When Is an Annunciation NOT an Annunciation?

Today’s post for the Feast of the Annunciation 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.

I take great joy in the fact that I was born on March 25th,  the feast of the Annunciation. In this way, two annunciations are juxtaposed in my life.

‘Annunciation’ by Paula Rego

Birthdays mark one’s entrance into the world, but also one’s entrance into an identity. When I was born, people looked at my body and annunciated that I am a certain kind of person. My name and lineage were recorded, and the authorities notified. I was inscribed within the language of political institutions, and therein assigned a place within society.

My identity then continued to be annunciated in countless ways as I grew older, moving through society and its institutions: in the words people use for me, in the way they treat me, and in the behaviours I have been taught.

This annunciation is a locus of injustice. As a white British national, I was annunciated to be a member of groups deemed socially valuable enough to be beneficiaries of the wealth, power and violence that sustains the nation. But many are annunciated to be otherwise, and designated as objects of exploitation and violence in the name of those more fortunate others.

Sometimes people are also annunciated to be valueless because they defy the power of institutions to annunciate. This is the essence of queerness, which disrupts ideologies of heterosexist reproduction and the identities constructed around it, and is punished accordingly.

Here, my transness becomes important. Transitioning means failing to conform to how one has been annunciated to be. 

It also undermines the categories according to which identities are annunciated themselves:transition shows that gender categories (including where the body is annunciated to fit within them—i.e. sex) are less immutable, discrete, all-encompassing, and natural than they are claimed to be. 

In short, transness moves illegitimately through and out of the language in which our identities are annunciated. It is an anti-annunciation: a queer defiance of straight institutions and ideologies, and the injustices they underpin.

This is why official responses to transition tend to involve affirmations of the state’s power to annunciate. 

For example, the state of Kansas recently rescinded trans people’s driving licenses. This was ostensibly a way of rolling back the right to change one’s gender on one’s license, thus enforcing the original annunciation of trans people’s identity. 

However, the state also rescinded the licenses of trans people who had not changed the gender on their licenses. It was enabled to do so by an alleged list of trans people covertly built up by the state, for which there appears to be no purpose other than this kind of persecution. In the face of trans anti-annunciation, this list annunciates trans people in a way that marks them for social punishment.

The same goes for more positive responses. 

‘Annunciation’ by Fra Angelico

For example, legal gender change is a re-annunciation of your identity by the state.Making legal gender change necessary for various kinds of protection and access to public life is then a way of ensuring that trans people allow the state to annunciate who they are.

Likewise, legal gender change sometimes requires  an explicit commitment to a narrow set of identities recognised by the state, as well as acquiescing to the state’s annunciation of your new gender. For example, in the UK you are restricted to a binary identity, and you are required to swear you do not intend to change gender again.

I’d like to return here to the second annunciation on my birthday: the Annunciation. Christ’s life defies the state’s power to annunciate. In this sense, the Annunciation, too, is a kind of anti-annunciation.

The miraculous circumstances of Christ’s conception appeared as illegitimacy (Matt 1:19). His paradoxical nature as fully divine and fully human also defies annunciation in any human language—least of all the state’s.

The Magi participated in this anti-annuciation by not reporting Christ to Herod, and Jesus escaped the state’s murderous accounting in the massacre of the innocents by fleeing with his family to be a stranger in Egypt (Matt 2:12-16).

Christ was annunciated as the Son of God (Luke 3:22), but the only non-supernatural figures who truly recognised him as such were the marginalised outsiders who followed him (Matt 16:16; Mark 8:29), and a Roman soldier who repented of his role as an agent of state violence (Matt 27:54; Mark 15:39).

Christ was executed by the government beneath a sign that proclaimed his true nature, but ironically—thus negating it (Matt 27:37; Mark 15:26; Luke 23:28; John 19:19).

Finally, Christ rose from the dead as the Body in which all the identities annunciated by the state fail: in which “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female” (Gal 3:28). 

Paradoxically, the Annunciation annunciates anti-annunciation: it heralds a life that will defy all annunciation by the state.

When confronted by this annunciation of the limits of its power, the state did not listen. Instead, it tried to wield its power against those limits by annunciating Christ’s condemnation. But Christ rose again in vindication, testifying to the state’s failure to overcome God. 

All contemporary annunciations by the state are overshadowed by this disobedience, and the subsequent failure of the state’s power to annunciate. When the state annunciates its distinctions and discriminations, it thus annunciates its guilt before God, and God’s judgment over it. The state’s annunciations now call us to resist them. This too is the message of the Annunciation: that we are tasked with creating a more just world, unmarked by the state’s deathly distinctions, and the power and violence that enforces them.

The juxtaposition of these two annunciations on my birthday highlights this vocation to justice.  And it reminds me how we queers witness to this tension in the anti-annunciation of our queer lives. 

This is surely something to celebrate.

—Nicolete Burbach, March 25, 2026