“Ecce Filia.” (2024). Wood, chalkware, LED lighting, fabric, paint.

This sculptural triptych explores transness through the life of Jesus, but with his mother Mary as the storyteller. It utilizes three last rites cabinets or viatica (viaticum = Latin for "supply of provisions for a journey"), wood boxes in pre-1960s Catholic homes containing utensils to assist in the transit from this world to the next. Each panel reflects a stage in the life of the mother of a child assigned male at birth (AMAB).

The first features Mary with her child who, based on external genitalia, she believes to be her son and who goes by the name she gave him. The center panel uses a Pietà figure to convey Mary’s mourning of the “death” of her son, but his eyes are wide open and languidly staring at the viewer. It is not Jesus who is dead but rather his maleness; scholars have debated the possible yonic nature of his torso wound “to balance (or indeed subvert) Christ’s manhood in the Christian visual imagination” and to further solidify “Christ’s union with all humanity insofar as his body is sexualized in both masculine and feminine terms” (Heath 2022). Thus, Jesus’ life transgresses the gender binary that has largely organized human life. The final panel represents the rebirth of Jesus as as a beyond gendered figure.

I am careful to point out two things. First, I am interested in Catholic visual culture but I am nonreligious and do not espouse or promote any viewpoint on any religion. Second, as a cis woman, I make no first-person claims about transgender experiences, only about mine as the mother of a trans daughter.

As a final note, by Biblical accounts, Joseph was Jesus’ adoptive father. Thus, in addition to the gender dysphoria common among transgender individuals, Jesus’ lack of a biological father may be considered a source of what I’ve termed bioethnic dysphoria common among adoptees such as myself. I explore bioethnic dysphoria in some of my other work.