(Trans)Formations: Religion and the Making of Trans* Identities

Abstract

Gender, transness, and religion have long been sites of innovation and imagination through which human beings have sought to both imagine the unimaginable and make the unimaginable real. Through three case studies centering different trans* identity categories, communities, and movements across the latter half of the twentieth century, this thesis explores the ways in which many trans* people in America have historically harnessed religious language and frameworks in their attempts to understand, explain, organize around, and reimagine the world through their transness on their own terms. Whether in the Christian religious individualisms of the transvestite movement, the religious pluralism and community care practices of the transsexual movement, or the emergence and construction of the distinctly religious Two Spirit category, (Trans)Formations shows how various trans* people have drawn on diverse religious traditions, expressions, and innovations in order to theorize gender and transness, build and protect trans* communities, and pursue trans* liberation.