Of Monsters, the Church, and Trans People

The metaphor of “building a bridge” is common among LGBTQ+ advocates in the Catholic Church. This image takes for granted that the path to connection and acceptance must be a two-way street, and that the Church and queer Catholics must both take steps to create it. 

This scenario is pleasant to imagine, but one theologian has recently noted that it is not always realistic. Nicolete Burbach, a transgender theologian in the UK (and a frequent contributor to Bondings 2.0) points out in recently published essay some of the assumptions of such an image: 

“This perspective implicitly assumes that the path to unity must necessarily pass through a conciliatory style of relationship. The problem, however, is that this style is not always accessible to trans people.”

Burbach’s essay, entitled “Meeting the Monster: On Hearing Transgender Rage” appeared in Trans Life and the Catholic Church Today, a book she co-edited with renowned moral theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill. The essay was excerpted on the Italian Catholic LGBTQ+ website  Progetto Gionata, and the excerpts in this post are a Google translation from that Italian version. 

The essay is not so much about the Church’s failure to provide a foundation for building bridges with trans people, but about the way some forms of transness are not compatible with the reconciliation implied in the bridge-building metaphor. 

Some forms of transness are based around anger and opposition towards a hostile cisgender world–a hostility that isn’t compatible with the more conciliatory metaphor of two way bridge-building. As long as the Church views encounter with trans people through the lens of two way bridge-building, trans people whose transness works in this way are shut out from the Church.

Borrowing from the concepts of “monster” and “monster” from a classic 1994 academic article by Susan Stryker*, Burbach looks at the way Catholicism ‘monsters’ trans people. Burbach offers an example from one of Pope Francis’ few negative statements on LGBTQ+ issues: 

“Just think of Pope Francis’s now infamous rhetoric about the ‘Herods’ who ‘destroy, plan death, and disfigure the face of man and woman, destroying creation.’ These ‘Herods’ represent an excessive use of human power, which claims to dominate nature and which will end up leading to the destruction of both nature and humanity. Among these excesses, Pope Francis includes nuclear weapons, certain biotechnologies, and a ‘gender theory that does not recognize the order of creation.’…This passage associates trans people with Herod, a man who commits the inhumane act of killing children and who, through this act, becomes monstrous himself.”

Monstering puts people into an oppositional posture, and this concept is particularly relevant to how the Church sometimes relates to trans people: 

“The monster thus inhabits a borderland, frightening and repugnant, challenging accepted notions of humanity, nature, and possibility. And it is precisely from being defined in this way that a particular form of opposition can arise in the trans experience.”

Burbach argues that the idea of one-way bridge building through self-emptying is less about having humility and learning from trans people, and more about giving space for this hostility to be performed. Receiving this hostility is actually a kind of connection that might be understood as one way bridge building: a conciliatory gesture on the part of the Church that isn’t returned, but is nevertheless a genuine occasion for encounter and perhaps learning something.

Burbach’s idea of a one-way bridge is “a bridge that the Catholic Church can choose to cross in contexts where its historical attitudes toward trans people have generated forms of trans experience that make other approaches impossible.” 

Anger, she says, while sometimes hard to receive, can still be welcomed by the Church as genuinely constructive.

–Lynnzee Dick, New Ways Ministry, September 9, 2026

*Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1994. Reprinted in Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, Routledge, 2006, pp. 244–256.