THIS is a remarkable book, no less than a milestone in the ever evolving story of human beings’ seeking to find words for God who is mystery and cannot be contained in human words and concepts. And yet human beings have felt and continue to feel compelled to do just that: to speak about God, to find God in their lives and in their stories. Yet whose story is it? Who tells it? And who is listening to, responding to, and engaging with the story of God embodied in the lives and bodies of human beings created in the image of God? And whose stories are not told? Who has not yet been heard into speech?

Alex Clare-Young is a theologian and minister in the United Reformed Church and identifies as transmasculine and non-binary. The starting point for this book could be that trans Christians have all too often found themselves on the menu of apologetic and/or ethical debate rather than at the table of constructive and grounded theological discourse. What is so often missing in the Church’s speaking, thinking, and praying are the lived experiences of trans and non-binary Christians. Likewise, much of the aforementioned menu is constructed with the assumption that trans people are a monolithic group in which one individual can easily be seen as representative of a significant part of humanity: a form of reductive essentialism that impoverishes everyone involved.

In Trans Formations, Alex Clare-Young explores what theology could look like if it was, indeed, grounded in the lived experiences, the narratives of life and faith, of suffering, resilience and joy, of trans and non-binary Christians. To say that this is a deeply personal book could be misunderstood (and that is not intended), but the personal is political, and Alex Clare-Young begins with their own search for theological spaces in which trans and non-binary Christians can speak about God.

They have listened to the faith narratives of ten other Christians, who are “variously agender, androgynous, genderflux, genderqueer non-binary, genderqueer, living full-time as female, male, man, mtf, non-binary trans-masculine, non-binary, simply female, trans guy, trans, transgender female, transgender, transmasculine, woman”. Yet, this is by no means an anthology of life stories, but, rather, a rigorous search for theological and anthropological spaces.

The author engages critically and constructively with methods of theological reflection (such as autoethnography) and gender theory, and identifies themes and limitations, and yet there is much in this book that opens up a beautiful poetic God-language: “the God who is known and yet unknowable, gender-less and yet gender-full, enfleshed and yet transcendent, fully, often reciprocally, involved in our lives and yet just beyond out grasp”. In a final chapter, “Erring”, they take on some of the tropes of discourse about trans people (in contrast to theology by and with trans people), and the book ends with an open-table communion liturgy.

Trans Formations is a very rich book, exploring a range of different approaches to theological speaking and listening. It is by no means a definitive trans theology or a last word, as all theology is essentially provisional and work in progress, but the author shows that there are life-giving spaces to be created and discovered in this work in progress of speaking about God and human beings created in God’s image.

Dr Natalie K. Watson is a theologian, editor and writer living in Peterborough.

Trans Formations: Grounding theology in trans and non-binary lives
Alex Clare-Young
SCM Press £25
(978-0-334-06600-2)
Church Times Bookshop £20