How Purity Culture Leads to Transphobia

It exploits the disgust reflex and sexualizes all identities

Boundaries and contamination (?). AI generated image (cool, right?)

Purity culture and disgust

Purity culture, as the evangelicals would tell it, considers the body as holy and sacred: so sacred that the most intimate of acts (sex) must be reserved for the holy and sacred institution of marriage.

Purity culture, as many survivors of it would tell it, considers the body as shameful, tempting, dangerous, and dirty. That is, until you are heterosexually married, when the woman’s body belongs to her husband (the assumption being only men crave sex) and it becomes her job to keep her body temple-like so that his attention never strays from her.

In the direct teaching of how to be “pure,” many churches used techniques that directly exploited the disgust reflex to teach teenagers they need to stay far, far away from sex. I enjoyed this Reclaiming My Theology episode between Brandi Miller and Krispin Mayfield about how the disgust mechanism is used in purity culture, and how that ends up creating a bunch of people who carry shame baggage around sexuality in general. (Link to Apple; also found on other apps)

If you grow up in purity culture, you’re often gifted with the gift that keeps on giving: sexual shame. And a bonus! Not just sexual shame, but shame in general. You learn that your body – your self, the “you” you can’t separate from unless by dissociation or general feelings of disembodiment – is bad, dirty, dangerous.

The book #ChurchToo by

Emily Joy Allison

has been helpful in unpacking the harms of purity culture. Allison quotes Linda Kay Klein (author of the book Pure):

“The purity message is not about sex. Rather, it’s about us: who we are, who we are expected to be, and who it is said we will become if we fail to meet those expectations. This is the language of shame.”

This idea of purity being much more than behaviors, and instead about an identity, is the thought I’d like to riff on as we try and understand why conservative and/or religious people are so threatened by the idea of transgender people.

The role of disgust in group boundaries

Research points to the link between pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust sensitivities, and increased scrupulosity¹. I love this very simple definition of scrupulosity: “seeing sin where there is none”… and adapting one’s behaviors to avoid supposed contamination.

Pamela Urfer

² wrote a post just this past week on disgust and contamination, summarizing Richard Beck's work. "Disgust is a boundary psychology. Disgust marks objects as exterior, dangerous and alien."

Religiously conservative people tend to have stronger in-group/out-group feelings, seeking to purify the in-group and not let it be contaminated by what they perceive as sinfulness. (Liberals can do this too, to be sure, though the ‘sinfulness’ is seen as something else; this is also why I think we need to address fundamentalism in all kinds of ideologies. But I digress). They seek homogeneity in the group, in this case found by everyone following the same limiting sexual ethic: straight cisgender people who only have sexual contact in legal marriages.

Finally, as Allison notes, “Queer people in general are hypersexualized regardless of their actual level of sexual activity” (120). You can’t be queer without being hypersexualized; your assumed sexual activity suddenly becomes the defining feature of your identity.

---

What I believe religiously conservative and transphobic people have done is they have turned their own religious scrupulosity – their own desire to be pure and holy – outward in a desperate attempt to find purity within. They are seeing sin where there is none when they see a transgender person, and their disgust reflex around difference and overt sexual expression is so overly sensitized that they have visceral reactions of disgust. But instead of looking within to examine whether their heart needs to change, they assume the problem lies outside and must be eradicated.

I believe a huge, yet unconscious driver of transphobia is because too many people are uncomfortable with their own sexuality, they feel shame that they cannot name, and act out their unconscious shame on others by turning somebody else into the bad guy – the scapegoat; the sinful one.

We run into problems “when people are the objects of expulsion, when social groups (religious or political) seek ‘purity’ by purging themselves through social scapegoating” (quoted from Pamela Urfer’s post). We see this happening over and over in society.

Miguel de la Torre, the liberationist theologian, said something I’d like to interact with (quoted from #ChurchToo):

“Whenever an individual fails to deal with their sexuality in a healthy manner, it will manifest itself in destructive ways, not just for the individuals, but also for the overall community” (from A Lily Among the Thorns, p. 131).

What do we see when we look at the ways that patriarchal, heteronormative men have failed to deal with their sexuality in a healthy manner? Collectively, and often individually, they have caused destruction in their intimate relationships and society at large.

---

Of course, this article is much more than a thought experiment about what mechanisms of purity culture cause transphobia. To keep this theoretical wildly misses the point. I appreciated Allison’s direct approach to the gravity of the situation:

“Theology that teaches that heterosexuality is the only sexual orientation acceptable to God…is violence.” (p.115)

We are all human. We are all subject to feelings of shame and disgust. This is often evolutionarily adaptive: shame helps ensure group cohesion and belonging; disgust keeps us safe from things that might hurt us. But shame and disgust can show up where they don’t belong, and they can be exploited.

I will be honest, the “T” of LGBTQ has been the hardest for me to wrap my mind around, as I suspect is the case for most of us who aren’t trans. This mini-series is part of my attempt to do that, as well as seeking out trans stories and doing my own research. But as I alluded to above: it is MY job to interrogate my own reactions. As someone with a sensitive disgust reflex (…having little germy kids has NOT been easy!), I can be aware of my own tendencies toward scrupulosity. I have the chance to learn more about topics I’m unfamiliar with.

The common theme is that instead of projecting my issues out into others and making them my scapegoat, I can try and turn a gentle gaze inward and ask what might be going on in myself to make me react in such a way. We all exist in a cisgendered society; I think it’s inevitable that all of us – even trans people! – experience some amount of transphobia that is our responsibility to address³.

Because to insist we should exist in a cis/heteronormative society and that we should all fit into the same boxes is violence. It’s about damn time we stopped scapegoating the trans and queer community.

1. Many thanks to my friend through this newsletter for sending this my way! https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00051/full

2. Pam writes a weekly newsletter that summarizes a work of a major theologian or other theological influence. Sort of like CliffNotes! Great for if you want to get introduced to important thinkers but don’t have time to read all the books!

3. This dynamic feels similar to acknowledging the racism that is baked into the bones of our society: recognizing what’s happening, not being too proud to see it in ourselves, and doing what we can to root it out.