ABSTRACT
The expansiveness of the label 'transgender' is contingent on how we understand 'gender'. It is here not limited to the social construction of masculinity or femininity but encompasses, as Judith Butler in Gender Trouble shows, the transformation, transfiguration and transcendence of the alignment of sex/gender/desire which finds fullest expression in heteronormativity. Transgender theologies are inescapably body theologies that aim to subvert the always already present and seemingly intractable sex/gender/sexuality binaries in Christian 'identities, practices, terminologies and histories'. The trope of the stranger that the transgender signifies through its bodywork that is at once stupendous to some yet monstrous to others, precipitates the call to relationality – which builds on the principle of Christian hospitality, extends to the Eucharist and culminates in the Incarnation, queering (making a stranger of) both God and Christ in the process. In envisioning theologies for the transgender a critical reflexivity is called upon and it begins with the cognisance of the 'instability of sex'.
