This chapter focuses on gender identity. I begin by exploring the gendered complexity of devotion to Jesus in the Christian tradition, from the gospels to the present day. With the help of a variety of trans theologians, I then return to the idea that in Christian devotion the Spirit gathers people in all the complexity and richness of their embodied existence around the imagined body of Jesus. I ask again what it means to negotiate such bodily life in relation to Jesus in the light of all the affordances and resistances provided by our bodies and by his. The movement for trans, non-binary, and queer liberation provides an opportunity to see how, in this ongoing and unfinishable negotiation, we are all discovering the possible ways of living in, with, and as our bodies, at every level from our chromosomes to the patterns of our feelings and our capacities for certain kinds of experience. This is a negotiation that involves each of us in the discovery and articulation of our own gender identity, and in the invention of forms of community life that will do justice to what we are discovering.

I suggest that embodied life is necessarily a matter of negotiation with the affordances and resistances both of our own bodies and of all that surrounds us. I suggest that those negotiations always involve our imaginations, which provide us with our sense of the forms of engagement that might be possible with all these bodies. I suggest that to know another living being well is always, in its fullest sense, a matter of knowing how one might live well with them, or of knowing how you might arrange a habitable life together with them in the light of the affordances and resistances that you each offer and that you encounter together in the world. Finally, I suggest that there is always more to be known of any given body, and that each body has a depth or interiority to it that comes into view only over the whole endless sequence of forms of life that can be woven with it. Bodies are, inherently, inexhaustible.