Intersex and Transgender Theology

By Kwok Pui Lan

The Episcopal Church took the courageous step to approve same-sex blessing service at the General Convention last July. At the same time, the Church voted to amend church laws to include that no one would be discriminated based on “gender identity and expression.” The church affirms “gender identity (one’s inner sense of being male or female) and expression (the way in which one manifests that gender identity in the world) should not be bases for exclusion, in and of themselves, from consideration for participation in the ministries of the Church.”
 

The Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge, an Episcopal priest and chaplain at Boston University, has worked with others for a number of years for the passage of the amendment. He was one of the panelists to speak about intersex and transgender theology at the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) on September 7. Other panelists include Dr. Susannah Cornwall from University of Manchester, Dr. Megan K. DeFranza of Gordon College, and Iain Stanford, a doctoral student at Harvard Divinity School.

Professor Patrick S. Cheng of EDS moderated the panel and said in his opening remarks that the Christian community has talked more about lesbian and gay issues than transgender and intersex concerns. He welcomed Dr. Cornwall, an expert on intersex theology and ministry from England, to EDS to have a dialogue with other scholars in Boston.

Intersex people are those persons whose biological sex cannot be classified as clearly male or female, because they have combinations of physical features of both. Intersex people have also been called “hermaphrodite” or people with “disorder of sex development” (DSD), although these terms are contested.

Cornwall’s book, Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ: Intersex Conditions and Christian Theology, is the first full-length examination of the theological implications pf intersex conditions and their medical treatment. Currently she is interviewing intersex Christians to deepen her study. She said that the Church of England has begun to discuss ministry to intersex and transgender persons, which is a step forward.

Cornwall emphasized that intersex persons challenge a binary construction of gender, which has dominated Christian theology for centuries. The acceptance of a non-pathological understanding of the intersexed necessitates the re-examination of some of the Christian images and teachings, such as the church as a feminine bride to a masculine god, the maleness of Christ, body and perfection, and marriage based on complementarities of the male and the female sexes.

In her intriguing remarks, DeFranza pointed out that the Bible offers material to discuss intersex issues. As someone who has grown up in a fundamentalist church in which women were not allowed to even pass the offering plate, she was surprised to find discussion of “atypical” bodies in the Bible. For example, in his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19:1-12, Jesus refers to different types of eunuchs, including those who have been so from birth (as different from those who have been castrated). DeFranza argues that intersex persons would have been included in this group. In Isaiah 56:3-5, the eunuchs who hold fast to God’s covenant are blessed. DeFranza said that instead of “an icon of shame,” the eunuch is raised up as “a model of discipleship.” The Bible also refers numerous times to barren women and some among them might have been intersex.

Just as intersex persons disrupt our ways of constructing gender, transgender people challenge us to see gender identity and expression not as fixed, but in a continuum. Partridge and Stanford reminded us that transgender theology concerns the whole church, because it affects how we see theological anthropology, the nature of creation, and the Body of Christ.

Partridge said that the feast he liked most is the Feast of Transfiguration. It marks the liminal space that life is not static and Christians are called to grow to be like God, as in the doctrine of theosis in the Eastern Church. He invited us to see creation as variegated and always changing and to have an expansive notion of the collective embodiment of the Body of Christ. With such an inclusive understanding of creation and the church, each person will be free to discern who God has called him or her to be and to embody the vocation that God has given.

Stanford was at the General Convention when the Episcopal Church passed the amendment not to discriminate transgender people. He noted that in church politics, the blessing of same-sex union is considered a “sexuality” issue, while the inclusion of transgender persons is seen as a “gender” issue. But the two are much related and often overlap with each other. He reminded us that homosexuals were called “inverts” by nineteenth-century sexologists such as Havelock Ellis. For them, the problem had more to do with gender non-conformity than what these people did in their bedrooms. He, too, exhorted the church to transform its understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality in its theology and ministry.

The panel provides much food for thought at the beginning of the semester. To continue the conversation, Professor Cheng is organizing a group to further discuss lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer issues and theology. The video of the panel will be available later at the Episcopal Divinity School website.

Kwok Pui Lan is the William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School and her book OccupyReligion: Theology of the Multitude is forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield.

A Unicorn at the White House

By Patrick S. Cheng

When I came out of the closet in college in the late 1980s, I thought I was a unicorn.  That is, I believed that I was a mythical creature; surely I was the only gay Asian American person in the universe.  All of the gay spaces that I belonged to were white, and all of the Asian American spaces that I belonged to were straight.  There couldn’t possibly be others like me!

Never in my wildest imagination did I think that, some twenty-five years later, I would be attending a national conference of some 350 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT or queer) Asian American activists and allies in Washington, D.C.

Nor would I have ever imagined that I would be invited to a White House briefing about issues of interest to the queer Asian American community.

The conference, “Presence, Power, Progress,” was organized by the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA), an umbrella organization of LGBT East Asian, Pacific Islander, South Asian, and Southeast Asian organizations in the United States.  This was only the second national NQAPIA conference, the first one being in Seattle in 2009.

On Thursday, July 19th, the day before the conference officially began, I attended an interfaith convening of LGBT Asian Americans who were interested in faith-based issues.  It was an amazing experience to sit around a table with queer Hindu, Muslim, and Christian Asian Americans and talk about how we could support those in our communities who were struggling with issues of race, sexuality, and spirituality.

Later that afternoon, I was privileged to attend a briefing at the White House by Obama administration officials about issues that were of interest to the LGBT Asian American community.  The three-hour briefing touched upon a number of important issues, including immigration, bullying, international human rights, and HIV/AIDS.  We even heard from Chris Lu, the President’s Cabinet Secretary and the highest-ranking Asian American in the administration.

The conference itself lasted three days – from Friday, July 20th, through Sunday, July 22nd – and offered numerous panels and workshops to the participants.  One highlight for me was speaking at a workshop for LGBT Asian American Christians who were wrestling with heterosexism and homophobia in their churches.  The workshop was led by Jess Delegencia, the Asian Pacific Islander Roundtable Coordinator at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry in Berkeley, California.

We also had a lot of fun.  There was a queer Asian American performing arts festival on Friday night, and there was also a festive banquet on Saturday night emceed by Tamlyn Tomita of The Karate Kid II fame (and who played Mike Chang’s mom on Glee).  On Sunday morning, I attended Eucharist at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on K Street with Weiben Wang, a friend of mine from New York City.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the conference for me, however, was the fact that my mom, Deanna Cheng, also attended the conference and visited the White House.  My mom had been invited by the conference organizers to participate in a gathering of Asian American parents of LGBT children and to film a public service announcement for the Asian Pride Project.  Thinking back to when I first came out to my mom, I can only attribute how far we’ve come to God’s amazing grace.

It was an incredible blessing to attend the NQAPIA conference and to visit the White House as an openly gay Asian American man.  I am grateful to the co-directors of NQAPIA, Ben de Guzman and Glenn Magpantay, for making the conference happen.  Most of all, however, I am grateful for my fellow LGBT Asian American activists around the country for ensuring that no queer Asian American person ever has to feel like a mythical creature for being honest about who they are – racially, sexually, or spiritually.

Patrick S. Cheng is the Associate Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  For more information about him, see his website at http://www.patrickcheng.net.