starts with three stories of variously gender diverse people and a paragraph listing off six more people with one sentence introductions to their relationship to trans-ness accompanying four of them. It is notable that none of the stories he tells are of transgender Christians who affirm the goodness of their own trans-ness, who affirm transition for all those who want it, and who are confident in their own identities.
Instead Sprinkle gives us the stories of someone "struggling with gender dysphoria", someone whom he claims
(1) was browbeaten by the medical establishment into facilitating a transition
(2) for her child that Sprinkle implied was inappropriate to the child's gender, and someone who identifies as a cisgender man who struggles with "an unchosen desire to dress, act, and behave like a woman"
(3). Then he briefly mentions a detransitioner, another person who identifies as a man "who has wrestled with gender dysphoria his whole life", then "fathers whose daughters are now sons, and
sons whose fathers are now mothers" followed by someone "whose struggles with anxiety only seem to diminish when he wears women's underwear" and finally one named person "who also transitioned from male to female three years ago".
It may be worth re-reading that list, the only mention of what is, by all accounts, the mainstream of transgender Christian people, is a single sentence snapshot right at the end. This sets a pattern that will continue throughout Embodied: Sprinkle routinely distorts the overall picture of trans folk (often under the justification that he wants to demonstrate "the diversity of trans*") so that the actual center position and identity set of our community is minimized while the positions, attitudes, and approaches to "trans*"-ness that support his overall narrative and conclusions are magnified.
People and Concepts
Having recounted the stories he has chosen to foreground, Sprinkle outlines the tension that he senses behind the "conversation" around transgender people in the context of churches and Christianity. In Sprinkle's view (and I think it has merit) the tension is between recognizing that there are real people who are affected by Christian thinking, speaking, and acting on the basis of their ideas about trans-ness, and a concern for the truth value of the concepts we use to think about and evaluate trans people. I need to say that I think that when looking at this framing, we see Sprinkles greatest strengths (or at least his greatest potential strengths). Sprinkle is...nice. More than that his niceness is, by all accounts, genuine and seems to stem from an unfortunately rare capacity to keep the personhood of the subject centered throughout his engagement in a given topic—this one included.
And I don't think Preston's identification of this tension is false. Certainly I have, far too often, encountered Christians who reduce LGBTQ+ people generally and especially trans people to enemy tokens in a culture war. Sprinkle puts it quite aptly when he says, positing a hypothetical person who "struggles with his [her] gender identity": "He experiences church not as a hospital for saints but as a graveyard fro the marginalized—and so many Christians are whistling through it".
And yet...
Already Sprinkle's views on who trans people really are is shining through a bit in the background. We are, for him, people to be healed, while so many of us are shouting to him that we are not ill aside from the poison we have been given by so many who are determined to cure us.
Mark Yarhouse (one of Sprinkle's favorite Christian Sources for this topic—their views and approaches align fairly closely) in his book
Understanding Gender Dysphoria proposed three contrasting frameworks to categorize the ways in which Christians tend to think about trans folk: the
Integrity Framework, the
Disability Framework, and the
Diversity Framework. The
Integrity Framework prioritizes preserving binary and cisgender understandings of gender and is generally willing to ignore or discount the experiences of transgender people. The
Disability Framework focuses on the wellbeing of trans people but identifies trans-ness as a product of the fall and sees it something to be healed or, if healing isn't possible in this life, then at least treated. The
Diversity Framework recognizes the legitimacy and validity of transgender identities and seeks to celebrate the diversity and perspectives we bring to both the Church and the world.
Preston Sprinkle is a functional champion of the Disability Framework (I can't imagine that he would deny this though he might want to pad it with nuance about "good pastoral approaches to people who need to be loved") and it shows. It shows through a thousand little cracks in
Embodied where, in the same sentences that he insists we be treated with dignity, respect, and love, he alos implies or says that we need to be cured. That our trans-ness is not a blessing but an unfortunate curse; a "product of the fall". His smiles are laced with pity
And I want to talk for a moment about why this is dangerous for trans people and why it is a problem:
And in a world where it isn't easy to be trans, it is really really hard to resist the lure of someone who wants to pity you. I don't know that anyone really wants to be pitied but I do know that pity is orders of magnitude better than rejection and hostility. And in a world where it is hard to be trans it is so so terribly easy to think that the problem is not the hate, the bigotry, the small-mindedness, and the fear, the problem is your own transness. I don't think Preston Sprinkle sets out to prey on that insecurity, but regardless of his intention, this book and his approach absolutely do prey on it. All a trans person has to do is reject a beautiful God-given part of who they are—call it a struggle, a temptation, evil—and Sprinkle will reward them with kind words, with encouragement, with praise for their courage and the depth of their faith. The poison is well candied.
Preston finishes out this section not by insisting in good evangelical idiom that both truth and love need to be celebrated. He depicts Jesus' "upside-down" Kindom as a place "Where truth is upheld, celebrated, and proclaimed. Where those who fall short of that truth are loved." I also want both truth and love to be celebrated. I also affirm that both are central in the Kindom of God. I just don't think that they are in any tension when it comes to the identities of transgender people.
As a final reflection on this section of the chapter, my impression on reading this was that Sprinkle intends his position on trans people to be a sort of "
Side B but for transness" type position—Preston Sprinkle serves on the
Advisor Council for Revoice, one of the largest Side B organizations in the country—and that he sees Yarhouse's
Disability Framework as providing the basis of a
Side B equivalent, while the
Integrity Framework would stand in the place of
Side X, and the
Diversity Framework would work for
Side A. I would posit that this attempt simply doesn't work and I will have more to say on it later in this series. For the time being, if a Side B trans or cis person wants to reach out to me to talk about this idea I would welcome your input.
The Question of Incongruence
In the next section of the chapter, Sprinkle identifies the central question of his book
"If someone experiences incongruence between their biological sex and their internal sense of self, which one determines who they are—and why?"
Sprinkle presents this question(4) as the critical factor in determining what a Christian ought to think about trans-ness in general. There are worse questions to center and it is clear that Sprinkle has worked hard to find as neutral as possible a phrasing for the question. I will say though that, if I were to run across that phrasing "in the wild" I would almost certainly move on satisfied that it got close enough without doing any specific harm. In any case Sprinkle then sketches the barest outline of the questions he promises to tackle in chapters 8 and 9 and then moves to the close of the chapter. His sketch continues to use language (e.g. "biological male", "ontology") for which he has somewhat odd or questionable definitions(5) but I will hold my response for the parts of the book where he makes his argument more fully.
We would be honored to
Sprinkle ends the chapter in good irenic fashion by returning to a story emphasizing the fundamental humanity of one of the gender diverse people whose story he opened with. He tells a story of being welcomed and loved through tragedy by a church and the way that the church's love brought his subject back into Christianity. The story is heartwarming, the moral a little more infernalist than I am comfortable with, but centered in mainstream evangelical soteriology.
Some final thoughts about how Sprinkle genders those he talks about in his book
Throughout the book Sprinkle is careful to always gender (in terms of pronouns and names) the people he talks about in the way that they want him to gender them. He defends this practise as hospitable rather than as reflecting reality in Chapter 12 and I will have a good deal more to say about it at that time, but he has a different practice when he uses stories of hypothetical people and I think it is really telling.
Chapter 1 ends with a question:
As we continue to think through questions related to trans* identities, just remember: there might be a fourteen-year-old girl [boy/non-binary person] in your youth group on the verge of suicide because she [he/they] doesn't feel like a girl and has no one to talk to. She [He/They] was created in God's image and is beloved by Jesus.
Will she [he/they] be loved by you?
and it is such a representative question. I hope that my use of corrective "[]" demostrate the failure of Sprinke's approach. While I believe he was honestly hoping and trying to still be "neutral" on the question of the validity/reality of trans identities at this point in the book, his actual view shines through. And because he hasn't yet stated it, his approach (gendering the hypothetical child according to the sex they were presumably assigned at birth) actually serves to reinforce in the readers mind the idea that trans people are really the sex and gender we were assigned at birth. My hope is that this is unintentional on Sprinkles part—another case of a cis author failing to recognize where his cisnormativity manifests—my fear is that he knows that by stating neutrality in a form that his cis readers will grant and then allowing his text to be shaped by one conclusion rather than another without recognizing that his violates his stated neutrality, he is insidiously influencing his readership to see these case studies, these people the way he does.
Series Index
Footnotes
(1) Sprinkle got this story from a "Public Discourse" article in which the accounts provied are anonymous and uncredited. We don't know whether it is authentic
(2)Sprinkles quote here (referenceing puberty blockers) is "From what we do know, they
may have an adverse efffect on a person's bones, heart, and brain" (emphasis mine). The footnote he provides to source this
may is a comment that he will talk more about this in Chapter 11. Notice that he is sourcing a future argumnet in a way that makes the claim
feel supported at the outset of the book and will likely have been internalized and forgotten by the time he puts the argument forward. And the argument he makes is
very weak and unevenly sourced per the habits I discussed in the intro to this series.
(3) This story (Alan) is one he
footnotes to his own blog and it is an account of someone rejecting the identity of being a trans woman on the basis of thier interpretation and experience of Christianity.
(4) There is a lot to say about it already but I am going to leave that for my review of later chapters for the time being I will only identify that "biological sex" and "internal sense of self" are doing a whole lot of heavy lifting for Sprinkle and that he is going to prove rather slippery around them throughout the book.
(5) Spinkle defines "
ontology" as "a philosophical temr that has to do with the natrue of being; specifically, what does it mean to be human, especailly a sexed embodied human". I am not sure where he gets that definition but beyond the first clause he seem to actually be talking about
philosophical anthropology. Regardless he is not wrong in locating his question as ontological "what
is a transgender man?" is properly an ontological question as well as a question of philsophical anthropology depending on where the emphasis is placed.
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