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A notable phenomenon when Christians discuss trans people is the criticism of relying too heavily on trans people’s stories, combined with the claim that the Church ‘still needs to do the theology’ about transgender people. We make no apology for grounding our approach here in trans people’s stories and dispute the idea that trans people’s stories and the Church’s theology about them can be separated in this way.

Given that the Bible is largely a collection of stories, it’s intriguing that the Church has a history of ignoring stories when it suits its purpose, as Don Cupitt (1995, first published 1991, p.42) has pointed out:

At the drop of a hat theologians would reel off the old philosophical criticisms of pagan myths, images and sacrifices. Yet somehow they tacitly exempted their own narratives, images and rituals from the same criticism… It was all very odd. Philosophy condemned stories for stirring up our emotions and seducing us into identifying ourselves with the central characters. But if this is generally a bad thing, how does it suddenly become a good thing when the central character is St Ursula or Jesus?

Rowan Williams (1979, pp.2–3) explains how the Incarnation of God in human form in the person of Jesus Christ is the most powerful critique and counterbalance to this tendency:

By affirming that all ‘meaning’, every assertion about the significance of life and reality, must be judged by reference to a brief succession of contingent events in Palestine, Christianity – almost without realizing it – closed off the path to ‘timeless truth’… Even when Christian writers use language suggesting such a picture, there are strong forces pulling in an opposite direction, demanding the affirmation of history, and thus of human change and growth, as significant. If the heart of ‘meaning’ is a human story, a story of growth, conflict and death, every human story, with all its oddity and ambivalence, becomes open to interpretation in terms of God’s saving work.

It is our conviction that all of us have much to learn, both spiritually and theologically from the stories of the Christian trans people and their loved ones that we interviewed for this book.