Transgender lives and bodies have become potent sites of contention and consume considerable media, political, social, legal and religious attention. Navigating positively through such controversies is not easy, and it is tempting to take a supposed ‘side’ or avoid deeper engagement. Instead, the first paperback publication of Susannah Cornwell’s Constructive Theology and Gender Variance offers both much needed grounding perspectives and renewing theological encounter. It invites us to move beyond discussion of gender variance as a zero-sum game about otherness into dialogues which can enrich everyone. For, whilst its core subject matter is gender variance, it offers pathways to a richer theology of transformation in Christ for all. Hence, it is not only a highly informed ‘trans study’ but also a broader project bearing the fruits of engagement with a wide variety of voices from many quarters. The arguments of conservative Christians and gender-critical radical feminists are hence given serious, respectful, attention, with considerable sensitivity to the complexities of terminologies, key concerns and wider issues involved. Yet, gender variant people are also taken seriously as fellow interlocutors, as not only belonging but already being in the tent, not as marginal ‘others’ about whom entry requirements must be continually asked. Juxtaposing their hyper-scrutinized lives with the typically unexamined lives and assumptions of others, Cornwall uncovers the potential of regarding gender non-competitively. Contested issues might then be explored dynamically rather than as choices between supposed static postures. Understanding gender as being for humans, not humans for gender, we can view gender eschatologically, as something we receive and transmit in different ways, looking forward, in our active participation in God, to further transformation in this life and beyond.

The book is in four parts. The first provides a clear and patient teasing out of overall themes and terminology, before exploring conceptions of impermanence, transition, and how gender ‘detransition’ might be valued despite its often weaponised use. Existing Christian theological responses to gender transition are then investigated, including the limits of much prevailing ‘deficit discourse’. In contrast, theological approaches of thinkers such as Mathias Wirth and Dirk Evers are highlighted: seeing otherness not as a threat but as benign examples of pluriformity in creation, and all humans as living in dynamic tension between freedom and determinism with God. The second part, entitled ‘Telling Truths’, wrestles with complex ethical questions around autonomy, authenticity and gender diversity. Thus, for example, Oliver O’Donovan’s well-articulated emphases on responsibility to material givenness are weighed alongside Karen Lebacqz’s perception of reality as always negotiated ‘in continual creation’, and, not least, with transgender people’s accounts of their own truths of recognition, responsibility and sometimes ‘strikingly sacramental’ journeys. Thirdly, Cornwall engages with questions of limits, technology and health associated with gender variance. Central are appeals to what is ‘natural’. Nature is often viewed in an uncritical surface manner and independent of human artifice, but, especially in our highly technological ‘postnatural’ age, might best be seen as always in transformation. In which regard, do transgender people provoke anxiety less for themselves but because of the much wider fears of others about the stability of their own lives and boundaries? Might gender models be better viewed not as indicative but as optative, as orientations towards a better humanity and world? Such questions lead into the final part, which invites the reader into understanding gender ‘proleptically and provisionally’, as part of re-envisioning everyone as transformative creatures. Human existence is here understood as not simply given, but a calling. Creation is not a blueprint fulfilled at the beginning, but a process of creative participative relationship in which the end is open to Christ’s fulfilling.

In this call to transformative creatureliness, Cornwall does not underestimate the challenge of facing the toxic hierarchical norms in which Christianity has been bound up. However, she draws attention to extensive Christian resources for explicating transformation: including Paul and grace, early theologians on theosis, process theologies and more. Importantly, transgender theologians are highlighted as contributors: not being empty vessels or people especially needing to let go of false self-images, but as participants seeing theology as needing to reflect multiplicities of human-divine experience. In this task, Cornwall also acknowledges the very Western construct of ‘transgender’, her work here drawing extensively on her particular UK context. Yet, she well identifies the need for intersectional connections, not least hearing subaltern voices, and she models how cooperative and constructive theologies can be practised today. For, if, in Christ, humanity and divinity can be viewed non-competitively, might we not find ways to enable multiplicities of gendered characteristics and expressions to thrive? From an Anglican perspective, theology should not only be able to hold tensions and complexities beyond simple binaries and simplistic solutions, but may do so in ways which renew and enhance each of our lives, our mutual relationships and faith journeys. Building on many years of fine work, Cornwell thus offers a substantial contribution to our common understanding and growth together.