporalities. The life and love Betty and Ricardo share is not fixed, but are formed and reformed by the transforming contact between persons, past and present, and their mutual contact with Christus Medicus. “Now everything is fine," worries Ricardo, "but if I get sick... I hope you won’t abandon me in the hospital then.” Ricardo’s concerns with Betty’s love stress that the products of cooperation cannot be known in advance. “I know," Betty replies. " But I love you and I want to be with you!” Embracing uncertainty, the contingent facts of Betty’s embodied “faith” and “love” are distinguished from Terry’s rhetorical dicta. By her continual contact, Betty asserts that she is not a docile part of Terry's exploitative operations, but a co-operative with Ricardo.

In contrast to these critiques and abuses asserted by absolute all or nothing dicta, Betty offers a model of love as a radically positive and transformative dicta, the activity of continually stitching together disparate facts of different moments and embodiments. "Love is not just something that just happens in the beginning. Love is something that continues to grow. But love is not just something that’s a feeling either. Love is a commitment … that means when things aren’t going well you are still going to be there." Change, whether it is the shift from Sara to Ricardo, or the inconstancy of health, calls on love to sustain cooperation through transformation, constituting what Betty calls growth. Betty recalls that they have “talked about this [love and mutability] many times” and will continue to have check-ins. This love is not a once and for all dictum, a feeling or essence that a person has or not, but a lived fact between persons requiring risk and collaboration.

In the end, the wholesomeness promised Terry and Betty’s dicta on faith and love depends on the cooperation of eunuch facta formed and narrated to be its antithesis, the embodiments of fragmentation, inconstancy, and contingency. “I repented for my past life [as Sara]," says Ricardo narrating the Transformation’s final scene in a drive back from Texas to New York. "Now when I think about everything I lived I remember some of it as beautiful. Because the real truth is that I enjoyed it. That’s what I would have liked to be: a woman.” This contingency leads Ricardo to consider how he might reclaim the abandoned part of his life and return to living as Sara. Yet this change would likely involve ending his life as Ricardo, as Terry’s eunuch, and Betty’s husband. As Ricardo or Sara, the trans operative life is defined by castration, a “trans” position between separated parts of life that love might hold together if our sense of wholeness might be transformed. 

Before title screens announce Ricardo’s death, his final words leave viewers with the sense of the trans life’s precariousness. “If I could still have the choice, if I could change my life right now,” says Ricardo, “even now that I have my wife and everything, I would chose to be a woman.” While Ricardo imagines a free life, “if I could still have a choice,” he knows that the facts of his life are checked by contingency, by dictated limits set between his body and will. Undoing the change enacted by Chritus Medicus is impossible, only more changes, more castrations, more cuts; perhaps in the form of film cuts that slice together lives separated by time, circumstance and operations. Sacrificing parts of his life as Sara and Ricardo an exempla with competing presences and powers, the eunuch’s life stories implicate the audience as cooperative in the narrative. Choices still exist, but now shift to the hands of those who share in the eunuch’s story. All become eunuch-makers, implicated in crafting what becomes of the future of his pasts.

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[i] Whereas most of his interviews occur in his Cuban Spanish, Ricardo uses the English terms "homosexual" "transvestite" and "drag queen" for sexuality and trans embodiment. Even by the 1990s, the scientific term "transsexual" was still fighting for legitimacy and use in the public, while another scientific terms, "homosexual" and "transvestite" were being considered expansive enough to include a wide variety of embodiments. Indeed, the trans body seemed to be so elastic so as to be able to pivot between a wider variety of exempla on both gender and sexuality. 

[ii] (Aikin & Aparicio). 

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Eunuch Dicta: Naturalizing Sex in the Transformation

"You have stuck him 
in the Devil's face and said,
'Look what I can do'"

The Transformation

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The following is part 1 of an ongoing series
on Exemplum and Eunuchs
focusing on the Transformation (1994)
a documentary by Susan Aikin

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The Dicta of the Eunuch

“Let’s talk about Ricardo,” says Terry at the film’s opening, over a black-screen introducing the preacher as the primary narrative, the source of the dicta that will grab hold of Sara/Ricardo's body in order to narrate it into an exemplum on eunuchs in the 1990s. “Let’s talk about Ricardo,” he repeats as the film cuts to him sitting in a white room, on a white couch with a photo-album in hand.[i] As if acknowledging this absent presence, the scene ends with fading back again from the white room to a black-screen announcing the film’s title. This movement from white to black plays with notions of death and heavenly light. In these spaces suggest that Terry is speaking a metanarrative dicta from outside of Time. Terry's principles are associated with scriptural dicta, a priori, and then the body is produced as facta to demonstrate it. The "talk about Ricardo," depends on the showing and looking as key to the operations of power, yet depend on laying hands on Ricardo's body in order to grab him and shove him in people's faces.

Wrestling with the splitting of these two forms of the exempla by the 1990s, Terry works to turn Ricardo, understood as a “homosexual” or “transsexual” back into an eunuch and thus reclaim a public discourse into religious, locating the medical authority with Satan in order to hold up the scripture. Public and sermon authorities, function as different dicta that differently frames the factum of the eunuch body around which he pivots. This is the necessary turn in an exemplum where the dicta must give way to the power of the facta. Yet in all these cases, the authority of nature, religion, or medicine is exterior to the body it defines. In turn, the exemplary bodies are called upon to present their bodies as facta for the Christus Medicus proses to make incomplete bodies, taking control of them, in order to “make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom.”

"First of all, you can probably focus on this," Terry says opening up his photo album, on the right a picture of Sara and on the left a picture of Ricardo. "Find Ricardo in here, so everyone is on the same page. This is Ricardo. When I met Ricardo he was Sara." Holding Sara and Ricardo's images as illustrative facta, Terry sets himself as the authority of the exemplum that will both not only verbal but visual. He orders the engagement, tells the audience where to focus, and defines the terms. "The thing that makes him unusual," says Terry, "he is enormously charismatic. He attracts people. He has power, he has presence. he has a personality." While Terry positions himself as the authority, but he needs Ricardo as factum in order to provide the physical "presence" in order to attract people to his message. For medieval audiences examples were highly persuasive, but for modern audiences steeped in scientific empiricism and materialism, the physical facts of a eunuch are indispensible to keep these sharp machines operational.

In order for the eunuch to be a proper operative, operations cut out parts of their body and history, in order to make it fit into the Church’s sexual regulatory operations. As such, Terry must renarrate Ricardo’s history to contain and cut down Sara’s presence. "Ricardo was there on that first night [the Church visited]" Terry recounts. "Sara," he corrects himself. "Sara was there on that first night." This slip is significant. It places Ricardo before Sara; a narrative it has Sara collaborate when the film cuts to her account of living as an unhappy man in Cuba before traveling to New York to live as a woman. Ricardo is the origin and the ending, while Sara is an interruption in the middle. "There was something missing,” Terry of Sara, “He never knew what it was to be a man.” Sara becomes the non-masculine part that is always already cut away, in the story an eunuch, lacking and castrated from birth, a pre-op subject for Christ’s reparative operations.

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Naturalizing Authority

Ricardo’s latent “power” and Sara’s lingering “presence” in the film, however, remains dangerous to authorities and narratives that try to contain them. Holding images of Ricardo in his hand as he narrates the film, a mise en scène figurative of material dependences, Terry asserts the dominance of his dicta to frame and authorize the facta of the eunuch’s life story. Positioning himself as Christus Medicus, a kind of surgeon, Terry excuses laying hands on trans images and bodies by establishing a state of crisis that requires him to resolve. The poverty of trans women, the physical need for nourishment and medical care, becomes evidence of the supposed to lack of meaning without the dictum of the Church providing structure. This is especially true in cultures, medieval and modern, based on a “Gospel of Wealth” or “Prosperity Gospel” where financial success or failure is supposed to reflect degrees of God’s favor and wholesomeness.

Given the power of physical facts, the transformation of material circumstances is then key to defining Sara’s life as defined by a lack of resources and sexual wholeness and positioning Ricardo’s post-op life on the side of social fulfillment. This is done in part through the insertion of flashbacks to choice interviews with Sara from the Salt Mines. “I couldn’t wait to come [to the US],” says Sara in one talking head, “but now I am sorry I came. Because here if you have no money you are nothing.” The nothingness that Sara references is the absence of power and presence that money provides. Thus despite the promise of “the land of the free,” because she is denied material resources, she is not free to live as she will. As Sara says these haunting words, the screen freezes and the distinct voice of “Ricardo” from another scene speaks over the image. In a frozen moment before the change, we see the woman who is supposed to be “nothing” in this place linger as if to affirm that she remains an absent presence throughout the film. 

Indeed, a persistent irony of the eunuch transformation narrative is that its post-op “power” (Ricardo) is dependent on repeatedly invoking the “presence” of a supposedly erased and empty part of the pre-op past (Sara). In this, nothingness reveals itself not to be a state of non-being but rather the result of continual emptying to divide undesirable parts from the desired whole. Because nothing and being, part and whole, past and present are all operations in the same shape machine, the difference is not ontological but functional. While remaining intermeshed, the prior is made to be the unseen background to the latter’s foreground. This exchange is evident in when the film catches up the voice of Ricardo in the post-transformation time and space, where the still of Sara is replaced by the actively swaying Ricardo and the subtitle “Ricardo” appears on the bottom of the screen. “Dallas, Texas” appears on the screen as it pans over a dark room with dark furniture, where a Terry’s church thanks God for bringing Ricardo (into being) there. 

Through the ritualized operations of Chritus Medicus, Sara is made “nothing,” the missing something, to serve as a background for Ricardo’s thingness. Despite the dark enclosure that remains around them during the prayer, Terry calls the place where he brought Ricardo out from “a deep and dark hole.” This is where Sara worked the streets at night as a prostitute, injected drugs and hormones. Then, as later, she becomes a (penetrated) hole for the sake of her survival, but here she does so for pleasure as well. Sara’s location is indeed deep, as blood, semen, make-up, salt and semi-tangibles like love and community saturate each other, leaving traces of them in her blood. It is a dark space, relegated to the margins, taken off the street until the night work.[ii] It is this place, in the form of HIV/Aids that Sara carries deep in her body even as she migrates to Texas, remaining as the haunting material cause for Ricardo coming (into being) there. 

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Spiritualizing Authority

While Christus Medicus’s authority depends on asserting the essential naturalness of the post-operative trans body, the exemplum needs to continually show the scars of the operations in order to evidence its power. There is a kind of double-meaning when Terry stands beside his church with Ricardo, thanking God for his transformation, praising, “You have stuck him in the devil’s face and you have said, ‘look what I can do’” The words are telling. The material facts of Ricardo’s new body and circumstances are perpetually being shoved in the face of Christians so that Terry can effectively tell them “look what I can do.” Rather than merely disturbing established gender discourses, the materiality of the trans body grounds scriptural rhetoric in a sense of physical realness. Rather than hiding the fault lines of reconstructed gender, the scars of trans bodies were showed off as a tool of social control, even as they offered their own forms of resistance.

Sometimes the scar that is erased and shown as part of the operation of sharp machines are not enough, the exemplum occasionally needs to open wounds as a reminder of the dangerous facts of living without the security of its framing dictates. “HIV affected [Sara/Ricardo’s] mind,” recounts one of his trans friends in an interview. “He grew afraid of dying alone on the streets. The Church was the only way out.”[iii] It is perhaps too easy to paint Sara's life on the streets as free and uninhibited. Yet it was physical and social operations already acting on Sara that drove her into the hands of Terry's Church. Sara had long been trained to trade her body for what she needed. She traded her skin as a prostitute in order to gain the currency to exercise limited claims over her body: paying for food, clothing, hormones and heroin; each operating between violence and pleasure, necessity and choice. At HIV’s arrival into the network, however, this machine became unlivable and Sara came to desire the closed system of the Church.

The gated community of Terry’s Born Again Church allows admittance only at a high price, yet promises to give life and future as it takes away another. “I thank God that I have AIDs,” says Ricardo in an interview, sitting comfortably in a plush chair and warm sweater, “I wouldn’t have come off the street, and I wouldn’t have devoted myself to God. I’m not a fanatic, I just love the way God loves me.”[iv] Nowhere in the documentary does Ricardo claim that he is fully gave himself to the church, although he participates in it. He says that God participates in him through the care he is given. He does not say he loves God (or His Church), but how God loves him. Across in the exemplum of the eunuch, sharp machines reveal the contingency of parts and wholes, dicta and facta working together with the promise of mutual benefit. In this way, even as it makes its trans operatives to be docile, it teaches them a critical tool for exploiting systems. This practice of cooperating in ways that at once erase and sustain, subjugate and empower, builds into the trans operatives a powerful capacity for contingency.

Along these scars and contingencies lie fault lines where the cooperative trans body always keeps one foot out of the door, never fully deployed in any form or machine in which it participates. Those eunuch machines, those transgender operations, freed from the yoke of pre- and post-op demarcations become trans operatives (like double agents) who may use the feature which is most used to subjugate them, their mutability, to effect changes on both sides of supposedly strict divides of gender and faith. Such operatives may effect wider change that offers a greater variety of livable lives and in a new sense of Christus Medicus, to “love the way God loves.” Yet even as exemplum position its exemplary bodies to potentially open up the meaning of dicta, it is not an easy slash and burn. Changing machines, especially those working towards love, require cooperation.

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[i] (Aikin & Aparicio). 

[ii] Despite this failure to establish closure, once and for all, enclosure appears to be a pivotal desire for both Terry and Ricardo. McRuer notes that Ricardo’s environment is particularly closed-off and he is almost exclusively shown indoors, in houses, in Church or in a hospital (McRuer 116-119). Becoming sick from Aids, Ricardo appears anxious to exist in the supposed closed systems of church, house, and care.

[iii] ”(Aikin & Aparicio).

[iv] (Aikin & Aparicio).

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