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Keywords: androgyny, nonbinary, religious studies, transgender, transmisogyny
I respond with gratitude to Max Strassfelds essay, which lays critical, unprecedented groundwork for "transing" religious studies. Strassfeld unpacks and refuses the neoliberal logic that would render trans bodies and "religion" as mutually incompatible and shows how the bodies of transwomen in particular are made to bear the impossible burden of that supposed incompatibility. In a crucial concluding paragraph, Strassfeld states,
If we accept the underlying assumption that religion and trans bodies are in some way mutually incompatible, we inherit a deeply impoverished discipline and collude with the same logics that govern the regulation of trans bodies; the creation of publics as white, able-bodied, and sex-segregated spaces; and cosmologies that write trans people out of existence. We collude with the logics of transmisogyny that render transwomen monsters, or jokes, and always something less than human. (52-53)
I appreciate Strassfelds refusal to look away from how strands of feminism- particularly those articulated by Janice Raymond and Mary Daly-have contributed to the dehumanization of transwomen. In a historical moment when attacks against trans people in general, transwomen more particularly, and transwomen of color most of all, are proliferating from both "obliquely and explicitly" (41) conservative Christian contexts, it may be tempting to overlook or downplay this specifically feminist anti-trans strand. But as Strassfeld has convincingly shown, we ignore the shared logics of trans exclusionary public accommodation legislation and this form of feminist transmisogyny at our peril.1
In this response, I seek to build upon Strassfeld's essay to illumine an additional way in which Daly's and Raymond's work has contributed to broadly anti-trans and specifically transmisogynistic conditions, attending to the construction and critique of "androgyny" in their overlapping work.2 Put simply, their anti-androgyny arguments extended their anti-trans critique, functioning as a barely veiled form of transmisogyny. I consider this pattern important to highlight for at least three reasons. First, since the categories of "androgyny" and "the androgyne" historically have been significant for religious studies, the project of "transing religious studies," as Strassfeld describes it, should critically examine how this term has functioned. What roles might the uses and interpretations of "androgyny" and the "androgyne" have played in what Strassfeld calls the cisgendering of religious studies? Needless to say, my brief...