Seen and Not Seen: On Toilets, Transsexuals, and Terrorists

In the last week or two, a lot of my friends have been sharing this image:

[Image description: two young Black girls are holding hands and laughing in front of a GIRLS LOCKER ROOM sign. The caption above reads, "So, tell me, which girl shouldn't be allowed in?", while at the bottom of the picture are two hashtags, #beautifulgirls and #transgenderisnotscary. Facebook commenter 1 writes: "People would feel differently about is if they showed an actual transgender person in the picture, not that I'm against it at all but if you're going to make a pro-trans page then you should use actual transgender people." Commenter 2 replies: "This ad features my trans niece." Commenter 1 responds: "Oh, my bad then."]

I find this image, especially in conjunction with the accompanying comments, extremely revealing of the visual logic that underlies cis images of trans people. In light of the ever-growing spate of anti-trans bathroom bills (and certain responses to them, of which more below), I think it's worth unpacking what precisely we can deduce about how cis people do and don't see us.

For the commenter who objects to the photo, "an actual transgender person" is someone who is visibly recognizable as gender-variant, someone who can be seen to be non-cisgender. "People" (not himself, he insists) "would feel differently" if the picture portrayed an "actual" (i.e. visible) trans person -- and on this point he's not actually wrong, because the ad wouldn't make any sense if one of its subjects were visibly trans. The caption "So, tell me, which girl shouldn't be allowed in?" only makes sense if neither girl is visibly trans. The logic of the ad demands that transgender people be indistinguishable from cis people. This ad couldn't work with, and doesn't speak to, visibly trans people: people who are not conventionally "beautiful girls," people whom the cis gaze does designate as "scary." The commenter understands the category "trans people" to contain only visibly trans people, while the ad refuses any identification of trans people as visibly different from cis people.

At base, there are two disparate logics of gendered visibility at work here, and their disparity can be traced to the fundamental contradiction in the medical establishment's manner of bestowing gender on people. Birth-assigned genders rely on a logic of pure visibility: the doctor sees the fetal genitalia on an ultrasound and declares a gender on that visual basis. Trans people's genders are recognized on the basis of invisibility, on the pure interiority of a self-declared psychic gender (I'm talking here about the medical recognition of trans people's genders, which is usually required in order to receive hormones, surgeries, and a change of legal gender).

Now,  my reaction to the incommensurability of these two models is that the birth assignment model of gender is deeply flawed and harmful, and ought to be phased out. But a lot of people -- who may on some level be aware that there is a contradiction here, but who may not have thought through the exact details of it; or who may simply find the idea of such a radical overhaul of our gender system too scary -- respond by doubling down on birth-assigned genders (or "biological sex" as they like to call it), seeking some kind of deeper reality in which to anchor birth-assigned genders, whether that's chromosomes, internal reproductive organs, gonads, etc. The problem with this approach is that chromosomes and genitalia and internal reproductive organs and gonads don't align neatly in a binary-sex model. There's a lot more variation than that.

For those who are wedded to the concept of a biological sex binary and everything it represents, visibility is the primary metric of gender. This logic assumes that all trans people are instantly recognizable, "scary" and certainly not "beautiful" to the cis onlooker, and this is ostensibly what underlies bathroom bills like that of North Carolina. Some pro-trans responses to the bathroom bills -- like the ad above, or the phenomenon of cis-passing trans men taking selfies in women's restrooms -- react by privileging the logic of the non-visibly trans person, where the very invisibility of one's transness reveals the absurdity of the bill.

For one group, trans people's visibility is the problem; for the other, trans people's invisibility proves that there is no problem. The reality of cis views on trans visibility, however, is decidedly more complex than either side concedes.

Quite apart from throwing visibly trans people under the bus, the "we're just like you!" response overestimates the rationality of anti-trans bigotry. The increased visibility of transness in the public eye may have shaped the climate in which current anti-trans rhetoric is formed, but being anti-trans has never just been about cis people's fear and disgust of visibly trans folks. Arguably, the "trap" narrative of the cis-passing trans person who "tricks" a cis person into intimacy has a much longer pedigree in the bigoted imagination. For anti-trans bigots, the "man in a dress" (their view of a visibly trans person) is pitiful and laughable, but the "trap" (their view of a non-visibly trans person) is a devious degenerate.

In Assuming A Body (a book about which I am, incidentally, highly conflicted), Gayle Salamon invokes the figure of the terrorist as an analogue for anti-trans fears:

The primary anxiety today is not that transpeople [sic] will fail to pass, but that they will pass too well -- that they will walk among us, but we will not be able to tell them apart from us, an anxiety that mirrors current apprehensions about nationality, border control, and the war on terror with uncanny precision. [192]

If Salamon is right, then responses like the ad above or the bearded trans guys in women's rooms are not only unhelpful, but precisely counterproductive, stoking cis fears of trans non-visibility. And it doesn't take much reflection to recall that US cultural signifiers for terrorism float free of actual terrorist acts -- brown skin, thick beards, turbans -- such that bearing one or more of these signifiers marks one as Other, as enemy, completely independent of the actual definition of "terrorist." The anxiety that terrorists walk invisibly among us is cathected onto visible traits. People who attack a Sikh man don't care whether he is or is not a terrorist; they care that his turban is popularly construed as a visible symbol of an invisible threat, and they care about the message they can send to the invisible threat by attacking the visible symbol. In the same way, people who propose bathroom bills don't care whether or not they target actual trans people; they care about sending a message to us, and the message is that our existence is an affront to them.

Look: they know, okay? Anti-trans bigots know that some cis people "look" trans and some trans people "look" cis, and they do not care. Our visibility isn't the point. Our existence is.

On Biomedical Technologies of Gender

I have a bad habit of accumulating interesting journal articles on my computer and only reading them months or years later. Such was the case with a 2012 Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health article called "Transgender Transitions: Sex/Gender Binaries in the Digital Age" by one Kay Siebler. The title is clumsy, but the convergence of transgender studies with internet studies is a research interest of mine, so the other day I finally got around to reading it.

I was disappointed. Siebler's argument boils down to a rehashing of that boring, ignorant claim that people who medically transition are reinforcing gender binaries, and if we were ~real true queers~ we wouldn't get hormones or surgeries (and we certainly wouldn't talk to each other about them). This idea is weirdly pervasive in queer circles, and it's predicated on fallacies.

What I find most troubling about this claim isn't its oversimplification of the relationship between individual's actions and the system of enforced gender binaries; nor its naive valorization of nonbinary identities as always inherently better and more liberatory than binary identities; nor even the way it holds trans people to a different standard than cis people. It's the way that, even as it purports to dismantle the gender binary, it naturalizes the sex binary and the cis body. For Siebler, and for many others who think similarly, binary sex assignment at birth is self-evident; the cis body and its gender are natural, a blank slate on which hormones and surgeries constitute unnatural intervention (if not mutilation). These are pernicious misconceptions: the cis body as given, unmarked, its sex preexisting and floating above the socio-material discourses in which its life is lived. These are the (platonic) ideals clung to by the "don't call me cis" crowd (with, and I always promise myself I'm not going to compare gender and race but I always end up doing it anyway, its irresistible echoes of "I'm not white, I'm Irish").

Look: all genders are biopolitical fictions. It's just that some are more strictly regulated and suppressed than others. The body is never a blank slate and genders are never natural. There's no ontological difference between a trans person taking hormones and the assignation of an infant to a socio-material category based on its genitalia, as discerned by the medical gaze at birth or before. Both are biomedical interventions. Both are leaps into the rapid-running river of the sex/gender system, and both require intense struggle to keep your head above the suffocating flow of discourse. The only real difference is that the birth assignment is socially and institutionally supported.

Ironically, I find a parallel frustration in the work of someone who is both acutely cognizant of the fictitious nature of cis genders and extremely in favor of doing whatever the hell you want with synthetic hormones: Paul Preciado. Preciado's Foucauldian analysis in Testo Junkie is so brilliant, such a lucid and convincing account of the operations of pharmacopornographic biopower, that it's kind of hilarious how thuddingly flat his conclusions fall. All that dazzling description of the global assemblages of sex and gender, and then all he can offer is a revolution through drag king workshops. It's like a parody of everything he has devoted the preceding 350 pages to dismantling. Perhaps I am jaded by too much queer theory of the "my preferred gender/sexual practices just so happen to be the most politically subversive" variety, but I find it hard to get excited about any revolution that entails occupying the postures of toxic masculinity, whatever the intent behind so doing. Bragging about your dick(s) and mistreating your girlfriend as revolutionary praxis? Count me out, bro.

For Preciado, biomedical technologies of gender are inherently revolutionary. For Siebers, they are inherently reactionary. Both of them are ignoring the ways we interact with existing gendered power structures.

Biomedical technologies of gender are systems in which we all partake, trans or cis, knowingly or otherwise. The cis/trans axis of power requires that trans people fight harder for their genders, prove and justify and earn them in ways cis people aren't required to do. The male/female axis of power denigrates women in material and discursive ways. Trans women's oppression at the intersection of these axes is multiplied as transmisogyny. This is, like, feminism 101. It's incredible how quickly it gets forgotten by people who want to make sweeping claims about trans folks.

The Joyful Mysteries of Reproductive Justice

On Saturday, I worked as an abortion clinic escort for the first time. Escorts offer moral support and a friendly face for the women whose path to the clinic door is lined by protestors whose intimidation tactics are a shameless smorgasbord of shouting about murder, thrusting leaflets into passing hands, and brandishing disgusting and mendacious placards.

On my way to the clinic, I prayed the rosary, a practice at which I am still very new. Saturday's apportioned subject matter for contemplation is the Joyful Mysteries.

The first Joyful Mystery is the Annunciation, when the angel tells Mary of her impending parthenogenetic motherhood. Mary's “yes” (“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word”) is often embraced by liberal Christianity as a moment of empowerment and consent; but this “yes” troubles me, circumscribed as it is by power and coercion from all sides. I think of women and girls in the US and around the world whose reproductive options are narrowly circumscribed by social forces, women and girls whose bodily autonomy is consistently violated by poverty and patriarchy and legal structures and social institutions. I think of the “nos,” “nos” unspoken or sublimated or overridden. I think about how every “yes” is a compromised yes, a coerced yes, and I think of the very real improvements we could make to the material and discursive circumstances of these yeses, and the space we could make for these hidden nos, if only we tried.

Don't worry, I know a clinic staffed by very nice people who can help

I first read about the work of clinic escorts at least 18 months ago, and I have finally succumbed to the call that has been quiet yet persistent at the back of my mind ever since then. The call said: These protestors – the ones who are violent, the ones who make death threats, and the ones whose presence is a barrier to justice for those most in need of it – these are your co-religionists. Aren't you going to do anything?

The second Joyful Mystery is the Visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth. I think of the intergenerational solidarity of these two improbably pregnant women, one old, one young, in the face of pregnancies so unplanned that it took divine intervention to make them happen. I think of all the ways in which solidarity between oppressed people manifests. I think especially of women who seek ways to live and to live with dignity in a world that is hostile to their bodies; of black women whose bodies are targeted by white supremacy; of trans women whose bodies are rendered disposable by transmisogyny.

A fellow escort was deeply troubled by a flyer she had seen in her local Methodist church. It advertised a fundraising walk for a crisis pregnancy center – those creepy fake clinics that spread misinformation about reproductive options. My escort friend was concerned to see the anti-abortion agenda pushed so brazenly within the walls of a mainline church.

She isn't wrong to be concerned. Mainline churches have failed hard when it comes to reproductive justice. By silence, by noncommittal waffling, by avoiding the issue for fear of controversy, mainline denominations have allowed the voices of injustice to set the terms of the national conversation. Our reticence has helped cause a political climate in which serious presidential candidates earn applause and acclaim for stating their opposition to abortion under all circumstances.

(Increasingly, when I watch this old Simpsons clip, I expect to hear cheers instead of boos in response to the proposition, “No abortions for anyone!”)

Still a very compelling platform imo

The third Joyful Mystery is the Nativity, childbirth in poverty and peril, one precarious life bringing forth another. I think of the 69% of abortion-seekers in the US who are “economically disadvantaged.” I think of how structural racism and ableism lead to the high rates of poverty among people of color and people with disabilities. I think of all the parents and guardians whose economic disadvantages force them to make heartbreaking decisions about exactly which goods they should deprive their children of today. I think of the shockwaves of devastation caused by an unplanned pregnancy when abortion is not easily or affordably available.

Progressives, and perhaps especially progressive people of faith, need to stop being on the defensive on this issue. We need to stop apologizing for abortion and start treating it as a good and necessary aspect of reproductive justice.

I don't concede the “pro-life” appellation, I don't accept the oversimplified “choice” framework, I'm not interested in the third term in the safe-legal-rare buzzphrase. I care about reproductive justice, the intersectional movement founded by women of color and centering their perspectives. Reproductive justice is about race and economics and ability and sexuality, birth control and abortion and parental leave and childcare, comprehensive healthcare and living wages and affordable housing, education and access and culture. Facilitating coparenting among polyamorous partners, overhauling the foster care system, marriage equality for people with disabilities – all are aspects of reproductive justice.

The fourth Joyful Mystery is the Presentation of the newborn Jesus at the Temple, when the old prophets Anna and Simeon express their joy at seeing him. I think of every friend's baby I have cuddled, every tiny human I have smiled at in passing, every infant I have smothered in kisses. I think of the material and psychological wellbeing I wish on my godchildren. I think of the incalculable value of a supportive community, including those who are older and those who are childless, in the care and upbringing of a child. I think of how forced childbirth and lack of reproductive options reduce this community.

Abortion isn't something we should tiptoe around, apologize for, or treat as a necessary evil. In the political climate of the US, caring about reproductive justice means arguing for abortion as a moral good. “Life,” in the phrase “pro-life,” means only “fetuses carried to term, all other factors be damned.” It's a reduction of the richness of life to pure numbers, where the only number that matters is the birthrate. Quite aside from the fact that indefinite population expansion will eventually outstrip the planet's resources and result in death on an enormous scale, this is a cruelly narrow definition of life, one that prioritizes the dogma of fetal preservation over every actual living human's needs.

The fifth Joyful Mystery is the Finding of prepubescent Jesus in the Temple at Jerusalem, after he goes AWOL from his parents. This is the only story of Jesus' childhood that made it into the canonical gospels. I think of it as an instance of the child Jesus asserting his personhood, refusing to be treated as an appendage to or property of his parents. He breaks from the established hierarchy of his society in order to seek his God. I think of all who are oppressed by the established order of society. I think of their quests for truth and meaning and justice and life. I pray that I might be one to help facilitate that.

Marriage Is Meaningless. Yay!

Today's SCOTUS decision confirming marriage equality across the US has brought out the predictable chorus of conservative opposition. The conservative argument that resonates most with me is the claim that marriage equality is the first step toward stripping marriage of all meaning. To some extent, I agree with this claim -- the difference is, I think this is a good thing -- but I also think it's overlooking a more fundamental reality:

Marriage is already meaningless.

Seriously, even before today's ruling, even 25 years ago when same-sex marriage wasn't a major issue in the public eye, what is marriage? As far as I can tell, marriage is a conflation of at least three different things, none of which need to coexist anymore:

• a legal kinship contract
• a religious rite
• a sexual relationship 

There is no logical reason for these three to coincide, and, in a pluralistic society like the 21st-century United States, there's no legal or moral way to ensure they do.

A lot of people get terrible upset about the relationship between the legal and religious sides of marriage, but it seems pretty clear to me. Constitutionally, the legal and religious sides have to remain separate. Look at other religious rites: there is no religious monopoly or mandate with respect to birth or naming or death. These are legal matters in civil society, and you have the option to involve your religion if that's your jam.

Truth be told, this is how marriage already operates. I got married in a courthouse. So did plenty of heterosexual couples. You sign a contract in a little room that is nominally a chapel, but there's nothing inherently religious or spiritual about it (other than the civil religion of US law and politics, but that's a different conversation I won't get into here). Non-religious straight people have been getting married forever. From a legal perspective, religion is an optional add-on to legal matters of birth, marriage, death, etc. In the course of human history, the religious meaning of these rites of passage arguably preexists the legal meaning, but this is 2015 CE, not 8000 BCE.

As to the sexual component of marriage, my general feeling is that it's nobody's business outside of the members of the marriage (assuming consent and legality and all that good stuff). In practice, mandating the sexuality of a marriage has always been deeply misogynistic, whether it's contemporary purity culture's obsession with female virginity, or the centuries of men's control over women's sexual and reproductive rights.

But even just ideologically, the sexual component of marriage is plain incoherent. In the conservative imagination, marriage involves a sexual initiation. This demands an arbitrary declaration of a singular sexual act as uniquely constitutive of sexual and marital union, and/or an asinine blanket ban on all extramarital sexuality, as though sexuality were wholly separable from friendship, romance, and other forms of relationship. Even if you don't buy the initiation thing, the assumption of sexuality within marriage is both creepy and unnecessary. Not all couples want sex; not all couples have sex; and telling an asexual couple that their marriage is incomplete is both rude and factually inaccurate. Mandating (or even normalizing) sexuality of any kind within marriage is as incoherent as insisting that all married couples have to, I don't know, share an umbrella.

What frustrates me the most about the whole same-sex marriage argument, though, is that it's a public debate where both sides rely on an adherence to the legal enshrinement of the gender binary. In New York, even before today's ruling, the "gender" fields on a marriage license application are optional, and we left ours blank. I'm pretty sure that my ungendered marriage is therefore neither "same-sex" nor "opposite-sex" -- an all-too-rare instance in which the legal paperwork accurately reflects reality.

Once you recognize that the religious, sexual, and gendered aspects of marriage are and have always been irrelevant to the legal side, there's only one logical course of action: create a legal framework for kinship contracts among partners and families of all configurations. Phase out "marriage," with its archaic focus on the monogamous pair-bond with an assumed reproductive capability. Make life easier for the genderqueers, the polyamorous, the three-parent families, the siblings who live together, the consenting adults and the children they may or may not take responsibility for.

We're here. We've always been here. We're not going away. It's time the legal system caught up to that reality.

Freddie Gray, Baltimore, and the Christian Logic of Abuse

Smarter, better-qualified people than myself have written smarter, better things about the protests in Baltimore. From a quick survey of Facebook, here's Ta-Nehisi Coates, Julia Blount, Benji Hart, and those are just the three articles I've seen shared most.

Of course, I've also seen the terrible responses, the white people referring to the protestors as “thugs” and “animals” (transparent racist dogwhistles both), sanctimoniously misusing out-of-context MLK quotes, expressing far more concern over CVS than over black human lives – and the inevitable production of Freddie Gray's arrest record, as if that revealed anything other than the logical knots into which white supremacy will tie itself in order to maintain the just-world fallacy.

Something that really strikes me about the white supremacist treatment of Freddie Gray and the Baltimore protestors is the extent to which it manifests the Christian logic of abuse. White America has been subjugating people of color for centuries, and when we demand compliance from the people we oppress, we are operating exactly as white patriarchal Christianity does.

Bloggers like Libby Anne, Sarah Moon, and Samantha Field have been writing for a long time about the abusive Christianity of patriarchy and the profound harm it does to women and queer people. Scholars like Delores S. Williams and Kelly Brown Douglas have spent decades critiquing the intersection of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in Christianity, and the oppression of black and brown women at the hands of an imperialist religion.

Wives, obey your husbands. Slaves, obey your masters.

As the religion of empire, Christianity has taken the contextually specific advice given by one subject of imperial oppression to others, in a world he expected to pass away imminently, and imposed it from above as the rule of law. This advice is not normative advice for moral living; it is a measure for survival as a beleaguered minority. A black mother in the US in 2015 tells her son to avoid the cops, not because avoidance of cops is all-purpose moral advice, but because it is a survival tactic to avoid being murdered in a white supremacist context. A whole system that puts the onus on black people to avoid being murdered by cops is a profoundly broken system.

The logic of patriarchy blames women for being abused while simultaneously encouraging them to stay in abusive relationships. The logic of white supremacy murders black people and simultaneously blames them for their own murder. Much of that logic traces directly back to the imperial wielding of the cross.

The resurrection is a profound symbol of the transformation of abuse and suffering into new life and hope. The imperial misstep is to demand abuse and suffering. Imperial Christianity sees abuse and suffering transformed into new life and hope, and concludes that more abuse and suffering is needed. The Christianity of empire, of patriarchy, of white supremacy, centers Christ's death and believes that it can be the agent of hope.

This has never been true. The face of God is not the face of white America. The face of God is the face of Freddie Gray, the faces of those who protest. As Kelly Brown Douglas says, “To be where God is, is to be where black people are crying out for freedom from crucifying realities.”

ETA: Nyasha Junior has an important take on Kelly Brown Douglas' piece.

UKIP, Queerness, and Non-Reproductivity

This week, Vice published an amazing piece about the UKIP spring conference. The whole article is worth a read – every time you think it must have exhausted the cornucopia of preposterousness, along comes another sentence like 

A leaflet that was handed out as he spoke helpfully pointed out that foreign aid is actually spent on "giving dance lessons to Africans" 

 or 

"At the risk of sounding melodramatic, let's suppose our leader was issued with a European arrest warrant for allegedly stealing a chicken from a Carrefour in France"

Before I read the article, though, I saw this image circulating in isolation.

Image: a page from a flyer. A highlighted text box states that "What the LGBT is achieving, of course, is a recruitment drive. As such people cannot reproduce their own kind, they must recruit fresh 'blood' and this is best done among children in schools, the younger the better. The Government, through Gove and Morgan, has given them carte blanche."

It's easy to laugh at the naked scaremongering – the appeal to the tired old "predatory gays" trope, the implie conflation of queerness and pedophilia, the othering language of "such people" and "the LGBT" (which, ???) – but I think it's worth devoting some attention to the focus on reproduction.

That queers cannot reproduce is, of course, an anti-queer argument of long pedigree (see what I did there?). The Catholic church has thrown most of its anti-LGBT eggs into this philosophical basket, despite the elaborate theological hoop-jumping required to maintain this position while still justifying sex between infertile hetero couples. Its demonstrable falsity notwithstanding, the non-reproductivity argument still holds powerful rhetorical sway.

Look again at the flyer's language: 

As such people cannot reproduce their own kind, they must recruit fresh 'blood' and this is best done among children

See that must, both bolded and italicized. If queerness and pedophilia are conflated, as in the popular queerphobic trope that is certainly being invoked to some extent, the fresh blood to be recruited is a rainbow army of child prey, new meat for the insatiable sexual appetites of those voraciously vampiric queers who drain the bodily fluids from each victim before tossing them aside like so much offal. On this reading, queers need fresh blood because we are going through our finite supply of single-use sex partners at a rate of knots.

Simultaneously with this subtext, though, runs a second set of implied reasons for the queer recruitment drive, and that is simply "to reproduce their own kind." If this reproduction is intended to be analogous with human reproduction in its idealized form, in which parents are assumed not to prey sexually on their own children, then presumably queers are not recruiting these young schoolchildren to be our own sex partners. Recruitment, in the minds of the anti-queer flyering brigade, is the queer version of reproduction.

Queerness is definitionally non-reproductive to the creators of this flyer. Why, then, do queers wish to reproduce their own kind? They must do it, and the reason that they must do it is that they cannot do it. Self-evidently, non-reproductivity is a defect, and reproduction is the goal. For those who subscribe to the non-reproductivity argument against queerness, there is no "why" to reproduction. It's simply what living beings do.

I can't help wondering what would happen to this discourse if it came face-to-face with Lee Edelman. Edelman (No Future, 3, 4) exhorts queers to refuse the very terms of the argument that we must reproduce our own kind:

queerness names the side of those not 'fighting for the children,' the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.  [...]

Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it.

If we're talking pure biological fact, queerness is not definitionally non-reproductive, and straightness is not definitionally productive; but that's not the argument I want to have. Frankly, I don't want to have any argument that accepts the parameters UKIP sets.

I am bedeviled by fits of rationality

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
"Amen."
"Have a great day!"
--conversation between me and the Canon to the Ordinary when I got Ashes to Go at the train station this morning

 When I think rationally about existence, I am unable to function.

The universe massively preexists humanity and will vastly outlive us. We are specks of spacedust, and as a species our little life is nary a blip in the spacetime continuum. That's pure scientific fact, y'all.

"In four billion years the sun will swallow the earth, so what's the point of writing this assignment?" is not a good excuse, but when you think about it it's a strictly rational one. What's the point of getting out of bed? What's the point of staying alive?

In our anthropocentric little construction of reality, my fits of rationality are known as "depression" and are assumed to be treatable. When I lie staring at the ceiling, sleepless for wondering desperately why there's something rather than nothing, I'm making the most rational and fundamental of inquiries, and yet I am not functioning as a human should.

I take my meds. I drink my coffee and catch my train and go to work and class. Most of the time, I am not so rational that I can't participate in the trivialities of human life. The great irony, of course, is that my studies -- the work to which I am attempting to devote my life -- entail engaging the very existential questions that, if I delve into them too deeply, immobilize me utterly.

We are dust, and to dust we shall return. Have a great day.

chewed up by the machine

Laverne Cox is going to be in a CBS pilot. Glee has gathered a goddamn 200-person all-trans choir. The BBC is making a transgender sitcom.

I'm mourning, and I'm goddamn furious.

Look, I love TV, probably more than anyone I know. I watch a ton of it, I write about it, I constantly agitate for more minority representation. I'm in no way saying that having more trans people on TV is in itself a bad thing (though God knows bumping a trans women of color in favor of a white trans guy reflects real life so perfectly that, on a decent show, I'd think it was a brilliant piece of meta-commentary).

But it's a bitter, bitter pill to be expected to rejoice, to cheer how far we've come, to grovel in thanks at the feet of TV execs who want to cash in on the current high visibility of trans people – to see all of this fanfare happening among the so-called LGB(T) community, while women are being murdered.

Trans women, mostly trans women of color, are being fucking murdered. Two hundred trans folks making jazz hands about how far we've come doesn't address their murders. If anything, it obscures that reality by focussing attention on an all-singing, all-dancing celebration of assimilation into the capitalist mainstream.

So far, a trans woman or gender non-conforming person of color has been murdered in the United States every week of 2015. This week, the horrifying trend continued when 21-year-old Black trans woman Penny Proud of New Orleans was shot multiple times early in the morning of February 10. She joins fellow trans women of color Yazmin Vash Payne, Ty Underwood, Lamia Beard and Taja DeJesus and gender non-conforming person of color Lamar Edwards, all of whom were under the age of 35.

Assimilation always leaves a remainder, and the remainder must be dealt with. Trans people aren't being welcomed aboard the shiny happy American Dream, even if it looks that way to those of us at the top of society's transgender league tables. We're being consumed by the machinery of imperialist, white-supremacist, heteropatriarchial neoliberal capitalism. If we're deemed the good ones, we slide willingly down its gullet, clapping along with a show choir as we fuel its ongoing machinations. Otherwise, we're chewed up and our mangled bodies are spat out to bleed to death in an alley.

(And I say "we" and "our" in that last sentence not to appropriate the struggle – since people like me, the white socioeconomically-privileged trans guys, are not the ones dying – but as a deliberate gesture of solidarity with my sisters.)

Nowhere is the operation of the machine of death clearer to me than in last week's appointment of a State Department envoy for LGBT rights around the globe, enshrining a supposed concern for LGBT people in US foreign policy.

“While there is currently strong momentum in the United States toward equality, there are many places in the world where the LGBT community is at risk, sometimes even for their lives,” added Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin in a press release. “This is an important way for the United States to facilitate diplomatic conversations with countries where we see ongoing violence, harassment and discrimination of LGBT people.”

Look at that phrasing, that eye-gougingly disingenuous phrasing designed to set up the US in opposition to "places in the world where the LGBT community is at risk," as if this is not one of the "countries where we see ongoing violence, harassment and discrimination of LGBT people." As if our very right to exist in public spaces isn't currently being legislated against right here. As if trans panic defense isn't still legal in 49 states of the union.

As if this is about human rights, as if this is about caring about LGBT people, and not just another excuse for neoimperialism. As if any of this means something, and isn't just about placating public outcry in the emptiest, most breathtakingly cynical way possible.

Women are being murdered. I'll join the party when that stops.

White Christianity, Black Anger

I request a lot of random stuff from NetGalley, because I have a book-hoarding problem. Most recently, I read a book called Unoffendable by a conservative evangelical type called Brant Hansen. The title intrigued me, because when I requested the book I didn't know where Hansen was coming from, and I was kind of hoping for a radical argument for a new social justice coalition that transcends the worst excesses of petty holier-than-thou progressive infighting. Obviously that is not what I got, but I still tried to read with an open mind, because there are certain overlaps between the things that offend a conservative evangelical Christian like Hansen and the things that offend a radleftist SJW Christian like me, even if it's almost always for very different reasons.

This is a hard week in America, a sad and scary week for my Black friends. White supremacy is flaunting its ugly face even more brazenly than usual, and Black grief and anger is rippling throughout the country. Inevitably, white people who believe they speak from a lofty position of reason and objectivity are telling Black Americans what to do with their anger: suppress it, let it go, rise above it. Most perniciously, these white people are co-opting the words of a Black martyr and saint in service of their craven complicity with the white supremacist status quo.

To my fellow white people I say: How dare we? How dare we commit this twisted sin of white supremacist apologetics? When we steal Martin Luther King Jr.'s words to demand that Black emotion and Black action be directed toward the maintenance of this racist society, we murder him – and Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice, and Jesus Christ – all over again.

Brant Hansen does it too. He not only quotes MLK in support of his anger-quashing agenda, but he also makes an example of his Black friend's story of convincing an actively racist white guy that Black people are human. This is the kind of narrative white people love: focus on the overtly racist individual, and elide the existence of the profound systemic racism on which this country is founded and through which it continues to operate.

The thing is, Hansen's book actually has a pretty good message for a specific audience. It's shot through with theological assumptions I do not share – Christian exclusivism, penal substitutionary atonement as the entirety of soteriology, a patriarchal He-God, an emphasis on heterosexual nuclear families and fetal personhood, that baffling evangelical tendency to assert that conservative Christian values are somehow countercultural – which make it clear that the book is written within and for a white conservative evangelical context. Hansen would have done much better to be upfront and explicit about this. With such a disclaimer, this could be a helpful text for conservative white cishet Christians: one of their own telling them they need to quit getting so angry and offended about stuff is definitely something they need to hear.

Without the disclaimer, though, and with the MLK-quoting white-supremacist sanctimony, it comes off as yet another instance of white evangelicals trying to universalize their contextually-circumscribed circumstances: yet another instance of white people telling Black people what to do and how to feel. Black men are constantly subjected to the dehumanizing narrative of the angry Black monster-man whom a white cop or a neighborhood vigilante can murder with impunity because any “reasonable” person would see him as a threat. They have absolutely zero need for condescending whites to tell them what to do with their anger.

Hansen calls for Christians to stop perpetuating the idea that humans can have righteous or justified anger. He says that anger is never a force for good. But the thing about marginalized people is – and I have felt this as a trans person, as a queer person, as a person with depression, and I can only imagine how it feels as a Black person – sometimes our anger is the only thing keeping us alive. Sometimes (too often), my white-hot rage at a society that doesn't want me to exist, that doesn't see my life as having worth, is all that empowers me to say, I won't let them win.

I don't have answers, I don't have solutions, I don't have a call to action. All I have is this little flame, a grief and anger too deep for words, and the assurance that God, too, lost a child to state-sanctioned violence, and she knows how it feels.

Blessed Are The Poor In Spirit

"Blessed are you who are poor ... woe to you who are rich."
"Blessed are you who are hungry now ... woe to you who are full now."
"Blessed are you who weep now ... woe to you who are laughing now."
"Blessed are you when people hate you ... woe to you when all speak well of you."
(Luke 6:20-26)

The Gospel of Luke is easy to love. In social justice-oriented contexts, Luke's is the go-to gospel because it so clearly portrays a Jesus who is deeply concerned about the social and material circumstances of the poor and the marginalized. It's the natural source for a Christian theological call for justice (assuming we're ignoring all the Hebrew Bible prophets, which as Christians we probably are. Thanks, supersessionism!). In Luke's rendition, the Beatitudes are a pretty uncompromising set of eschatological reversals, "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable," as we bleeding-hearts like to say.

Matthew, on the other hand, is a little more difficult. I've never heard anyone say that Matthew was their favorite gospel. Matthew is fussy and literalist to the point of being nonsensical, as when he tries to fulfil a Hebrew Bible prophecy by having Jesus enter Jerusalem riding two donkeys simultaneously because he's never heard of hendiadys. And look at what Matthew does with the first Beatitude:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
(Matthew 5:3)

For starters, note that Luke's Jesus is addressing the poor directly (as well as the rich, whom Matthew doesn't mention), whereas Matthew talks about them as though they are absent or even abstract. The most glaring difference, though, is that Luke's "poor" have become for Matthew "poor in spirit." It seems like a pretty clear-cut instance of Matthew softening the call for justice in order to avoid upsetting the wealthy and to accommodate the status quo.

I think there is potential for a more generous and more interesting reading of Matthew 5:3, though, and it arises from the question: what the hell does "poor in spirit" mean anyway?

Historical-critically, or with respect to the author's intentions, your guess is as good as mine. The reading I'm proposing has nothing to do with source criticism, the historical context in which Matthew's Gospel was written, or the nuances of the Greek terminology. It's just a reading I think is interesting, challenging, and kind of cool.

Luke's Jesus says: "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." It's a promise of straightforward reversal: those who currently lack resources and comfort will receive abundance

Matthew's Jesus: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." If this is also a reversal, Matthew is clearly not using "kingdom of heaven" in quite the same way Luke is using "kingdom of God." Neither the reward nor the affliction are material in nature.

What does "poor in spirit" mean? I suggest that we can read it quite simply, as the reverse of "the kingdom of heaven": the poor in spirit are those who lack a certain sensibility, which for want of a better term I call "religious." Not those who do not believe in God, who have no use for that hypothesis -- it's perfectly possible to be religious without believing in God -- but those who have no sense for, well, whatever you want to call it: the transcendent, the liturgical, the impossible, wonder, the perhaps. Something precarious, something humbling, something greater than oneself. The people with the shallowest, most mean-spirited view of what humanity can be (I'm sure we can all think of examples, including some who call themselves religious and believe in God) are blessed. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

This is no way replaces Luke's vision of material abundance for the materially poor, but it's a thought-provoking supplement. For someone like me, steeped in leftist academia and liberation theology, "blessed are the poor" is normative, but "blessed are the small-minded" is a real challenge.

Disability, Limits, and the Church

A couple weeks ago, the World Council of Churches called for more inclusivity of people with disabilities in churches. The coordinator of the Ecumenical Disability Advocates Network apparently said this:

“The communion of the churches in unity and diversity is impaired without the gifts and presence of all people, including persons with disability.”

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this statement since I first read it. There's so much to unpack here with respect to my theological interests.

Ever since I started trying to do embodied theology, theology that is in and of and about the flesh, I have been compelled by the image of the Church as Christ's body. This is already a powerfully rich and evocative image in New Testament literature. The image is present in Paul's letters to the Romans, the Ephesians, and the Colossians, but I suppose it gets its most extensive treatment in 1 Corinthians 12.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.

I often think about taking this image quite seriously. Given what we know about bodies – from queer theory, from crip theory, from critical race theory – what does it mean that we the Church are, collectively, Christ's body? And what does it mean to call this body, for whatever reason, impaired?

On the social model of disability, “impairment” usually refers to a physical fact about a specific body, while “disability” as such is caused by social and environmental factors. Any disability theory worth its salt from the last five years or more will, of course, note that this distinction is as necessary a step and as unsustainable a dualism as the sex/gender distinction: one can no more conflate these things absolutely than one can separate them entirely. Impairment (/sex) the physical fact and disability (/gender) the social construct are hopelessly entangled, to the point that even what we call “the physical fact” (of impairment or of sex) is itself a social construction.

Deborah Beth Creamer proposes a model of “limits” to displace or supplement the social model's inadequacies. Limits are not identical with either “disability” or “impairment,” and are inherently value-neutral. As a society we naturalize some limits (a person who cannot fly is normal) and pathologize others (a person who cannot walk is defective). As in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's concept of “misfit,” our understanding of limits tends to be circumscribed by the relations between human bodies and their environment, but attention to the limit or misfit can enable us to interrogate the “default” bodies we construct. Disability becomes “an intrinsic, unsurprising, and valuable element of human limit-ness” (Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities, 96).

So far, so human; but what of God? What about the limits of God? The classical theological notion of kenosis, self-emptying, proposes that God took on limits in the incarnation; but, traditionally, this was in order to overcome said limits through glorification and resurrection. But if the Church is Christ's body – a body of bodies, human bodies, defined by the having of limits – is God, then, not still flesh? Still material? Still limited?

The Church is Christ's body, but it is also a (or many) human institution(s), and as such it is deeply flawed – perhaps even impaired, in the most negative sense – and never more so than when it practices the exclusion of those whose bodies are too disabled, too queer, the wrong color. The Church is the communion of saints, but it is also a temporal coalition of temporal bodies, and as such it has limits – limits that are not necessarily intrinsically good or bad, but limits that are constitutive of it as a body.

I wonder what that means.

Habakkuk 1:2

This morning, we had an active shooter drill on campus. We had our emergency response plans in place from a preparatory meeting a few weeks ago, and today we tested them out. When the alert was sent out – by text, email, phone call – everyone in the building where I work piled into a little office, locked all the doors behind us, and spent the next ten minutes sharing stories of other workplace drills and laughing too loudly in the buzz of adrenaline.

This week, the town of Ferguson, MO, is under siege. Last night, all the activists I know were glued to Twitter and its eyewitness accounts of staggering police brutality.

My school, the place where I study and work, is located in one of the 10 wealthiest counties in the nation. Ensconced in our office, my coworkers and I talked about friends in other places who had been mugged. All of us are white.

"Can you imagine what would have happened without the internet watching?" "Sure. It's called the last 240 years of American History."
— Bobby (@BobbyRobertsPDX) August 14, 2014

Campus Safety is working hard to protect my school against the remote possibility of a gunman on campus. Statistically, he would be white, male, lone, probably a disgruntled student.

Police in Ferguson shot and murdered an unarmed Black man. The community has refused to accept this. The police have responded by going nuclear.

When we had the first meeting about the active shooter drill, I panicked. I'm still not accustomed to gun culture and the idea that I might have to face it firsthand freaked me out.

I'm ashamed of myself. I'm ashamed of my race.

There's a lesson in this juxtaposition. I'm learning something visceral about the nexus of violence, poverty, race, and security in the US. I struggle to unpack the enormity of the injustice. Long may it haunt me.

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?

The Trouble With Trans Discourse

My God, I am sick of trans discourse.

I am sick of the toxicity of each subculture of trans ideology toward those who do not share its particular rigid orthodoxy (none of which are adequate anyway). I am sick of the bitter infighting, and I am sick of the calls for unity. I am sick of the holier-than-thou posturing of the language police, and I am sick of the pretensions to bold truth-telling in the face of censorship. I am sick of hearing what's a slur and who needs to lighten up. I am sick of hearing who's a true transsexual, who's a newly-minted queer, who's a gendertrender, who's a quisling shill for the cissupremacy/patriarchy, who deserves necessary medical treatment or basic fucking human respect based on whether or not they agree with your definitions. I am sick of everybody wanting to eradicate everybody else.

I'm sick of radfem ideology. I'm sick of the oversimplification of claiming that, because the social construction of the gender binary as we know it is harmful, gender as such needs to be eradicated. I'm sick of the reduction of sexism to the nakedly biological, as if sexual dimorphism were the entirety of biological sex/gender diversity, as if patriarchy could be exhaustively described by “people who can't get pregnant oppressing people who can get pregnant,” as if its complex matrix of the material and the discursive could be adequately described in terms of uteri alone, as if the Foucauldian soul had never been posited.

I'm sick of truscum ideology. I'm sick of the oversimplification of asserting that being trans is always and necessarily reducible to a medical condition. I'm sick of the implied reification of medical conditions, as if they were eternal, subsistent, and external to the culture that diagnoses them. I'm sick of the binarism, the refusal to treat nonbinary genders as legitimate. I'm sick of the biological reductionism that dovetails exactly with the TERF understanding of sex and gender, differing only in the degree to which they believe trans people should have access to medical care.

I'm sick of genderspecial ideology. I'm sick of the reduction of gender to a feeling, to something that has no overlap with the flesh in which it is manifest, to a garment that can be donned or sloughed with the day's outfit. I'm sick of the holding sacrosanct of potato genders and nounself pronouns, placing them above critique just because someone nebulously “identifies as” them. I'm sick of the disembodiment of gender just as much as I'm sick of the biological reductionism thereof.

I'm sick of appeals to chromosomes or gonads, of claims of “deception” or the knowability of “true sex,” of the kind of biological reductionism that binds me to my birth assignment. I'm sick of born-this-way-ism, of brain sex and prenatal hormone exposure, of the kind of biological reductionism that is nothing but trans apologetics. I'm sick of airy-fairy gendering that erases the body so utterly as to make people believe that medical care is not a necessity for those who require it.

For most of my master's degree, I avoided writing about gender. I was undertaking the coming-out process, and I felt that, in a life where gender (what it is, how you know, what mine is) consumed my every waking thought, my academic work constituted a single blessed corner of relief. I would talk about Derrida and Johannine Christology and new media theory, and I could immerse myself in deep topics where for once, for once in my life, I didn't have to think about gender.

Now, in my doctoral work, engaging with gender seems unavoidable. It's still not my primary interest – I'm more interested in disability and crip theory, Eucharistic theology, and phenomenology – but I can't seem to talk about anything else without also talking about gender.

I fantasize about quitting Tumblr, about shutting down this zombie blog, about leaving trans discourse altogether. I believe in listening more than I talk, and most of the time I suspect that what I have to say is neither interesting nor valuable.

But, my God, anyone should talk who can add a little nuance to the trans wars 2k14 and their relentless, horrifying oversimplifications.

Boyhood/Girlhood

Richard Linklater's new film Boyhood sounds fantastic, and yet I've been consciously avoiding going to see it. Two years into social transition, one and a half into medical transition, I still feel that little fishhook of pain in my chest when I contemplate boyhood and my lack thereof.

To comply with the popular trans discourse, I suppose I would have to claim that I “always was” a boy, even when I didn't know it. To be sure, there can be both rhetorical and emotional value in the “always was” narrative, but for me that is a conscious rewriting of my history, which doesn't sit quite right with me.

Not that it's not to some degree true. There is a truth in the suggestion that I always was a boy; there is a truth in the admission that I never had a boyhood. These truths are not contradictory so much as complementary. Each alone only tells a fragment of the story.

For me, the value of the “always was” narrative is very limited. I see its use for trans people who were conscious of their gender from an early age; but what does it really mean for me? For a female-assigned child with two cis brothers, who deeply internalized the “(birth) genitals=gender” message of a cissexist society, who could plainly see that I was not a boy in the precise way that my brothers were boys, who did not know that there was any other way to be a boy and who therefore assumed that my desire to be a boy belonged to the same imaginary realm as my desire to go to wizard school? (And later, on discovering feminism, decided my desire to be a boy must be rooted in internalized misogyny?)

I find more use in a negative framing and a paradox: it's not that I “always was” a boy, but that I never was a girl, and that I was not a girl even as I was a girl.

The logic of Jewish philosopher and theologian Peter Ochs is helpful here. For Ochs, the dyadic logic of binarism – the notion that not-X is the opposite of X – is properly applicable only to situations of suffering. To the sufferer, actions either help alleviate the suffering (X) or they do not help (not-X), and as such the world can be divided into the binary categories of X and not-X. In all other situations, however, binarism is misapplied, and it is an oversimplification and a logical misstep to assume that not-X is necessarily the opposite or absence of X.

This, I think, is the logic of transition, and it helps to explain why trans people, particularly in the earlier stages of transition, can be so sensitive to seemingly small aspects of the gendered world, such as being called “sir” or “ma'am” at the grocery store. A transitioning person experiences gender from a place of suffering, and as such divides the world into two categories: my-gender and not-my-gender. Anything that reinforces my-gender helps to alleviate the suffering; anything that reinforces not-my-gender does not help.

(Clearly, I am referring to a binary-identified trans person. I have not yet thought through the implications of this logic – or even, if I'm to be perfectly honest, the limited temporality inherent to the concept of “transition” – with respect to non-binary genders.)

However, the binary logic of my-gender and not-my-gender only applies once I am consciously aware of my gender. Accordingly, it would be inaccurate to retroject this binarism onto my childhood. My childhood as I lived it at the time was, as far as I knew, a girlhood. My childhood as I view it from my current perspective as a male adult is not-a-girlhood. Both perspectives are true.

Much as I long for boyhood, driven by losstalgia for a past that was never mine, and much as I could psychoanalyze my childhood gender identity, seeking evidence for the sublimation of my own felt maleness into an abundance of carefully nurtured fictional personae – even so, I have had experiences that turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Anglo-American culture categorizes under the heading of “girlhood.” I was given dolls and dresses alongside legos and pants. I was permitted, even encouraged, to embrace masculinity as male-assigned children still tend not, even in liberal households, to be encouraged to embrace femininity. I first embraced feminism as an insider, and I know firsthand fears such as that of walking alone among men as a (perceived) woman at night (though I think I am a better feminist now that I am no longer at war with the feminine in me).

My girlhood, as I understand it now, is not a matter of having “been” a girl, but of having experienced much of what is culturally considered to be part of girlhood. It is not an ontological but an epistemological girlhood. Even as I ache for the boyhood I should have had, I recognize that I have learned a great deal from girlhood and that it has been a major contributor to the man I am becoming.

I don't know if I will ever learn to love my girlhood. But I hope to someday be at peace with it.

Things I Read: Justin Holcomb's 'Know the Creeds & Councils' and 'Know the Heretics'

This review is based on digital review copies provided by NetGalley.

Justin Holcomb's new books from Zondervan, Know the Heretics and Know the Creeds and Councils, make good companion pieces for the lay reader who wants greater familiarity with the history of the Christian faith. Creeds and Councils is the stronger work, but Heretics has a more important goal.

I assumed, from certain tell-tale tics of vocabulary and theological emphasis, that the two volumes were aimed primarily at an evangelical-leaning audience. It surprised me to learn that Holcomb is an Episcopal priest; I rather suspect he went out of his way to be accessible to the popular evangelical subculture of the US. (Of course, he might just be more conservative than me. He did get his PhD from Emory, and I was specifically warned off applying there because I would be too radical for them.) In my experience, evangelical Christianity tries to put the Bible above all else. The trouble is, an awful lot of Christian tradition cannot possibly be derived by the individual from scripture alone – for example, the Trinity. Creeds and Councils would be a valuable book for readers in a position like my own of about five years ago: unclear about the relationship between certain church doctrines and scripture, unsatisfied with the answers provided in an evangelical context, uncertain where to look for a history of doctrine that is not geared too specifically toward a single denomination.

It's a nicely laid out book, first explicating the differences between a creed, a confession, a catechism, and a council, and then going on to examine a number of important examples of all four. Holcomb hits all the biggies, from Nicaea and Chalcedon through the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Westminster Confession down to Vatican II (and, somewhat surprisingly to me, the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy). Each chapter provides historical background for the creed (or council, etc.) in question, a summary of its contents, an exploration of its theological relevance, discussion questions, and a list of further reading. It's a solid structure that should have particular appeal for evangelicals, with their love of expository preaching. Throughout, Holcomb tries to stress the importance of knowing this history, critiquing those who “decide to ignore history altogether and try to reconstruct 'real Christianity' with nothing more than a Bible” (10). Holcomb's critique has a particularly evangelical flavor to it, focusing on “being faithful to God” (10) and how “Jesus continues to build his church” (22) – not arguments I would personally have used, but appropriate ones for his audience.

Know the Heretics is a more exciting and potentially more challenging idea for a lay evangelical readership. I can't be the only ex-evangelical who has been told not to even read certain books because of their poisonous theological content, and I think it's still a pervasive attitude in certain strands of Christianity that faith is a fragile thing that must be protected from too strong a challenge lest it crumble. The distinction between heterodoxy and heresy is one of the reasons I left an evangelicalism that seemed narrowly prescriptivist for the broad theological tent of Anglicanism, and Holcomb's solid Episcopalian emphasis on that distinction is a crucial contribution to evangelicalism as I experienced it.

Structurally, Heretics is similar to Creeds and Councils, providing background, content, relevance, discussion questions, and further reading for each heretic – Gnostics, Marcion, Docetists, Arius, Pelagius, and so on. However, I have three major reservations about this volume.

First, at an epistemic level, I find Holcomb's truth-claims unsatisfying. Again, this reflects my viewpoint as both an ex-evangelical and a graduate student in theology and philosophy, but frankly any definitive statement of theological truth or falsehood makes me uncomfortable. I am willing to accept value judgments of a given theological statement as good or bad (referring to its intellectual honesty, its coherence, its fruitfulness or harmfulness, among others), but in general I think that to call theology true or false is to make a category mistake. For example, modalism and partialism are models of understanding the Trinity; a model is not true or false, but is misused when it is taken literally or ontologically, rather than being seen as a way of understanding at least one aspect of something bigger than itself. To me heresy is not a matter of giving the wrong answer to a legitimate question, as Holcomb defines it (12), but of elevating the finite to the level of the infinite. (You could also call this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Or idolatry.)

Second, I find Holcomb's soteriology inadequate, and borderline disingenuous. Substitutionary atonement is throughout presented as the only orthodox soteriology, and is used to bolster Holcomb's Christology: “Only a divine Savior can bear the weight of God's wrath in atonement. Only Jesus as the God-man can satisfy the enormous debt and penalty caused by human sin against God. … Only a divine Savior can pay the costly price for redeeming us from our bondage to sin and death” (97). A major reason for my drift from evangelicalism is my no longer finding substitutionary atonement sufficient. Frankly, I think it's an example of the very fallacy I described in the above paragraph: one specific model of atonement has been concretized above all other models. The anthropocentrism of this soteriology is distasteful to me, especially given than John 1:14 states not that the Word became human (anthropos), but that the Word became flesh (sarx). To me, a good soteriology must stress the redemption of all creation, and thus a good Christology must understand Christ not narrowly as a “God-man” but expansively as Creator-creation. Holcomb hedges the possibility of alternate soteriological models, discussing only Socinus' view (“Jesus' death is only an example,” chapter 12) which is set up as an unacceptably extreme alternative to substitution, instead of a different model that demonstrates a different (but still important) aspect of salvation.

Third, the heretics of the first chapter, whose heresy is summarized as “The old rules still apply,” are referred to unreflectively as “Judaizers.” Christianity's history of antisemitism is such that, if you're going to use a term like “Judaizers” and be unrepentantly supersessionist, you had damn well better acknowledge the embedded anti-Jewishness here and actively combat it. That Holcomb doesn't is not a minor point of theological disagreement but a major and unfortunate misstep.

With these reservations taken under advisement, I do think these two books provide a generally sound and accessible introduction to the history of church doctrine, especially for Christians whose denominational background under-emphasizes the role of tradition and history.