The Crucifixion of Trans People

Since the UK Supreme Court have seen fit to rewrite the Equality Act in this Easter week (at least in the Western Christian calendar), it seems fitting to think about the crucifixion of trans people. Before the far-right who have never entered a church, still less opened a Bible, yell blasphemy—as if any of that matters to me as a committed atheist—let me explain. The reason it is important for Christian doctrine for the Jesus story to include crucifixion, and the reason the Romans loved to inflict such punishment on early Christians, and why the early Christian culture enjoyed their torture porn, otherwise known as martyr literature, are all evidenced in the ongoing treatment of trans people.

(For the record, it's only the whole son of God thing I am sceptical about; that particular crucifixion probably happened, and everything in that list certainly happened.)

Let's consider the point of crucifixion. It is not a quick method of execution, and it was not applied by the Romans in all circumstances and to all types of people. Such research as has been done (in the years before woke ethics committees when it was still possible to crucify your graduate students), suggests it takes a long time to die, and probably as a result of exposure, all other things being equal. It is, then, a form of torture, as well as execution, and extended public spectacle was integral—to humiliate the victims and to deter others. It thus differs from forms of execution such as beheading, hanging, electric chair or lethal injection, and has more in common with the full hanging, drawing and quartering, a flogging around the fleet or some of the nastier practices of the Inquisition. For the Romans, it was particularly used against disruptors of the social order,, such as enslaved people daring to revolt. It is often noted that in the Jesus story, he is crucified among common criminals, but this misses the way that certain crimes are framed as undermining the social order—class, of course, being an important factor in this.

So let us return to recent events. Transphobes have made no secret of the fact that their goal in their campaign of harassment of trans people is to eradicate us. Yes, this would qualify as genocide by international definitions, but those have been routinely ignored of late, as is well advertised. In any case, if they cannot literally kill us by causing us to commit suicide (and it is also well known that the discredited Cass Review and the equally discredited Wes Streeting have been going to some lengths to ignore the statistics on suicides by trans people denied healthcare), they have publicly affirmed that their goal is to drive us out of the public sphere by making it as difficult and humiliating to live and participate in public as a trans person. This week's Supreme Court decision is thus a two-pronged assault on trans people: part of the longer-term goal is to get rid of us; in the meantime, the goal is to make it even more difficult to live. Of course, the decision only really affects those of us with a GRC, effectively invalidating it for the purposes of sex-based discrimination; gender reassignment is still on the books, for the moment, as a protected characteristic, but the usual bad faith actors are already trying to pretend that it does not or that its scope is severely limited.

So trans people must be punished as humiliatingly as possible; but just as the crucifixion of Jesus was not just about Christians as such (after all, Jesus was no more a Christian than Marx was a Marxist), so too this backdoor assault on the Gender Recognition Act is not just about punishing the trans community themselves but what the trans community represents. Any historical Jesus was one of a number of radical or millenial preachers and activists who were active in Palestine in the period, and, if we believe Josephus, not even the most significant at the time. He was crucified because of his disruption to vested interests, particularly of the Jewish authorities. This is not to let the Romans off the hook: their attempts to stop the impact of the fledgling religion as it spread beyond its origins as an extremist sect within Judaism, was at times vicious. Here, too, the point of repression was where the religion undermined social and political power. The letters between the younger Pliny and the emperor Trajan make this plain (notably the established religion, which perhaps not coincidentally, by this time included emperor worship). Trajan is generally represented as a good emperor; gratuitous scapegoating of a minority was not his thing, as it allegedly was for others. The early Christian church, as well as demanding exclusivity in its worship of a single god, also provided opportunities for excluded groups such as women and slaves to exercise power. This was, inevitably, largely restricted when the Christian Church and Roman political structures effectively merged at the beginning of the fourth century, but the early church was undeniably radical. And one of the ways in which it was radical was not just in its facilitating of female power, it also fostered extreme gender non-conformity in the process. The martyr literature is strong on this, with such stories as that of Thecla inspiring other martyrs to abjure sexual reproduction and adopt men's clothing. Of course, there is absolutely nothing trans about any of this.

In similar ways, the persecution of trans people is not because of who we are, but what we represent. As has been exhaustively documented, the pivot by the US evangelical right and the nationalist Russian authoritarianism to focus on trans people, is because we are at once both a vulnerable minority and an embodiment of the challenge to patriarchal order. To be sure, that challenge is also offered by feminism and homosexuality, and in some (mainly Catholic) jurisdictions the priority has been to push back on feminism and reproductive rights first (or at least at the same time). But in other contexts, it has been no surprise to see restrictions on reproductive rights and female bodily autonomy following hot on the heels of attacks on trans people. Trans people are a wedge, as those celebrating outside the Supreme Court this week are entirely in denial about. Similarly, Christianity was far from the only challenge to conventional power structures in a religious context, and a number of those (not coicidentally those that involved gender nonconformity and even bodily modification) were similarly repressed at different times.

Within Christian doctrine, too, the role of crucifixion can also be seen as parallel to the trans experience. One of the points, perhaps the main point, of Jesus' crucifixion is that in (symbolically) dying, he took on the sins of humanity. Jesus is, thus, the scapegoat in the purest sense for the sins of the world. The persecution of trans people, without the apparatus of divine forgiveness, is similarly being used as a way of standing for the sins of the progressive, rights-based order which is systematically under attack. No god is coming to save us, I fear.

On a more optimistic note, you can't keep a good man, woman or nonbinary person down, and so we can look to tomorrow's resurrection with hope in our hearts. Whether we attribute it to being the son of god, or to being not entirely dead when cut down, the resurrection of Jesus offers symbolic hope to the persecuted trans minority. Looking at the longer picture, it is surely to be hoped that we do not have to go through centuries of this repression, but the Christians had the last laugh. We in the trans community would do well to observe the dangers of replacing one tyranny with another, but as things stand, there seems to be little immediate danger of that happening.