Trans Spirituality – Memorial Day Edition

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality (these numbers are a few years old) there are over 134,000 trans veterans and 15,000 trans Active-Duty service members. Whether serving openly or not, trans service members have been wounded and killed in combat and in peacetime operations, and we have become disabled veterans in a percentage much higher than the general population. As we enter the Memorial Day weekend, we hold all these national heroes in our hearts, and uplift their spirits to wherever they have gone.

At the same time, while trans people serve in very high numbers, the Christian Right is seeking to take away our rights with bigger efforts than ever. This seems a very strange dichotomy to me, but a recent research paper I wrote helps to make sense of it.

Tanakh

As long as Bible has existed, it has been interpreted. Whether that means trying to understand it in its own language or trying to translate it to another language, it has always been interpreted. I do not say THE Bible because there are many. The Tanakh, or Jewish Bible, The Old Testament, of which there are several versions (The Christian versions of the Tanakh), and the New Testament. And there are many translations of said bibles.

As I show in this paper, many choices were made in history to change the meanings of the original texts in order to support the ideologies and theologies of various denominations. So, for instance, Gen 2:21 says God took mitzalotav, from one of Adam’s sides, in the Hebrew. Yet the Christian translation has always been “rib” and this has permeated to Jewish translations as well. Why? Because of “Original Sin,” The Church needed to subjugate woman to man, and so by showing that she was taken from a tiny piece of man this is made possible. The rub is that the Hebrew word tzela means side in context.

How do we know? Gen 1:27 says that God created THE Adam (The Earthling) male AND female. The Adam was both male and female at the same time. A rabbinic commentary from 1,600 years ago says, using a Greek borrow work that The Adam was “Androgynous,” which means they had both penis and vulva. The great Bible commentator Rashi (11^th Century France) said that The Adam had male and female faces (similar to Plato’s soul mate).

With these images of The Adam in mind, of course God would have had to take one of their sides to split them. This makes man and woman EQUAL in creation. This verse also suggests non-binary creation when read a different way.

But those who seek to take our rights away aren’t interested in Bible scholarship, whether by rabbinic scholars or Christian scholars. Their motivation isn’t, in fact, religious at all. If we look back to the Obama administration, we see that White Supremacy attacks from the Christian Right really took off then. They couldn’t handle a Black man being President. They were greatly emboldened with Trump’s election and then infuriated with his defeat. This explains the record number of anti-trans bills this year.

When we look at the organizations behind the bills, we see that they are benign sounding groups. But when we pull the threads, we see that they go back to the Evangelicals, who have put up barriers to protect their tax-exempt status. They are not in any way acting in accordance with their self-proclaimed Christian values. What they are actually saying is that only White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, able bodied, minded, wealthy men matter. And everyone else can go to hell…

Friends we need to vote these people out of office permanently. Therefore, in every election coming up, we need to do what it takes to get EVERY marginalized voter to the polls to ensure that the Right’s gerrymandering, their voter ID laws, their intimidation do not work. The DNC is corrupt as all get out, but at least they are not trying to kill us. So, until we have a better political system, vote Democrat (not independent) to get the GOP out of power.

Honor our dead and wounded trans military and veterans this Memorial Day weekend in this fashion.

Peace out,

Rona

Tags: featured, politics, Transgender

Category: Transgender Politics