The Freedom to Be Trans

Today’s post is from guest contributor Dr. Nicolete Burbach, a theologian whose research aims to help the Church navigate its difficult encounter with transness. To read Dr. Burbach’s other Bondings 2.0 posts, click here. 

In The Fall of the Prison (1993), Seventh Day Adventist theologian Lee Griffith argues that the New Testament associates prisons with the powers of sin and death. 

According to Griffith, the figure of the prison evokes Sheol, the underworld of the dead, from which Christ rescues us: the word used for the entrance to Sheol is bôr. This is the word for both grave and the cisterns or pits into which captives were thrown (p. 106). In this context, Christ’s internment in the tomb also evokes imprisonment (p. 125).

Luke 4:18-19 explicitly politicises this view of salvation. In this passage, Christ claims his kingship by announcing to the Synagogue:“He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives”. In the ancient world, kings would celebrate their coronations by releasing prisoners. Similarly, Jewish kings would offer manumission on the Sabbath, and Jubilee years (pp. 108-9). Kings would do this in response to God’s liberation of Israel from Egypt and the founding of the Mosaic Covenant, patterning their reign on God’s justice and mercy (p. 98). Christ’s announcement identifies him as a king by portraying him as releasing not just metaphorical ‘spiritual’ prisoners, but literal prisoners in the world.

In short, in Christ’s time, liberating captives was seen as both a spiritual and a political reality. Christ therefore makes both a metaphorical and literal claim when he says he comes to proclaim release to the captives: he comes to release us from the captivity of sin including as embodied in the prison.

I find myself returning to Griffith because trans people today are being cast into the bôr. We are imprisoned literally, as members of criminalised groups: trans women of colour, sex workers, immigrants. This imprisonment can be the site of other kinds of captivity. In a US context, numerous examples have recently come to renewed prominence, including slavery and sexual slavery. In my own nation, the UK, prisons are far from innocent either.

But we are being imprisoned in other ways too. I was prompted to write this essay by three developments in the UK, which all occurred within about a week of one another.

The first was a rejection of a legal challenge to a radical reinterpretation of the Equality Act 2010. Originally put in place to safeguard human rights, this legislation has been reinterpreted to do the opposite for trans people, for example permitting service providers to exclude us from single-sex spaces, and mandating that employers do so. Laws that were once meant to protect us now lock the doors to public life in significant ways. 

Second, the UK government is currently consulting on draft guidance for safeguarding in schools, which includes material on trans pupils. Ruth Pearce, Senior Lecturer in Community and Development at Glasgow University, describes this guidance as introducing “extreme restrictions on social transition, toilet and sports bans, and censorship of the word ‘trans’ itself”. It would turn schools into sites of abuse and policing, and is intended to “stop trans children from existing altogether”.

Third, since the 2024 banning of the regular prescription of puberty blockers for transition, trans children were only able to access them at the cost of being coerced into a medical trial. This trial has now been suspended for children under 14.

In these developments, the courts, schools, and the National Health Service are all turned into instruments of captivity, imprisoning us in a society that denies us the freedom to live trans lives.

Many in the Church will approve of these developments. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2024 declaration, Dignitas Infinita, suggests that such measures are even good for trans people: 

Dignitas Infinita (§7) teaches that human nature possesses an intrinsic, inalienable “ontological dignity” by virtue of our being created and loved by God. This means that it bears value and must not be harmed or rejected. With regards to transness, the declaration teaches that respecting and valuing human nature is a matter of respecting and valuing the specific things that make up our nature, including what it understands to be our nature as male or female. In this context, it  portrays transition as a rejection of this nature (§55-60). Viewed in this way, preventing transition thus becomes a way of protecting our nature and thereby respecting our ontological dignity.

Against the presumption that transition rejects human nature, many trans Christians claim that transition is actually a response to our nature as trans people—whether that is based on the idea that we have an essential gender identity that can only be realised through transition, or simply a nature that defies normalisation according to dominant ideologies of sex. 

Under this view, transition is an expression of our trans nature—it is what trans creatures do. This has two major implications. First, the Church’s rejection of transition represents a denial of our value as creatures. It is a denial of our ontological dignity.

Second, to deny us the freedom to transition is to deny us the freedom to express our nature. This is nothing less than to deny us the freedom to be. Hence, as in the case of the proposed schools guidance, this denial is part of an attempt to stamp out trans being.It is an attempt to make us cease to be.

Here we can see the Biblical connection between the prison and the grave: we are cast into the bôr, and a stone rolled up behind us. It is incarceration, denying us freedom. And it is a deathly denial, not only because it leads to death, but because it condemns us to nonbeing.

But there is hope. 

This situation parallels the one depicted by James Cone in Black Theology and Black Power (1969). Cone writes: “The structure of white society attempts to make ‘black being’ into ‘nonbeing’ or ‘nothingness’”. Against this, he calls for Black Power as an affirmation of Black people’s being: a “courage to be” (pp. 7-8). We too must find this courage.

Be encouraged that your being cannot be taken from you by anything short of death. Even if you never gain your full freedom, the very choice to choose to fight for freedom is a choice to be. This choice itself is an act of being.

Be also encouraged that, when Christ announced freedom to the prisoner, he chose for your being, too. As Griffith translates Ephesians 4:8, Christ has “captured captivity”: the deathly powers of the prison are undone.

Those who have died will have their being restored to them. As for those of us who still live—we may still be in the cell, but the stone has already been rolled away. 

Christ announces that the prison walls are broken: we must walk out.

Christ announces that they need not stand: we must tear them down.

—Nicolete Burbach, February 25, 2026