In the Margins

A Transgender Man's Journey with Scripture

Shannon T. L. Kearns

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467463072
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Moving the conversation beyond transgender inclusion to demonstrate the unique and vital theological insights transgender Christians can provide the church.

Father Shannon Kearns is familiar with liminal spaces. He's lived in them his whole life. And while his experience as a transgender man has often made it difficult for him to fit in—especially in the context of Christianity—it has also shaped his perspective in important ways on complicated, gender-transgressing aspects of theology and Scripture.

In the Margins weaves stories from Shannon's life into reflections on well-known biblical narratives—such as Jacob wrestling with the divine, Rahab and the Israelite spies, Ezekiel and the dry bones, and the transfiguration of Jesus. In each chapter, Shannon shows how stories have helped him make sense of his own identity, and how those same stories can unlock the transformative power of faith for those willing to listen with an open mind and stand alongside him in the in-between.

CHAPTER 1

Eunuchs: Beyond Boundaries

In elementary school, my best friend was Chris, the boy who lived across the street from me. We were the same age, and in the summers we would play outside from sunup to sundown. We rode bikes and went swimming; we spied on the neighbors and trekked through the woods. There were days of epic mud fights and endless baseball games with a dizzying array of complexity and “ghost” runners since there were only two of us.

We created worlds and inhabited them—mysteries involving rocks we found in the stream, a day-long fantasy where we played imagined characters, and conspiracy theories about neighbors who we thought never left their houses. As a child, I had no deep understanding of gender; I was simply myself. I loved my dolls and my stuffed animals, but I also loved my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and my Micro Machines. I collected baseball cards and loved puffy stickers. I wore dresses to church on Sundays and then came home and put on my shorts and t-shirts and ran around in the yard and woods. There seemed to be no disconnect between myself and the world.

I felt at one with myself and everything around me. I would go hunting with my grandfather and then play parent and teacher with my dolls. I would play with Chris outside all day and then come home and read Babysitters Club books until it was time to fall asleep. I didn’t have a sense that anything I was doing was gendered.

There were occasional moments where gender would confine me: wanting to cut my hair short and not being allowed; quitting T-ball and then not signing up for a team for years because I wanted to play real baseball, not softball; continually asking if I could wear pants to church “just this once” and being told to put on a skirt. Sometimes, adults would ask me questions about my appearance, such as, “Why do you wear that baseball cap all the time?” When I would reply, “I just like it,” they’d respond knowingly, “Oh, you’ll grow out of it.” I would laugh and then run outside to play again.

I’ve never been a morning person. My most active mental times, even as a kid, happened late in the evening. It took forever to get my brain to settle down enough for me to sleep. And yet I had a strict 8:30 p.m. bedtime. I would get into bed and my mind would race and I would stare at the ceiling begging for sleep. Early on, I learned to tell myself stories to help pass the time until I could drift off.

I imagined myself as a professional baseball player making the World Series–winning triple play. I imagined myself as a soldier on the battlefield in the army saving everyone in my platoon. I was always the hero; I was also, almost always, a boy. Sometimes in my stories, I would tell myself that I was born a boy; in others, I had somehow turned into a boy. These stories were a way of making space for myself to inhabit a world I felt I belonged in. I never told anyone about my stories. These stories were so vivid they sometimes felt more real than the life I was living. I would drift into them on the bus on my way to a school where I often felt out of place. I had friends, but I was always kind of on the outskirts. The elementary school I went to was affiliated with a strict independent Baptist church. Their rules made my evangelical church look like an anything goes free for all. The Baptists had rules about everything: from hemlines and the importance of boys wearing belts, to outlawing denim and prohibiting the use of drums in worship. This is a school that, well into the 1990s, was still administering corporal punishment to their students.

Even though I was a devout Christian who went to church, I didn’t go to the church affiliated with the school. I felt their rules were a little over the top. I wore shorts under the mandatory skirts so I could play better during recess, and when I was alone on the bus on the way home, the last to be dropped off, I would take off my skirt and enjoy the freedom of just being in my shorts. I felt out of step with my classmates, so I retreated into books and my imagination. I realized the world of stories gave me the escape I was longing for. I gave myself what my mom called a “play name.” It was a masculine name I used when I envisioned myself as a baseball player or army guy. I used it as a pen name when I wrote stories. I didn’t know at the time it was also my father’s first name (he died when I was very young and I never knew him), but I claimed Timothy as my play name. Years later, when I transitioned, I took it as one of my middle names, a way of honoring both my dad and the boyhood I had tried to carve for myself.

When I was a child, our church put on annual musicals for the congregation. Every year I was excited to audition and find out what role I would get. One time, we did a musical called All We Like Sheep where we played—you guessed it—sheep who spent a lot of time talking about how good our shepherd was. It was a little on the nose, but cute kids in sheep costumes are always a hit with adults.

The year I remember most fondly was the one when we performed a Psalty musical. For those readers who didn’t grow up immersed in the very strange pop culture world of 1990s American evangelicalism, Psalty was a cartoon character in a series of children’s programming. He was a giant blue hymnal (i.e., psalter) that walked and talked. He had a hymnal family. An adult from our congregation and his daughter created and dressed in these elaborate, giant hymnbook costumes.

There was a series of musicals written for churches that featured Psalty, and the one we were doing that particular year was Psalty the Singing Songbook’s Hymnological Adventure through Time. In this musical, the giant blue songbook took a group of kids time traveling to different ages where hymns were being written. The musical covered everything from the temple songs of the Levitical priests, to the future King David as a child turning poetry into music, to Fanny Crosby writing in the 1850s.

I was chosen to play King David, a male character. I was thrilled. I got to sing a solo in Hebrew and lead a dance circle. Plus, I got to pretend to be a boy! I loved every second of it. I wore my long hair in a tight braid with a headband covering it. I was dressed in a white tunic and I felt so cool. While some people teased me about playing a boy, I let that roll off my shoulders because I was so happy. I was doing what I loved in a role that felt like me. It was the sense of ease I had in this role that I didn’t have in my “real life” that made it feel so special.

Things started to shift when I turned twelve. I was less and less comfortable in the skirts I had to wear for my conservative Christian school and church on Sundays. I would wear shorts underneath “for playing on the jungle gym,” but really it was because shorts felt more comfortable. I didn’t know what to do with my growing body, and getting my period terrified me. I was embarrassed to talk about bodily things. I wanted to disappear.

Our church celebrated communion quarterly. We did it so infrequently because it was a huge production that took most of the evening. We would all come to church and gather together for prayer and singing. Then it was time for the part I hated most, the foot washing. The women would go to one room and the men would go to another. I always felt out of place during this sorting, though I couldn’t have told you why at the time. Everyone would take off their socks and shoes and bowls of water would be passed from one person to the next. When the bowl came to you, you put your feet in it, and the person next to you got down on their knees and washed your feet and dried them with the towel wrapped around their waist. Then you would both stand and embrace, the towel would be passed to you, and you would get on your knees and wash the feet of the person next to you. During this entire process hymns would be sung from memory.

I was terrified of the foot washing. I was always glad it came first before communion so we could get it out of the way. Even as we drove to church my stomach would be in knots. I didn’t want to do the foot washing. I would often try to get out of it, but everyone participated. I didn’t like being barefoot. I didn’t like people touching my feet. I didn’t like touching someone else’s feet. This wasn’t some kind of weird foot phobia; it was the intimacy that scared me. This sense of being seen by other people, being touched and held—I didn’t want it. I tried to make sure I only washed my mother’s feet, which seemed easier somehow. She would roll her eyes as I tried to position myself to the correct side of her so I would wash her feet.

Once the foot washing was complete, we would sit around long tables and share a full meal, family style. I generally found the meals to be fine, but we weren’t supposed to have causal conversation. We were supposed to talk about what it would be like when we were all in heaven together, to think about eternity, and to talk about our spiritual lives. I mostly just wanted to eat and talk about how the Phillies were doing, so those meals got pretty boring. I always left feeling a little hungry, though, like there was never enough food. My mom would remind me this was a spiritual symbol: we weren’t supposed to be gorging ourselves on food. The explanation didn’t make my stomach feel any better.

After dinner we would listen to a sermon and Scripture reading about the importance of the bread and the cup. We would be reminded to make ourselves right with God, because if we took part in communion with sin in our lives, we would die. As a kid with an active imagination and a pretty firm idea that God was ready to smite me at any given moment, the quiet time of prayer before we took communion consisted of me praying frantically that God would forgive me for whatever I’d done wrong, even the things I didn’t know were wrong, or the wrong things I didn’t remember doing. We were given time to go and apologize to people in the congregation we might have wronged. I kept wondering if someone was waiting for me to apologize to them or if I had slighted someone without even realizing it. I took the bread and the cup and waited for lightning to strike, sure that I had somehow prayed incorrectly or been living in sin.

When I recount the stories in an orderly progression like this, it seems clear I was grappling with my gender identity from a young age. I can point to all of the places where I violated gender norms and where my behavior didn’t fit the roles set out for me. Someone trying to make a case against transgender identity could do the same thing with this same set of stories and point to how I played with dolls, how I never said I was a boy out loud, and how I didn’t mind wearing dresses when I was small. The arguments over when I knew and if I was born transgender don’t appeal to me, though; neither do arguments about nature versus nurture. What I do find interesting is how I dealt with growing up in strictly gendered spaces without the language of gender.

I had no idea transgender people even existed. Since I didn’t have that word in my vocabulary, I don’t remember ever thinking that I might be transgender. I was definitely confused, because I knew something about my body felt off to me. Some days I felt like I was trying to come out of my own skin, that it was holding me in a shape that didn’t match my soul, but I had no language about gender or gender variance. My world was rigidly divided into male and female. Men did “manly” things like lead and preach and build stuff. Women did “womanly” things like dress modestly and care for children and work in the church kitchen. The two spheres were mostly separate except for the strange land that was marriage.

Men went off for their men’s weekends, hunting and doing whatever else men did when they got together. Women stayed home or threw showers for weddings and babies. I didn’t get to go on the hunting weekends. I hated the showers because they were unbearably boring to me. Plus, I felt nervous around all of these women who seemed to understand with such clarity how to move through the world in their bodies. They seemed comfortable talking about marriage and babies. They were happy to be surrounded by pink things. Each woman talked about her husband- or baby-to-be with shyness, but also with a deep joy.

Years later I realized that some (most?) of my discomfort came from these strictly gendered spaces. Even before I had words to express myself, I had the sense I wasn’t sure I belonged in these spaces. Being in a space where I didn’t belong yet was also required to be vulnerable felt wrong somehow.

My sense of gender growing up is conflicted; on the one hand, outside and at play either alone or with my friend Chris, I had a sense of myself as ungendered and free. At church and school I felt out of step but didn’t know why. Had you asked me then I wouldn’t have pointed to gender as the root of my unease, but looking back, it’s clearly the culprit.

What I do know is growing up without language about gender was difficult. I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling, so I simply didn’t. I felt both a sense of fearlessness in being myself and also carried shame about feeling like I was failing to measure up. I didn’t understand the shame, though. I just knew I wasn’t like the other girls.

As I grew older my gender difference became more pronounced. I started to get more grief for being different, but it was almost always subtle. No one, at least in the beginning, directly asked me about my sexuality or gender presentation. There were simply gentle nudges: I was told I should wear a dress, asked if I wanted to grow my hair longer, queried about whether there were any boys I was interested in. No one said I was failing at being a girl, but I was taught the Bible was clear on everything, particularly how men and women were supposed to live in the world. I knew I was not meeting the expectations that were “clearly” laid out in Scripture. It turns out, though, like much of what I was taught about the Bible growing up, that isn’t true. There is a whole world of gender complexity and expansiveness in our Scriptures. You just have to know where to look! Had I known then what I know now about gender and Scripture, I would have had a much different experience growing up.

In Sunday school and church services during my childhood, I never noticed how often eunuchs are talked about throughout Scripture, which is probably because I didn’t know to look for them or understand how transgressive and radical they were.

When the Israelites were forced into exile by the Babylonians, some of their men were taken and forcibly castrated (2 Kings 20:18).¹ These castrated people were called eunuchs, and many eunuchs were placed to serve in the courts of their captors. Their castration meant they wouldn’t be a threat to the paternity lines of the elite.

Eunuchs were considered to be ungendered; they were no longer men, but they weren’t women either. They were their own class of gender. While it’s impossible to make a direct correlation to transgender and nonbinary people of today due to their forced castration, eunuchs are one of the closest comparisons we have. When we look at how people understood and treated eunuchs in the past, the parallels with transgender and nonbinary people are hard to ignore. Eunuchs weren’t treated as castrated men; they were treated as a whole new gender. Not men, but also not women. In between. They moved through royal palaces freely, slipping between the men’s areas and the women’s areas.

Even though these eunuchs were in places of power and living more comfortable lives than the hard laborers, those places of power must have been cold comfort. They were now cut off from having biological children. Maybe in the time of exile they didn’t much care, because survival was top of mind. They were alive; they would deal with the implications of castration later. When Israel was sent into exile, the people had to figure out the answers to several questions. What decisions would they make in order to save their lives? What kind of compromises would God forgive? How would they keep their faith alive when they no longer had the temple to worship in and when those in the priestly class were scattered or killed?

When exile ended, the Israelites had to deal with the fallout. The texts that we have in our Bibles today mostly come from the post-exilic period when the newly reunited community was trying to figure out how to recover from decisions made in exile. There were different ideas about how to create a community again, and we have these arguments from within the community recorded in Scripture. In the book of Deuteronomy, the focus is on purity (see especially Deut. 22–23). The idea was that exile had been caused by a community filled with impurities. The Israelites had become too much like the nations around them and if they were to survive, if they were to become a thriving nation again, they would need to regain their sense of communal purity. So, rules about who was “in” and who was “out” were created. Rules were established about who could worship and who couldn’t.²

The creation of a class of ungendered or third gender people in exile was a complication for the people of Israel. From the very beginning of the Israelite people, the focus had been on procreation and family. For a small and often oppressed nation, numbers mattered. Having children meant that you were increasing the population, but it also meant that you would have people to care for you in your old age. Children were everything. Eunuchs, those whose testicles had been crushed, were now prevented access to the temple (see Deut. 23:1–3).

The eunuchs were being sent home from exile, but they were no longer able to be a part of the community in the same way. What a blow. Insult added to injury. Where did eunuchs belong in this new Israel? Where could they belong? These questions were about more than just religious observance; they were now also having to face the reality that there would be no families or offspring...