Mother Mary and The Side Wound: A Trans Reading of Catholic Idolatry
Words by Willem Koller (he/they)
“God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”- Daniel Mallory Ortberg
I have never been a practising Catholic, apart from the one Christian summer camp I attended when I was 8-years-old. An acne-ridden teenager I met there told me I would go to hell if I didn’t accept Jesus Christ as my lord and saviour. Other than that, I grew up not giving religion much thought.
My brain has always been hardwired to gravitate towards the gaudy, garish, and extreme, and as a preteen with unrestricted internet access, that’s exactly what I went digging for. Pinterest and 123movies quickly became my best friends. Cut to a decade later, and my lifelong devotion to pop culture has resulted in two and a half years of a Film and Media degree. My favourite hobby is still obsessively excavating the media I consume for queer undercurrents.
As a baby queer and budding film nerd, I fell in love with John Waters and his lurid film Mondo Trasho. I especially loved the sequence in which drag queen Divine, in orgasmic, religious rapture, sees visions of Mother Mary as she begs to be freed of sinful desire. The next obsession that blended queerness and Catholic imagery was, of course, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and today some of my favourites are Sebastine and The Holy Mountain.
I remember stumbling across an Andy Warhol interview where he discussed being too young to understand the Catholic doctrine but loving Sunday service because he could tune out and just admire the spectacle. This is very similar to my experience. I have only the most rudimentary knowledge of Catholic philosophy, yet I can’t help but admire the grandness of clergy robes and nuns' habits, the delicate elegance of a rosary, and the magnificence of the church’s stained glass windows.
There’s no denying the aesthetic beauty of Catholicism, but on a deeper level, there's also something fascinating to me about their strict dichotomies. Heaven and hell, sin and virtue, man and woman. Take this with a grain of salt, as I am terminally indecisive, but it seems almost unfathomable to me that anyone could be that certain about anything, let alone something as serious as one's own faith.
The more I fell down YouTube and Wikipedia rabbit holes, however, I discovered a surprising expanse of grey area. It was recently, as I was coming to terms with my transness, that I discovered Catholicism is bursting with surreal uses of the body. The ritualistic use of symbols stands in for physical change and allows for a metaphorical rebirth and spiritual salvation. Strange, abstracted uses of the body such as the worship of the sacred heart or Eucharist to me seemed so ripe with trans subtext that it reminded me of some of my favourite trans-coded films, like Titane and The Skin I Live In. Because it coincided with an era of scrutinous consideration of my own body and my relationship to it, I found it surprisingly moving to see these themes reflected back to me.
Just like trans people, Catholics have a unique approach to the human body as a surface to place meaning upon that can transcend conventional biological boundaries. For example, they believe the Pope is the physical representation of God on earth. Their doctrine twice explores the solitary creation and birth of a sacred figure from a body of the opposite sex, first in the story of Adam and Eve, then Mary and her son Jesus.
Mary is one of those prevalent symbols of womanhood in Western culture, but I’m interested in Mary as a symbol of gender transcendence. She is the highest Catholic saint, and as such, her image has undergone infinite representations in a way that has heightened the incorporeality of her flesh. Despite being the archetypal Mother, the divine feminine, her experience of motherhood was divorced from the biological realities that were believed to have made her ‘unclean’, such as sex and menstruation. Her womanhood is abstracted from the traditional cis-female biology, becoming reliant on the performance of typically feminine rituals without the cisgender bodily experiences of these tasks. Mary’s estrangement from female sex characteristics makes her a potently trans figure in my eyes, which is an example of the ever-fracturing representations contained within her idolatry.
My favourite example of gender transgression in Catholicism is the worship of a wound in Jesus’ side that was pierced after crucifixion to check if he was dead. The wound is described as explicitly vaginal and was worshipped as a holy symbol in itself, much like the sacred heart. There is no shortage of artwork and hymns about it.
During a period in the 18th century, there was a denomination called the Morivians that were devoted to the side wound, painting themselves kneeling inside it and waxing lyrical about its warmth and protection. They described kissing it or drinking from it in states of religious ecstasy, and in their hymns they lovingly described it as a womb that could incubate its devotees and they could be reborn of. The theory about this phenomena has noted that Morivian women would come to find further resemblance with their saint, as his hermaphroditic anatomy was thought to heighten their connection to him. There is of course an obvious trans, intersex nature to this idolatry of the vaginal wound, but as I dug deeper into its function within the religion, it got even trans-er.
The little Bird finds presently,
Its Nest in the dear Cavity,
From Whence the Church was dug.
- Excerpt from a Morivian hymn.
The blood and water that poured from this wound in artistic renditions represented salvation, like baptism. It functioned as a symbol for the physical sacrifice Jesus made for the forgiveness of humanity’s sin. A physical incision in the body that results in a metaphorical rebirth and personal salvation? What could be more transgender than that? When I try to conceptualise the gravity of this salvation, I can only liken it to the feeling of my first testosterone shot: a feeling of rebirth into my own body.
The way that Catholics use bread and wine to symbolically consume the body and blood of Christ displays the liminality with which they understand the physical bodies of their deities. The ritual possesses an uncanny similarity to the way I understand my own physical liminality as a trans person. I have felt extreme alienation from my own flesh. My body has felt like more of an intangible, unknowable concept, seen and understood in completely different ways to all who have ever known it. That's why I feel connected to these figures whose transient bodies have been the subject of centuries of conceptualisation to the point where the reality of their physical form has become unclear. They have been dissected under countless cultural knives and are, in essence, immortal in their cyclical regeneration.
I know that seeing Mary and Jesus as trans figures is not universal by any means. But to me, the power of idolatry is in the ability to find your own meaning within these figures. Although I do not feel drawn to abide by the rules of the Catholic faith, the comfort I find in their idols transcends is guttural and emotional, not logical or rooted in any theology. Past the obvious physical features of their gender transgression, Mary and Jesus make me re-experience the familiar ache of possessing a body that doesn’t belong to you. To be a symbol is to have your body be owned by those who make meaning out of it. Mother Mary and her son Jesus hold within them all of the interpretations of all those who have ever known them. Like trans people, they are metaphysical, imbued with duality, and all the more holy because of it.