Divining Femininity: Exploring Faith and Gender

Coming to one’s true gender expression can be a deeply spiritual experience. It can also be met with intense religious or cultural exclusion. The artists, writers and activists featured in today’s launch for the Resource Portal exhibit the wide spectrum of living or performing one’s gender. These include poet Arielle Twist, drag performer Manghoe Lassi, writer and activist Leslie Feinberg, and performer and author Ivan Coyote. 

The 2019 CBC Documentary series, Canada's a Drag, maps the landscape of drag performers across the country. In a stunning episode in the series, Manghoe Lassi, a Desi performer, describes how she came to drag and pushes back against 'Western' assumptions of what coming out must entail. Watch Manghoe Lassi's episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xqKPyVxpBo&ab_channel=CBCArts. 

In Disintegrate/Dissociate, an award-winning debut collection of poetry, Arielle Twist writes unsparingly of the death and violence that preceded and accompanied her birth and life as a Nehiyaw, Two Spirit and trans woman. In short, staccato bursts, Twist grapples with the erased languages around her, and the destruction and desire of relationships. Poems that particularly encounter the fissures between queerness and Indigeneity, and the connections between transness and spirituality include "Who Will Save You Now?" "Mother/Creator, "Born in Mourning" and "Iskwêw." For all its linguistic sparseness, Disintegrate/Dissociate is a substantial and forceful work to be read and read again. Content warning: explicit language, sexual assault, abuse. 

The cult classic, Stone Butch Blues, is considered one of the key texts of queer and trans literature. First released in 1993, it’s a work of historical fiction by Leslie Feinberg about protagonist Jess Goldberg’s coming of age in 1970s Buffalo. Raised by Jewish parents, Jess is increasingly ostracized for their gender and sexual nonconformity in school, at temple and at home. Discovering gay bars, lesbian femme-butch cultures, and coming into contact with cop raids and the tragic, early deaths of trans elders, Jess provides a unprecedented look into this subculture.

Gender Failure is a collaborative book by artists Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon is based on their acclaimed 2012 live show and follows a multidisciplinary structure of illustrations, essays, and lyrics. Gender Failure explores growing up, in Rae’s case, “socialized as a girl in a Pentecostal family in Calgary,” or in Coyote’s case, as a butch kid in the Yukon. They write of “God Failure,” their inability to meet what society has demanded of them and how they’ve come to embrace the possibilities of gender failure. 

In Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders, Joy Ladin, a professor at the Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women in New York, recounts her life-long struggle of living in the world not in the gender she knew herself to be. Living with gender dysphoria for the majority of her life, Joy finally comes out to her family and the university community. It's a story of struggle and pain, but ultimately a message of hope for those who are struggling with reconciling their identity and faith.


We hope you enjoy these new resources and thank the Tegan and Sara Foundation for providing us the funds to add in greater contributions from women and girls.