Am I a Gender Gnostic?

What actually is the body and the "self" when you're trans?

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I’m aware that I illicit a strong reaction in people. Like most human beings I am a bizarre mish mash of identities and life experiences and concepts, but I think I have a tendency to forgo filtering quite as much of it as is generally expected in polite society. But there are two groups that seem to have quite strong reactions to me and my work.

First of course, we have the old school New Atheists. If you have been here since the beginning you know this, this is why Transing Boundaries was started to begin with. Apparently pointing out that mainstream transphobia is deeply rooted in Christian theology was a crime against science and reason. According to them I am just as bad as the crusaders and violent missionaries, proselytizing the “religion of trans/woke” and should be swiftly thrown out of the state-church separation movement.

But we also have the Radical Traditionalist Catholics (and other Christian conservatives but mostly RadTrads). Despite the fact that most of them converted to Catholicism thirty seconds ago, they despise the fact that my (admittedly complicated and on-going) life long journey with Catholicism passed down to me from generations of my family has resulted in a feminist and leftist politic that embraces queerness, bodily autonomy, and rejects the hoarding of wealth and the capitalist mindset. They at best view me as a conversion project that will earn them their “fixed a tranny” merit badge in Saint Scouts and more frequently view me as someone that is better off dead so as not to “groom” any children by living a happy and fulfilled trans life.

Bizarrely, both of these groups agree that I am somehow destroying “western civilization” by wanting basic human rights as a trans person.

I’ve gotten a plethora of insults and threats from both of these groups, but there is one term that has been thrown around that always makes me laugh: gnosticism. Yes, one of these two groups loves to call me a gnostic, because I am trans and because of my approach to gender politics. But bizarrely, it’s not the one you’d think if you have even a passing knowledge of gnosticism.

It’s the New Atheist camp that really loves to throw this word around at me, and it’s one of my favorite moments of accidental comedy.

Because I’m not a gnostic – far from it actually. Top tier comedy, truly.

…

I can sense your silence from here, it’s ok. Gnosticism is one of those weird niche things that I probably only think is more common knowledge because of the circles I tend to operate within. So, here’s the quickest 101 I can possibly give on an incredibly complex school of philosophy/spiritual thought. We’re going to skip a lot of detail and nuance here and I’m going to try and give you just the absolute bare bones knowledge.

“Gnostic” comes from the Greek word “gnôsis,” meaning  knowledge, or insight. Its origins are unclear. It thrived in the first and second centuries C.E., but has roots as far back as second century B.C.E. Gnostic themes appeared in the Corpus Hermeticum (a collection of 17 Greek writings whose authorship is traditionally attributed to the legendary Hellenistic figure Hermes Trismegistus, a combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.), the Jewish Apocalyptic writings, and Platonic philosophy. It’s not inherently Christian, though gnostic thought represents a sort of “road not travelled” by the early Christian Church, having been declared heresy by the early Church Fathers in the second century C.E., as it was somewhat popular in an era where Christian doctrine was brand new and rapidly developing.

There’s a fair amount of diversity in gnostic thought, but at the most fundamental level, the gnostics believe that material existence was essentially a cosmic mistake. In the gnostic mythos, the God-head figure (the Monad) emanates many different aspects, including Sophia (Wisdom). Sophia, depending on the source, is reckless, rebellious, or naive, and sought to actualize her innate potential for creation without the approval of her partner/divine consort (also a part of the God-head), and in her hubris, created the “Demiurge” who then created the material realm, and, ignorant of the true cosmos around it, declared himself the one “true” god. Human souls are the “sparks” that fell from Sophia in this mistake, and are trapped in the material world until they regain direct knowledge of the higher divine world and the true cosmos beyond the Demiurge. Once that direct knowledge is achieved, human souls are thought to be simply reintegrated into the God-head, but until then, are left to suffer in the material world.

In the Christian version of gnosticism, Jesus is thought to essentially be a messenger, sent to provide humanity with the direct knowledge of the divine necessary to be reintegrated into the higher cosmos. Salvation comes not through the rejection of and repentance from sin, but from the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment. You are saved, in the gnostic thought, by realizing the self that you perceive and experience is not your true self, and that the world you are in and of is a mere imitation of the reality of the heavens. Basically, you are not you, you are merely a small piece of something larger that only exists independently as a consequence of cosmic hubris, and the only way to escape the cycle of material suffering is to be reintegrated into that larger cosmic entity.

If you’re confused, that’s ok, this is a deeply confusing topic that took me quite a while to even grasp the basics of.

Now I’m sure you’re sitting there thinking “ok that’s all well and good, but what does that have to do with being trans?”

Best as I can understand, when followers of the New Atheist movement refer to me as a “gnostic” they are further condensing this topic down to “you are not your body, but something apart from it.” Because my gender identity does not align with the social expectations associated with my genitals, they seem to think that I am something other than my body. To be fair, I do believe that what someone “is” is more complicated than simply what their body is, but that alone is not gnosticism.

Some of this probably has to do with the “born in the wrong body” narrative. This phrasing has, for a long time, been a shorthand for dysphoric trans people to describe gender dysphoria and legitimize our distress and need for transition in a cis-normative society. This has, in many ways, been effective. I myself, as a dysphoric trans person, have used it in the past. But it does us a disservice in many ways, by making the mainstream conversation about what is “wrong” with us, or reducing our experiences down to something medically wrong with us, and not the complicated series of social, psychological, and medical factors that characterize trans existence. 

Frequently you hear from practicing Christian transphobes respond to this by saying that transness is invalid because “God does not make mistakes.” Similarly it seems, many secular transphobes say that “biology does not make mistakes.” For both groups, the problem with trans people is that we are rejecting what we were “made” to be, whether that is by a divine creator or by the random processes of biology. We are “abominations” in need of fixing and realignment with the destiny written onto our bodies at birth, and any internal sense of self is flawed and incorrect, because these higher forces already made this determination. As I have pointed out before, it is incredibly difficult to find a meaningful distinction between the role of “God” and the role of “biology” in these types of conversations.

Both groups completely eschew the notion that maybe, just maybe, transness is not a rejection of one’s physical self, but an acceptance. And I include the physical body in that notion, even amongst those of us who seek out medical transition through hormones and surgery.

Since starting my medical transition journey, I have never felt more tied to my physical body. My relationship to it has been deeply changed. Through hormone replacement therapy, yes, I have changed my body to align with my internal sense of self, but that is not a rejection. As a nonbinary person my body will never be perfectly androgynous – one of the oddities that differentiate my transition from that of a binary trans person. By addressing the things that make me the most dysphoric, however, I’ve come to realize that total androgyny is not even my personal end goal. Transition has allowed me to exist within my body more solidly, without the dread and anxiety that I previously had.

This is a very different experience than I think a lot of cis people imagine transition to be. While yes, I do love the changes I’ve made, I love the things I haven’t as well. The goal is not a facsimile of a cisgender body, something that again is impossible for me and leads many people to question why I would choose to undergo medical transition. The goal is a body that I can actually experience life, fully and totally in without the cloud of dysphoria obscuring the experience. My biological sex and gender identity are two different things, yes, but they are both constantly interacting and interrelating. My transness does not make my body irrelevant to my sense of self, it just makes my body a trans body. And some trans people may disagree with that take and that’s ok, we aren’t a monolith. But I think I am circling some kind of bigger idea here.

While there is some evidence that shows there are biological processes that underpin transness, I don’t necessarily find them necessary. After all, plenty of aspects of our sense of self are unrelated to random biological functions. My favorite color isn’t biological, I just like purple. My preference for non-fiction books over fiction isn’t biological. I can certainly tell you that my ability to cook is not an inherited trait as I didn’t realize that vegetables could actually be enjoyable until I moved out of my parents house and learned that you don’t have to consume them as warmed up, unseasoned canned mush. The fact that I get activated like a sleeper agent when I see a marching band might be biological, actually, (my mom was also a band person,) but frankly is probably more pavlovian than anything else.

So that leaves the question: am I a “Gender Gnostic”?

No. I’m not a gnostic of any stripe. I think it's a fascinating concept, but I've never bought into the idea that we are something wholly separate from our bodies or the experience of being in the world that we actively perceive.

I just think that it is unhelpful to try and reduce the depth of human experience to any singular phenomenon, whether that be some notion of “God” or “biology” or psychology or chemistry or anything else. Nor do I think it is particularly helpful to determine a person’s entire destiny based on a notation about what genitals they present at birth, regardless of what force you think gave them said genitals. And I certainly don’t think we should limit the knowledge we use to create law and to govern society to any single field. Human identities are deeply and infinitely complex, so why would we not ultimately need multiple frameworks through which to understand the concept of the “self?”

I don’t claim to have any ultimate answers to the questions about what makes you, “you.” My approach is one of many, and has absolutely changed as I’ve gotten older and studied philosophy more in depth. It will continue to change throughout my lifetime, as should most people’s understanding of the “self” I think. Humans have been grappling with the very notion of “who are we” since we evolved to have the ability to conceptualize ourselves as wholly unique individuals. I’m not even really all that interested in the actual answer if I’m being honest. The process of figuring it out is far more interesting.

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Kat (they/them) is a queer lawyer, activist, and theorist focusing on the intersections of law, queerness, religion, and politics, with the occasional bit of theology, political theory, and legal theory thrown in for good measure. Originally from rural southern Indiana, Kat earned their B.A. in Political Science in 2019 before continuing on to earn their J.D. in 2022, both from Indiana University- Bloomington. A former Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Kat has spent their professional career fighting for the separation of church and state and LGBTQIA+ rights. Outside of work you can find them at a ballet or contemporary dance class, sipping on dirty shirleys at their local gay bar, or playing video games with their cat, Merlin.