Scar Care
on incarnation, trans theology, and becoming somewhere
It’s been almost 8 weeks since I had top surgery. It was not something I always knew I wanted, but rather, a late-blooming surprise — I just turned 34. My birthday is always the first day of Pride.
I haven’t been sure what to write about this, because to be honest, there isn’t very much that I’m sure about. I don’t have a vision in my head for who I want to be, nor do I think of transition as a move from one side of a binary to the other. For me, it’s more like feeling my way around in the middle with my eyes closed, sinking my hands into joy when I find it.
I agonized over top surgery for years, but I was scared that my lack of certainty wasn’t safe to discuss, in this moment when everything trans people say — even, cruelly, our suicide rates — get twisted and weaponized during congressional hearings, on the news, at the dinner table.
Mainstream discourse on transition centers on what scholars call the ‘Wrong Body Narrative’ — that to be trans is to be born into the wrong body, to know this from a very young age, and to fix such a condition with medicine.
Anti-trans pundits often mock this idea, but what they don’t realize is that a lot of trans people also find this story lacking. It’s an oversimplification of the complex, unfolding process that is identity formation, and historically, it’s been a tool for gatekeeping the means of medically transitioning.
In Wronging the Right-Body Narrative, Laine Hughes writes:
“The [Wrong Body Narrative] serves the project of confirming cisgender-certitude by constructing the notion that there could be a ‘right’ body to be born into in the first place. What this model fails to account for is the fact that gender certitude is a myth for all subjects, cis, trans, or otherwise.”
Hughes doesn’t mean that a dysphoric sense of the body as wrong isn’t very real and very painful, just that cis people do not exist somewhere outside of gendered decisions. The choice to remove breasts and the choice to keep them aren’t so different, because “both decisions equally reflect gender desire,” Hughes argues.
I don’t think the difference between cis and trans people is an inner essence, but more a willingness to confront some of the hardest questions about living, and to accept even the most horrifying implications of your own honest answers. Would I have chosen this for myself, if I’d been given the chance? No means grief and the terror of change, but it is also a door to possibility.
Transformation, of any kind, is a painful process, and it is always, in some sense, a leap of faith. Only death bears fruit, Jesus said. Or, as Cronenberg put it: the old flesh must die for the new flesh to be born.1
I couldn’t find it in me to post about my surgical process in real time, but I am indebted to the internet diarists of transition for their service. The network of information trans people have created online for each other is a blessing; how much more terrified I would have been in the weeks after surgery without healing progression slideshows to lurk late at night on Reddit.
Is this okay? Someone asks, posting a picture of their chest, one side curving out beneath the scar. Yes, it’s just swelling, someone else replies. It took months for mine to go down, don’t worry. It’s a long process.
I knew in abstract terms what it would be like to scar from sternum to armpit — I’d read everything that exists about top surgery online in preparation — but there’s no real way to understand how a scar feels until it forms in you. Being stitched back together by your own collagen inspires disgust and awe in equal measure, which I think is actually the definition of the sublime.
For the first two weeks, I watched blood and water come out of my side, draining into little pouches I carried around with me everywhere. When the nurse took my bandages off for the first time, waves of deep wrinkles puckered across my chest, gathering around interior stitches. I left a camera on a tripod and stood in front of it every few days, so that eventually I could click through my photos and speed up time, watching my skin pull itself taut.
Thick lumps of tissue gathered under the scar, tight and hard to move against. I was told to massage the scars twice a day, to pinch and roll them between my fingers, but honestly, there was nothing I wanted to do less. It was scary to begin the work of integration, hard to shake the instinct to hunch over a wound. Something animal in my brain was screaming, don’t touch it!
People like to call this ‘breaking up’ scar tissue, but you don’t really break it up — rather, you help to guide its coalescence. In scar formation, a rush of collagen creates a chaotic weave; lifting, pushing, and rolling it away from the layers of tissue below keeps it from adhering where it shouldn’t, flowing across muscle instead of getting stuck.
At first, I couldn’t do scar massage without crying. I am not a squeamish person — I watch horror movies to calm down — but there were emotions inside my scars, and it felt like pressing down brought them out. I started going on walks to distract myself, pressing gentle circles through my shirt at first, crying and breathing and walking.
I thought about how the philosopher Frederic Gros describes going on a walk, as ‘a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar’. Driving through a place at machine-speed keeps you separate from it, but when you move through the world at a more human pace, your body ‘absorbs’ the landscape, it grows ‘more and more insistent’ in your limbs.
It isn’t really about going anywhere, but becoming somewhere.
The more I walked my fingers across the new landscape of my scars, the softer they became, until one day I woke up surprised to find that those subterranean collagen hills were plateauing. I could lift my arms farther, sit up straighter; dig holes in the dirt, and tend summer flowers. My roses had come back, and they were blooming with a vengeance.
One day while picking my way through a wet, overgrown path, fingers absently pressing the place on my sternum where my scars almost meet, I discovered a podcast interview with Reverend Josephine Inkpin, the first openly trans priest in the Anglican Church of Australia.
Transition, Inkpin says, is a form of incarnation.
“The various religions for me are ways into enabling transformation and holding it together,” she says on Blessed Are The Binary Breakers. Inkpin likens God to an artist, and the Bible’s stories to art.
In the US, anti-trans pastors often rely on a literal reading of Genesis 1:27: So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. But Inkpin argues that Genesis 1 isn’t a literal account of world-making mechanics — it’s a poem, “a beautiful web of the divine mystery that God, as it were, evolves in society.”
I grew up being taught to read Genesis as a mandate for gender roles, shoe-horning modern-day conservatism about sex into an ancient text of poetry and narrative. Fundamentalism left so many marks on me that I hardened into an angry atheist for a long time. I’ve been longing for a way back into spirituality, an image of God that reflects the diversity and beauty that makes itself insistent in me when I walk through the woods.
Trans theologians remind us that there are many ways to read a text. A literal read denies God his mysteries.
Christians did not always think in a sexual binary. Early Christians said prayers about drinking the ‘holy milk’ of Jesus, medieval artists painted Christ with breasts, and mystics revered the slit in his side, through which they received maternal nourishment. The historian Leah DeVun has charted a rich history of non-binary sex in Christianity from 200–1400 C.E., challenging our rather modern, binary ideas.
The host of Blessed Are The Binary Breakers, a trans and autistic seminary grad named Avery Smith, argues that the narrative of an infinite God becoming man is a story of transition that many queer people can find solace in. In another episode, Smith says:
“..this is what kind of cracks me up about Christianity, is that in its current state, sort of tangled up in power and colonialism, it has become very anti-queer, and it always baffles me, because it's an extremely queer religion. Queer as in strange and binary-breaking. That we believe that the Creator of the universe was then created in a human womb, and nursed at Mary's breast, and taught how to walk and speak and read by his human parents. That's very queer. That's very trans!”
Still, pastors in the US repeat the same anti-trans sermon, as if they are passing it around in an email chain. “You and I, we are created intentionally in the image of God. So how we look is intentional and it matters. It was not by chance,” one says. “You are a child of God! You are made by God and for God in the image and likeness of God!” another one screams.
Theologians have been arguing about what ‘the image of God’, or imago dei, means for centuries — for some, it referred to a person’s capacity for reason; for others, it was a statement about moral character. A looser interpretation is just that God made humans to be his representatives on earth.2
My favorite read, though, is that being made in God’s image means that we are ‘created co-creators’.3 According to Mary Elise Lowe, arguing against transition by saying ‘because God created you this way’ makes two theological assumptions:
“First, they think that God created only at the beginning of creation. Second, they mistakenly believe that only God creates. Today, many transpeople are co-creating new identities and reforming their body-minds, thereby demonstrating God’s ongoing creative activity in the world.”
I think if I created a sparrow, and she plucked out some of her feathers to make a new nest, I would be proud that my imaginative spirit was so alive in her. All artists know that once we put our art into the world, we no longer own it, nor control what happens to it — the art evolves through its encounters, it is kept alive through change.
Clock time presents life as a steady march of forward progress, the self as something you can arrive at someday. But the body and its cycles resist this, spiraling through pain, swelling, and scabbing in what sometimes seems like a frustrating randomness. One day I feel so good, I forget I am still healing; the next I am tender and reaching for ice.
I love Reverend Inkpin’s description of living as ‘entering into a deeper mystery about ourselves.’ This is how coming out has felt for me, like exiting a small room and dropping into deep space.
I was straight until I wasn’t; I was, ostensibly, a woman for most of my life, until I learned there were other options. Top surgery was not a step down a path toward a predetermined point I could see on the horizon, but a surrender to all that I can’t know.
On the way back in from a walk, I always stop to check on the flower border I started (mostly) from seed last spring. The perennial goldenrod, yarrow, and mountain mint have returned as full bushes this year, and the coneflowers that didn’t bloom last summer are now four feet tall and setting spiky green flowerheads.
I let plants that you might call ‘weeds’ grow in around them, pulling back the Creeping Charlie when she gets too pushy, but favoring chaos and surprise over meticulous pruning. The more kinds of plants that grow together, the more kinds of insects come to visit us. I imagine that God does look a lot like this.
The skies proclaim the work of his hands, Psalm 19:1 says. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. What is the knowledge of an ecosystem? Diversity, adaptation, collaboration. Entanglement at every level, and not a binary in sight.
Further reading:
When Did We Become Cis? by Jules Gill-Peterson
Gender Has a History and It’s More Recent Than You May Realize by Kathryn Bond Stockton
Avery Smith’s resource on gender diversity in Christian history
This beautiful zine of art, poetry, and process philosophy by trans Christians, from the Transient Theology Project
This piece in Hyperallergic about a new wave of queer religious art
Also, Our Pride is Not a Sin. Happy Pride, my weird little slugs!!
A line from Videodrome. I watched every Cronenberg film I could find in the month after top surgery and I get him now! He makes very trans movies!
I love this so much. I feel tendrils of all sorts of things I’m thinking about growing toward the light of this essay.
Your visuals are always gorgeous, but the collages in this one especially blew me away.