Trans. Substantiation.
Until about four years ago, I believed in a funny thing that a lot of other people believe in, too: that when consecrated in a specific way, by a specific kind of person, a piece of bread and a cup of wine could be transformed into the literal body and blood of Jesus. This process is called transubstantiation. Take it apart etymologically and it suggests a crossing over of substance, a change of a thing from one material truth to another. I also believed that consuming the consecrated host and wine was a sacrament that could sanctify my life.
The reason I believed so firmly in this idea was because of Adoration. In the Catholic tradition, Adoration is just what it sounds like: you sit or kneel in front of the consecrated host and you adore it. Pray, worship, meditate. I had experiences in Adoration that I could not describe in words, moments when I sat there and felt a radiant love coming at me from the Eucharist. Moments when I knew with complete certainty that God was real, that I was beloved by Jesus, that he had died for me and was now sitting in front of me, waiting, loving me.
Sometimes, I’m tempted to dismiss those experiences, to say that it was all environmental. To say that when someone plays the right chords and sings the praise music, when the lights are dim and you’re encouraged to cry, of course you will feel something extraordinary. That it’s all psychological. Other times, I believe that my experience in Adoration was in fact mystical, that I found some kind of divinity, and understood it in the terms I had at the time. I’m not sure what’s true.
I encountered skepticism all the time, which I completely understand. How can it be that a piece of bread is literally the body of Christ? Does that make Catholics cannibals? It’s just ridiculous. Well, it is ridiculous, but I was also presented with an explanation that I come back to every now and then. The idea is that there is a physical reality and a spiritual reality to everything, that the form of something and its essence are not identical. In short, transubstantiation does not suggest a change on a molecular level, but on an essential level.
There are problems with this explanation. It suggests the spirit-flesh dichotomy that is at the core of sexual shame in Christianity, the augustinian idea that the body is gross in nature while the soul is pure, elevated. The physical world, in this reading, is sinful, and must be transformed by divinity before it can be sacred.
But as I’m writing this, it’s Trans Day of Visibility, and I’ve been thinking about transubstantiation as trans-substantiation, and I think there’s another reading of this. That the Eucharist could be literally the body of Christ tells me that physical form does not determine what something can be. In a way, the idea behind transubstantiation is the opposite of essentialism: rather than saying that form and essence are one, it says that essence can be something radically different than form, that essence can even change over time.
As a trans person with no intention of medically transitioning, I think a lot about what my body says. In the visual language of our culture, most things about my body say ‘woman.’ Sometimes this makes me question myself: if I’m unwilling to change my form, maybe I really am just a woman. In this form, can I ever be ‘trans enough?’
But most things about the host say ‘cracker,’ and yet, in Catholicism, it is not a cracker, or a piece of bread, or even a symbol. It is really, truly the body of Christ, because its essence is different than its form. If that’s possible, what else is? I don’t need to confine myself to any kind of essentialism. I can take the lessons of my upbringing, the ones that will help me remember that there’s no such thing as not trans enough, that my essence is what I say it is.
My experience of transness is also that my gender is not fixed, that it has changed over time. So might I say that, at some point or gradually, I too was consecrated? Like the Eucharist, I was held up to God and my essence was transformed. Transubstantiated. My transness infuses me with divinity, makes me a sacrament. And as I grow to love my trans body, in whatever form it takes, maybe that’s Adoration, too.
Subscribe to the Imaginary Novelist to receive these musings in your inbox on the first of every month.
