Nicolete Burbach

Do get involved in this - super exciting to be helping organise, and looking forward to seeing what people come up with!🕯️

Not my professional domain but am obvs personally tremendously interested in this. Submit cool stuff, team!

Theology4Trans Studies (online conference): (20-Aug-2026) Conference overviewOver the past few years, Christian theology has begun to take more interest in transness. Transness is recognised as an element within our contemporary metaphysical, ethical and pol...

The @londonjesuit.bsky.social is teaming up with @cdjtheology.bsky.social to put on this online conference on theology and trans studies later this year. See here for the cfp and signup (it's very affordable!)
londonjesuitcentre.churchsuite.com/events/wevpt...

Thinking of students I've had in the past, the vital bit missing from this is the importance of not stopping once you're done the thinking, but writing it all down a second time in a way that's actually focused and makes sense

But also, I'm not sure if it's a problem to treat Christian nationalism as a right wing phenomenon if actually existing Christian nationalism is genuinely right wing - even if left forms are hypothetically possible

I'm not sure if I buy the idea that "dreams of a more Christian society [which] have animated movements for workers’ rights, women’s liberation, and Black freedom" are really forms of Christian nationalism - while they certainly involve the "Christian" bit, are they really "nationalism"?

It was a genuine privilege to be able to edit it

At the risk of self-promotion, this is genuinely a unique book, exploring more-or-less affirming approaches that still try to keep in contact w mainstream/orthodox Catholic theology.

Some essays are obviously better than others, but it's actually worth reading if you're interested in any of this

Trans Life and the Catholic Church Today While transgender and non-binary identities are increasingly visible, too many Christians have either maintained a fearful silence, or have attacked 'transgende…

My edited collection on transness and Catholicism is coming out in paperback in September! Preorder here.

(or just keep using whatever pirated version you've managed to find - I don't really care, but the support is nice) www.bloomsbury.com/uk/trans-lif...

Christian Nationalism Across the Atlantic (13-Mar-2026) Event overview Christian Nationalism is a prominent movement within contemporary far right politics. Its influence is particularly clear in the US, where the Trump administration seeks to create a so...

The world is going to shit. Find out (partially) why this Friday londonjesuitcentre.churchsuite.com/events/ywnqr...

But what can I do – Dr Ruth Pearce Posts about But what can I do written by Ruth

There are two things you can do right now to support young trans people in England.

1) Engage in political advocacy and community support. I've got *loads* of advice on this in my blog post and zine "But what can I do? How to fight the trans panic".

Interesting that NHS England have now made this official. In practice it's been the case for years now, they just haven't publicly admitted it.

Not to take away from Ms Thorn at all, but this opinion is plain as day common sense at this point.

The only 'care' <18 trans kids on the NHS get is talk therapy to manage their distress at not being able to access hormones. The only possible outcomes are prolonging pain or encouraging desistence.

Medical transition for trans kids is now banned for new referrals on the NHS. Trans kids in the UK can still go private or DIY (for now).

This means the new clinics that replaced GIDS are close to useless at best, conversion therapy at worst. 1/5

It was genuinely great but yeah - wildly complicated and incredibly different to everything else. It was a really good boardgame though!

The historically pivotal court case, that is critical to the future UK Trans+ rights Christine Goodwin v UK, changed the lives of Trans+ people across Europe, leading to the UK Gender Recognition Act. But it continues to be misunderstood

“Goodwin remains a hugely significant and impactful moment in Trans+ legal history.

“We should not surrender what it means lightly," @jessothomson.co.uk 

Research that fails to take into account of this dynamic is therefore not simply missing an important variable, but productive of the very phenomenon it studies - and all the attendant injustices that circulate around racialised gender as an organising principle of patriarchal White supremacy.

This also adds an additional layer of significance to the way that Whiteness is universalised in research into gender. This is the exact same dynamic through which gender was produced - white bodies being taken as the norm, even while the concepts themselves were produced from Black flesh.

It's unsurprising in this context that gender differences are racialised - because modern Western sex/gender *is and has always been* race.

...or just forms of Black sociality that are more open to gender nonconforming life.

Correspondingly, Snorton argues, norms around the sexed body have historically been negotiated differently in Black communities, whether that's slaves using perceptions of sexed ambiguity to disguise themselves as the "opposite sex" as part of escape attempts...

These concepts mark out White ideals for the body that have always been defined against Black bodies, which were taken as revealing the truth of sex as objects of surgical experimentation, but also as embodying it in inferior ways. transreads.org/wp-content/u...

More recently, C Riley Snorton has written incredibly perceptively about we can understand sex in these terms too. Our concepts of the sexed body were developed through brutal experimentation on degendered slaves (following Spillers).

She argues that this latter development is, among other things, a punitive reaction against Black strategies for surviving racialisation in the form of gender.

Once in the New World, this dynamic continued in the disruption of kinship groups and other markers of sexed identities through the slave trade, and more recently in racist narratives about absent Black fathers and overbearing masculine Black mothers. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neg...

Spillers argues that de-gendering was intrinsic to the reduction of enslaved Africans to a mere commodity - "flesh" - to be crammed into the holds of slave ships, measured only by the volume they took up.

The missing piece in this is how sex and race were produced concurrently. Black feminists like. J Hortense Spillers have long written about how norms of masculinity and femininity have been used as tools of racialisation. www.mcgill.ca/english/file...

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The key to understanding this is that "lanyard" bears more meaning than "class". The phrase refers to people who supposedly fuse Trad Working Class(TM) exclusionary progressive ideology w organisational policy, signified by eg having a pride symbol on their lanyard. It's just culture war nonsense.

On my dad's side, my Oma was a secretary & my Opa was a shipping clerk. You may think they were the boring side of the family, but my Opa left us a series of catty letters to Wilbur Smith after he complained about their dog barking. My Opa only stopped sending them after being threatened by lawyers