Introduction 2nd edition

About a year after Dazzling Darkness was published, I was invited to speak at a university about being trans and religious. It was an occasion which brought home to me how much trans self-understanding had shifted since I’d transitioned in the early nineties. At the time I spoke, I thought I was reasonably forward-thinking, representing a leading curve in philosophical-theological thinking about what it means to be trans and a person of faith. I gave my talk to this group of young, educated and intelligent people and invited their questions. Rapidly, it became apparent that rather than being cutting-edge, I was something of a back-issue. These students were not hostile, rather they were puzzled. These young LGBT+ people, some of whom identified as trans, mostly found it curious that I thought of myself in binary terms; that I simply saw myself as a woman, rather than as, say, ‘trans-feminine’ or ‘nonbinary’. I think they saw my understanding of my sexuality as ‘lesbian’ as rather too defined. Why not pansexual or demisexual? While I think they appreciated my grip on how trans people ‘queer’ identity, they seemed unconvinced by my comfort at living within the social binaries that are standard in ‘cis-normative’ society. Some of them were disturbed by the way I had valued the support of psychiatrists in my experience of transition and medical and surgical reassignment. I suspect that some thought I had internalised transphobia. I sensed that many thought I had internalised a hierarchy in which trans people like me – who have lived

in the shadow of the old medical category ‘transsexual’ – were at the apex. Perhaps they were right.

Wherever the truth actually lies, that evening in a university lecture hall was salutary. I like to feel that I am reasonably smart and was already alert to the shifting discourses about trans identities. After all, I’ve read a lot of philosophy and gender and queer theory, and I think this is reflected in some of the ways Dazzling Darkness negotiates the language of gender and identity. However, the encounter also helped me place this book in some perspective. It helped me become more alert to the language I was inclined to use to describe my experience. It challenged me never to be tempted to use my own very particular experience as the basis to universalise about trans experiences. Dazzling Darkness was never intended to be a systematic theology of trans identities. It is a theological memoir or spiritual autobiography which seeks to explore what it means to encounter God in the complexities and the problematic ‘facts’ of a body, my body. This body happens to be a trans body and a chronically ill body among many other things. 4

Nonetheless, in this second edition of Dazzling Darkness I seek to be alert to the shifting nature of the language used by most trans people to talk about themselves. I’ve replaced or flagged up some of the words and phrases I used in the first edition, including ‘transgendered’, ‘sex change’ and ‘gender change’. I do so not because I necessarily disavow what I say in various parts of the book; it is simply to acknowledge that certain terms simply no longer have much traction, if they ever did. I am not hugely interested in the endless ‘flame wars’ which take place on social media and elsewhere between some trans people and certain sections of second-wave feminism, ultra-conservative political and religious groups, and their allies (some of whom represent a sub-section of trans people themselves). I am simply too old, too tired and – I guess I need to be called out on this – too privileged to generate

4 I also acknowledged that ‘the body’ is no undisputed term. It is always a thematised term. It always already belongs in and to discourse.

energy to plunge into the claims and counter-claims of groups who stereotype each other as proponents of inflexible ‘ideology’. I transitioned too long ago and too young to keep the energy going for the war. Judge me if you will. I can’t find the resources for the campaign at the moment. Furthermore, it is distressing for me to hear these opponents – many of whom should, I think, be allies – accusing each other of committing the same sins, whether that be being essentialist about gender or sex, or treating gender as entirely fictive. As I see it, these opponents see each other through theoretical mirror-balls that refract light unconvincingly.

So, perhaps one of the things this book demonstrates is how quickly one can become old hat. I still think that there are many people, some of them trans themselves, who are inclined to see people like me – those who have sought medical, surgical, social and legal transition – as the nearest approximation trans people can get to the ‘real’ (as women or men). Certainly, one thing that is true about me is that, at a profound almost pre-conscious level, I still dream about being conformed to some more-or-less ‘natural’ vision of being a woman. I am a sufficiently sophisticated philosopher and theologian to appreciate that the very notion of ‘the natural’ is disputed. It is never a given term that can be trusted without interrogation (and perhaps not even then). Judith Butler’s point that ‘gender is a copy without an original’ continues to speak.

As I grow older, I grow less and less interested in ‘policing’ the boundaries of identity, whilst wanting to recognise the ‘inner’ force of our convictions. I’ve learnt an enormous amount from friendships with non-binary people and those who live in a less determinedly binary way than me. I hope that, like all of our species, I spend a lot of time being bewildered by the varieties of human being. However, it is in God’s mysterious otherness that I ultimately find resources to delight in the riches of human bodies and identities. God’s delicious queerness – which as far as I can see is an implication of the quite orthodox doctrinal position which asserts that God is Trinitarian and affirms that Jesus Christ is fully

human, fully God – supplies resources to joyously appreciate our strangeness and otherness. 5

It is so tempting for any of us to live an unexamined life, presuming that we are ‘normal’ in a rather flat and uninteresting sense. As it happens, my adventures in gender and sexuality have convinced me that ‘normality’, if it has much traction, lies in our wild otherness and strangeness, to ourselves and others. It lies in our participation in God’s otherness and peculiarity. It lies in mystery. To be normal is not to be read as fitting into a patriarchal or hetero/cis norm; it is to be alert to the way in which we are all approximations of the deep call to grow into the likeness of Christ. When we look at our neighbours and at ourselves, we see approximate human beings. There has only ever been one complete human being: Jesus Christ. And that human being is God. How deliciously strange and delightful is that?

Of course, the exploration of gender and sexuality in Dazzling Darkness is only one part of the story. Shortly after its initial publication, my younger brother Andy made a comment about the book’s subtitle which has stayed with me. He said, ‘How often do you hear ‘gender, sexuality, illness and God’ in the same sentence?’ It’s a sharp insight, and I still insist that the core of Dazzling Darkness consists in my reflections on what it means to encounter God as gift in the midst of chronic illness. Reading back over what I wrote in 2012 remains a quite startling and shocking experience. I really was in a challenging place and it is in those challenging places that the book earns its title. To be exposed to the facts of one’s mortality represents a place of encounter, discovery and – potentially – new insight or knowledge. This really is ‘darkness’ as gift; that is, darkness that is no mere negative absence, but a place of intense potential – of pregnant wonder, of pain that may give birth to something new or previously unknown, of living colour.

5 It is intriguing to note that one of the most interesting criticisms from progressives that Dazzling Darkness received on first release was that it is simply too Christological – that is, too centred on Jesus Christ.

It is hope. It is in one’s deaths, multiple and particular, that one encounters the dazzling darkness of the living God and it is the promise of new life.

Nearly ten years on from its original publication some of the statements in Dazzling Darkness, especially those around living with the imminent risk of death, may look a little overdramatic. I have, after all, survived. I do not think the matter of survival invalidates the power of what the book embodies, but it does invite reappraisal. If I am honest, there is a voice in Dazzling Darkness that not only could barely appreciate that I might live and thrive as a person, but could not quite believe that – within bounds – I might live and thrive within the curious institution that is the Church of England. That I have found a way of being trans, a priest and a critical voice, thinker and theologian within the Church is not least among the lines of exploration I shall attempt to take up in this second edition. I shan’t pretend that it has been easy to find my place and level in the strange beast that is the Church. I think part of the wisdom I’ve accrued over the past few years comes down to this: those of us who are coded as ‘other’ within the Church cannot live ‘lossless’ lives. There is always a cost. One’s hopes and expectations become problematised by the Church’s mixed messages, and sometimes they have to be managed or downgraded. This I take as a token of living in the facts. To be coded as other or subaltern is never without pain. The other side of this is the discovery of divine solidarity, of the well of love and grace, that offers the promise of joy.

Thus, one of the extra two chapters in this edition concerns what it means to live well in the Church when one is out and unapologetic – as trans, LGBT+ or anything else. I seek to tease out something that feminist theorists have long taught us: that to be coded as other is always to caught in a ‘double-bind’. I think I already gesture towards this issue in Chapter Ten of Dazzling Darkness, but, in this edition, I want to attempt to go further. I want to really wrestle with the double-bind of being out, over time, in an institution which wants to be kind, welcoming and arguably inclusive, but

sometimes lacks the resources to do that well. Part of the reason for this struggle to celebrate difference lies in the particularities of the Church’s institutional culture: it wants to model God’s richness, but inevitably reflects limited human beings. The Church of England holds, it hardly needs saying, deeply ingrained white, middle-class, hetero- and cis-normative prejudices.

Those of us who are counted among the ‘rest of us’ almost inevitably become coded by such an institution as ‘lack’ or ‘insufficiency’ or ‘less-than-ideal’. This – and this is where it becomes interesting for me – does not necessarily mean that one encounters the institution as pernicious; rather it means that one’s negotiation of it is compromised and troubling. It is always messy and sometimes grubby. As I shall seek to tease out in this new chapter, to be trans in the Church of England entails negotiating what it is to be not quite enough – not quite safe or acceptable enough – and yet often too much. For the latter point reflects the other pole of the ‘doublebind’: when one foregrounds one’s difference one can become perceived as a threat. I want, then, to explore what it means to live in the midst of the pressures to be ‘the good trans person’. Who sets those pressures? What might the Church want from those whom it perceives are different? How might one negotiate the pressures in such a way that one isn’t crushed or assimilated?

The other chapter concerns living well in a place of reprieve. If, in 2014, you had said to me that – within sometimes challenging limits – I would be thriving in 2020 I would not have believed you. There is no other way for us creatures of time and space to live other than in and with limit. That’s part of the reason why bodies matter. They help keep us honest about the facts of decay and fragility and our precariousness. However, here’s one of the glorious discoveries for me over the past few years: that in a time of reprieve, no matter how brief that might ultimately prove to be, there is gift waiting to be found. It was only in 2018 that I came to a proper recognition of this. I remember walking into church one evening, probably to set something up, and feeling overwhelmed by what I can only call the glorious present. I didn’t

know whether to laugh or cry. I stood in the vast space that is St Nicholas Burnage, its riot of colours and lofty ceilings, and felt simply overwhelmed by the gift, the bonus, of love, which is a gift of time and space, an undeserved grace.

In my chapter on living with reprieve I want to attempt to treat with this sense of superabundance; not the superabundance known by those who garner ‘things’ and stuff to themselves, who operate out of the poverty of selfishness, but the theological superabundance that simply means one is invited to give away what one has. This is abundance in the midst of limit, where to live in the gift is unavoidably costly, but joyful nonetheless. Such a way of living will take all we have, because the final thing we have to give is our lives. But what, ultimately, is there to be afraid of? Death? We are always in its midst, in our dying, and through it lies life in all its abundance.

If all this sounds rather excessive, even grandiloquent, well I think that’s how it should be, at least in a book like Dazzling Darkness. Since it came out, I’ve had the good fortune to write several other books and contribute chapters to many more. Some of those other books are more measured, arguably more nuanced and more complete theological interrogations of their subjects. However, I still insist that Dazzling Darkness, my first book, is the only one I had to write. It came from a place of profound hunger for voice, sense and articulation. As one of my best friends put it, it is a ‘lonely’ book in which I wrestle over and over with the existential. In some of my more recent writing I’ve sought to begin in different places – with family, community, with the connective tissue found in religion – but Dazzling Darkness was a kind of irruption. After searching for a way to begin it for years, it was ultimately written in a couple of months. It is, therefore, almost inevitably excessive. This is also reflected in the storytelling and the choice of poetry within it. This poetry is not the disciplined and controlled work of my collection A Kingdom of Love. It is raw, intimate and far more unregulated. Does that make it worse? By some measures, yes; by others, no. Dazzling Darkness often feels

like it is no longer mine. It has found its place beyond me. It is, by turns, sharp and funny, painful and in search of holiness. It is, at times, ridiculously over-the-top. It is an offering from a place that – in the relative comfort of middle age – disrupts and disturbs my comfort. I hope it continues to disrupt and disturb as well as excite readers in equal measure.

Rachel Mann