If you are just here to take the quiz; you can take it HERE.

Share

Why Do We Need a New Taxonomy?

For all of the ways that the Sides taxonomy has been both helpful and useful, it was developed at a time when the primary focus in LGBTIA+ Christian advocacy was on sexual orientation. As a result the Sides taxonomy tends to be vague when it comes to trans people, to bi/pan people and to aro/ace spectrum people and the mapping gets really messy. There are Side A people who may not affirm trans identities and may have concerns or even hostility to aro/ace spectrum identities, and there are Side B folks (several of whom are close friends of mine) whose theological convictions lead them to choose celibacy but who are fully affirming of the full range of gender identities and who advocate forcefully for full civil liberties and protections (including the right to same-sex marriage, equal employment and housing protection, anti-discrimination ordinances and so forth) for all LGBTQIA+ people and who recognize aro/ace spectrum folks as radically and beautifully queer.

Further, we seem to be entering into a period where LGBTQIA+ Christians have been around long enough that we now fall along a significant spectrum regarding the degree of social and religious change that we are committed to and feel to be necessary. Matthew Vines’ and the Reformation Project’s recent pieces denouncing queer theory and queer theology while celebrating a somewhat more conservative affirming theology are, I believe, evidence that the community has grown and matured to the point that it will be helpful to have categories for the differing ways and degrees to which we are advocating for, and committed to, institutional change.

What I am Proposing

With all of this in mind, I have been working for the last few years to develop a more nuanced but (hopefully) still user-friendly taxonomy to describe the beliefs and approaches to gender identity and sexuality of LGBTQIA+ Christians. Starting with the sinful—holy spectrum that the original Sides taxonomy was based on where Side X sees anything that isn’t cis-het-allo as fundamentally sinful and Side A sees LGBTQIA+ identities and relationships as holy (and with plenty of folks in the Side A, Side B, Side Y, and Side X communities falling somewhere between those polls) as my horizontal axis, I added a vertical axis with Institutionalism-Liberationism at the polls to create a Cartesian plane that an LGBTQIA+ Christian can map themselves onto.

Further Building on the old Sides taxonomy, I then mapped three general horizontal positions corresponding roughly to Sides A, B, and X.

Then I added three additional categories (Institutionalist, Complexity, and Liberationist) to the vertical axis getting me to a 3x3 grid.

This gave me nine categories that a person’s position on LGBTQIA+ folks can be generally aligned with across two different axes: Sin-Holiness and Institutional-Liberationist.

I like the idea of a set of categories mapped onto a Cartesian plane because it allows for the understanding that even within a given category there is going to be variation based on where a person falls within that category. Someone in the upper left quadrant can still me more or less institutionalist/liberationist and may well refrain from wanting to call gay relationships “holy” while maintaining that they are morally and spiritually equivalent to straight relationships. Just as there has always been variation within the Side categories of the Sides taxonomy, there is variation within these categories as well.

Subscribe now

My next step was to think through what representative statements for each of these 9 categories might look like and to come up with titles for each one. Below is my current best attempt but this is definitely still a “work in progress”. Also please keep in mind that my goal here was to come up with a statement that would feel accurate to the people who occupy a given category; with that said, I recognize that terminology is not shared across the communities in question and that some of these statements, if written by a person who actually occupies a given category might use differing vocabulary. If you would like to see some of these category statements updated please avail yourself of the feedback link.

Beyond that, I absolutely realize that some of these categories are heavily populated while others (looking at you X Liberation people) are almost empty. My goal was not to create a map with roughly equal populations but to develop a religious/theological taxonomy that accounts for the range of positions people inhabit.

Finally I decided to let the original Side’s taxonomy, which has been deeply formative to our community, to play a role in how each of these categories actually “show up in the world”. For that reason the columns and representative statements may not always reflect the absolute center of the quadrant on the original axis map but instead are meant to be as broadly representative as possible of consensus within the category.

After that I decided to come up with names for each of the nine categories. Again, my goal was to come up with category titles that would feel accurate to the people who inhabit those categories.

The Nine Categories

• Affirming Structuralist: Affirming Structuralists generally believe that God blesses homosexuality, trans identities, and aro/ace spectrum folks on roughly the same grounds and under equivalent conditions to God’s blessing of straight, cisgender, and allo people. They tend to prefer language of equivalence with straightness and advocate for LGBTQIA+ inclusion in existing religious, social, and political structures with minimal disruption of those institutions.

• Pastoral Liberationists: Pastoral Liberationists recognize and appreciate the fact that LBTQIA+ people add diversity and bring new perspectives to society and to the church. They are more comfortable with the idea that queerness (or LGBTQIA+ identities, culture, and behavior) is good as such but want to avoid alienating or seeming to demean straight, cis, and allo people. For Pastoral Liberationists the focus is generally on celebrating the unique gifts of every person while standing against oppression.

• Enthusiastic Liberationists: Enthusiastic Liberationists understand anti-LGBTQIA+ oppression to be rooted in structures and institutions and are committed to dismantling all oppressive structures. They frequently align with Queer and Liberationist theologies and may well cite God’s “preferential option for the oppressed” in support of a belief that LGBTQIA+ people are uniquely gifted in ways that the cis-het-allo church and society need. Enthusiastic Liberationists are more likely than the rest to focus on intersectionality and solidarity.

• Conditional Structuralists: Conditional Structuralists believe that the basic frameworks, structures, dogmas, and traditions of the Church and of society are basically good though careful improvement may be appropriate. At the same time they are often aware of the ways that LGTBQIA+ people have been harmed by individual cis-het-allo Christians. Conditional Structuralists want to see Church and popular culture improve by becoming more kind and supportive of LGBTQIA+ people but do not believe that there is any error in the traditions and core beliefs of the church or of society regarding gay sex, gender identity and transition, or allo/amatonormativity. Additionally Conditional Structuralists often make a hard distinction between LGBTQIA+ identities which they see as valid, and LGBTQIA+ behavior which they see as sinful. Spiritual Friendship and similar commitment structures are often celebrated in this community, though they can appear in other categories as well.

• Open Individualists: Open Individualists accept cis-het-allo normative, non-affirming theology as accurate but tend to be uncomfortable applying that to people other than themselves. When pressed they will say that all LGBTQIA+ behavior is sinful but would prefer to emphasize empathy and understanding for the degree of burden that these beliefs place on LGBTQIA+ individuals. They will often call out hypocrisy among cis-het-allo non-affirming Christians who treat LGBTQIA+ behavior as particularly or especially sinful. “We don’t really exlude people for being greedy so we probably shouldn’t be excluding them for being gay” is a common sentiment among them. They may or may not support same-gender marriage and adult transition as civil rights in a secular society.

• Identity Liberationists: Identity Liberationists go the farthest in combining a personal conviction that it would be sinful or wrong for them to have gay sex (often based on personal conviction) with a strong commitment to civil and social liberation for LGBTQIA+ people whom they understand to be structurally oppressed on the basis of who they are. Identity Liberationists may even associate particular grace or charism with LGBTQIA+ identity. They stand foursquare for social, civil, and sometimes religious liberation for the full LGBTQIA+ community.

• Non-Affirming Structuralists: Non-Affirming Structuralists are fully committed to what they see as traditionalist, orthodox, and non-affirming theologies, churches, and social/political structures. They believe that to identify as LGBTQIA+ is intrinsically sinful as it means identifying with a sin in defiance of Christ’s redemption. They may describe themselves as experiencing same-sex attraction, gender dysphoria, or a low sex drive but would identify all of these as temptations that they are working to overcome. Non-Affirming Structuralists tend to practice exclusion and feel that it is necessary to expel LGBTQIA+ identified people from their communities until or unless they are satisfied of the person’s repentance.

• Relational Non-Affirmers: Relational Non-Affirmers are theologically similar to Non-Affirming Structuralists in that they believe that both LGBTQIA+ identities and behaviors are necessarily sinful. However they differ in their approach. Relational Non-Affirmers believe that kindness and a limited degree of inclusion the best pastoral stance to take regarding LGBTQIA+, same-sex attracted, and gender dysphoric people. While they may exclude eventually if the person “obstinately persists in their sin” their overall attitude is one. Those whose testimony is one of having overcome homosexual and gender dysphoric temptation are incorporated into community.

• Progressive Non-Affirmers: Progressive Non-affirmers are especially focused on celebrating LGBTQIA+, same-sex attracted, and gender dysphoric people who have testimonies of having overcome their same gender and gender dysphoric desires. They believe that those who have overcome these temptations or inclinations should be celebrated for their faith and held up as examples both to other Christians who experience similar desires and to their fellow straight Christians.

What is My Category?

I want to emphasize at the outset that you are the person best positioned to know and to identify where you fall within this taxonomy. I have created a quiz you can take (and afterwards a survey that I would very much appreciate your taking) to help you to think about which category best describes you. With that said, if your reaction to your quiz result is “I wish I were in a different category” or “I don’t that’s right” then I want to encourage you to trust your instincts and assume that the questions, answer options, or weighting on my quiz is flawed. Please let me know in the post-quiz (totally optional) survey what went wrong and what you think would have been a more accurate outcome.

And that is my proposal. I would love to read your feedback which you can provide on this form.

Subscribe now

P.S.

I have been accepted to present a paper on C.S. Lewis his idea of seven genders (a sort of sequel or follow up paper to my 2024 paper on Lewis and the Sex/Gender distinction) at the upcoming Undiscovered Lewis Conference. I am already registered and intend to go but teacher finances are tight in the summer and if you would consider becoming a paid subscriber to Transpositions or upgrading your subscription to a paid one, that would be really helpful as I budget for travel to the conference. Thank you!

Subscribe now

Webinar Description from the Seattle Shool

This conversation explores Eucontamination as a theological framework for understanding how disgust shapes our inner lives, communities, and responses to difference. Building from their book Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life, Paul and Billie Hoard argue that disgust is not merely an emotional reflex but a formative moment that reveals what we fear, what we exclude, and what we imagine holiness to be. Eucontamination names a counter-movement—an openness to what unsettles—that mirrors the pattern found in the life of Jesus, who consistently inverted the logic of disgust. Rather than reinforcing boundaries between clean and unclean, pure and impure, Jesus moved toward lepers, the bleeding woman, sinners, and the marginalized, contaminating the very categories meant to keep him separate. His ministry reveals that transformation often occurs precisely where disgust would have us withdraw.

Lacanian psychoanalysis provides helpful tools for understanding why disgust feels so potent—how fantasies of purity organize identity, and how desire is tangled with what we reject. These insights illuminate the psychological scaffolding beneath our theological impulses without replacing them. The psychoanalytic lens clarifies the human dynamics; the theological imagination gives them meaning.

This webinar moves from conceptual framing to practical application, offering ways leaders and communities can work with disgust as it arises around bodies, stories, social difference, and conflict. Eucontamination becomes a guide for inhabiting the difficult spaces where aversion and grace meet—inviting a way of being that mirrors Jesus’ disruptive proximity and opens the possibility of healing, truth, and renewed belonging. Join this webinar to explore theory and practical application, offering ways leaders and communities can work with disgust as it arises around bodies, stories, social difference, and conflict.

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration ... or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” — Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Subscribe now

Introduction and my Grounding Metaphor

“Remember that our community members are the stakeholders but our students are our true customers”

I was sitting in another “inspirational” professional development session about a decade ago when the presenter dropped this little gem. He told us that, as educators1, we ought to imagine ourselves as customer service representatives and, in that context, he wanted us to think of our students as the customers. Cringy as the metaphor might be, it had a certain surface plausibility to it: if we teachers produce education and our students receive that education then, if you sort of block out the fact that public education is taxpayer funded, then maybe you can see it. I rolled my eyes and muttered something to a friend about the inevitability of consumer metaphors under capitalism, but the image stuck with me for a while: students as customers.

The more I thought about this the more convinced I became that, problematic as the metaphor is, it does have some clarifying power in explaining what has gone wrong with the American system of public education. I am also convinced that the metaphor of students as customers of the educational system is descriptively wrong and badly misleading. In its place let me propose an alternate metaphor for contemporary American education, one which locates each of the participants in a way that is descriptively accurate and also profoundly troubling.

Over 15 years as a teacher in the American public education system has convinced me that this structure describes the way the system itself processes, responds to, and uses each of the agents.

• The district bureaucrats (Governor, County Executive, Board of Ed, Superintendent) are the owners of the education factory. Yes technically they manage it on behalf of the public but they are the ones making the decisions here.

• The administrators (principal, vice principles, etc…) are the managers of the education factory. They keep things running and are tasked with producing the outcomes and implementing the decisions that are determined by the owners.

• The teachers (and special educators, school psychologist, school councilors etc…) are the workers of the education factory. We are told what to do, which tools to use, and what sorts of products are acceptable and unacceptable.

• The parents, the public, and employers are the customers of the education factory. They pay for it, they decide in the end whether or not they approve of the product, they depend on a certain quality in the product and complain loudly when they find the product lacking.

• The students are the product of the education factory. Their job is to become what the customer’s want them to become. They are praised and rewarded for cooperating in that formation and they are punished and looked down on when they resist it.

I want to encourage you to go back and reflect on your own experience of public education; were you the customer or were you the intended product? Were you educated in the interest of your own maximal flourishing or were you educated to a standard designed to make you into the sort of worker, citizen, and producer that your state has a demand for? We like to tell ourselves the story that education is for the student but the evidence of our experience, of the accountability structures (such as they are) and of the pressures that the system actually respond to all point in another direction. Students shaped into productive workers and citizens are the product of the contemporary American educational system.

In this essay and over the course of this series on education I plan to explore how this de facto model of education has distorted both the purpose and practice of public education and I will propose the alternatives that seem most compelling to me. I hope you will join me for the ride.

Subscribe now

The Distorting Impact of Student-as-Product Education

Let’s look at how this plays out in real life. Starting with the students themselves, the de facto student-as-product model of education means that students who don’t succeed at becoming what the system “wants” them to to be are treated as defective products. This includes students who don’t respond well to the established teaching environment, structures, or curriculum. When students are not “successful” as determined by the factory system, then the defect (as happens in every factory because liability rolls downhill 99% of the time) is assumed to be either with the student as intrinsically poor material (this is the explanation we most frequently see from conservative types) or with the teachers as failed “craftsmen” (a conclusion more popular in certain liberal circles). Occasionally the system will decide that a lack of resources is to blame but that usually happens only after our credulity has been strained past the breaking point.

Second, the educational system as a whole is set up with “quality control” at the center. After all, the investors need to know that they are getting their money’s worth. Tests, assignments, and student work are all treated as product samples which are used to determine the quality of the product itself (students). This incentivizes everyone in the system to focus not on educating the student but on making sure the student is able to pass quality control benchmarks. And as it turns out, there are quite a few ways to improve standardized test scores; actually educating students is one of the hardest and least reliable of these. Redefining terms, forgetting to norm tests, and relaxing standards while re-naming them to sound more rigorous2 are all popular options.

Third, it means that curriculum decisions tend to be shaped more by what can be measured easily and will yield the most positive sounding results (somebody ask me about the last time my students were tested on their understanding of basic grammar and punctuation in Standard English3). We avoid testing what is hard to teach and harder to fudge the results of, while privileging tests of skills whose assessment is far more subjective using standards that are not normed4. It is far easier to seem to educate students than it is to actually educate students.

Finally (for now) this model leads to a system in which the actual on-the-ground purpose of each school is not to produce people prepared to flourish as adults having gained a critical understanding of the world and the skills to navigate it in ways that benefit them, but to produce workers who have been conditioned to engage as members of the workforce in numbers that nearly approximate the demand of employers. We are not helping persons to become who they can be, we are shaping them to become what we have decided it will be useful to our society for them to become. Then we tell them that becoming what society needs them to be (well trained workers) is necessary for them to be happy and fulfilled and we condition them to disdain all education that isn’t oriented towards turning them into the most productive cogs in society’s machine.

So What Else Could There Be?

What happens then, when we abandon the factory as a functional model for an education system while keeping in mind the distortions that it caused? What might a healthier, more just, and more effective educational system look like?

Well, a just system of education would be one which, first and foremost, is for the student. That means a lot of things but most uncomfortably (and so I want to put it first) it means not privileging the desires of the community, employers or even their particular parents5. At it’s core though, a public education system which is for students would be one oriented around the formation of fully realized persons. The goal for each students must be for that student to become as much as possible the most flourishing, most fully realized version of who they are. Instead of imagining education as primarily training we would have to start imaging education as formation and growth, we would have to recognize that education is about becoming.

None of that is to say that public education shouldn’t or can’t produce better citizens in a democracy, qualified participants in our economy, and engaged members of our communities. It can and it should. But those outcomes must be secondary to the fostering the flourishing of the students themselves. In fact I would argue that the only possible way to achieve those outcomes is to make them secondary to student development and flourishing for their own sake. C.S. Lewis famously referred to this dynamic as the Law of First and Second Things: “Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things.”6

And if we sit with it long enough, the application of the law of first and second things to this situation starts to make more and more sense. People are not actually programmable machines who can be made into perfect representations of anything other than what we are. At most (at worst) we can be forced into molds and pressured to conform to a given model or set of expectations. But something in every person is bound to rebel against that mold in every place that it varies from who they are. The idea that we can make citizens who will serve the interests of the nation and the economy presupposes the obscene idea that people exist for the sake of their government and their economy rather than the obvious opposite—that the economy and the country exist for the sake of the people. Because of course at the end of the day every student is already a member of our society.

Take just a second to ask yourself whether you would prefer to live in a community of people who have developed themselves and been developed to their own fullest and healthiest potential or a community of folks whose imaginations and vocations have bene artificially limited. Unless you are an unscrupulous politician I am willing to bet that you would prefer the former. It may sound naïf but it is nonetheless true that flourishing people are more likely to create a flourishing society (and a society in which it is easier for others to flourish) that miserable, imaginatively, and intellectually stunted people are to create a flourishing society. Remember that the corollary to the Law of First and Second Things is that second things (a flourishing society and good economy) do become possible once first things are put first.

Subscribe now

What then does formational education look like?

Well that is what much of the rest of this series of essays on education will attempt to explore but I don’t intend to leave you hanging so let me sketch out some preliminary elements here.

As a career-long AP teacher I have had a lot of bright students who have achieved wonderful things in my class. The students I remember the most though are the ones who grew in significant ways beyond the apprehension and retention of factual and theoretical content in my courses. For all the AP 4’s and 5’s7 I have seen students earn, the students I am the most proud of are the students whose understanding and capacity to engage their world in bigger and more critical ways was developed in some significant way in my classroom. The student who spend a semester in my Humanities class and, for her final project chose to explore the relationship between insanity and creativity by choreographing and performing her own rope dance to the Eurythmics Sweet Dreams; the student who had trouble walking out of class the day I introduced them to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and who spend the rest of the year wrestling with the egocentric dilemma; the student who chose to add a minor in creative writing to her STEM undergrad as a result of the poetry workshops we did in my classroom; the student who applied the lessons of world history to analyze the racist and sexist dynamics present in her own community, these are the students I remember the most, the students I feel I might have actually helped to educate rather than merely train.

As I said above, I intend to spend several essays diving deeply into my own ideas and suggestions around what formation and education really ought to mean but I also suspect that, on some level, you already have a good sense of it. Think back on your own education and ask yourself, what actually stayed? Not what you memorized for a test, but what genuinely changed you. And what were the conditions that made that possible?

A Paired Reading Recommendation

It is probably unavoidable that when a teacher is writing about education she is going to give you homework but I want to recommend by brother ‘s own series on education where he focuses on the relationship between AI and education.

I also strongly recommend Bell Hooks’ Teaching Trilogy:

• Teaching to Transgress

• Teaching Community

• Teaching Critical Thinking

and, of course, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is central to my thinking about education.

So dim below these symbols show,
Bony and abstract every one.
Yet if true verse but life the curse
They feel in dreams their native Sun.

-C.S. Lewis from The Birth of Language

Share

If the anti-trans crowd has a favorite “gotcha” question it is probably “What is a Woman?”. The question is asked on social media, by anti-trans pundits and influencers and talking heads, and even by congressional committee members looking for video-clip excuses for discounting witnesses and nominees. Julia Serono has already given us a masterful explanation of all that is wrong with the deployment of the question and I recommend that you go read it (it’s pretty short) and then come back both because it is worth reading in it’s own right and because it will serve wonderfully as background for what I have to say here. The question presents us with a sort of prima facie “common sense” vibe. “Alright,” it seems to say, “let’s get away from all of this liberal theory and get down to brass tacks; we all know what a woman is, and these ridiculous people can’t even give a definition”. If you wan tot have a little fun one day, I recommend turning the question around; promise to do you best to give an answer provided the anti-trans inquisitor agrees to provide their definition as well. Because, of course, they can’t.

On one level it is sort of true that we all know what we mean when we say the word “woman”. A certain vibe (as the kids say) or impression takes hold immediately. The difficulty comes when we try to put words around it without excluding from the definition, anyone that we thing ought to qualify. We can’t nail it down and be consistent at the same time. Intersex people exist and, whether you want to identify them as a third1 sex or establish some method of lumping them in with the male or female sex, you are going to have to abandon most of the “common sense” definitions you might have initially reached for. In fact any attempt to locate woman-ness in the physical body is going to end up either being so broad that it includes people you probably don’t think of as actually women2 or so narrow as to exclude people who you definitely think of as women.

And that “think of” is actually pretty critical here. What is far more profitable than trying to come up with a definition that you can force onto the world, is an exploration of what or who it is that you actually are thinking of when you think of a woman. If you reflect on that, if you attend to the original vibe, you will likely find that you have a sort of gestalt in mind made up of a combination of functions, social rolls and functions, appearances and body parts, and probably a sort of overarching spirit or character. I want to make the pitch today that from C.S. Lewis’ perspective (yes he is in the subtitle, I hadn’t forgotten that I am supposed to be writing about him) that gestalt sense holds a better and truer—if still imperfect—meaning than any discreet definition by genus and specific difference, or than some attempt at a “scientific”3 definition.

Subscribe now

In 1936, Lewis wrote the essay Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare4. At the time he was weighing in to “the discourse” of his day regarding the question of metaphor. The debate, as he describes it, had to do with whether or not language is metaphors all the way down. His summary is fairly straightforward so let me just quote him:

In fact the whole debate may be represented by a very simple dialogue:

A. You are being metaphorical.

B. You are just as metaphorical as I am, but you don't know it.

A. No, I'm not. Of course I know all about attending once having meant stretching, and the rest of it. But that is not what it means now. It may have been a metaphor to Adam—but I am not using it metaphorically. What I mean is a pure concept with no metaphor about it at all. The fact that it was a metaphor is no more relevant than the fact that my pen is made of wood. You are simply confusing derivation with meaning.

Lewis goes on to suggest that both sides are making strong points and then dives deep into his own analysis5 during which he invents the terms Bluspels, Flalansferes, and oshtrans as thought experiments words which were originally metaphors used to help someone understand an idea but have since then lost connection with their metaphorical origins and are now mistaken for terms that directly and literally correspond to the thing itself6. The real danger which Lewis points out is that, over time, we tend to forget that our terms for things started as metaphors. The metaphors “die” and are reduced in our imagination to “the literal word for the thing”. This isn’t a problem so long as we have some independent understanding of the thing that the term is a metaphor for, but if the metaphor was our original way of “getting our heads around” the idea, and was never replaced by independent understanding of the thing, then we will end up in a situation where we use the term in a grammatically correct way and feel like we know what we are saying but won’t actually mean anything at all. Our use of the term will be reduced from an expression of something we understand to grammatically correct language which may or may not mean something to people who still remember the metaphorical nature of the word(s) but which we ourselves have no actual understanding of. We will, in fact, be acting like meat LLMs.

And of course, this brings the original question to a point because “woman” is not a tangible thing anyone has immediate experience of. We interact with individual women all the time—many of us even are women—but “woman” is an abstract term used to represent a class and abstractions aren’t something we are able to have immediate experiences of. “‘Woman” is a metaphor7. That isn’t to say that women aren’t real, or that “woman” isn’t a valid category8; they are. But the term—the word—“woman” is a descriptive metaphor, symbol, or kenning for. that gestalt vibe or category that happens in your mind when you think the word. To make this concrete, let me quote Lewis and then perform a similar operation on the favorite definition among anti-trans folks. For clarity’s sake, a kenning9 is a compound word metaphor and kenningar is the plural. Here is Lewis on the oshtran example:

If a man has seen ships and the sea, he may abandon the metaphor of a sea-stallion and call a boat a boat. But suppose a man who has never seen the sea, or ships, yet who knows of them just as much as he can glean, say from the following list of Kenningar—sea-stallions, winged-logs, wave-riders, ocean-trains. If he keeps all these together in his mind, and knows them for the metaphors they are, he will be able to think of ships, very imperfectly indeed, and under strict limits, but not wholly in vain. But if instead of this he pins his faith on the particular kenning, ocean-trains, because that kenning, with its comfortable air of machinery, seems to him somehow more safely prosaic, less fighty and dangerous than its fellows, and if, contracting that to the form oshtrans, he proceeds to forget that it was a metaphor, then, while he talks grammatically, he has ceased to think of anything. It will not avail him to stamp his feet and swear that he is literal; to say 'An oshtran is an oshtran, and there's an end. I mean what I mean. What I mean is what I say.'

So when the anti-trans crowd crows that “A woman is an adult human female. Why can’t you just say that” what they are actually saying (though few realize it since most are merely talking about flalansferes) is this: ‘A wife thinking animal is a nourished earth-being suckler; why can’t you just say that?’. They have forgotten that their simple, common sense, literal language is actually made up of reified metaphors and, in the forgetting, have cut themselves off from any chance at meaningful thought on the subject.

I am not saying this in order to shame people into becoming etymologists. Rather my point is to highlight the fact that we are nearly always using language in a figurative way and that the more abstract something is, the more necessarily metaphorical the language for it becomes. Reductions of women to “large gamete producer” (expansive spouse fore-bringers) or “human with XX chromosomes” (thinking animal with XX shaped color-bodies) is insulting insofar as it reduces women to certain anatomical characteristics that are not shared even by every person the transphobes want to call “woman” but is also still relentlessly metaphorical. Do you personally have anything like direct apprehension of chromosomes or gametes?

Lewis continues his argument with the following recommendation:

The remedy lies, indeed, in the opposite direction. When we pass beyond pointing to individual sensible objects, when we begin to think of causes, relations, of mental states or acts, we become incurably metaphorical. We apprehend none of these things except through metaphor: we know of the ships only what the Kenningar will tell us. Our only choice is to use the metaphors and thus to think something, though less than we could wish; or else to be driven by unrecognized metaphors and so think nothing at all. I myself would prefer to embrace the former choice, as far as my ignorance and laziness allow me.

In the end, the child who recites the nursery rhyme about sugar and spice and everything nice, while still far from the truth, is nevertheless incrementally closer to actually meaning something when they say woman than those who try to insist on simple, literal, “common sense” definitions.

Of course I can already hear the objection that Lewis was pointing to a feature of language and abstraction and metaphor but that he couldn’t have meant it to apply to so concrete and obvious a term as “woman”. Oh but he did. In fact only a few years after writing Bluspels, Lewis chose to incorporate exactly the approach I have outlined above10. In his book Perelandra Lewis’s protagonist Ransom encounters the original archetypes of the masculine and feminine in the persons of Malacandra (the planetary god of Mars) and Perelandra (the planetary goddess of Venus) and in his description of them Lewis resorts to exactly the method described above and specifically calls out the inadequacy of simple “common sense” biological definitions:

Both the bodies [of Mars and Venus] were naked, and both free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try—Ransom has tried a hundred times—to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacnadra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with palms towards him. But I don’t know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender.

…

Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless…[T]he male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity.

So Lewis does offer us his own answer to the question “what it a woman?” He says that a woman “is like melody, will affect you like an accentual metre, and is sort of like standing with one’s palms open and facing out.” He would be the first to tell you that the definition is inadequate (he says so in this very passage), but maybe it takes us a step past sugar and spice and everything nice and at the very least, Lewis seems to actually mean something.

On March 13th of this year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the following statement as part of a larger address on the American attack on Iran:

Iran has plenty of cameras and plenty of voice recorders, why a written statement? I think you know why. His father, dead. He’s scared. He’s injured. He’s on the run and he lacks legitimacy. It’s a mess for them. Who’s in charge? Iran may not even know. With every passing hour, we know and we know they know, that the military capabilities of their evil regime are crumbling. They can barely communicate, let alone coordinate; they’re confused and we know it.

Our response? We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies. [emphasis mine]

As I have mentioned earlier, I am currently doing research for a paper on C.S. Lewis and his cryptic reference in That Hideous Strength1 to the existence of seven genders for the Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference. In the course of that research I have had reason to dive more deeply into both the primary and secondary material regarding Lewis’ view of Mars: the god/planet/oyarsa associated with war and with the masculine gender2. There is a lot there but today I want to draw your attention to a single instance from Prince Caspian, considered by Michael Ward and, now, many others to be the Narnian Chronicle that Lewis imbued with the atmosphere or (as the kids are saying) the “vibe” of Mars. In fact this particular passage is one that Ward himself points to in Planet Narnia as an example par excellence and rather than relying on my own analysis of Mars in Lewis (one which does deviate from Wards in a few salient details) I will rely for the rest of this essay on Ward’s own explication of Mars and Martial virtue. In any case the selection I have in mind takes place as Peter, the rightful High King of Narnia is dueling Miraz the usurper on behalf of the titular Caspian in an effort to depose the tyrant without needless bloodshed. The heroes (the “Old Narnians” are watching the match alongside Peter’s brother Edmund and Peter is only just barely holding his own against a heavier, more physically powerful opponent:

They were certainly at it hammer and tongs now: such a flurry of blows that it seemed impossible for either not to be killed. As the excitement grew, the shouting almost died away. The spectators were holding their breath. It was most horrible and most magnificent.

A great shout arose from the Old Narnians, Miraz was down—not struck by Peter, but face downward, having tripped on a tussock. Peter stepped back, waiting for him to rise.

“Oh, bother, bother, bother,” said Edmund to himself. “Need he be as gentlemanly as all that? I suppose he must. Comes of being a Knight and a High King. I suppose it is what Aslan would like. But that brute will be up again in a minute and then—

This is of course, nothing but the exact opposite of “no quarter”. Everything (including Peter’s own life but also the liberty of all Narnia) is on the line and Peter refuses to take unfair advantage of his enemy. Miraz does not ask for quarter; Peter grants it immediately and automatically anyway because it is the right and chivalrous thing to do.

I have written elsewhere that to my mind, the defining characteristic of the Fascist MAGA regime is it’s vicious boorishness. America at present is led by a pack of vicious toadies and buffoons who have the gall to tell themselves a story (one I suspect they genuinely believe) that they are an old guard of virtue and chivalry. Nothing could be farther from the truth. These man children have not done their homework. If they had they would know that (as Ward aptly puts it):

Chivalry imposes restraints on the practice of war so as to avoid unnecessary (that is, cruel) violence; and Prince Caspian memorably depicts (by means of the hag and the werwolf) the kind of unrestrained warring spirit that Lewis regarded as unacceptable.

And letting Ward have his head (you can dismiss me as a tranny anarchist and pacifist but maybe they will listen to one whom their own “scholars” admire)…

[T]here is another, more profound, reason that Mars Gradivus [Masculinity-as-warrior] has alimited range of influence. Although the knightly ideal is a high one, it is not hte highest aspect of the Martial character. ‘To the perfected Christian the ideal of honour is simply a temptation. His courage has a better root, and, being learned in Gethsemane, may have no honour about it. But to the man coming up from below, the idea of knighthood may prove a schoolmaster to the ideal of martyrdom. Galahad is the son of Lancelot.’ [the internal quote is from Lewis’ essay Christianity and Culture]…Martydom, not knighthood, is the summit of Martial achievement and contains no worldly dignity or honour, only crucifixion-like shame that must be ‘despised’ (Heb. 12:2)

The pinnacle of masculinity3, for Lewis, for the Medievals, and for Christ, was not Chivalry (though heaven knows the Christian Nationalists are not even able to embody that diminished form in anything but perverse caricature), but Martyrdom. It is toxic masculinity that tells you to that to “be a man” is to kill you enemies without mercy; redeemed masculinity has always taught that you must die for them instead.

I want to end with one last quote, this time directly from Lewis a prophetic depiction (the poem in question was completed in the early 1930s) of how even a corrupt church might have responded to tin-pot dictators. It is a mirror which, when held up to the modern white Christian Nationalist church, makes plane the degradation of that sect. This passage is from Lewis’ narrative poem The Queen of Drum. In that poem a General (calling himself Leader and called by the Narrator “Furor”) attempts to get the church to support him in the person of the corrupt Archbishop. In the face of this final crisis (the Dictator has already taken power he want’s the Church’s support only after the fact) the Archbishop finds one last strand for his faith to hold on to and ends a martyr, choosing at the last, the truest virtue of Mars:

The General answered, 'I should hope you do;
I'm a religious man aw well as you,
But now we're talking politics. You say
That you believe; the point is, so do they,
Which makes all doctrines easy to digest.
Come, now; I've made a very small request.

'I cannot tell them more than I believe.
I dare not play with such immeasuables.
I am afraid: yes, that's the truth, afraid,
Put it no higher. Fear would stop my tongue.'

The Leader said, 'Oh Lord, to have a fool
To deal with. God Almighty, keep me cool!
What do you fear? Have I not made it plain,
You and your Church have everything to gain?
Be loyal to the Leader and I'll build
Cathedrals for you, yes, and see them filled,
I'll give you a free hand to bait all Jews
And infidels. You can't mean to refuse?'

'I must: for He of whom I am afraid
Esteems the gifts that [you] can promise me
Evil, or else of very small account.'

'Silence!' The Leader said, 'Silence, I say!
... [he rants a bit and highlights the Bishop's corruption up till now]
'I've begged enough, I'll find a way to make you.
You've played a dirty trick, and now you'll rue it!'
He called his men and said, 'Boys! Put him through it.'

...

The Leader's ruffians gather with great strokes
About the Bishop. with lead pipe and sticks,
As foresters about a tree with the axe,
With belts and bludgeons and with jibes and jokes.
His breath comes grunting under heavey shocks,
His pants so loud, they think that he still talks,
And rail upon him crying Plague and Pox!
Ever a bone breaks or a sinew cracks.
They beat upon his stomach till its wall breaks.    Aoi!

In his imagination he seems to hang
Upon a cross and be tormented long,
Not nailed but gripping with his fingers strong.
With the toil thereof all his muscles are wrung,
Great pains he bears in shoulder, arm and lung.
He fears lest they should jolt the cross and fling
His body off from where he has to hang.                 Aoi!

Ever he calls to Christ to be forgiven
And to come soon in to the happy haven.
Horrible dance before his eyes is woven
Of darkened shapes on a red tempest driven.
Unwearyingly the great strokes are given.
He falls. His sides and all his ribs are riven,
His guts are scattered and his skull is cloven,
The man is dead. God has his soul to heaven.        Aoi!

By way of an update I wanted to drop a short piece today talking a little bit about what has been going on for me and what I am working on these days (I have been quiet but not idle). This is not going to be a theory or reflection essay though it may contain a few underdeveloped snippets of both. Anyway without further ado…

Subscribe now

What has been going on

I suppose that you are all probably very aware that this last year has been a rough one for those of us living under the shadow of American fascism—which is to say…everyone. I think the first thing to say is that I have been experiencing a form of overwhelm that probably fits under the “burnout” umbrella. In a (successful) attempt to keep my actual day to day life (my in-person relationships, my job performance, and my family) I found that I was “dropping” more and more of my online activities; far less social media, less blogging and essay writing, less time with the news, and honestly less time online. I reverted (and honestly this part I absolutely recommend across the board as possible) to reading fantasy and sci-fi novels that please me and that are best described as “escapist”; I picked up a novel-writing project that I had dropped prior to my transition and made some real strides with it; I took my kids to band and baseball, and I met up and had beer with friends. I went on dates with my wife. I was active but I was, at best, only sporadically online.

It turns out I also had a melanoma. About a month ago my doctor sent me to the dermatologist to get a spot on my back looked at and three weeks later I had the pleasure* of having a solid filet removed from my person. Results are back and things look good but that was a lot and I wasn’t really sure how to talk about it publicly. Honestly I am probably still not sure how. It’s one of those odd things where I was probably never in much danger, everything was best-case, and it was all still really scary and upsetting.

I was invited to speak to the Episcopalian Student Union at Vassar and it was a really lovely experience with some great students (and an amazing Chaplain; Mother Emily is very cool) so that was really cool. They let me run a small-scale eucontamination dinner and we had a terrific time.

So yeah, that is what has been going on. My therapist seems to think this was a good approach given gestures vaguely at everything and I agree though, like I said, I owed people a heads up about disappearing.

What I have been working on and what I hope is coming for this blog

At the same time I have also been thinking, and observing and building my notebook of “essays I want to write and projects I want to work on”. So here is a list of ideas I am chewing on which I hope to start writing about publicly before too long:

1. My Queer Christian Taxonomy Project

This one is actually a slow burn that I have been working on for several years now. I want to propose a new taxonomy (set of categories) for how with think about Queer Christians, not because I don’t appreciate the old “Side A/B/X/(Y)” categories but because I am now convinced that, as the Queer Christian community has grown and become a more discernable (legible) entity, we would be well served by a taxonomy that recognizes more of what both distinguishes our approaches and beliefs and by what unites us. I have been working on this on and off for a while and am about ready to publish something like a beta version of it here soon. I look forward to your feedback on it as I (hopefully) move from there to formal write ups and studies with it!

2. I want to start sharing my thoughts on public education

As most of you probably know, I am a high school teacher in my day-job and I have been in the classroom for quite a while now. In that time I have formed definite and (probably) idiosyncratic views on public education. I think I am about ready to start telling the internet what I think on the subject, which is mostly to say that there are probably 3-4 essays in me that want to get out and I look forward to sharing some ideas with you all.

3. Paul has been writing about AI and I have some things I want to say as well

One of the joys of working together with my brother has been getting to know him as a writer and thinker in new ways. Eucontamination was born out of years of conversations we had about disgust and philosophy and theology and we haven’t stopped talking since we published the book. Meanwhile my little brother is a far more disciplined person than I and he has maintained a weekly habit of posting essays to his substack2—the man is like clockwork and I am in awe of him. He has been working through a series thinking about the way we relate to AI and specifically to LLM’s from his perspective as a therapist and psychanalytic theorist. The series is brilliant and you should absolutely go read it and also subscribe to his Substack. And it turns out that I also have a lot of thoughts about AI (I mean who doesn’t these days). I want to write about what I am seeing in the classroom and what I think is coming, but I also want to talk about questions it doesn’t feel like other people are taking seriously.

4. I really am working on a novel again

So that’s fun. I am not going to share much about it yet but I do want to make an effort in the future to update and re-release my existing fairy tale (did y’all know that I wrote a fairy tale—The Dagger and the Rose—and that you can buy it under my deadname? I recommend getting it though my publisher (and friend) over at Clickworks Press where you can also read the comedy series we wrote together. If enough of you read that and love it and make noise then maybe Ben and I will bring Jimmy Acorn and Mr. Hubris back for another season. Meanwhile there was a project that I was working on pre-transition (inspired by Lewis’ work on the medieval model of the planetary spheres) that ran into a wall and now, post-transition, I think I might have worked out how to move forward on it. Also I want to shout out the book Death’s Dream Kingdom by my friend Gabriel. It is probably the most underappreciated novel I have ever read and I need all of you to go buy a copy right now and then tell me what you think of it.

5. I put in a proposal for another paper on Lewis.

Those of you who like it when I write about C.S. Lewis might be pleased to hear that I am deep in research for a proposed paper on Lewis for an upcoming Lewis conference. I can’t say much about it until it is accepted or rejected but I am really excited about this one and will almost certainly write the paper whether or not the proposal is accepted. But I hope it will be accepted.

6. I am not done writing about trans liberation

Don’t worry, I have plenty more to say on this topic. No changes there; expect essays and reaction pieces as the situation here in the US develops.

I hope to be back soon!

Thank you all for your grace. Thank you for caring about what I have to say in this world, thank you for your support and I am genuinely looking forward to showing back up and talking to all of you soon.

Billie.

Share

This post is a quick heads up for those who are recently “deconstructing” and/or finding post-evangelicalism and progressive Christianity and who are realizing that there is a lot of injustice out there you were passively or actively complicit in and that there are a lot of perspectives you want to understand as soon as possible:

I want to break down what might seem like an overwhelming task into more manageable chunks for you, and to remind you of some important helpful principles.

Learning is Your Job

Learning is Your job. It isn’t the job of people of color, queer folks, immigrants, disabled people or anyone else to teach you about their experiences and perspectives. A lot of us are doing that because it is a vocation and can be a joy, but the responsibility to learn lies with you to learn not with us to make what we have to say palatable to you. Some Truth goes down bitter and only becomes honey in the belly. People who are historically oppressed, marginalized, and overlooked can often be angry. You are strong and resilient and you can handle that and even learn to see the beauty in it.

Learning should be fun!

Let your learning be interesting and fun and engaging and eye-opening. Don’t get bogged down in shame or guilt as you learn things; process those things and move forward. High control religion wants you to treat all new information as a threat to your understanding of yourself, your system, and the world—and it is and that’s OK. To be alive is to grow and change and that means that those systems and structures are better and healthier when they are held with loose hands and open minds. Make changes, update your thinking. Don’t think that you are a failure if you haven’t arrived at every Truth already, you are walking the Way of Jesus faithfully if you are updating your prior beliefs, delighting in newly discovered Truths that force you to confront and change harmful parts of who you have been, and are on a trajectory towards less wrong. You are still writing your story and the parts you write today and tomorrow will go back and redeem (not erase) the meaning of what you wrote in the past.

You Don’t Need a Preacher-Man

Don’t look for a guru. None of us have it figured out. We are all talking to each other and hopefully listening to one another. We all come from different places and experiences and at our best we are sharing those with each other. Stop looking for a hierarchical community to subject yourself to and come be part of the conversation. Just please make a point to listen for a while before you start shouting over anyone else. You don’t want to be the person who walks up to a conversation and immediately sticks their foot in their mouth because they didn’t listen long enough to get a sense of what was being said and what had already been established.

Conflict is not Abuse

I know that, especially early on, it can be scary. You hear about people doing a racism or saying something queerphobic or being problematic in some way and all the old trained instincts about being caught out as a “sinner” in one of those ways that people didn’t talk about but always judged comes rushing back in. You are afraid that you will lose all community and acceptance. That fear is natural and of course people will (rightly) push back if you say or do things that hurt or threaten them. But that is an opportunity for growth. You are in a vulnerable position here. I know that, I have been there. You don’t want to be labeled “bad” and pushback can feel like just that sort of labeling. Pushback is how you grow and you will be amazed at how well “thank you for that, I am definitely still learning about X and hadn’t realized that” will usually be received (not always, few have the patience of Job and a lot of the same mistake are made frequently which can get frustrating).

Let People be Specialists

If you are white and a black woman is telling you about her experience don’t try to put her in conflict with what you heard form a queer person or a disabled person or an immigrant. Oppression Olympics are stupid and pointless1Your job is to listen and learn. This remains true even if you do occupy a marginalized social identity. Listen to other people to learn from them and their experiences, not so that you can one-up them on how badly your community has it. Trust me, your whole experience will be richer for this practice.

Follow People you Wouldn’t Have

This is a corollary to not needing a Preacher-Man. You don’t need a leader but you do need to be listening to a lot of conversations. Go look for people to follow and learn from (as teachers and conversation partners, not as know-it-all Sages) who come from social locations you would have overlooked in the past. Go learn about womanist theology, and queer liberationism, and disability advocacy frameworks. Find out what asexual people and immigrants and people living in poverty and sex workers and radical leftists and so many others have to teach you that you would never have seen on their own. Thank them, pay them if you can and it’s appropriate (subscribe, share, buy their books, recommend their work to friends) and learn from them. It is a joy and an opportunity2.

Finally Be Free

Remember that “it was for Freedom that you have been set Free”. Go and enjoy being free to learn, to grow, to change, to discover poignant and beautiful things about yourself and those you love. Have hard conversations; remember that the strength of vulnerability lies in processing and grieving shame and your own complicity in harm and injustice, not in brittle denial. This is about Joy. “Higher up and further in! Towards a world, a life, a becoming that grows larger the deeper you go. Blessings on your journey—may it never end.

There is a Howard Thurman quote I was reminded of this weekend and it has been haunting me since cited it. The quote is from a speech he gave titled The Sound of the Genuine and this is the quote:

It isn’t common but every so often we encounter something that we cannot un-experience, a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle, and that, once experienced will either change everything or kill us slowly.

When I was 35 years old I realized who and what I am. I have written about the experience and about what got me to the place where I was even able to think the thought that gripped me and doomed me in another essay. The thought, was straightforward enough: “I am a woman”. But it changed everything. In fact calling it a “thought” still seems too weak. It wasn’t a passing possibility or an intruding idea; it was a knowing, a Real Fact or maybe better, an Apprehended Truth which, after three decades of circling the walls of my being, finally found a way in to my conscious world. The corollary was pretty obvious: I am a woman and also I was assigned male at birth, ergo I am transgender. That was a lot

And Thurman was absolutely right. It is a terrible thing to hear the sound of the genuine in yourself because once you hear it, you have to move towards becoming it. I am more and more convinced that to live, to grow, to be is to become towards who we ARE. That might sound lovely and sometimes it really is, but it is also excruciating. To grow is to change, is to kill the you that you are now so that the you that you are becoming towards can take shape. We keep re-making ourselves and can only do that by embracing the death of who-we-just-realized-we-aren’t-but-who-we-thought-we-were-or-at-least-pretended-to-be-until-just-now. And every time it happens it is terrifying and every time it happens something passes away. This is the legacy of Ash Wednesday, this is Lent, this is the recapitulation of the God-Man’s descent into death for the sake of Life.

Share

Once the thought has registered it is already too late to dodge. Once I knew (better) who I am I could not un-know it. I tried for three years to minimize the impact it would have on my life. I didn’t want to be disrupted. Lacan says that the irruption of the Real—that wild beyondness that shatters our imaginary and symbolic orders—is a trauma and, my God, he is right about that. It would not be true to say that I never experienced gender dysphoria prior to realizing who I am.1 But before it was almost always diffuse—a sort of wistfulness and longing. After the irruption it was nails on a chalkboard abrading my soul. Ask nearly any trans person and they will shake their head and tell you “it doesn’t go away”. The desire, the longing, to be who we are is merciless and terrible. It will be satisfied by nothing less than our full capitulation to Joy. “Become Yourself,” it threatens “or become Nothing”.

Three and a half years after that stick of epistemic dynamite was shoved into my conscious mind I gave in and came out. I chose joy. I chose faith. For me it was a matter of desperation. It wasn’t that I saw joy on the other side of blowing up the world I had built for a me who was never more than a chapter in the story of my own becoming—I anticipated pain and unbearable loss—It was only that I finally recognized the death on this side of that death. I recognized that my refusal to live as myself was costing me everything I was trying to protect.

Nobody gets out of this alive.

Lacan has another concept2: retroaction. It’s the way that some things gain meaning in the rear view mirror which they lacked in the present. Gender dysphoria was only suffering at the time; ashes and death and dust are horrors in the present tense. And without negating or challenging that in any way—it would be an act of intolerable cruelty to say to someone in the throes of gender dysphoria that their suffering is good or a blessing or some such rot—through retroaction I now call my own dysphoria a blessing. It has a meaning now which it could not then bear due to what took place between now and then.

I am a transgender woman. I might have already mentioned that. I have always been a transgender woman and therefore, because trans women are women, I have always been a woman. But I have not always known that about myself. I have not always known who I am3.

Though the eyes of retroaction, my dysphoria was pain for sure, but it was a pain caused by the discontinuity—the mismatch between my Gender Identity and the sex I was assigned at birth—and like most other physical pain, it made me aware of that discontinuity. To borrow Howard Thurman’s metaphor, when I heard the sound of the genuine and recognized it for what it was, it was in an entirely different key than the one my life was playing and the resulting cacophony was what we call dysphoria. In The Problem of Pain C. S. Lewis (in)famously claimed that pain is God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world”. I take some issue with his claim, read as a theophany4 but it nakedly true that pain is what makes us aware of and unable to ignore wounds that need to be addressed.

Among allies and not a few trans people, gender dysphoria is the medical/psychological term for the agony that is caused by incongruence between a trans person’s Gender Identity and the Sex we were assigned at birth. All very well. But this frequently slides into the misapprehension that the dysphoria is the problem, which leads both well meaning and bad faith actors to conclude that “if we could just get rid of the dysphoria without transition and the person living into their gender identity then the ‘patient’ would be ‘cured’”. To that proposition the vast majority of trans people are struck with horror and revulsion—conversion therapy is a form of existential, ontological, psychic, and frequently physical, torture. Howard Thurman could have told you:

Dysphoria is a symptom and not the cause. And it is a matter of urgency to address the suffering that the symptom causes but that addressing has to be an addressing of that which dysphoria is a symptom of, not of dysphoria alone. The idea of treating a trans person’s gender dysphoria by “helping” them to not feel dysphoric anymore but to “accept” their sex assigned at birth as determinative of their gender identity is no less ridiculous or obscene than it would be to treat a severed arm with Morphene and Novocain. The patient may not have as much pain as they bleed out but they will bleed out nonetheless and end cursing you for ameliorating the urgency of the wound that killed them.

And so I have come now to bless my gender dysphoria. It was the music that drew me away from who I was not and could never have been and into my own sanctified becoming. In theological language, it was dysphoria that alerted me to my own need for sanctification. Because sanctification is, after all, the process of becoming in the direction of who we Are. And I will go further. Dysphoria—in retroaction—is a means of grace, a blessing, and even a charism. Gender dysphoria tears open a window in the walls of our symbolic-imaginary and grants us a glimpse of the Real that haunts us all.

Why should you trust a trans person when they tell you who they are, because if you are cis then that trans person has Seen Gender in a way that you have almost certainly not. You should trust a trans person to tell you about Gender for the same reason you should trust a prophet to tell you about God. Which is not to say that we all know (much less Know) the full Truth of Gender any more than it is to say that the prophets know the full Truth of God; the vision is too bright, the light is dazzling, the Real is paradigmatically beyond category5 or enunciation6, but we do see further along this particular vector.

If liberation theology has anything to teach those with privilege (and I believe it has nearly everything to teach us) then it first calls us to listen to the experience, wisdom, and Knowing of those on the underside of power. The Wisdom to be found there was not doled out arbitrarily, it is the product of experience. Wisdom, like most children, is born in suffering and blood and pain. She is blessed once arrived and will enrich the world when nurtured.

But I find I have once again gotten ahead of myself and started writing about a Resurrection World. Lent comes first and Good Friday before Easter. The precondition for this sublime retroaction is the death of all that dysphoria is demanding we leave behind. The new cannot come until we let the old pass away. Without an acceptance and embrace of who we are7. And this is why my transness and my faith are bound so tightly together. Each makes sense of the other. We are resurrection people who have made the appalling and transcendent discovery that Life and more Life awaits us but only on the other side of death.

Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return. Blessed be the dust.

Mortality, Thinking about Death, and Ash Wednesday

On Ash Wednesday we make a practice of remembering that we are going to die. Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.

To dust you will return.

To dust you will return.

To dust you will return.

We make a practice of it, we take it on as an obligation, we build it into the liturgy of the day, to remember today that you are going to die. Your body is dust and your body will return to dust. This is a fact of life; “death and taxes” (both especially present to our minds this time of year) is a part of our lexicon. But we don’t want to think about it; most of us don’t want to think about it most of the time.

You are going to die.

I am going to die.

Everyone we know is going to die.

You are dust and to dust you will return.

We don’t want to think about dying; we don’t like to think about dying. Today we have set aside to meditate on the fact that we are going to die, today we will be marked with a symbol of our own morality. What is even happening here?

Subscribe now

Eucontamination

My brother and I argue in our book Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life that this aversion to even thinking about the Truth is a epistemic instantiation of disgust. Put more directly, our minds are disgusted by the thought of our deaths and by the deaths of those with whom we identify. “I will die” is a thought that we resist incorporating into the large operating stew that guides our actions and forms our overall consciousness.

You are dust and to dust you will return

When I say that we are disgusted I mean precisely this: that we experience the thought as a threat to the nature of our selves and our sense of who we are. We know that if we think this thought as true—if we incorporate it into our selves—then we will be changed, we will become not-who-we-now-are. Change feels like death and, of course, in some ways it is. And yet also change is very nearly also the definition of life. To be static—to never learn, never grow and never change—is to be dead.

You are going to die

Not only is it true but, like all Truth in the end, to deny it is to consign ourselves to the very fate that our refusal to accept it was trying to stave off. If we accept that we are dust, that we will die, then there it is. We will have to live lives that have incorporated death. But if we deny it, if we allow disgust to rule, then we fossilize and our lives inch further towards mere living death.

You are dust

When Paul and I talk about eucontamination we mean a contamination for good. To be eucontaminated is to be “infected” by the very thing that the disgust impulse in us was determined to protect us from only to find that it was just what we needed all along and that rather than making us sick, we are being healed1.

To dust you will return

In the wake of Ash Wednesday tonight and as we move into Lent this year, I want to encourage all of us (myself very much included) to consider embracing the wild, dangerous possibility that there is something to be gained in facing the Truths we have struggled so hard to avoid. The Lord knows that this world needs more of us to stop looking away from the death that is all around us; to take a breath, take another if we need to; and to walk out into the dangerous, wild uncertainty that is the only possible Way towards life.

This last Sunday my wife Ashley preached on Jeremiah. The sermon starts around the 30 minute mark and I hope you will watch it. What she said was powerful and right and sobering and horrible and true and beautiful. We will not find life on this side of the fear of death.

The answer of course is bound up in the very event that Ash Wednesday is meant to prepare us for. The conundrum is only a conundrum is death is the end. But now I am getting ahead of myself. Easter is still on the far distant horizon and to retreat there now would be to fail the charge at hand. The truth is that today on the liturgical calendar and in the face of the flood of injustice across our country and across the world Life itself means the act of embracing the unknown without anything like assurance that it will work out for us.

Come and let us choose the way of Truth, of Uncertainty, of Kindness, and of Love even when that way threatens us with change, loss, and death. Because not to choose that, to hunker in on ourselves and prefer our safety our self-care, and our protection is already to have died.

You are dust and to dust you will return.

But then…

From Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

Last Sundsay was Gaudete Sunday: the Sunday in Advent when we pause in our posture of waiting and take a moment to enjoy the imminent miracle of the incarnation. As I was celebrating (our church tends to hold the Children’s service including the pageant and children’s choir on Gaudete Sunday) I found myself reflecting on the joy of the day and the way it (and advent as a whole) contrasts so sharply with what we should, by rights, be feeling around this holiday, and what a considered understanding of the logic of disgust has to tell us about celebrating advent and Christmas.

In our book Eucontamination my brother and I explore the affect of disgust and the logic that it utilizes. Disgust is a boundary enforcement mechanism which we use at the individual, biological, social, political, and religious levels to maintain the distinction between what is us or is safe to become us and what is not us. It also helps us to mediate between what should and should not be allowed to become part of us. At the individual biological level this is pretty basic and quite familiar: we experience disgust towards foods which we are unwilling to incorporate into our bodied while we feel no disgust (often we feel desire) for foods which we are willing to incorporate into our bodies. Disgust thus mediates between what is me and what is not me and between what can become me and what can’t become me.

Importantly here, disgust is not a rational or considered affect. It is something closer to a reflex or a heuristic—a short cut we use in place of careful and deliberate consideration so that we can act quickly and decisively. Disgust acts to expel first and justifies it’s actions second. One consequence of this fact is that the distinction between what can become me and what can’t become me is not so much based on the question “Is that good for me?” as it is based on the question “Will that turn me into something different?”. Think about how hard it is to get a child to eat her greens and how, even convincing her that the greens will do her body good, will make her “big and strong”, may (if we are lucky parents) be enough to get her to eat them but won’t prevent her having to suppress a disgust reaction to them. You might convince me that spinach is good for me and that I ought to it; you might persuade me to eat it for my health; you will not make it taste good to me and when I eat a spinach it will be a matter of suppressing my disgust reaction. Disgust as a mechanism simply doesn’t have space to consider whether or not I want to embrace the transformation that a given subject offers, it is restricted to whether or not the subject will change me.

And because disgust is special, we have a special word for the kind of anticipation we experience leading up to a disgust reaction: nausea. Nausea is that sense of fragile uneasiness we experience when (eu)contamination seems imminent. We don’t like it and the longer it persists the more likely we are to violently expel the perceived contaminant.

Subscribe now

A short primer on (eu)contamination

Disgust thus serves a sort of generalized preference for homeostasis; it resists change on the assumption that whatever is going on for us now is basically good or at least the best likely option on the table. But of course we know that all transformation is not bad for as. As in the spinach example above, some things, when incorporated into our systems, transform us into better, healthier versions of ourselves. As a result we are in a complicated position viz our disgust reaction and the possibility of “contamination” by some new subject. Our intrinsic bias (as is evident in the established negative connotation of the word “contamination”) is to treat all contamination as negative; but we know if we spend a few minutes reflection, that some contamination is good. Paul and I have coined the term eucontamination1 to denote a contamination that is good for the host. And there are many forms of contamination which, we can be pretty confident, are actually eucontamination. But more often we encounter the possibility of contamination/eucontamination in situations where we do not an maybe can not know in advance whether the offered/threatened change in us will be good or bad. We needed a third term that maintains the quality of the change in a sort of superposition so that it can be imagined and discussed without having to delineate whether or not the change itself would be positive or negative. For that possibility, Paul and I have started parenthesizing the “eu” in eucontamination as (eu)contamination.

So in summary:

• Contamination: Bad

• Eucontamination: Good

• (Eu)contamination: Undecided/Both/Neither/Unknown

Back to Advent

When we encounter the prospect of having something introduced to our system that threatens to transform us into something new, the natural reaction is one of disgust. And the anticipation of disgust and it the violent rejection that disgust engenders is nausea. But then that transformation is precisely what we are supposed to be anticipating during advent and specifically celebrating on Gaudete Sunday. In the Christian tradition we celebrate the utter transformation of the cosmos as God enters into and becomes one with creation. From the moment of incarnation2, the story of God cannot be told without reference to humanity and the story of humanity cannot be told without reference to God as one of us—God with us.

Put another way, the incarnation is the (eu)contamination of humanity by divinity and also the (eu)contamination of divinity by humanity. And, by rights, it ought to make us nauseous; in the incarnation the whole material world and humanity in particular is (eu)contaminated and transformed by something else, by the Divine; disgust logic ought to kick in and tell us that the whole thing is a threat to our status quo. Granted, disgust logic does have an additional dimension when it comes to things that we perceive as more holy/divine/pure than ourselves. In that context, we become the potential contaminant and the system or structure we are hoping to enter into becomes the pure substance. This is why so many religions and noble courts involve ceremonies or mechanisms for purification; the assumption is that we nee to be purified or cleansed in order to enter into a sacred or holy space or to experience union with a holy person/body/system.

Psychologist Richard Beck points all of this out in his book Unclean3: when something that we experience as “higher” in the divinity dimension than ourselves.

[A]ny movement from the world into the holy will involve acts and rituals of cleansing, purification, and absolution. Nothing “impure” can be carried into the sacred (pure/clean) space. As Mary Douglas notes in her book Purity and Danger, “sacred things and places are to be protected from defilement. Holiness and impurity are at opposite poles.”

From this understanding though, advent and the incarnation only become more of a scandal. Advent doesn’t so much (directly) anticipate our entry into the presence of God (that is more a function of Easter and Pentecost) as it does God’s (eu)contamination of humanity. Put bluntly, at Advent we are anticipating the moment in history when the Second Person of the Trinity is the contaminant. And he does it all wrong.

Jesus doesn’t eucontaminate humanity and the material world bathed in the glow of purity and holiness. The trappings of Jesus’ birth aren’t sterile, aren’t pure, aren’t ritually, spiritually, or religiously cleansed or sanctified. If God had wanted to follow the script for introducing the Sacred into a profane, that would have involved finding the least profane part of the profane body, subjecting it to purification and sanctification rituals, thereby preparing it to receive that which was more holy than it, and then surrounding the event with fanfare and honor and religious symbolism. God did the opposite.

In the moment when the Divine eucontaminated all creation, God entered into scandal and squalor. The trumpets and fanfare took place but were witnessed by backwater herders. The “Holy Family” were travelling nobodies from a hick town, and the celestial portents heralding the most auspicious moment in history were only picked up by foreign (read othered) astrologers. By rights, creation ought to vomit. God does it wrong. How is it that we celebrate this with Sundays of Peace, Hope, Joy, and Love instead of nausea and dread?

I don’t think the answer lies in our underestimating the gravity of the moment either. Certainly we have tamed Christmas with materialism, with secularizing distractions, and delightful family traditions. Those who are most closely in touch with the spiritual meaning and dimension of Advent and Christmas are not any more nauseated by it than those who blithely ignore it. I don’t think it is Jesus’ divinity as such that mitigates and even reverses our disgust reaction to the incarnation. If “very God and very man” were all we thought of when we thought of Jesus at the incarnation then I suspect the season would be characterized by a sort of nauseous holy dread. We do not, in our heart of hearts, generally believe that we can survive union with the Holy Divine; just witness the reactions of the prophets to encounters with God or the constant need of angels to comfort humans with the phrase “do not be afraid”.

“Jesus is God” doesn’t hold the key to making sense of the Joy of advent—not directly. In fact those who witnessed the moment first hand largely did seem to be affected by this holy dread. To their credit they embraced it, stood in it, overcame it and are blessed for it, but a quick read through the Christmas story will remind you that practically every human participant it it was “deeply troubled” when they first learned about it. Our tradition and experience of Joy at advent thus seems to have been impacted by subsequent developments. It is only because we know more (and, to be fair, probably because our experience is second hand) that we are able to associate this all with Joy. And what is it we know that Mary, Joseph, the Shepherds, and the foreign astrologers did not? We know Jesus, and through Him we know what sort of person4 God is.

There are two elements of who Jesus revealed himself to be (and thereby showed us what God is like) that I want to focus on as a scholar of disgust: Jesus showed us his personality; and Jesus showed us what it means to say that “God is Love”. When we celebrate the Joy of advent, we are celebrating, not merely the moment that Divinity in the abstract was joined indelibly to humanity; we are anticipating and then celebrating the moment when Jesus of Nazareth—the carpenter’s son who told off his best friends when they shooed children away from him, who celebrated sex workers and wept with compassion for the city that was about to turn on him, who got overstimulated by crowds and went off alone, who exhausted himself teaching and feeding crowds so thoroughly that he slept through a storm on the water, who used his last moments during his execution to make sure his mother would be cared for, who obeyed his Mama and helped a newlywed couple save face and extend a party, who lost his temper at people who neglected the wellbeing of the marginalized and ostracized, and who praised the faith of women and pagans (and pagan women)—became one of us.

You see, the psychological key to diminishing and even inverting disgust, the often overlooked but intrinsically present element in disgust logic is intimacy. Intimacy—love—reverses disgust. And it is because (and only insofar as) we Love Jesus for who he is that we are able to celebrate advent as a season of Joy5. When we Love another, our desire is not to avoid being (eu)contaminated by them but to be joined to them. To end with a summary from chapter 9 of Eucontamination:

When we operate out of Love, the whole higher/lower distinction dissolves and disgust is destroyed, killed, and reborn as its own opposite: the longing for unity. God will not tolerate union and shared life with Their creation for even a single moment because tolerance is far too weak to bridge the gap. God desires, embraces, died for, and delights in, union and a shared Life with Creation. We are not tolerated by the Divine, we are celebrated. Love is the only force in existence which could possibly bridge the infinite Gap between creation and Creator but Love will have nothing of gaps at all; what Love wants is unity with the Beloved. When Love acts, the gap is not bridged but erased. The father in the parable of the prodigal son does not condescend to or tolerate his son; the Father runs to him, embraces him, kisses him, and throws a party. Lovers delight in their union.

Share

What does it mean for fantasy to collapse? And how does one differentiate between the multiplicity of desires? These are excellent questions, and worth lingering on, since they touch some of the fundamental elements of Lacanian theory.

“They aren’t even good at it” is what I have found myself thinking more and more often since the MAGA regime has taken power. The thought isn’t in reference to Musk’s DOGE attacks on the federal infrastructure (though the application there certainly would be apt) but to the MAGA/Christian Nationalist/US-fascist attempt to embody a certain masculine imperial vibe to which they purportedly aspire. We shouldn’t be surprised I suppose; Hannah Arendt warned us long ago of the banality of evil, and the peculiar smallness that inclines a person to embrace fascism is hardly a secret. These are people who want to see themselves as masculine kings and nobles harkening back to the chivalric myths of medieval Europe and noble illusions of classical Rome, and they are just bad at it.

I am writing this both as a scholar of disgust focusing on the theology and politics of disgust and as a history teacher. Honestly at this point the fact that MAGA is a fascist movement ought to be practically self evident to anyone who was paying attention in high school but I find that I am still challenged on that point by people from all over the political spectrum. And in the wake of Trump telling reporters that he doesn’t mind being called a fascist (though he maintains it is more complicated than that) we are now experiencing another wave of the conversation.

If you are already convinced that MAGA is an American fascist movement then this essay is here for you to cite and share when someone asks you to “prove” the claim1 so that you don’t have to keep typing out the same argument ad infinitum2. If you are not yet convinced that MAGA is an American form of fascism then this essay is here to provide enough evidence and historical reasoning to convince you of the fact. If you are skeptical of the claim and a Trump supporter then this essay is here to let you know what arguments and evidence you will need to account for if you hope to make a good faith effort to argue that he isn’t a fascist.

Please keep in mind throughout that I will be restricting my analysis here to an American High-School standard3 of political and historical analysis. People should not need a college level degree in history or politics in order to decide whether or not their country is being led by fascists. For that reason I will restrict my definition and and its explanation to material and that I have used in my world history classroom over the last decade and a half4. I will additionally include some of my own world-history level arguments and analysis.

What is Fascism?

We need to begin by defining our terms. The most common academic definition of fascism is Palingenetic Ultranationalism5. So lets start there and then add some clarifying and representative characteristics using Jason Stanley’s 10 pillars of fascism and Umberto Eco’s 14 features of fascism from his famous essay Ur-Fascism . Lets start though with Palingenetic Ultranationalism and take the two terms for that definition in reverse order.

Palingenetic Ultranationalism

Ultranationalism really is just another way of saying “extreme nationalism” but in this context we have to make sure we know what we mean by “nationalism” specifically, we are not using nationalism in its “strong patriotism” sense though in day-to-day conversation a lot of people do use it that way. I this case though nationalism is a belief that “the nation” is (or at least ought to be) defined by some homogeneity—some shared property of people. The Historian and Political Scientist Benedict Anderson famously argued that a nation is an imagined community—it is the “us” that a person is thinking of when they say things like “this land is for us” or “these are our laws”. Essentially, then, nationalism is the belief that to be a part of the club (the “real nation) a person has to be like every other member of the club in some way. Nationalisms then are different from one another depending on the modifying word that comes before them. There are religious nationalisms (the idea that to be a part of the nation you need to a part of a given religion), ethnic nationalisms (you have to be part of a particular ethnic or racial group), linguistic nationalisms (you have to have a shared language), historic or cultural nationalisms, and so forth. In theory you could build a nationalism around pretty much any trait that people can share. In practice most nationalisms have been ethnic, religious, cultural, or historical.

When I am teaching about nationalism, I will often stop at this point and challenge students to develop a nationalism that would affirm the real American-ness of every person who is an American while also excluding every person who is not an American. The traditional classical-liberal theory of America (which has never been identical with the actual material history of America) is that, at the very least, any person who has American citizenship is fully an American. There may or may not be an American culture or American cultures but participation in them is not a prerequisite for being fully an American. You can be born anywhere on earth and still be an American. You can be a member of any religion or none and still be 100% American, you can come from any racial and/or ethnic background whatsoever and be a whole American; you don’t even have to believe in any particular set of politics or ideals to be an American. Certainly that is not an ideal that our country has actually lived up to throughout it’s history, and plenty of Americans have rejected it and do reject it, but that is the story America tells itself about who it is6. And because of all of this, it’s actually quite hard to imagine an American form of nationalism without embracing a politics that would end up de-americanizing people who are currently accepted as Americans.

Moving beyond the different greater categories of nationalism, we generally will insert a more specific adjective in front of “nationalism” when we talk about a particular nationalism in the real world. So rather than saying “Bob is an ethnic nationalist” we would say “Bob is a white nationalist”. Which would mean that Bob believes that the nation is or at least should be a nation that is either only, or is primarily, for white people. which is also to say that Bob is a a particular type of racist. If Bob is an American then saying that Bob is a white nationalist would mean that Bob believes at least that America is a country for white people, that white Americans are, in some way, more American than all other Americans, and that America ought to affirm, lift up, and celebrate white people in one or more ways as the exemplars of Americanism.7 The Nazis were German (and they would have described themselves as “Aryan” nationalists; in India today it is not hard to find examples of Hindu nationalism; and of course many of the mid-19th century wars in Europe were centered on ideas of ethnic or linguistic nationalism as we see in the German and Italian wars of unification, the disparate nationalisms that undermined the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires in the lead up to WW1 and so on8.

Ultranationalism then is nationalism that adds a sense of urgency, superiority or supremacy, and pride to the mix. The line between nationalism and ultranationalism is fuzzy (its a spectrum more than a binary here) but ultranationalists tend to believe that the nation they believe in is better than all others and has a right to whatever they deem important to its survival. For that reason ultranationalists tend to be more aggressive or acquisitive in their foreign policy.

Palingenesis, on the other hand, means rebirth or renewal (notice the root “genesis”). Fascists are generally invested in the idea of what scholars call a “mythic past” that was stolen from “their people” or nation and which they are trying to re-create. Scholars call it a “mythic past” because actual pasts are always messy, disappointing and full of contradictions. Beyond that, fascists don’t generally actually want to go back to an exact version of the past anyway because the present is a result of the actual past, so they generally want to make changes. For fascists, the mythic past is a lot more about vibes and justifying a sense of inherited greatness or grandeur which is currently being suppressed by whatever it is that the fascist happens to be against at time9. It is important for them that the mythic past stay mythic—they quite dislike actual skilled historians who are forever de-mythologizing the past—so that they can keep on pretending that their nation’s superiority (you will remember the ways in which the Nazis were forever going on about the “volk”) is intrinsic, destined, and inherited.

Bringing it all together then, Palingenetic Ultranationalism is the belief that “the nation” is rightly made up of a particular type of person who have a natural right to control their country; that those people are the rightful inheritors of a glorious past, the glories of which have diminished as a result of some set of modern villains or forces or ideas, and their goal is to restore that people group (nation) to it’s “rightful” place of glory and privilege whereupon the nation will be re-born in a second even more glorious age.

In the case of MAGA, the palingenetic emphasis is there, right in the acronym: Make America Great Again. Plenty of anti-Trump folks have pointed out that the slogan assumes a time when America was great and have rightly pointed out that the further you go into America’s past, the more rights you will be taking away from various groups of American citizens: Trans Americans, Gay Americans, Black Americans, Indigenous Americans, Women Americans, Indigenous Americans again, Black Americans again, non-land owning Americans, etc… And if MAGA were palingenetic but not nationalist, then that might be an effective objection to their paligeneticism. But of course they are nationalists. Specifically MAGA fascism is a blend of Christian nationalism and white nationalism. And it has become evident in 2025 that the era of American history that they want to “make…again” is a vague swath of time between the mid/late 1800s10 and the late 1950s all packaged in a disconcertingly white Norman Rockwell aesthetic. Remember that for fascists the mythic past is more a vibe than it is about particular real history.

Fascism’s Villains

Subscribe now

To make all of this work, fascism needs villians. It needs some group (or groups) of people and some political framework to blame for the fact that its mythic past is in the past and has not continued on into the present day. Fascism is thus preoccupied with a narrative of victimhood because it necessarily believes that its “rightful” greatness has been eclipsed by some powerful and ominous enemy. Fascism is therefore quite fond of conspiracy theories and will generally support all manner of mechanisms and actions to boost and enable conspiracism. Fascism’s investment in a mythologized past means that it tends to experience the academy as a threat11.

Now on one level fascists are inclined to see everything and everyone that isn’t fascist as a threat to fascism. But it does also have certain preferred and repeating stock villains it uses in predictable and repeating ways:

• Ethnic and religious minorities: In Europe and to a lesser extent in America the “first among equals” ethnic minority has been Jewish people. Longstanding traditions of antisemitism in Europe coupled with Jewish peoples status as a diasporic community worked to make them into prime targets of fascist hate and violence12. More broadly though, the largest established religious or ethnic minority in a region will generally be pressed into service as the villain of fascist conspiracism. Existing bigotry and hatred together with entwined histories creates an easy foundation for propaganda here. “They infiltrated our pure nation and brought it down from within and they are still conspiring to keep us weak and prevent us from realizing our glorious potential” is the general thrust of the argument they make here. MAGA fascism is currently focused primarily on Latin American immigrants whom in incorporates as a threatening contagion or contaminant using the “Great Replacement Theory” which manages to also shoehorn in a dollop of antisemtic conspiracism by positing that the whole operation is orchestrated and funded by Jewish billionaires.

• Democratic, Classically Liberal, and Neo-Liberal Politics: Fascism is distinct from monarchist and traditional imperial political theory and systems in that it is post-democratic; remember that fascists like dictators rather than kings or emperors (though they do occasionally borrow variations on those terms as honorifics for their dictators). That is to say that it is democracies rather than monarchies or empires become fascist (monarchies and empires become democracies). The flip side of this of course is that fascists see democracy as the political system that stands in its way. With that said, fascists tend to see democracy as a relatively weak and fragile form of government doomed to failure due to its own internal weaknesses and inconsistencies13. Essentially fascism sees liberal democracy as an enemy only insofar as it tends to be the status quo that fascism seeks to replace and also represents the force that replaced a previous more authoritarian form of government which fascism sees as superior14.

• Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism: Fascism, like communism and anarchism15, is a post-democratic form of government. This (together with an alarming tendency for state forms of communism to embrace authoritarianism) has, unfortunately facilitated the development of “horse shoe theory” which tends to misleadingly collapse all forms of post-democratic political theory into the single term “extremism”. In reality and throughout history, fascists have identified communists and anarchists as their most dangerous and hated rivals—and vice versa. Where fascism tends to oppose but also look down on democratic forms of governance, it recognizes communism and anarchism as real threats largely because they are genuine rivals. Since fascism assumes that the fall of democracy is inevitable, for fascists the real threat is represented by those forms of government which appear as rivals for post-democratic governance. Beyond that, communism and anarchism represent polar opposite impulses to the beliefs and structure of fascism.

  

  Because fascism is a form of ultranationalism it is necessarily hierarchical. Fascists are forever organizing the population into social and political castes based on how “pure” they are are representatives of that fascism’s chosen nationalist homogeneity (i.e. for white nationalism, how representative of whiteness is a person; for Christian nationalism, how perfectly Christian are then, etc..) and because fascism is palingenetic is always socially reactionary and patriarchal, insisting on gendered hierarchies of power and status. In strict contrast, communism and anarchism are fundamentally egalitarian insofar as they seek to eliminate (or at least minimize) all hierarchies of political power and status. It is built into the very nature of fascism to attack and invert the societies that communism and anarchism seek to facilitate and vice versa. Communism and Anarchism have in common with fascism an awareness of the tensions of liberal democracy in its preservation of some political, economic, and social hierarchies while opposing others and both believe that the liberal democratic state of affairs is ultimately unsustainable. But where fascism seeks to resolve the tension by reinforcing and amplifying hierarchy, communism and anarchism seek to eliminate hierarchy (by varying means).

  In fact and throughout actual history, fascists have frequently risen to power in the context of liberal democracies by positioning themselves as the only party strong enough to resist the encroachment of communism or anarchism. When democracies are afraid of falling to communism they become more sympathetic to fascist advances and propaganda and when democracies are afraid of falling to fascism (this happens less frequently) they become more sympathetic to communist and anarchist advances and propaganda. Democracies frequently hold on to power by allying by turns with whichever post-democratic group represents less of a threat to the status-quo than the other. The US and Western Europe are probably the best example of this dynamic throughout the 20th century as they swung back and forth between alliances and tacit support with both communists and fascists. As late as the Spanish Civil War, the western democracies used tactical neutrality to benefit the fascists before turning to ally with the Soviet Union against the fascists when Hitler proved the more aggressive and greater threat. Then once WW2 had ended, those same western democracies formed NATO in opposition to Soviet (and later Chinese) communism and throughout the Cold War, allied with fascist and other far-right authoritarian dictators.

  Don’t worry I have not forgotten socialism16. Socialism proper is more an economic theory of governance and it can therefore be overlaid onto any number of existing governmental structures and systems. The short definition of socialism is that it is an economic political structure in which the means of production are owned or controlled by the public. This can take a lot of different forms and actual instantiation of socialism is always along a spectrum. The question to ask about any given polity is not “is it socialist or not” but “How socialist is it?” So long as a given state is understood to be representative of the people in some meaningful way, some degree of socialism will be present. And in its early phases, while still operating within and working to subvert democracy, fascists will frequently embrace certain socialist ideas and plans both because many of those plans direct a greater degree of control to the state (which fascists do like) or because they help fascism to affect a pretense of populism. Even once democracy has been fully subverted, a fascist nation claims that the whole will of the people is represented in the person of the dictator/authoritarian/leader and will sometimes use that idea to argue that the dictator’s claim to control every aspect of the nation means that socialism has been achieved. Alternately fascism will treat socialism as nothing more than “communism lite” or even as synonymous with communism17 and will attempt to take power by opposing it in pretended common cause with conservative liberal democrats.

• Sexual and Gender Minorities: I mentioned above that, because fascism is palingenetic and hierarchical it is also socially reactionary. While fascist movements may make temporary and bad-faith accommodations for socially respectable sexual and gender minority people who are willing to be useful to the fascist project; fascism is ultimately antagonistic towards all sexual and gender minorities. The fascist incorporation of hierarchy and social traditionalism mean that fascism imagines its mythic past as one in which the patriarchal family reigned as the model for social and gender relations and identities. Sexual and gender minorities actually pose a problem for fascist theory because even members of their chosen homogeneity (their ideal/pure/true group) turn out to be queer at pretty much the same rate as do members of their chosen villain/scapegoat minority group.

  20th century fascism used the pseudoscientific eugenicist concept of degeneracy to cover over this problem. Seizing on the fact that diverse sexual and gender identities are associated with reproduction in one way or another, they argued that sexual and gender minority status was an affliction nefariously caused by nefarious cabals and groups seeking to undermine the strength and purity of the nation. The idea was that the infiltration and contamination of the designated villain/scapegoat minority was responsible (either intentionally or incidentally) for degenerating even members of the ideal/pure/true group so that they lost a sort of half-step in the fascist caste hierarchy. In the fascist imagination, a queer person will thus be a half-step lower on their social/political caste hierarchy than that same person would be if they had been cis/het/allo and will always be seen as a contaminating threat to the rest of the “pure” nation. For a clear example of how this imagines check out the portion of the recent Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson interview where Carlson gets Fuentes to explain to him how it is that he believes that queer and trans people are corrupting men18.

The 10 Pillars of Fascist Tactics

Subscribe now

In a classroom setting I would follow this sort of broad explanation positioning fascism among other politics by handing out either a summary sheet like this one of Jason Stanley’s 10 Pillars of Fascist Politics from his book How Fascism Works or a summary sheet of Umberto Eco’s 14 Characteristics of Ur-Fascism. I have used both in the past and have generally found that Stanley’s 10 pillars are more accessible for Standard and Honors level classes while Eco’s 14 Characteristics are better in AP classes as they allow for a somewhat more complex and nuanced incorporation of larger world history themes and dynamics. I want to note that while, in the section below, I have included a series of slide created for this essay, in a classroom I would not supply students with the argument for or against the conclusion that MAGA is an American form of fascism. Instead I would present the analysis of fascism alone and invite a classroom discussion wherein students would be encouraged to argue their own conclusions and to identify and provide evidence to support their own position.

For our purposes here I will go through Stanley’s 10 pillars and pair each one with example of MAGA fascism engaging in or embracing the relevant beliefs and behaviors19. Note that all of these headlines are from before Trump’s current term in office. During that time, MAGA has only doubled down on each one of these tactics.

1. The Mythic Past

   

   I don’t know that there is a whole lot to be added on this one. MAGA is, if anything, a self-evident and self-described appeal to a mythic past.

2. Propaganda

   

   There are far too many examples here to even begin to cite in a comprehensive way. As of today some of the most egregious and obvious examples are probably the administration’s use of bizarre Rockwell-esque AI generated graphics to promote a 1950’s image of white Americana across several departments on social media.

3. Anti-Intellectualism

   

   It is a matter of established fact that the Trump administration is using its “anti-DEI” campaign to take control of, intimidate, defund, and generally harm higher ed. In addition the fact that the Trump administration is actively working to functionally dismantle the entire Department of Education should be more than sufficient evidence to drive this point home.

4. Unreality

   

   My brother and I have written extensively in our book about the way in which Trump himself is a master of “bullshit” as mode of communication. Where a liar is invested in knowing the Truth and lies are spoken with reference to the Truth if only to discredit it, bullshitters will use Truth or Falsehood and don’t care either way. Their purpose is to convince their audience to accept a particular unreal version of reality.

5. Hierarchy

   

   I made this argument throughout the essay.

6. Victim-hood

   

   Trump and MAGA as a whole constantly work to position themselves and those they cast as “real Americans” as victims of various agendas, threats, and infiltrators.

7. Law and Order

   

   The propagandistic use of “law and order” here is incredibly ironic. MAGA and fascists generally use the rhetoric of being strong and tough of crime to distract from the fact that they themselves are more corrupt than their opponents. Here in the US it is notable that Trump’s supporters viewed him as the law and order candidate despite the fact that he himself is a convicted felon.

8. Sexual Anxiety

   

   The Trump regime has made attacks on sexual and especially gender minorities central to it’s administration, going so far as to create the term gender extremism to denigrate feminism and trans people as actual threats to the country. I have already written about it HERE and HERE.

9. Sodom and Gomorrah

   

   At the time of this writing, Trump’s ICE and CPB are occupying multiple US cities and Trump is in court tryin to use the National Guard to occupy American cities. The messaging is beyond obvious.

10. “Arbeit Macht Frei”

    

    This is at the heart of Trump’s anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric.

For the sake of discussion and simplicity I have included only a single headline or two with each slide/graphic. The simple fact of the matter is that, on each one of these tactics (though of course MAGA-ism is stronger on some tactics than others as you would expect of any historically instantiated expression of fascism) there are many many examples available. In the context of a discussion I would encourage participants to provide their own examples.

Share

What does it mean to be brave? Is courage simply the eradication or conquest of fear? In a world that emphasizes integrating our feelings and listening to our bodies, courage often appears as the exception—a virtue defined by overriding those very signals. To be courageous, we are told, is to deny fear and act anyway, to master what threatens us. But is courage really the triumph of mastery? Or—as readers of my earlier essays may anticipate—does courage emerge instead through failure and lack, precisely where the fantasy of wholeness collapses?

Paul’s Substack

Freedom in Fear: Courage Through a Lacanian Lens

What does it mean to be brave? Is courage simply the eradication or conquest of fear? In a world that emphasizes integrating our feelings and listening to our bodies, courage often appears as the exception—a virtue defined by overriding those very signals. To be courageous, we are told, is to deny fear and act anyway, to master what threatens us. But is…

Read more

a year ago · 6 likes · Paul Hoard

You can find the full written version of this essay HERE

This letter is written to and for Christian trans women. If that is not you then you are welcome, invited even, to listen in but know that the further you are from that social location, the less this is written “for you”. I hope that listening in our our conversation might bless you. The letter draws heavily on the work and theory of James Baldwin and Julia Serano and I hope that you will go to the original page to read the citations if nothing else.

Subscribe now

“Americans do not know how to lament”. I am not sure where I first heard that claim but it has stuck with me. Today I would modify the question; if I were trying to be precise I would say that “Hegemonic America does not know how to lament.” When I say “Hegemonic America” I am not trying to be cute, or progressive, I am trying to be accurate. Hegemonic America is the portion of America for whom America has built itself; Hegemonic America is the America that Americans serve. Hegemonic America is simply and merely that version of American culture which benefits from being the default and norm that people think of when we think about what “the average American” is like. It is not the case that American’s do not know how to lament, it is merely the case that Hegemonic America does not know how to lament.

Culturally, Americans just aren’t very good lament or mourning and socially we have precious few scripts for it. Think about the awkwardness you feel when someone tells you that a dear friend or family member has died or is suffering or threatened in some way. “My condolences” is available but is so worn and has become such an upper-middle class polite meaningless words response that it is hardly more than enough to facilitate a face-saving exit from the topic. On social media we use some variation on the “hug”, “care”, or “single tear” reaction, and “thoughts and prayers” almost inevitably falls flat. We don’t know how to mourn.

It isn’t that we don’t mourn or experience lament—we do—its that we are ill-equipped to process that experience individually or collectively. And I am not here to offer a grand solution to this problem which is likely rooted in capitalist individualism and consumer culture. Rather today I want to point to an exception: Transgender Day of Remembrance. On November 20th each year many transgender people, our loved ones and our allies will gather together or take some time alone and will lament the deaths of transgender people this last year. We will mourn their loss; we will grieve the political, social, religious, and familial circumstances that led to the loss of their precious lives, we will rage against the injustice of anti-trans violence, and we will say their names.

Our ritual of lament—like all such rituals—is constructed out of necessity. In this case cis culture either refused to recognize the violence that transgender people face or, when they did recognize it at the individual level, they refused to recognize the way in which that violence is enacted against us as trans people. They would erase our transness for reasons ranging from over anti-trans hatred to embarrassment and a misplaced desire to preserve our dignity by minimizing our transness. We were deadnamed and misgendered; we have been placed in graves bearing the names of people we never were by family members who never acknowledged us; we have had obituaries written for people who never existed just to erase the truth of who we were. Reports of our deaths did not mention our transness and so even our deaths were prevented from speaking to the fact anti-trans violence, our eulogies becoming weapons against our liberation. Our community’s suffering has historically been ignored, erased, diminished, or shushed.

Subscribe now

Maybe a personal story will drive this point home. Before coming out as trans I spent three and a half years knowing who I am but choosing to live in the closet, not living as the woman I am but continuing in the pretense of being a man1. For reasons that turned out to be entirely unfounded but which were compelling at the time, I believed that I needed to stay closeted. And for all of that it was also deeply important to me that, when I died (I thought I would stay closeted my entire life) I wanted people to know that I had actually been a woman presenting and performing as a man my entire life. I wanted the truth of who I am to be known in death at least even if I couldn’t bear to have it known while I was still alive.

We do not want to be alone. We want to be known. Even when we don’t want others to see us, even when we are convinced that being known will lead to our destruction, we still also want to be known because without others working to know you, you are forever alone. To be in relationship means to have other persons learning to see you more and more for who you are.

Transgender Day of Remembrance exists first as a duty, an opportunity, and a grace to mourn the lives of trans people who were taken from us. Transgender Day of Remembrance exists because it is right and good to lament loss—to mourn death, and because our community has fought to make space for that. Transgender Day of Remembrance exists second as a correction and a partial un-doing of the destructive erasure of anti-transness. Transgender Day of Remembrance is thus a day of lament steeped in righteous liberating rejection of all that necessitates that lament to begin with. The way in which we mourn our dead is both an act of sorrow and an act of defiance. We say their names. We say their names because those names, the names they chose, the names that represent who they are, ought to be said. We say their names because far too many people won’t. We say their names because it means that some day if it comes to it, we can know that our community at least will say our names.

Hegemonic America does not know how to lament. But it’s victims do.

Share

Paul’s introduction:

Last week I reflected on how self-help culture feeds on our fantasy of wholeness, always dangling the next habit, hack, or method as the key to completion. This week I want to press further into that same restless dynamic, but from a different angle: contentment. If self-help promises freedom through mastery, consumerism promises peace through satisfaction. Both miss the point of desire.

This is one of a few essays I wrote in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. You can find the original written version of the essay HERE. In this piece I examine several of the most common reactions to his murder on the left and in the center and I argue that moral clarity and a refusal to soften the edges of this profoundly racist and cruel individual are necessary in this moment.

The 6th circuit court of appeals ruled this week that misgendering transgender students is not a form of bullying and that schools in its jurisdiction are not permitted to punish students for misgendering their transgender classmates. This happened the same week that the Supreme Court decided that transgender Americans can not be presumed to have a right to a passport that accurately reflects our gender identities, so things aren’t looking great for the trans community at the moment.

There have been any number of worthwhile and insightful takes on this news but what stood out to me was the degree to which both decisions rest on the same premise: that trans people are not really what we say we are. Watching the discussion over all of this, and particularly this conversation between Evan Urquhart and Ari Cohn, it struck me that we have reached the limit of Trans Accommodation as a paradigm for supporting transgender rights. I wrote an essay this year about the difference between what I call the Trans Accommodation Paradigm and the Trans Affirmation Paradigm and I would encourage you to go read it but as a summary, the Trans Accommodation Paradigm sees trans people as really members of the sex category we were assigned to at birth on the basis of a quick genital inspection but as people who mental health is best served by being accommodated as members of the gender with which we identify. In contrast the Trans Affirmation Paradigm begins from the premise that non-binary identities are real and valid, that trans women really are women, and that trans men really are men.

The upshot here is that under the Accommodation Paradigm, support for trans people is a matter of kindness and toleration. It recognizes that treating us as the gender we identify with is the best thing for us and advocates of said treatment on the basis of “be a decent person”. But under the Affirmation Paradigm, support for trans people is a matter of fidelity to truth. Where the accommodationist might say of a trans woman “of course she’s really a man but its the right thing to do to treat her as if she were a woman”; the affirmation paradigm will say of the same trans woman “we ought to treat her like a woman because she is a woman”.

Subscribe now

If we return then, to the two recent court cases, the material and practical difference between the two paradigms becomes immediately evident. It is far more difficult to argue that a public high school student should be punished for referring to a transgender classmate as a member of the sex category they were assigned to at birth on the basis of a quick genital inspection, even if it hurts the feelings of the transgender student in question, if you believe that the transgender student really is the sex category they were assigned to at birth on the bases of a quick genital inspection. “It’s not true but we should all play along because otherwise they will be sad” is not an especially compelling argument even if it is accurate.

Viewed through the affirmation paradigm though, the case looks quite different. It is ridiculous to suggest that it would not be a form of bullying to belligerently and insistently refer to a student as something other than what they are. If a student asks me why they shouldn’t misgender a trans boy in their class, I don’t tell them “because it will make him feel bad” (though of course it will), I tell them “because he is a boy and it is rude and inappropriate to refer to boys as girls.”

Of course what the government (as well as many institutions including news outlets) likes most is a situation where they can claim that the truth of the matter is contested because that allows them to cast themselves as relatively “neutral” arbiters of
”balls and strikes”. In the case of the 6th circuit decisions, the majority acted out of the position that the truth of trans kids’ gender is legitimately contested (unlike the truth of cis kids’ gender) and that under those circumstances it would be a 1st amendment violation to prohibit cis students from referring to trans students using language reflecting the sex category those trans students were assigned to at birth on the basis of a short genital inspection. And frustratingly, there isn’t much of an objection for accommodationists—even accommodationists who think of themselves as trans allies to raise to that. It is certainly true that the ontological status of transgender students is contested at this point in time, just as it is true that the efficacy of vaccines is contested at this point in time. The problem of course is that contesting the truth has absolutely no impact on what the truth is but that isn’t the point. For these courts (the same basic analysis is available to the recent Supreme Court decision on passports and gender markers) the point isn’t to arbitrate based on the truth of the matter—Justice takes sides but the Justice system likes to pretend it can be neutral—it is to appear non-partisan.

Subscribe now

This facially “neutral” seeming “balls and strikes” approach serves the interests of those whose politics depend on bullshit1 and lies. It means that once a group (in this case white Christian Nationalists and MAGA fascists) are able to convince a sufficient number of people to genuinely believe a falsehood the courts will give that falsehood the benefit of standing and will stop ruling on the basis of Truth and fact. I am not a consequentialist. While I do think it is truth that the trans affirmation paradigm represents a far stronger foundation for supporting trans rights than the trans accommodation paradigm does, and while I think the trans affirmation paradigm recognizes the dignity of trans people far more robustly than the trans accommodation paradigm, neither of those are the reason that I subscribe to the trans affirmation paradigm. I subscribe to it because I am convinced that it is more true than any other paradigm for understanding trans people.

Accommodation was a trap

On these grounds I am becoming increasingly convinced that the trans community and our allies have found ourselves in a bit of a trap over the last 10 years. We have, until recently and on the more “extremist” edges of our community, tolerated the trans accommodation paradigm2. In the context of a broadly liberal political and social context the accommodation paradigm (most frequently encountered in the form “just be respectful of trans people; call people what they want to be called”) seemed sufficient and represented a much smaller “ask” than the trans affirmation paradigm. We were able to shape social expectations so that misgendering or otherwise invalidating the identities of trans people was perceived as boorish and gauche. And if the social pressure to conform to liberal standards of tolerance wasn’t sufficient we would resort to (accurately) pointing out the massive harm in the form of increased depression and suicidality that results from invalidating trans people’s identities. But we too often shied away from pushing into the why of it.

We didn’t explain that the reason that it hurts trans people when our identities are invalidated, is that the reality of who we really are is being denied. We didn’t push into the hard and complicated work of explaining what it means and why it is true to say that nonbinary identities are real and valid, that trans women are women, and that trans men are men. So long as people would treat us as though we are who we say we are, we settled for letting them believe whatever they happened to believe about us.

That isn’t to say that trans people weren’t aware of the dynamic. We were. We knew, for instance, that a lot of cis women “allies” enjoyed the company and even friendship of trans women on about the same grounds and in the same vaguely condescending and exoticizing mode that they enjoyed the company and even friendship of gay men. It’s just that, by and large, that was the price we had to pay to have them vote and advocate on our behalf. We understood that much of the popular support for trans rights was only an inch deep. But that inch at least seemed real, and where we could we were fighting to build on it. We challenged those who wanted to think of themselves as trans allies to really examine their assumptions and presuppositions; we asked—we begged—people to listen to trans people and to the way we spoke about and contextualized our own experiences. And we hoped that the support we had gained would be enough to withstand the backlash.

Now we are few years into the backlash and the failure of the accommodation paradigm as an adequate foundation for resisting the white Christian Nationalist MAGA fascist attacks on trans people is readily apparent. We see our self-proclaimed “allies” now arguing for “reasonable compromises” on trans rights. We see the party that was supposed to “have our back” actively convincing itself that the best way to regain power is to pretend that we don’t exist and floating the possibility of embracing “heterodox” members who actively oppose our liberation. When our rights are attacked they stand silent or tut-tut our dehumanization as “unkind” or “insensitive”.

Subscribe now

So then…what do we do?

In the long term I think the answer is clear: We need to re-build the trans liberation movement on a paradigm of trans affirmation. Without turning away from anyone who is moving in the right direction, we need to be absolutely clear from the start that what we are claiming—what existing science and all other legitimate sources of knowledge demonstrate despite popular “common sense” assumptions to the contrary—is that the gender identity claims of transgender people are valid and True ontological claims. Anything less remains bogged down in transphobic beliefs, norms, opinions, and preconceptions. When I say that I am a trans woman, I am not asking you to treat me like a woman; I am telling you that I already am a woman (and always have been) and I am inviting you to recognize a segment of reality that was hitherto obscured to your perception. Our goal must be liberation not toleration.

And in the short term? In the short term the answer has got to be the same. If the last year has taught us anything it has to be that the foundation of accommodation is not one that can be relied upon, nor is there any purpose in building on it. The perception of security that we might have in the support of accommodationist “allies” must be recognized for the illusion that it is and must be abandoned. We have to come to grips with the harsh truth that the cause of transgender liberation enjoys far less support that the polling and the numbers suggest. The nice white liberal ally who “has some questions” but works to get your pronoun right and has shown himself more than willing to accommodate your needs cannot be trusted. He can be educated. He can be exhorted. He can be given the reasons for shifting from accommodationism to affirmation, but until he makes that move he cannot be relied upon to stand with us when or where it matters.

This moment, for all that it is painful and for all the real and terrible suffering it is causing, can also be a moment of refining fire for transgender liberation. We made real gains over the last 10 years. Some real allies have emerged and many of our friends, family, and community members are now on board with full affirmation of transgender identities. Yes far more of the support we thought we enjoyed has turned out to be chaff and that chaff is being burned away but we can use this moment of disillusionment to get a picture of what is and make a plan to build something stronger.