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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Trans Saints: Imitatio Christi in The Last Time I Wore A Dress

“The more I talked to Jesus, the more I liked him, 
and the less crazy he seemed. ”

Dylan Scholinski
The Last Time I Wore A Dress

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Imitation as Counter-Reality

Imitation is not only a matter of performance but embodiment and circumstances. In "Body Talk: Gestures of Emotion in Late Medieval England," Paul Murphy writes on how Christ fashioned the model by which the Imitatio Christi would follow in later generations. For Christ too, this was a process of engaging with and reacting to the world, to the point of suffering and death. "The cross forces Jesus to take on the shape of the cross," observes Murphy, "and as such, humankind are to be considered exemplars of that shape just as they are to imitate Christ's example" (Murphy 2016). Our bodies take on the shape of our sufferings. Imitatio Christi then is not only how we respond to God but how we respond to the world. The figurative cross-section is visible in how the Imago Tranvesti can move toward the Imago Dei at the same time that it is set apart and marginalized by the Imago Mundi. As a result, while postmedieval generations of trans persons may find themselves living outside of Christian community and faith, nonetheless they can come to share in the suffering of Christ (or Christ figures). In this way, while occupying a point in the modern era, trans persons can find themselves within a living narrative of medieval continuity. Murphy observes that for late medieval Christians, "It did not suffice to imitate Christ in his moral teachings, but rather it was demanded that a sensual and emotional activity be completed to better understand the sufferings of the Passion" (Murphy 2016). Unlike models of Christianity that emphasizes otherworldly purity, the Imitatio Christi of saints emphasize sharing a lived position of suffering and opposition to an unjust world. In this vein, one does not become a saint by excelling in worldly virtue but by opposing the norms of the world in ways that bring one closer to the suffering of others, particularly the suffering of Christ. Following this tradition within the hagiographic genre, Dylan Scholinski's memoir, the Last Time I Wore A Dress, surprisingly makes an overt move toward affirming an Imitatio Christi from within the secular circumstances of the mental hospital. For Scholinski is gifted with a chance to relate to a living Christ figure in the form of a fellow mental patient who believes himself to be Jesus Christ himself. Through their shared sufferings by a world that rejects them, the two form a conjoined Imitatio Christi and Imiatio Transvesti that gestures back toward a medieval tradition of imitation even as it responds to very modern circumstances.

Imitation gives a sense of counter-reality or non-reality. The madness of a man who claims to be Jesus Christ is diagnosed as disordered in this sense. It is not-real that he is Christ, therefore to live as though he is Christ is sick. Likewise, the "girl" who lives like a "man" is regarded as imitation of the same non-reality. Imitation as a form of fakeness is then the justification for the asylum locking up youths. Scholinski's memoir however argues against this understanding and argument on imitation. "Even if we'd looked up Gender Identity Disorder, I don't think anyone would have tried to fake it," Scholinski writes. "We knew the rules: pacing, screaming, hallucinating and vomiting were okay. Not okay was walking around with a scarf in your hair, for a boy, or being like me, a girl who never felt comfortable in a dress" (24). A man knows that he is not to say he is Jesus Christ unless he is Jesus Christ. A youth knows that he is not to live like a man unless he is a man. The rules are evident and understood. The other things Scholinski lists are also understood as unacceptable but for different and related reasons. Pacing, screaming, living out visions or fashion statements, even vomiting are all forms of resistance. They are ways that those incarcerated for being fake and unreal assert the reality and transgressive power. In screaming and vomiting the body literally unleashes their internal disgust with the reality being shoved down their throats. In pacing, as will explore shortly, the body walks and may even cross the limits of freedom. Imitation may be counter-real in another sense than non-real. Imitation may be a way of changing reality, asserting alternative ways of being, living, and relating.

The movement of people within the mental hospital causes unexpected relations to occur and over time patients and staff began to imitate one another. Indeed, at first Scholinski tried to assert a level of superiority and distance between himself and other patients. In this way, in his first encounters he imitated the role of staff more than fellow patient. "Being in a mental hospital was a boon for my counseling skills," writes Scholinski, "although after a while I got confused." Over time of meeting the personalities of the hospital, Scholinski began to like them and even began to question how alike they were or could be. A trans youth incarcerated with persons with different diagnoses put them all into similar positions, made similar demands, and forced them into similar routines. Likewise, as with many friendships, relationships with the other patients as peers brought Scholinski to regard himself more as an equal with them. Yet the more he began to associate and imitate other patients, the more the divide between himself and others, trans and mad, began to dissolve. He began asking how he appeared to others. "Maybe I don't know I'm insane," Scholinski wondered. "They don't know they're insane, so why should I know?" (20). After reflecting how life in a mad house made him question what madness actually is, Scholinski describes how the system reacted to such discussions arising between patients like him and Jesus. "The staff discourage this sort of questioning," writes Scholinski. "They liked the line between sane and insane to be perfectly clear" (19). The act of turning someone into a saint can be a transgressive move. In the eye of society, those who have been set apart are marginalized because they resist normative traits and values. The work of re-narrating the mad house into a place where one may meet Jesus Christ (or one representation of Him) and the mad as perhaps worthy of imitation turns the system of madness inside out. 

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Imitation as Solidarity

"'I am Jesus,' he said. 'I Know it's hard to believe, but I am Jesus.'" What draws Jesus and Scholinski together is that both of them believe themselves to be persons that other people do not believe them to be. In the case of Scholinski, the butch soon-to-be trans man is isolated by a world that insists that he is (and should be) a girly girl. Jesus's case is more specific. Jesus is isolated by the world because they deny he is Christ. Ironically, the world also denied that Jesus Christ was who he said he was. In both cases, it is as much the belief of the patient as much as the disbelief (or alternative belief) of the doctors that set them apart from the rest of society. Despite the differences between Scholinski and this modern Jesus (or the biblical Jesus for that matter) there is a shared subject position: men who believe they are other than the world believes. Over time, this shared physical and social position turns into a shared ethos of resistance and support. They began to believe in each other. Scholinski writes, "the more I talked to Jesus, the more I liked him, and the less crazy he seemed. Zealous, but not dangerous. I could imagine him in the outside world, preaching. He'd probably help some people." The argument that Scholinski employs here is a traditional one in the transgender community as well as Christianity: 'so what if you don't believe what I believe? If it makes my life better and doesn't hurt others, what harm is it in letting me be?' Jesus offers the trans youth a way of believing in themselves and affirming others. Beyond their ontological claims, these assertions for alternative networks of care and support when the authorized system turns against those under its care. If the world regards them as disordered sinners, they will be saints for one another.

Sharing in the discourse of Jesus, the trans youth begins to imitate him in various ways, forming a unique kind of Imitatio Christi. A signature feature of this Jesus (much like the Jesus of the Bible) was that he was an unstopping walker. Jesus would walk the halls to the limit of his capacities. In this walking, Scholinski followed Jesus. "A couple times I paced with him, down the long corridor and back, for exercise," recalls Scholinski. "I wanted to help him. I was always this way, helping my friends. I thought of myself as a roving counselor. It kept people a nice distance away from my problems." Scholinski finds that by helping others he is helping himself. Maybe by saving others (in a way) from the harm of this place, he could save himself. Regardless of why he did it, the walking itself taught the trans youth a valuable way of liberation. The walking was a sign of transgression against beging caged. It helped them imagine and prepare themselves for the day that those walls would not be able to contain them. "Escape was something we all talked about," admits Scholinski. "It was a sign of sanity; it was a statement, I am not one of these people, I am not a mental patient" (51). By imitating this mad Christ's physical actions, the mad trans youth imitated his mental actions as well. In the walking was the statement that they could not be contained. They could not be contained forever by physical walls, nor could they be contained by the walls of diagnosis and marginalization. Like a form of prayer, even if this habit did not magically give them what they wanted instantly, it did prepare them and instill in them a form of resistance. The walls and staff kept them bordered yet within these restrictions they could exercise a degree of freedom and life. Set apart from the world, they could create their own world and walk every square inch of it. While they could not cross the boundaries that separated them from those outside, they could at least cross the boundaries that separated them from each other.

The saner Jesus seems to Scholinski, the more mad he fears he has become. Scholinski considers this dillemna without coming to a firm conclusion. He asks, "If I thought he was sane what did that make me? Mental hospitals are rife with this kind of debate. Are people like Bob [a.k.a. Jesus] simply more sensative than the rest of us? Bombarded with information, the delusioned find it hard to function in the world, but is that their fault or the world's?" Deconstructing the definitions and boundaries of madness, the trans youth becomes habituated to skills that will indispensible in preserving his own sense of truth. Are transgender persons insane and disordered or are they simply more sensitive than the rest of us? Bombarded with information, the dysphoric find it hard to function in a world of fixed and binary genders. But is that the fault of the trans youths or the world? This alternative way of thinking and living is attractive for those set apart by society. Scholinski admits to imitating Jesus even to the extent of claiming to sharing in his visions. "I used to hear voices," Scholinski told him. "That wasn't true, but I didn't want him to feel alone. Plus, I wanted to fit in" (19). Rather than making fun of him through sarcasm or trickery which assert the non-reality of Christ's understanding of himself, Scholinski's claim of sharing in the visions of Jesus is rather an attempt at solidarity. The trans youth wants Jesus to know he is on his side; and, he admits, to try to get Jesus on his side. By reaching out to Jesus, Jesus reaches back towards Scholinski. Much like the Jesus Christ of the Bible, the Jesus Christ of the Mad House challenges others to cross borders and identify with the isolated and marginalized. Whether either Jesus was right about their personal ontological or metaphysical claims, this does not mean that their ethical and social critiques are not valid. The Jesus that Scholinski meets offers him a way of life to imitate that could lead him to make the world a more sensitive and just place.

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Imitation as Resistance

Whereas the Imago Dei affirm the diverse creative power of God, the Imitatio Christi affirm the agency among persons to transform their lives and that of their community. The work of imitation brings alternative forms of life and community together, the authorized systems will exert the supremacy of their definitions and boundaries. By affirming the same in the other, imitation can be an act of solidarity and resistance. While often tolerated, the subversive defiance of Jesus's continuous walking was did not go unnoticed by the hospital workers. Scholinski recounts one night when the conflict between patients and staff burst into violence, challenging the contingent alliance established between Jesus and the trans youth. Scholinski explains, "they went after after Jesus because he wouldn't go into his room at bedtime. He kept pacing" (33). The physical control and isolation of patients was an exercise of power whereby the normitizing establishment worked to control and isolate disruptive spirits. "Three guards held him down on the floor and Jesus whipped his body around, screaming and crying. This guards swore at him. It was nasty," recounts Scholinski (33). Each movement of Jesus's body was an material act of resistance much like his continued assertion of the man he is was an internal act of defiance. Yet the force of putting him on the ground as well as the shoving around his body showed how the medical system could curtail even these movements. The dangerous persistence of the system was that it could be in one moment fixed and in another moment fluid while retaining a degree of control on the body being disciplined. Jesus could yell and twist but we could not escape the firm hands of the hospital. The battle to put Jesus into his room was an assertion that the staff could put the man in his place in a variety of ways and senses. The momentary restricting of Jesus relates to the logic of the asylum as a whole: the hospital has a right to hold the bodies of patients and to assert ever more isolated control. The time specific enforcement of power (asserting a bedtime) likewise related to the overall authority of the hospital to remove the patients from the general population for a given amount of time. The removal from public time and community is imitated in the removal from the time and community within the hospital between patients such as Jesus and Scholinski.

The attempt to isolate and divide Jesus and Scholinski from each other are met by resistance between the bond formed during the regular walks prompts the trans youth to stand in solidarity with his companion. "Another patient, I don't remember who, ran over with me to help Jesus. We yelled, Leave him alone, he's not hurting anyone," recalls Scholinski (33). Ironically, the demand to "Leave him alone" reflects the goal of the staff in one way. The hospital intends on isolating Jesus from the others, inhibiting his ability to walk and talk with them and inspire their imitation of his transgressive spirit. Yet in another way Scholinski's demand inverts the meaning of the isolation. While the hospital removed Jesus and the trans youth from the general population, setting them apart, it also allowed for them to form an alternative community and become saints for one another. Indeed, this night, they would become momentary martyrs for Jesus. "A guard with huge arms wrestled me to the floor and put his black leather boot on my head," recounts Scholinski (33). Because the imitation of Jesus did not stop at walking and talking together, the trans youth's decision to stand by his friend results in him receiving similar punishment. While subdued, the act of resistance forced the hospital to extend their energy threefold.  Scholinski admits that the hospital staff spoke their message louder. "He stood over me for a long moment to make sure I understood who held the power," Scholinski recounts. "I understood. 'Shut up, you fucking crazy queer,' he said" (33). Much like the tradition of imitating Christ by "turning the other cheek," the act of others taking and multiplying the punishment was a way to shame the medical staff. The imitation was a message that there are alternative ways of living, understanding, and enacting power. While Jesus and the trans youth were insane by the standards of the medical staff, the staff was out of line by the standards of the patients. As Scholinski repeated several times in various ways, Jesus being Jesus, like the trans youth being a trans youth, wasn't hurting anyone. "So what if Jesus wouldn't go into his room?" Scholinski asks. "He was peaceful until they arrived" (33). In this moment that the hospital staff was asserting the supremacy of their Imago Mundi, the Imago Transvesti and Imitatio Christi worked together to offer a peaceful alternative. Who are the ones that need to be physically restrained: the ones going for a night walk or the ones beating children?

The scene demonstrates the way and the cost of Imitatio Christi for transgender saints. Yet it the narrative also opens up for others to join in the imitative act of solidarity. The invocation of a nameless other person, "Another patient, I don't remember who, ran over with me to help Jesus," works much like the unnamed "Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John" wherein the reader can imagine themselves running to Jesus's aid (33). The Imitatio Christi of Dylan Scholinski is not without dangers nor is it normatizing in the way the Christ of his wider society has become. Standing beside one another can be taking blows meant for another. "The next day my neck and shoulder were so sore the nurse gave my Tylenol," recalls Scholinski (33). In a hospital where medicine is regulated, especially for those with recorded drug transgressions, the gift of pain killers is both an act of care and erasure. The medicine is an act of forgiveness but also a reward for a patient who has returned to following the rules. Just as how the removal of pain smoothes over the materials consequence of the defiance, the act of care works to reassert relations between patient and hospital, oppressed and oppressor, after a swift blow to divide the relations between patient and patient. The immediate force of the violence followed by the lingering memory of the pain can secure the system in silence. "In the meeting we didn't mention Jesus being beaten up" remembers Scholinski (33). Nonetheless, Tylenol is not a very powerful drug. Nor is the act of care able to make all things right and peaceful again. The pains will persist and the memory will be retained until a time that voice can be given to both of them. In this way, through the trans hagiography the veil of silence is lifted. Old wounds are reopened and at last the pain is able to speak. Years after Jesus and Scholinski were divided, the pattern of their relationship continues, offering a model of imitation for other oppressed groups to follow. Even if one is not Christ or a trans man, one can embody the same form of resistance and community through a shared suffering in the Imitatio Christi.

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Click here for more information 

on Transgender Saints

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Trans Saints: Imago Transvesti in The Last Time I Wore A Dress

"I stared in the mirror at the girl 
who was me, and not me:
the girl I was supposed to be."

Dylan Scholinski
The Last Time I Wore A Dress

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Imago Dei and Imago Mundi

On this All Saint's Day, I return to the question of what and who makes a saint "a saint." Is it being an exemplar of values held by the Church? The values of the World? Are saints the embodiment of all things society holds as ideal and normative? This is how saints are often regarded. In the Imago Mundi, saints are those who fit into the picture, in opposition of those sinners who do not fit. A careful examination of medieval hagiographies demonstrates that the conventional vision of saints as Imago Mundi are inaccurate. Saints were saints because they were set apart. Saints did not fit in much like sinners. In fact, by the standards of the world in which they lived, many saints may have been regarded as sinners. The marking of these saints inverted the value systems of the world and God. Saints could be and often would be Imago Dei that were set apart because they directly opposed, reformed, or resisted the Imago Mundi. One typical case that represents the subversive creativity of the Imago Dei was the Imago Transvesti of transgender saints. These trans saints are recorded in trans hagiographies as often existing on the edge of society, in places such as monestaries, where they offer an alternative image of like and an alternative habit of life. A more detailed investigation of the Imago Dei and Imitatio Transvesti in the Life of Saint Marinos the Monk on previous articles. In these medieval trans hagiographies, the trans saints faces oppression but is vindicated in the end. Because these trans lives were celebrated, they became honored as saints in the Orthodox and Catholic Church. Here, I wish to examine modern secular stories of transgender lives that do not end with celebration and canonization. What do transgender hagiographies look like when the Church no longer authorizes new trans saints and indeed has largely adopted the Imago Dei's exclusion of the Imago and Imitatio Transvesti? Who are our trans saints today and how are they made?

To explore how the Imago Transvesti works in modern secular hagiography I will examine one its the genre's genealogical descents: trans memoir. In form, trans memoirs share many generic features with hagiographies. In short, they tell the life of a trans person. A more complex answer is that they seek to make a misunderstood life of someone who is set apart from the world better understood by the world. Often, these trans memoirs come with the ethical imperative (implicit if it is not overtly stated) that the reader and the world need to transform themselves if they are to better integrate those reflecting the image of the trans life as well as to save themselves from the sins of sexism and transphobia. In other words, whether they state a moral or thesis, many trans memoirs today compel the same ethical changes in a reader's life as trans hagiographies must have medieval readers. Furthermore, an often unstated or understated goal of trans memoirs (or any memoir) is to garner a certain level of vindication, understanding, and even fame for its subject. Just as the trans saint functions as a generic image of a population calling for social change, the memoir also presents the image of a particular person. The effect of becoming familiar with the person, learning their story, and the oppressions they faced has the effect of making that person special in the mind the of the reader. That the memoir would be written, circulated, and read is honor enough for many. Yet an effective memoir, like an effective hagiography, draws readers to regard the subject life as set apart and significant if not an ethical role model. Yet even if the subject of the memoir does not offer ideals, they may yet be a guide for readers experiencing or seeking to understand and oppose the challenges faced by the particular trans person. In this way, trans memoirs resist the modern binary of saint and sinner. Medieval saints could be both and so too their modern counterparts.

Toward the end of examining trans hagiographies in a modern form and context, I will close read Dylan Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress. The memoir recounts the years the author spent incarcerated against his will in a mental hospital, in large part because of a diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder. The book details the extreme lengths the hospital enacted in order to erase the Imago Transvesti from the young trans boy and inscribe the Imago Mundi, the image of a normative heterosexual cisgender girl. An additional reason for this study comes from a shared personal context. The town that Scholinski grew up in and the hospitals in which he was incarcerated exist within the same Polish community in which I lived. Just outside of Chicago, Scholinski was a transgender teen a number of years before me, yet if he had been allowed to receive public education it would have been entirely possible that we may have graduated from the same high school.  In many ways, the life of Dylan Scholinski recalled in the memoir reveals an alternative image of how my life may have developed. The particulars of his life draw sharp distinctions between us, yet this ability to see parts of one's self reflected in the Imago Transvesti of another is a function of the trans memoir and hagiography. Just as the cloister of Saint Marinos reveals something about the medieval Imago Dei and Mundi, so too mental hospital of Dylan Scholinski reveal much about the image of transgender and normativity in our world. In order to better understand these images, this examination will occur in two parts in order to counterpoint the study of Saint Marinos's medieval hagiography. First, I will examine how the memoir presents the conflict between his Imago Transvesti (as a particular form of the Imago Dei inscribed in his "soul") and the Imago Mundi of the hospital. In the second part, I will attend to the relations and habits formed between Scholinski and another mental patient who believes that he is Jesus Christ. The practices of alliance formed between the patient who acts too much like a man and the patient who acts too much like Christ form a secular, mad, modern form of the Imitatio Chrisit. 

To begin, it is necessary to understand that images are not always visible with and through the eyes but can be constructed and consumed through a variety of media, including narrative. The Imago Mundi that is imposed on transgender youths is just as varied as the Imago Transvesti it is supposed to replace. Just as the Imago Dei is supposed to be present in every human life and yet each life is distinct and ever changing, there is something diverse and dynamic about images. The Imago here concerned are moving images. In this respect, narrative may be better at capturing the living Imago Mundi than static photographs. Thus, without needing to give photographs or fixed details, Scholinski is able to communicate what the Imago Mundi was for him and how it was imposed on his trans life in the mental hospital. "Every morning I lowered my eyelids and let Donna make me up," he recalls. "If I didn't emerge from my room with foundation, lip gloss, blush, mascara, eyeliner, eye shadow and feathered hair, I lost points. Without points I couldn't go to the dining room, I couldn't go anywhere, not that we were going many places to begin with. Without points, I was not allowed to walk from the classroom back to the unite without an escort.... Either choice I hated: makeup, or a man trailing in my shadow" (IX). From the memoir, readers are not given a specific image of girlhood being forced onto his body, yet by listing the tools of inscription a generic image of cisgender femininity is invoked. The color of the lip gloss did not matter so much as the application of makeup. The Imago Mundi is more about the power of execution, the authority of the world to dictate how his gender is embodied more than any specific feature. The point system emphasizes the abstraction of the Imago Mundi as a value structure to be inscribed and imposed. Just as there may be many varieties of transgender saints within the Imago Transvesti, the Imago Mundi which opposes it is able to transcend time period and gender norm as a force of marginalization that at one moment sends one youth to a monastery and at another moment sends another to a mental hospital.

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Images of the World

Icons of saints are set apart because they are Imago Dei and not merely images of the world. The transformations of appearance in many hagiographies show audiences how divine truth can exist just on the edge of what the world can see, on the horizon of understanding, or just beneath the mundane. While transgender transitions are often imagines by the public as a form of disguise or drag, covering up the identity of the person, for trans saints this transvestism, the Imago Transvesti, reveal in visible ways what society has long covered with its own designs. Scholinski recalls looking at himself done up in the mirror of the mental hospital where he was held and forced into feminine clothes against his will. "I stared in the mirror at the girl who was me, and not me: the girl I was supposed to be" Scholinski writes(IX). The mirror scene is a traditional mechanism of transgender film, art, and narrative to show disjunctures between the outside and inside. The duplication of the images represents competing images of the trans person themselves. Which will win out? The image the world sees or the image inside the trans person, written, as Scholinski describes, in their soul? "The staff was under orders to scrutinize my femininity: the way I walked, the way I sat with my ankle on my knee, the clothes I wore, the way I kept my hair. Trivial matters, one might say. But trivial matters in which the soul reveals itself," Scholinski writes. "Try changing these things. Try it. Wear an outfit that is utterly foreign to you... See how far you can contradict your nature. Feel how your soul rebels" (IX-X). As in a mirror, one image faces off with another. Another critique waged against trans persons, especially transvestites, is that they are too changeable. Yet Scholinski's resistance to the gender forced on him demonstrates that his soul is fixed even while his body changes. The Imago Dei is made of things unchanging if unseen while the image of the world is mutable if empirical. 

When society cannot dig out the transgender soul, it suffices to control the person's embodiment down to the skin. Scholinski recalls that when he was first brought against his will to the asylum, he was forced to strip off his clothes. "A clerk went through every pocket of every pair of my torn-up jeans, unrolled the cuffs of my socks, put her hand in the silky lining of my suitcase," Scholinski records. "I'm certain I had to take off all my clothes down to my bra and underwear" (7). Once inside the hospital, Scholinski's clothing and gender will be closely controlled by the medical staff. At the threshold to this isolation, the medical panopticon cuts through the layers of the identity that Scholinski had built for himself. When social construction is reduced to systems, the creative work and agency of the trans life (and its Creator) can be take out of the equation. The trans person is imagined as only a social construct, without its own internal choice or image. Trying to control the changes of the the trans life, the medical hospital works to strip Scholinski down to the core and then rebuild. The system excuses this extreme invasion of the trans person's body on the grounds of healing. They claim to seek out unhealthy or toxic elements on the body (drugs, weapons, contraband) in order to exert changes in the body (behavior, mindsets, beliefs) because of the danger the trans person poses to trans exclusive society. By reaching down toward the transgender soul, the medical system turns the trans life into an embodiment of a disease to be quarantined and set aside from the general population (thereby justifying the systems existence and force); the negative or inverse images of cis society. 

Altering the visual image of the trans person is not enough, systems construct narratives that turn them either into a sinner or a saint. In medical systems, sin as a spiritual disease (an illness of the psyche, or soul) is replaced by the diagnosis of a physical or mental disease. For many trans persons, such as Scholinski, their lives were pathologized and seized through the imposition of a diagnosis for Gender Identity Disorder. After being processed, reclothed and given a room wherein he will be kept, the doctors begin in on Scholinski to tell him the medical justifications for his isolation. "[The Doctor] said the other diagnosis was something called Gender Identity Disorder... He said that means you are not an appropriate female, you don't act the way a female is supposed to act," recalls Scholinski (16). The "supposed to" here reflects an implicit command in society that the medical system here makes explicit. Instead of religious commandments, "thou shall" or thou shall not," which are supposed to have divine authority and authorship, medical discourses follow social assumptions and norms without easily definable origins. Often, cis society defined itself by how it set apart and controlled trans society as its negative image. Cisgender became not-transgender. Scholinski was not affirmed as a trans man but as a "not... appropriate female." The invisible truth of the transgender soul or image is recast from a thing unseen into an embodiment of negativity. Transgender is treated as the dis- to the cisgender's -order. Without context or narrative, Scholinski's trans life would not be recognizably diseased. Yet forced within the discursive and physical frame of medical institutions, Imago Transvesti are set apart as a dangerous alternative to the ruling image of the world.

In the negative construction of the Imago Transvesti, environments, narratives, and images work together to set apart trans lives. Scholinski recalls what may one of the earliest moments that an authority told him that he embodied the wrong picture of himself. The moment occurred when an educator brought Scholinski aside in school and ran through ideas of what professions he might like to have one day. "She held up cards with pictures of a policeman, a farmer, a construction worker, a secretary and a nurse, and said which ones I'd like to be: police officer and construction worker. She looked at me with a curious face like a mother robin. She was the first one who said I had a problem with my gender" (30). Likely, the genitals of the images are not visible yet the gender of the figures are supposed to be apparent. Police are supposed to look like men. The nurses are supposed to look like women. In turn, these socially dictated images are supposed to reproduce themselves. Implicitly, a girl sees an image of a female secretary and so becomes a secretary. The oppressed can be an instrument of enacting an oppressive system. A mother robin works to create a little robin, even if both will remain caged. Yet Scholinski was not only choosing jobs considered "inappropriate" for women but positions "inappropriate" for any marginalized person. Police officers enforce the law, enacting the power of systems on society. Construction works on the other hand enact the literal power to shape the image of the world. What would the world look like is women were in charge of the legal and physical structures of the world? What would it look like is transgender persons could claim that authority? Or intersex or disabled persons? Evidently, by choosing images other than those assigned to him, Scholinski is following another image, an alternative image, an Imago Transvesti that may be an "inappropriate," disordered, and problematic choice. In the end, Scholinski will be isolated and set aside because of following these Imago and not the image of the world.

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Set Apart

Isolation is no safe haven for the trans saint. The exclusionary system of the cisgender binary allows for no mixtures and movements between categories. Expelled from one space by choice or force, trans saints are often not allowed entrance into the other. As a result, trans persons medieval and modern often find themselves caught between chairs, homeless. This sense of homelessness began for Scholinski early in his life, when he was shopping with his father and needed to use the restroom. "On the door it said: WOMEN," recalls Scholinski. One his way out however, he encountered trouble, "a balding clerk with wet produce stains on his apron gave me a look of raw hatred. He grabbed my hand. He wanted me to know who my parents were and I said my father was in the aisle. We looked down each one until we saw him pausing before the cereal. The clerk hauled me over and said, ' We found your son in the women's bathroom.' My father said calmly, 'That's not my son.'" (106). While he was sent to the mental hospital in part to make him accept his place as a woman, spaces for women were often not safe for Scholinski. His presence and performance of identity alienated him from women's spaces. Yet neither was he accepted as a man among men. It is true enough for his father to say, "that's not my son," yet his actions in committing the child to a mental hospital was enough to say, "this is not my daughter." Trans youth often find themselves placed in the dangerous no-man's-land by the enforcement of gender binaries in spaces like bathrooms. Here the privacy of cisgender persons is protected not by merely isolating trans persons but by ensuring that they don't have even the same privacies to relieve themselves in peace. In other moments, Scholinski recalls going to and being assaulted in a bathroom, "a group of them followed me in and said 'are you sure you're a girl?' Sitting in the stall I waited until the laughing stop and I heard the door close behind them" (106). These acts may seem like the innocent misunderstandings of a Clerk or a few youths but they reflect a wider systemic oppression of trans persons. The pressure put on the Imago Transvesti will not release until no space is left free from the mark of the Imago Mundi. Trans saints are made to be set apart for a special place in the tapestry in Creation but as an excluded and erased smudge that is at home no place.

There is no place in Imago Mundi for the Imago Transvesti. Rejected from communion with his family, school, or wider neighborhood, Scholinski finds himself at the medical hospital without any other place to call his own. When Scholinski first arrives, he insists to a member of the staff that the asylum is no home for him either. "I told her I didn't need to be here. 'Uh-huh,' she said" (13). The response is sarcastic, a dismissive reply to crazy person who does not know they are crazy. Yet it is also ironically true. This hospital will not be a home for him. Recording various observations of various medical staff during his time in the care of the hospital, one doctor observes, "Patient has no sense of home" (35). The young trans man has a residence. He dwells -against his will- in asylums for several years. Yet this place of isolation is a physical embodiment of his marginalization and separation from the world. This is a place he is set apart and not merely set somewhere else. He is sainted not by becoming an exemplar of acceptable norms but by being unacceptable. If the trans man makes sense, this meaning and orientation is not of this world. Indeed, the function of the medical isolation is in part to ensure that the trans man does not become at home. When Scholinski is moved to another hospital, he finds that he is again being disoriented through his gender as he is placed (as a girl) among a male-only unit. "All other units were co-ed, a mix of psychotics, violent types and regular depressed people," Scholinski explains, "so there was no reason to throw me into the all-male unit, they could have shifted a depressed boy around. I suppose they thought throwing me to the boys would encourage my girly-girl side" (138). The move is supposed to shock him, emphasize his girlhood and thereby reorient him towards men in a sexuality and not gender identity. While Scholinski was able to form an alternative community in his last hospital, this move is intended to further throw him off his center. In this way, the memoir emphasizes the sainting of the trans youth by showing how the world continually functions to displace him, set him further aside until he comes to embody that sainthood.

The crux that many saints face is what to do when there is no place in the world exists for them and the image of another world remains unclear or uncertain. Too often, escape from the isolation the world imposes on trans life is death. Scholinski recalls how the medical process of chipping at his Imago Transvesti layer by layer changed his appearance but made him a soul with no life left in body. "My new self was pleasing. My new self: girly-girl dead stranger" (120). The image of the girl being fashioned was not only an artificial construct, it was an unlivable life. Rather than embrace a trans image of life, the medical staff preferred instead to turn Scholinski into an image of cis girlhood even if it killed him. The face of a girl was for the trans man the face of the dead. One way or another, liberation or isolation, transition or death, the girl in the mirror was no long for the world. Leaving nowhere left to run in the world or in himself, Scholinski considered suicide the final option. Better death than an unlivable life. Yet this final act of self agency, this final corner where the medical staff could not get at him, death, was painted for the trans man as an unfair rejection of the world. "Suicide is a selfish act," said one of the medical staff after Scholinski's suicide attempt, "Do you know that?" (73). In a place where no personal decisions (that did not follow the medical systems guidelines) was considered selfish and aberent it is not surprising that suicide would be among those personal decisions that the staff condemned. For a system only concerned with the appearance and mechanical functions of life, an unlivable cis girlhood was preferable to escape by death. Ironically, such condemnation and how it was responded to only served to demonstrate how this "selfishness" and isolation was in fact constructed by the medical environment. After being chastized for his suicide attempt, Scholinski was brought into a private room to think about what he had done. "Why the hospital would lock me in a room by myself when I felt so sad I wanted to die, I don't know" writes Scholinski (73). By leaving the suicide alone in a room after his attempt, the statement is made: you cannot escape even by death. The temptation to try again is teased and yet thwarted by the stark reminder of the  recent failure. The lesson is made: life and suicide both lead to isolation. Without escape all that is left is submission.

The mechanisms of mental hospitals not only inscribe the Imago Mundi over the visible Imago Transvesti but carve itself into the inner life of the trans saint. While the hospital could and would regulate his outward appearance, Scholinski protected his inner life and truth as his final holdout. "I like to be in control," admits Scholinski, "to keep what was inside my brain inside. It was the only form of privacy I had left" (85). While the hospital insisted that he embody to image of femininity and a sexual orientation toward men, in his mind he maintained the Imago Transvesti as a hidden truth as well as meditate to himself, particularly in his journal, about his experienced attractions to girls in the hospital. This tactic worked for some time, or seemed to work, until one day Scholinski found that even in isolation he was not free. The doctor called the young trans man into the office and discussed with him details of his "disordered" feelings toward women, encouraging him to instead adopt a heteronormative relationship with men. That is when Scholinski realized, "They had read my journal" (98). While in isolation after his suicide attempt, it seemed as though being alone was the final line for the treatment. If he could submit to being a trans saint, set apart because of his diagnosed pathology, then in that sacred cloister he could be free. The trans life of the Imago Transvesti could survive if only within a small hidden frame. Yet this was to be. The World is a jealous God and will permit idols to no other. Over the course of years, Scholinski survives the isolation and treatments of his forced incarceration. Yet when the time comes for him to leave the physical walls behind (coinciding with his approaching legal adulthood) the test of the Imago Mundi was whether it could function to isolate and control Scholinski when he was on his own.  "No one was watching me. Nine months of survellience: I'd survived seclusion, I'd hugged the males, I'd walked around with globs of blue on my eyelids, and now I was here" (127). For years afterwards, Scholinski recalled feeling the eyes on the back of his neck and an inscribed sense of shame that kept him from fully living out and showing his Imago Transvesti. He experienced depression and relapses into suicidal thought. Yet as he carried with him the chains of the mental hospital, practices of liberation and creation developed within the asylum helped him finally break free and reclaim an authentic image of his life - an Imitatio Transvesti built upon a queer and mad Imitatio Christi.

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Coming soon:

Part II: Imitatio Christi in the Last Time I Wore a Dress

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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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More on Transgender Saints

Hagiography as a Genre of Trans Literature

Transgender Saints: the Imago Dei of St. Marinos

The Digital Iconography of Transgender Saints

An Address on the Future of Trans Historicities

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