Walk as Children of Light

For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly, but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,

“Sleeper, awake!
    Rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”
(Ephesians 5:8-14, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

In a recent message, I mentioned Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. While I find much of his critique of modern society compelling, I disagree with his hostility to what he calls “the transgender moment.” He doesn’t just oppose the campaign for transgender rights; in fact, he doesn’t consider it a civil rights issue at all. 

Instead, he regards the existence of transgender people as “the latest stage of modernity’s long rebellion against nature,” tying it to broad philosophical trends he sees stretching back nearly three centuries, powered by “the twin engines of cultural revolution and advanced technology.” The Machine promises people they can become more than human but, he warns, it really seeks to exploit humanity to perpetuate its own growth. Sort of like how everyone in the Matrix films gets turned into batteries, except not literally.

I reject that view of transgender people, and I hope you do, too.

I do see the Machine (or Empire, or late-stage neoliberal capitalism, or whatever you want to call it) as akin to the “principalities and powers” warned about a little later in Ephesians (6:12). As such, I believe that it does aggressively exploit humanity for its own ends. But I don’t think that has much, if anything, to do with the existence of trans folk. 

I take many of my cues on this subject from an essay Daniel Walden wrote for the Catholic magazine Commonweal in 2021, “Gender, Sex, and Other Nonsense.” Walden directly confronts the shortcomings of much of the contemporary conversation surrounding gender and sexual identity, and urges people to do better on a theological basis: In the same way that we might wish to speak accurately about God, we should also wish to speak accurately about those made in God’s image.

For Walden, that begins with listening to other people and what they share with us about their own lives. “In disclosing ourselves we also disclose the work of God,” he writes:

“To tell other people what our lives mean is to draw them deeper into ourselves, and to listen to what someone tells us their life means is to be drawn deeper into the mystery of both their humanity and humanity’s maker. To impose upon another the meaning of their life is, by contrast, a kind of pretense at divinity. It is to tell another person something that only God can tell them, to claim the ultimate interpretive authority over experiences that do not belong to us.”

Do you imagine you can speak to someone’s condition better than God can?

When someone tells us “I am a man” or “I am a woman,” and we think we know more than they do about that, we are rejecting the opportunity to enter into a relationship with their most authentic selves. As Quakers, we strive to live in integrity. Why would we assume someone else does not? We don’t have to accept everything someone tells us as true. We should, however, embrace the possibility that people want to tell the truth about themselves, as they have come to understand it.

“When a person identifies as transgender,” Walden explains, “they are saying that the relationships our society has allowed them to form are not adequate, that there must be more authentically human ways for them to live… They feel that there must be other, truer ways of speaking about their life.”

Instead of accusing trans people of abandoning their “original” nature, we might do better to see their rejection of socially imposed gender identities, which were based solely on the presence of primary and secondary physical characteristics, as a recognition—and an embrace—of their authentic selves. Whether or not they see Spirit accompanying them on that journey, as we work to understand their inner transformation, we might find the metaphor of walking out of darkness and into the light helpful.

Some of you may think I’ve got a lot of nerve, using Ephesians 5 to support trans identity.

I just take the liturgical readings as they come. Yes, the lines immediately before the passage I’m quoting condemn “sexual immorality.” They do not, however, say anything that should lead us to put gender identity among the “unfruitful works of darkness.” And when trans people come out to the world, by definition they have given up secrecy. So, yes, I see the call to “walk as children of light” as, among many other things, an invitation to those who feel the gender norms of this culture do not speak to their condition, an invitation to look for an Inward Light that might help them awaken and realize themselves more fully than the gods of this world can.