Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From How God Became King (2012)

  Not all, however, will see it like that. Many traditional Christians may think instead of the debates about “creation and evolution” and may hear in this statement an affirmation of the former rather than the latter, which was not, of course, the original intention. The anti-evolutionary belief can quite easily accompany a belief that the early Christians strenuously resisted, that “this world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through.” Indeed, the picture of God “intervening” from outside, as it were, to “create,” can all too easily accompany the picture of Jesus as a kind of superman or spaceman, coming to earth to snatch saved souls from their dark prison. And that is classic Gnosticism, not Christianity. The fact that we jump straight from this clause to the second one, “And in Jesus Christ...,” makes it easy for many Christians to maintain their silent and unrecognized Marcionism—that is, their view that the Old Testament is a kind of parenthesis in the story, replete perhaps with signposts and promises, but in the last analysis not essential to the whole theme. What many think, then, as they jump from God to Jesus, might go something like this: “Yes, God made the world, but we are sinners, and so God sent Jesus to save us from our sins.” Creation, sin, Jesus. That is the implicit narrative of millions of Christians today—and it guarantees that they will never, ever understand either the Old Testament or the New. And in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord... One word and one clause might give such people pause at this point. The word is the title “Christ,” and the clause is the mention of Jesus as “son of God.” But, sadly, most people, saying the creed, do not at this point think, “Jesus, the Jewish Messiah.” They think of “Christ” as, effectively, Jesus’s second name or perhaps a word that implies his “divinity.” And they think of “son of God” not in the light of Psalm 2 and 2 Samuel 7, but simply as a way of referring to Jesus as the second person of the Trinity. I fear that most will understand “our Lord” quite vaguely, meaning “the one we worship and invoke,” rather than anything more wide-ranging or substantial. Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. Here we have the central pair of statements, as we saw near the start of this book. The virgin birth and the crucifixion, with nothing but a comma in between. Sadly, here most modern Christians who say the creed from the heart barely even notice the comma, let alone think about the wealth of biblical emphasis that is thereby dwindled down to nothing.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  My problem with this is that the canonical gospels and the creeds are not in fact presenting the same picture. This, actually, is a question that goes much wider and deeper than we have time to explore in this book, but at the heart of it we could sum up the problem like this. The great creeds, when they refer to Jesus, pass directly from his virgin birth to his suffering and death. The four gospels don’t. Or, to put it the other way around, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all seem to think it’s hugely important that they tell us a great deal about what Jesus did between the time of his birth and the time of his death. In particular, they tell us about what we might call his kingdom-inaugurating work: the deeds and words that declared that God’s kingdom was coming then and there, in some sense or other, on earth as in heaven. They tell us a great deal about that; but the great creeds don’t. Before we examine the great creeds in more detail, let’s remind ourselves of the reason why they came to be formulated in the first place. The early church faced many problems and battles. This is hardly surprising. Jesus himself told his followers it would work out like that. Sometimes it was direct persecution; there were many martyrs in the first three centuries. Sometimes it was internal division, as devout followers of Jesus discovered that other devout followers of Jesus saw things very differently, but held their position equally strongly. There were ongoing debates with Jewish groups and individuals who did not believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah and found themselves in an awkward position vis-à-vis the expanding Christian church, which claimed so much from its Jewish heritage (not least the ancient scriptures) and yet saw so many other things in a very different light and ordered its life accordingly. In particular, there were the great battles with Gnosticism in the second and third centuries, in which Christian teachers like Irenaeus and Tertullian stood firm for belief in God as the good and wise creator, and with Arianism in the fourth and fifth centuries, in which teachers like Athanasius stood firm for belief in Jesus as “being of one substance with the Father.” All these serious and long-lasting controversies, many of them against a background of fierce persecution from the imperial authorities, were enormously important in shaping the way the early Christians understood and articulated what was significant to them.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Unilateral approaches (sometimes referred to as “identity politics” or “reverse discourses”) tend to be centered on the concerns of one particular marginalized group (e.g., women, homosexuals) who is imagined as being oppressed by an opposing group (e.g., men, heterosexuals). In practice, this framing ignores the many differences within these groups (e.g., women differ greatly in their backgrounds, experiences, and the obstacles they face), and often leads activists to propose one-size-fits-all solutions that ignore many constituents’ issues and needs. It also discounts (and sometimes demonizes) people who do not neatly fit within the imagined oppressor/oppressed binary (e.g., transgender and intersex people). In other words, unilateral approaches to activism inevitably erase or exclude many people who have a stake in the movement. In response to such unilateral approaches, the ’90s saw the rise of several movements—third-wave feminism, queer activism, and academic disciplines like poststructural feminism and queer theory—that were intentionally pluralistic, espoused and celebrated difference, and contested all binaries and rigid identities. The transgender movement sprung out of this wave and forwarded similar sentiments—it was a purposefully anti-identity movement that welcomed anyone who defied gender conventions and/or who supported those who did. That was the activist milieu that I came out into during the early ’00s in the San Francisco Bay Area. And at first, the queer/trans community I encountered there seemed incredibly open and accepting of difference. But I eventually came to recognize that while the community did not police individuals’ identities, it was not without hierarchies. For instance, while people who explicitly or visually blurred binary gender distinctions were routinely celebrated, transsexuals who unapologetically identified as women or men were often dismissed as “reinforcing” that binary. And while queer and trans expressions of masculinity were routinely celebrated in those spaces, queer and trans expressions of femininity were usually viewed as suspect (unless they were presented as merely playful or ironic). It became increasingly obvious to me that these two hierarchies—especially in combination—put trans women (many of whom also identify as feminine) in a precarious position in those settings. After watching these community attitudes play out while attending Camp Trans in 2003, 3 I became engrossed in this issue. Up to that point, I had primarily been a slam poet; many of my pieces dealt with either the transphobia I faced since coming out as trans or the sexism I faced since I began navigating my way through the world as a woman. But I now turned my attention to writing personal essays that explored how these two forces combined to impact my life, and the lives of trans women more generally. The first essay I wrote along this line was “Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels,” which first appeared in Bitch magazine in the fall of 2004, and which appears here as Chapter 2 .

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  For example, if I were to identify myself as a “cat person,” nobody would be outraged or confused if I said I also loved dogs. Further, when I tell people that I’m a “musician,” no one makes unwarranted assumptions about what instruments I play or what styles of music I prefer. Nonpoliticized identities like “musician” and “cat person” allow us to see that the recurring problems in gender and sexual identity politics arise not from identity per se, but rather from opposite-think (e.g., that a cat person cannot be a dog person, and vice versa) and from a sense of “oneness” (e.g., the assumption that all musicians are or should be punk rock guitarists.) I believe that if the transgender movement had simply continued to view itself as an alliance of disparate groups working toward a shared goal (like making the world safer for gender-variant folks), it may have avoided such exclusivity while respecting the distinct differences and specific concerns of its various constituents. Instead, by promoting the idea that we must move beyond the supposedly outdated concept of “identity,” the transgender movement has created its own sense of “oneness.” Rather than viewing ourselves as a fragile political coalition of distinct subgroups, some activists instead encourage us to see ourselves as one big homogeneous group of individuals who blur gender boundaries. Rather than learning to respect the very different perspectives and experiences that each transgender subgroup brings to the table, the transgender community has instead become a sort of gender free-for-all, where identities are regularly co-opted by others within the community. These days, many transsexuals assume that they have the right to appropriate the language of, or speak on behalf of, intersex people; similarly, many cissexual genderqueers feel they have the right to do the same for transsexuals. This needlessly erases each group’s unique issues, obstacles, and perspectives. This sort of “gender anarchy”—where individuals are free to adopt or appropriate any identity as they please—might seem very limitless and freeing on the surface, but in practice it resembles gender-libertarianism, where those who are most marginalized become even more vulnerable to the whims of those who are more established. In this case, it leaves those of us who are cross-gender-identified susceptible to negation at the hands of the greater cissexual queer community. Indeed, it has become increasingly common for people who are primarily queer because of their sexual orientation to claim a space for themselves within the transgender movement. 7 This is particularly true in the queer women’s community, which has become increasingly involved in transgender politics and discourses due to the recent sharp increase in the number of (1) previously lesbian-identified people transitioning to male, (2) dykes who now take on genderqueer or other FTM spectrum identities, and (3) non-trans queer women who seek a voice in the transgender community because they are partnered to FTM spectrum individuals.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Indeed, the picture of God “intervening” from outside, as it were, to “create,” can all too easily accompany the picture of Jesus as a kind of superman or spaceman, coming to earth to snatch saved souls from their dark prison. And that is classic Gnosticism, not Christianity. The fact that we jump straight from this clause to the second one, “And in Jesus Christ…,” makes it easy for many Christians to maintain their silent and unrecognized Marcionism—that is, their view that the Old Testament is a kind of parenthesis in the story, replete perhaps with signposts and promises, but in the last analysis not essential to the whole theme. What many think, then, as they jump from God to Jesus, might go something like this: “Yes, God made the world, but we are sinners, and so God sent Jesus to save us from our sins.” Creation, sin, Jesus. That is the implicit narrative of millions of Christians today—and it guarantees that they will never, ever understand either the Old Testament or the New. And in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord… One word and one clause might give such people pause at this point. The word is the title “Christ,” and the clause is the mention of Jesus as “son of God.” But, sadly, most people, saying the creed, do not at this point think, “Jesus, the Jewish Messiah.” They think of “Christ” as, effectively, Jesus’s second name or perhaps a word that implies his “divinity.” And they think of “son of God” not in the light of Psalm 2 and 2 Samuel 7, but simply as a way of referring to Jesus as the second person of the Trinity. I fear that most will understand “our Lord” quite vaguely, meaning “the one we worship and invoke,” rather than anything more wide-ranging or substantial. Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. Here we have the central pair of statements, as we saw near the start of this book. The virgin birth and the crucifixion, with nothing but a comma in between. Sadly, here most modern Christians who say the creed from the heart barely even notice the comma, let alone think about the wealth of biblical emphasis that is thereby dwindled down to nothing.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Without that larger picture, the word “teacher” or “teaching” can result in a severely diminished sense of what the gospels are trying to say about Jesus. The notion of “teaching” can easily collapse into the standard popular picture of Jesus as one of the world’s great “religious teachers” alongside Buddha, Muhammad, and so on. In other words, there are some things called “religious truths,” which some great souls have discovered and taught, and Jesus was simply one of those great souls, one of those great teachers. One often meets people who are extremely keen to insist that Jesus’s teaching was “just like” that of Buddha or another great teacher—as though they are perhaps a bit too eager to make sure that the much more specific claim of Jesus, that Israel’s God was launching his project of new creation in and through him, should be set aside and forgotten. Jesus as a “teacher” is much safer than Jesus as the gospels actually present him. Most Christians today would, I suspect, see straight through that reductionism. But would they know what to put in its place? Or would they simply substitute some version of the first answer, that Jesus came to enable us to go to heaven? In the gospels, Jesus is undoubtedly a great moral teacher and exemplar. But he is much, much more. And it is that “much more” that the church has found so hard to grasp and express. Jesus the Moral Exemplar A third standard line people sometimes advance when wondering why the gospels tell their readers about what Jesus did in his public career is to suggest that he was offering an example of how to live. His utter, generous love and his fearless rebuke of wickedness and oppression make a formidable combination, especially when you add in his apparent fondness for parties, on the one hand, and prayer, on the other, and his remarkably shrewd ability to sum up situations, people, and problems in a pithy phrase or to tease out fresh meaning with a neat, telling story. What a man, we say to ourselves. Unlike many moralists then and now, his own life strikingly matched his own stringent teaching. People have sometimes accused Jesus of betraying his own standards (in cursing the fig tree, for example), but most people have accepted the gospels’ portrait of him as embodying that mixture of wisdom, love, holiness, and truth that he was urging as the proper standard for human life. The idea of Jesus as “teacher” is therefore sometimes elaborated further, and Jesus is seen as “moral exemplar.” Jesus came, many have said, to “show us the way,” to “show us how it’s done.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But I would rather begin at the beginning, the beginning of Luke’s gospel (not least because Luke, quite wrongly, is often supposed to have been uncritically friendly toward Rome). After his opening chapter, which evokes the opening of 1 Samuel—and thereby already reminds his hearers of the long story that eventually led to Samuel anointing David as king and David defeating the Philistines—Luke begins again, as it were, in chapter 2, by declaring portentously that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered for the purpose of taxation: At that time a decree was issued by Augustus Caesar: a census was to be taken of the whole world…. So everyone set off to be registered, each to their own town. Joseph too, who belonged to the house and family of David, went from the city of Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judaea, David’s city, to be registered with his fiancée Mary, who was pregnant. (2:1–5) A census! Everyone in Palestine knew what that meant. It meant not only that the people were going to have to pay up, but that they were being enlisted as subject members in a kingdom ruled by a foreign power. Not for nothing does Josephus tell those stories about the revolutionary movements that arose spontaneously because of the various censuses the Romans took and about the numerous violent deaths that followed: But a certain Judas, a Gaulanite from a city named Gamala, who had enlisted the aid of Saddok, a Pharisee, threw himself into the cause of rebellion. They said that the assessment [i.e., the census] carried with it a status amounting to downright slavery, no less, and appealed to the nation to make a bid for independence…. They have a passion for liberty that is almost unconquerable, since they are convinced that God alone is their leader and master. They think little of submitting to death in unusual forms and permitting vengeance to fall on kinsmen and friends if only they may avoid calling any man master…. I have no fear that anything reported of them will be considered incredible. The danger is, rather, that report may minimize the indifference with which they accept the grinding misery of pain.* We should also remember that when Luke narrates how the chief priests went to Pilate to bring charges against Jesus, one of the key things they said, untruthfully of course, was that he had been forbidding people to give tribute to Caesar: The whole crowd of them got up and took Jesus to Pilate. They began to accuse him. “We found this fellow,” they said, “deceiving our nation! He was forbidding people to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he is the Messiah—a king!” (23:1–2)

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But—as we can see from some of the extreme manifestations of this phenomenon—it simply won’t do to assume that, because the New Testament contains some quite radical critiques of Caesar’s empire, we can pick them up, as Luther picked up Galatians, and make them serve our particular contemporary agendas, whether American, British, or Continental—not to mention those of the rest of the world (which is often squeezed out of the conversation in another breathtaking act of post-Enlightenment “superiority”: perhaps we’ll get around to thinking about Africa when its countries get around to copying our now rather threadbare political institutions). We owe it to ourselves, to the gospels, to the church, and, not least, to the poor and oppressed in the world not simply to produce a vaguely biblical echo of today’s fashionable left-wing critique, but to read the New Testament afresh and to try to discern the deeper and more powerful pathways it offers through the morass of social and political uncertainty. Perhaps we have been looking for hope in the wrong places. All this is still by way of introduction. We shall shortly return to the four gospels themselves. But before we can do so with any hope of advancing the argument, it will be necessary to spend a few moments longer thinking about the way in which power and empire were thought of within first-century Judaism, not least in contrast to the way the same issues are often addressed today. Power and Empire Within First-Century Judaism As we saw earlier, the Judaism of the postexilic period had quite a well-developed narrative of God and empire. Even though many Jews longed for God to become king in the full, complete way he’d promised, they still believed that in the interim he was in fact already in some sense sovereign over the nations. Yes, he allowed pagan kings to rule; as the creator, he didn’t want his world to collapse into anarchy. But he judged rulers severely, cutting them down to size, as with Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar in the book of Daniel. The Jews assumed, on the basis of their strong creational theology, that the creator had made the world in such a way as to be properly ordered and run by human beings. The Jewish vision of theocracy, of God being in charge, was always one of a rule mediated through his image-bearers, that is, through human beings.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  I am not trying to make the case here that MTF spectrum folks are “more oppressed” than cissexual women, as playing the moreoppressed-than-thou card serves no purpose other than narcissism. But I do hope to encourage cissexual women to take a moment to put themselves in our shoes, to consider how patronizing and condescending dismissive quips about “male privilege” would sound to you if you had been forced against your will into boyhood. As someone who spent my childhood desperately wishing that I could be a girl rather than boy, and who as an adult considers it a privilege to finally have the opportunity to live in the world as a woman rather than a man, I find those attempts to undermine trans women’s femaleness by decrying “male privilege” hollow and crass. Having said all that, I will be the first to admit that many MTF spectrum folks seem to be rather oblivious to the impact that traditional sexism has on their lives—both with respect to the male privileges they gain because of it as well as the special social stigma they receive for their feminine transgender expression and/or for choosing to transition to female. Personally, it was only after I began living full-time as a woman, experiencing firsthand all of the inferior and negative assumptions that others projected onto me because of my femaleness, that I began to make a connection between traditional sexism and the discrimination that I faced because of the specific direction of my transition and transgender expression. Only then did I realize how inadequate the transgender movement’s mantra—that we are discriminated against for “transgressing binary gender norms”—is for those of us on the MTF spectrum who primarily grapple with effemimania and trans-misogyny. MTF spectrum folks need feminism in order to make sense out of our lives and to work toward ending our continuing marginalization. Unfortunately, many cissexual feminists seem to fear that MTF spectrum inclusion within feminism might dilute, distract, or undercut a movement that has historically centered itself on the struggles and issues of cissexual women. Typically, such fears arise from the assumption that we cannot work together because we supposedly have different goals, or that we are unable to relate to one another’s experiences. I believe that is a red herring. After all, many lesbian women, who typically do not have to deal with the issue of unwanted pregnancy, work hard for and are committed to protecting the availability of birth control and a woman’s right to choose. Similarly, a woman doesn’t necessarily have to be a survivor of sexual or physical assault herself to do crucial work in a domestic violence shelter or a rape crisis center.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Jesus, for such people, is the miracle man, the supernatural being who came miraculously into the world to save us from our sins. For them, it really would be true that Jesus could have been born of a virgin and died on a cross and done and said nothing whatever in between. The miracle of the birth and the death for sinners—that’s the heart of it, think “orthodox” Christians. (The Apostles’ Creed does not mention the purpose of the death, as does the Nicene Creed—“who for us men, and for our salvation”—but most modern creedal Christians will think of it at this point, and be rightly grateful.) But will they understand the incarnation as God becoming human in order to become king? Will they understand the cross as the means by which God completed his incarnate kingdom work? Pretty certainly not. As I have repeatedly said, it is possible to check all the “orthodox” boxes and still miss the point. Indeed, I sometimes fear that people have been all the more eager to affirm the official doctrines in this truncated sense as a way of carefully avoiding the implications of God’s actually being king on earth as in heaven. Far safer to have a superman Jesus who zooms down into the world to snatch us away from it. He descended into hell. I doubt if most modern Christians give too much thought to this. Those who have known hell in their own lives may sense with gratitude that Jesus came into the worst place imaginable, the place where we sometimes are, to rescue us. The third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Traditionally minded Christians will celebrate this gladly. Here’s the great miracle, the supernatural intervention! The tomb was empty, and Jesus, having risen, was taken up into heaven. I suspect that most won’t bother too much about Jesus’s precise location now, “sitting at God’s right hand”; we sense that the idea of God having two hands and Jesus being at one of them is at most a metaphor. For many, though, the ascension itself basically means that Jesus has gone away, leaving us to get on with the task (in the power of the Spirit, of course). It won’t, of itself, conjure up any idea of his present sovereignty over the world. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. Fine, think creedal Christians. Final judgment may be a fearful prospect, but we know that we, having been justified by faith, need fear “no condemnation,” as Paul says (Rom. 8:1). We may have in our minds at this point an image of the great wall of the Sistine Chapel, with the living (that’s the meaning of “quick” here) and the dead summoned to face Jesus and hear their ultimate fate.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  For example, some queer women’s events and establishments have policies that specifically exclude trans women from attending. Proponents of such policies often claim that they are not transphobic, because they do allow some transgender-identified people to attend (as long as they were “born female”). Thus, rather than calling trans-woman-exclusion policies “transphobic,” it is more accurate to say that they are cissexist, as they refuse to accept transsexual women’s female identities as being as legitimate as those of cissexual women. (Such policies may also be called trans-misogynistic, as they favor FTM spectrum trans people over MTF spectrum folks.) Furthermore, those “female-born” cissexuals (regardless of whether they are transgender-identified) who choose to attend such events can be said to be exercising their cissexual privilege (i.e., they are taking advantage of all of the privileges associated with their female birth sex). Indeed, it is disappointing that most cissexual transgender and queer folks—particularly those who hypocritically accuse transsexuals of trying to attain “passing privilege” by transitioning to our identified sex—have given little to no thought about the countless ways they frequently indulge in their own cissexual privilege. Once we understand cissexual privilege, it becomes evident that many acts of discrimination that have previously been lumped under the term “transphobia” are probably better described in terms of cissexism. Next, I will reconsider a number of such discriminatory acts, focusing on the ways that they are more specifically designed to undermine the legitimacy of trans people’s identified genders rather than targeting trans people for breaking oppositional gender norms. Trans-Exclusion Trans-exclusion is perhaps the most straightforward act of prejudice against transsexuals. Simply stated, trans-exclusion occurs when cissexuals exclude transsexuals from any spaces, organizations, or events designated for the trans person’s identified gender. Trans-exclusion may also include other instances where the trans person’s identified gender is dismissed (for example, when someone insists on calling me a “man,” or purposely uses inappropriate pronouns when addressing me). Considering how big of a social faux pas it is in our culture to misgender someone, and how apologetic people generally become upon finding out that they have made that mistake, it is difficult to view trans-exclusion—i.e., the deliberate misgendering of transsexuals—as anything other than an arrogant attempt to belittle and humiliate trans people. Trans-Objectification The objectification of transsexual bodies is very much intertwined with the cissexual obsession with “passing.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Luke has structured his opening so that we hear in the background the great stories of Samuel and David, all pointing forward to the arrival of the true king. The great poems we call the Magnificat and the Benedictus, the songs of Mary and of Zechariah (1:46–55; 1:68–79) speak powerfully of the fulfillment of God’s ancient purposes and promises in the forthcoming births of John the Baptist and Jesus himself. This theme runs right through the gospel and is emphasized in such passages as 22:37, where Jesus declares, at table with his friends, that everything about him in the scriptures “must reach its goal.” Even Jesus’s closest followers, however, cannot begin to see in the strange events of his arrest, trial, and death any kind of fulfillment. They had been living in the currently prevailing version of the Jewish story, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to end with the violent death of God’s anointed. “We were hoping,” say the two on the road to Emmaus, “that he was going to redeem Israel!” (24:21). But he obviously hadn’t. The answer, highlighted in Luke’s matchless telling both of the Emmaus story and of the larger story of Jesus as a whole, is clear: “You are so senseless!” he said to them. “So slow in your hearts to believe all the things the prophets said to you! Don’t you see? This is what had to happen: the Messiah had to suffer, and then come into his glory!” So he began with Moses, and with all the prophets, and explained to them the things about himself throughout the whole Bible. (24:25–27) In other words—as the disciples excitedly discover in going over the scene immediately afterwards—there was a new “opening of the Bible” as Jesus expounded to them the large story, which, when seen in this light, was bound to lead to the crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah as the complex event through which, indeed, Israel and the world would be redeemed. But, in parallel with this, there was an “opening of their minds” that had to happen as well (24:45). Luke is clear that the events involving Jesus are the events in which all of Israel’s previous history has been summed up and brought to its divinely appointed goal. But this is not something that casual readers can see at a glance. It is not something that Caiaphas or the Pharisees would instantly recognize when Jesus’s followers began to announce that he had been raised from the dead.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But he is much, much more. And it is that “much more” that the church has found so hard to grasp and express. Jesus the Moral Exemplar A third standard line people sometimes advance when wondering why the gospels tell their readers about what Jesus did in his public career is to suggest that he was offering an example of how to live. His utter, generous love and his fearless rebuke of wickedness and oppression make a formidable combination, especially when you add in his apparent fondness for parties, on the one hand, and prayer, on the other, and his remarkably shrewd ability to sum up situations, people, and problems in a pithy phrase or to tease out fresh meaning with a neat, telling story. What a man, we say to ourselves. Unlike many moralists then and now, his own life strikingly matched his own stringent teaching. People have sometimes accused Jesus of betraying his own standards (in cursing the fig tree, for example), but most people have accepted the gospels’ portrait of him as embodying that mixture of wisdom, love, holiness, and truth that he was urging as the proper standard for human life. The idea of Jesus as “teacher” is therefore sometimes elaborated further, and Jesus is seen as “moral exemplar.” Jesus came, many have said, to “show us the way,” to “show us how it’s done.” But that’s part of the problem—with this as a theory at all, and with this as a theory about why the gospels are what they are. As I have written elsewhere (in After You Believe ), * it isn’t actually much of an encouragement to me to read the stories about Jesus. I might as well take encouragement from watching a great athlete run a four-minute mile. Sure, it’s a fine sight, but at my age and with my weight I would be lucky to do a mile in ten minutes, let alone four. I can watch a ballet dancer on stage with great delight, not because I think I can copy him, but precisely because I know I can’t. Have you ever tried to copy Jesus, not just in his amazing generosity and kindness, but in his sharp, brightly colored little stories? Very few people throughout history have been able to tell short stories like that, so brief yet so complete. The obvious answer to this proposal, then, is that just because I see someone, even Jesus, behaving in a particular way, that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier for me to do so. Only today I was reading a testimony from a leading theological teacher who lamented the fact that her own life hadn’t matched up to the ideals she had assumed were the Christian norm. If Jesus came either to teach or to model a perfect way of life, hoping that people would then obey him and copy him, we would have to conclude that he was a striking failure. And that’s not the only point.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “My mother doesn’t accept my pit bulls. Or, she accepts them, but she doesn’t like them. Which is exactly the way she was about me as a child. She just tolerated me. But she didn’t think I was special. Also, now that I’m living at home I obviously can’t start conscious-dating anytime soon.” “Your feelings are certainly understandable. But with regard to the conscious dating, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true,” said Dr. Jude. “Of course it’s true!” neighed Chickenhorse. “You don’t know my mother. She has no boundaries. She’ll want to know exactly what’s going on, who I’m with, what family he is from, and then she’ll find some way to involve herself. So, sorry, now that I’m homeless we will have to put off dating again.” Brianne’s dating life was going no better. “Things have gone a little south with the man from OkCupid,” she murmured, adjusting one knee sock. “He sent me an email the other day letting me know that he couldn’t return to the States yet, because he was waiting for a business deal to close and temporarily was out of funds. Then he asked if I could loan him some funds.” The group gasped in unison. “I’m not sure what to do. One of the items I put on my vision board is that I want a man who is financially stable. I don’t want to compromise my vision board. I’m supposed to be manifesting. My life is simply too abundant to take on someone who is living a life of lack. But at the same time, because of that abundance, I can’t help but think that it might be the kind thing to help him out—especially if it will allow us to go on our date.” “Mmmmmm,” said Dr. Jude. “I would strongly suggest setting a boundary with him.” “Do not send the money,” said Chickenhorse. “He’s probably a catfish!” “A what?” asked Brianne. “A catfish. Like, a scammer. Someone who pretends to be someone he isn’t.” “Oh no, he’s not a scammer. I know that he is who he says he is. We’re very close.” “How long have you known him again?” I asked. “About six days,” said Brianne. We all looked at her. “It’s been a rich and rewarding six days.” Sara looked at her quizzically over the pomegranate she was peeling. But she was in no position to judge. Having almost reached her ninety days of no contact with Stan, she had had a slip. A big one. Now not only were they in contact again but they’d been seeing each other. Stan had reached out with an apologetic one-thousand-word email declaring his love. He also sent her a bouquet of carnations. Of course, Sara was allergic to them and gave them to a neighbor, but that wasn’t the point.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The strength of this position is that it really does try, to some extent at least, to pay attention to the bits of the church’s own canon that the church’s own creeds had bypassed. At its best, it produces, as we shall see, a strong “social gospel” agenda in which many of the things the gospels emphasize about Jesus—his care for the poor, the sick, the weak, and so on—are given a new energy that official “orthodoxy” has often strangely failed to supply. Its weakness is that it has neither the will nor the means to integrate that central piece, the why-did-Jesus-live bit, with the outer, creedal questions, the puzzles of Jesus’s birth, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming. Many of us, I guess, have grown up with this liberal reductionism in the air. Books with titles like Jesus Who Became Christ abound. The “Jesus Seminar,” which trumpeted its own “findings” (“Scholars say that…”) while almost all New Testament scholars in America gave it a wide berth, went down very well with Time magazine and with liberal clergy who wanted to believe something like its reductionist teaching in the first place. The idea that Jesus came to teach a new, simple, clear ethic of being nice to people, without any “dogmatic” claims or “supernatural” elements, is so deeply embedded in Western culture that one sometimes despairs, like a gardener faced with ground ivy, of ever uprooting it. To this day there seems a ready market right across the Western world for books that say that Jesus was just a good Jewish boy who would have been horrified to see a “church” set up in his name, who didn’t think of himself as “God” or even the “Son of God,” and who had no intention of dying for anyone’s sins—the church has gotten it all wrong. The authors of such books routinely proclaim themselves “neutral,” “unbiased,” “impartial,” or “independent.” As if. This reductionist project suggests, in other words, that we try the picture the other way around. Instead of privileging the creeds and screening out the middle of the gospels, let’s privilege the middle material of the gospels and screen out all that odd supernatural stuff at either end, the ideas that found their way into the creeds. This position remains hugely popular. As with Richard Dawkins and his ilk, people clearly still want, in fact they rather badly want, to be told that Jesus was just a great teacher, not the divine Savior. The greatly outworn phrase “the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith,” which has meant many different things, naturally reflects this position.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But that’s part of the problem—with this as a theory at all, and with this as a theory about why the gospels are what they are. As I have written elsewhere (in After You Believe),* it isn’t actually much of an encouragement to me to read the stories about Jesus. I might as well take encouragement from watching a great athlete run a four-minute mile. Sure, it’s a fine sight, but at my age and with my weight I would be lucky to do a mile in ten minutes, let alone four. I can watch a ballet dancer on stage with great delight, not because I think I can copy him, but precisely because I know I can’t. Have you ever tried to copy Jesus, not just in his amazing generosity and kindness, but in his sharp, brightly colored little stories? Very few people throughout history have been able to tell short stories like that, so brief yet so complete. The obvious answer to this proposal, then, is that just because I see someone, even Jesus, behaving in a particular way, that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier for me to do so. Only today I was reading a testimony from a leading theological teacher who lamented the fact that her own life hadn’t matched up to the ideals she had assumed were the Christian norm. If Jesus came either to teach or to model a perfect way of life, hoping that people would then obey him and copy him, we would have to conclude that he was a striking failure. And that’s not the only point. Again and again in the gospels we find that Jesus is not, in fact, holding himself up as an example to follow or copy. Yes, there are times when he does say something like that. He is taking up his cross, and his followers are to take up theirs. And he expects them to share his faith and to pray in the way that he himself seems to have prayed. Ultimately, he tells them that as the Father sent him, so he is sending them. So there is an element of imitation involved, as Paul speaks of in his letters; indeed, Paul tells the Corinthians to copy him because he is copying the Messiah (1 Cor. 11:1). All that is true. But it is held within a framework where Jesus is not simply “an example to copy,” but the one who is doing something new that will change the way things are for everybody else. Where he is going, he tells them, they cannot come. He is to be arrested, but they must escape. His task is unique. It cannot be reduced to that of the great man showing his followers how it’s done. Like the other suggestions we are reviewing, this one has a modicum of truth, but fails to come anywhere close to a satisfying account of the whole. Jesus the Perfect Sacrifice

• From How God Became King (2012)

  To this we shall return. The last point already looks ahead to the second speaker in our sound system. Israel’s story was not just the story of a people. It was the story of a God, the one the Israelites believed was God, the creator of the world, the God of Israel. 5 The Story of Jesus as the Story of Israel’s God T HE FIRST SOUND SPEAKER needed to be turned up from nearly silent to its proper volume, or indeed to be turned on after being switched off altogether. People have tried to read the story of Jesus as though the only thing it had to say to the Jews of Jesus’s day was that they were wrong. They were wrong about God, about God’s coming kingdom, about the way to salvation. They were wrong about the idea of there being “a story of salvation” in the first place. No, “the time is fulfilled.” The gospel story is the climax of Israel’s story, however surprising and unexpected it may have been. Distorted Noise The second speaker contributing to what we hear the gospels saying is the one that enables us to hear the story of Jesus as the story of Israel’s God coming back to his people as he had always promised. But this time the problem is the opposite one. This speaker hasn’t been turned down, or off. Instead, it’s been turned up so loud that the noise it makes has become distorted and has drowned out much of the rest of the music. In much of Western Christianity down through the years, and particularly in the rather noisy conservative Christianity which has reacted (not unnaturally) to the skepticism of the Enlightenment, we have been so concerned to let the gospels tell us that the story of Jesus is the story of God incarnate that we have been unable to listen more carefully to the evangelists telling us which God they are talking about and what exactly it is that this God is now doing. We are quite happy to hear about the “God” of Western imagination, less ready to hear about the God of Israel. We are quite happy to hear that “Jesus is God,” in some sense. That, we have assumed, is what the gospels are telling us. We are less ready to hear that the God of Israel had promised to do certain specific things, in particular to establish his sovereign rule over Israel and the world, and that Jesus was embodying this intention. Within the long and sad story of Israel, the story of Israel’s God is not simply, as you might think from some Christian language, the story of a distant God who wants to save people from sin and death and is trying various ways of doing so (most of which seem unfruitful).

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Many movements of social reform at various points in the nineteenth century bear witness to this spirit, not least of course the pressure that led to the abolition of slavery. And then, around the start of the twentieth century, the movement known as the “social gospel” made its mark, not exactly by ignoring the “cloak” of ancient dogma, but by concentrating instead on the actions of Jesus and the command to his followers to behave in the same way. Matthew 25:31–46 has regularly been highlighted in this connection: “When you did it to one of the least significant of my brothers and sisters here,” declares Jesus about the hungry who need feeding, the prisoners who need visiting, and so on, “you did it to me.” And “When you didn’t do it…, you didn’t do it for me.” The Achilles heel of the “social gospel” movement, however, was that many of its enthusiasts were, like the critical scholars of the time, focusing on the center rather than the edges, and so misreading the center itself. In trying to have a Jesus who cared for the poor without needing to be the incarnate son of God or to die for the sins of the world and be raised bodily thereafter, they falsified (so we could argue) even the bits they were highlighting. The problem with all this, however, is not merely at the level of theory (“How come you’ve taken some bits of the gospel story, but left out other bits?”). The problem is that, a century after the “social gospel” was at its high-water mark, the world, including the Western world, still seems to be a place of great wickedness. Greed and corruption, oppression of the poor, violence and degradation, war and genocide continue unchecked. It isn’t only the Jesus of popular imagination, then, who expected something dramatic to happen and was disappointed. The “social gospel” may have helped to clean up some slums, to reduce working hours for women and children in factories, and so on. Wonderful. But homelessness and virtual slave labor are still realities in the modern Western world, never mind elsewhere. Has anything really changed? Faced with this puzzle, it is fair to ask: What difference might it make if the “middle” of the gospels was integrated with the “outer” bits? What would it be like if the cloak was no longer empty? Did Jesus Talk About Himself?

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Another article, “They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?,” attempted to make the several-decade-old medical practice of puberty delay appear “questionable,” but in the process disseminated so much misinformation that WPATH released a statement to correct the record. 26 Perhaps the most influential of these “just asking questions” articles is The Atlantic ’s July/August 2018 cover story, “When Children Say They’re Trans.” 27 While the article interviews people on “all sides” of the issue, it is frontloaded with cautionary tales of kids who briefly considered themselves trans but never actually transitioned and three individuals who did transition but later de transitioned. We aren’t introduced to a single happily transitioned teen until three-quarters of the way through this twelve-thousand-word article. A whole section of the article is devoted to “social contagion,” which is introduced as one of “the reasons [parents] question their children’s desire to transition.” Yet the article never disclosed that some of the parents interviewed were associated with 4thWaveNow, the website that originated and promoted that theory. It also omitted that the detransitioned women interviewed also had connections to anti-trans organizations. People who detransition fall along many different life trajectories: some were assigned male at birth and others female; some detransition due to societal transphobia or pressure from family members, while others do so because of shifts in their identity or because transitioning didn’t feel right for them; some no longer identify as trans, while others simply stop taking hormones, adopt different identities (e.g., nonbinary), and/or continue to participate in trans communities; some detransition permanently, while others may retransition at a later date. 28 But this diversity is never shared in “just asking questions” stories, as these stories are not actually concerned about the well-being of people who detransition. If they were truly concerned, they would examine the pervasive transphobia that forces some people to detransition and that complicates the lives of those who are unable to “pass” as cisgender after they detransition. And they would highlight the need for more accessible and competent healthcare for people of all genders, rather than favoring binary outcomes and identities that are legible to the cisgender majority. The gender affirmative model, with its individualized approach and support for all gender-diverse outcomes, comes closest to achieving this. But no, the purpose of “just asking questions” stories is to render trans identities and gender-affirming care as “questionable.” And there is one particular detransition narrative that is best suited to this task: a naive (and thus readily misled) cisgender person who mistakenly transitioned and now fully regrets it. Elsewhere, I have called this the “cisgender people turned transgender” trope. 29 While most people who detransition do not fit this narrative, a small subset appear to.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  This influx of authentic trans voices and respectful trans depictions in the media did not exist when I was writing Whipping Girl . And it is clearly a sign of progress, albeit one that comes with certain limitations. As I write this preface in the wake of Caitlyn Jenner’s recent mega-public coming out and transition, I am impressed by all the kind words of support and praise she has received, while simultaneously unsurprised by the constant pronoun slip-ups and references to “Bruce,” the relentless use of “before and after” pictures in the coverage of her Vanity Fair cover story, and the scenes of her putting on make up used in promotional clips for her new show I Am Cait —these are all transgender tropes that I discuss over the course of this book. One way to make sense of this discrepancy is to say that while transphobia (i.e., fear of and aversion to trans people) is on the decline, cissexism still runs rampant and persists in the minds of many people who consider themselves to be trans-friendly or trans allies. Hopefully, Whipping Girl will continue to be a resource for those who wish to move beyond superficial expressions of tolerance or acceptance, and instead are willing to recognize and relinquish the many double standards that negatively impact transgender people. Another major shift in the last decade has been an increased acknowledgement of differences among transgender people. As I discuss in the final chapter, “The Future of Queer/Trans Activism,” by the early-to-mid-’00s, a very specific conceptualization of “transgender” seemed to be coalescing in the minds of many people. Rather than simply being a broad coalition of gender diverse people (as originally intended), “transgender” seemed to increasingly signify a particular aesthetic and political identity, and a set of shared values and preferred ways of being, that favored certain gender-variant individuals over others. Whipping Girl is most certainly a reaction to that trend, as I tried to explain how this monolithic view of “transgender” ignored the very different experiences, obstacles, and perspectives of both transsexuals and people on the trans female/feminine spectrum. But I was not the only person who was concerned with this growing presumption of transgender homogeneity. The mid-to-late-’00s also saw an increase in discussions about how racism, classism, and ableism intersect with the transgender experience, and how trans people who exist outside of queer communities, urban centers, and/or the United States, often had very different takes on trans activism and gender variance. In an essay I wrote the year after Whipping Girl was released, I christened this movement “second-wave transgender activism”—analogous to a similar increase in discussions about difference that occurred during the rise of third-wave feminism—although (perhaps for the best) that moniker never caught on.