I was given an advanced reader edition of Transfigured by the author. Here's my review:
Taking spiritual director from a person who isn’t a gender minority made it difficult for me as a trans and intersex person to read these pages at first: After all, these are the same passages I’ve studied, prayed over, and eventually taught on for decades as a Christian pastor and theologian — particularly in the decades I was closeted, struggling to find answers for why I was different and what to do about it, and in the years after I first came out and so deeply wanted reconciliation with the global Christian community now agitated against my very existence. During those decades of life-and-death theological, pastoral struggle, I’d arrived at the very same interpretations Suzanne shares here, leaning into the boundless grace of God’s unconditional love. What can I learn from someone who isn’t even a gender minority restating in such a simple form what took me decades to integrate into my life openly? And some phrases here grate against my own lived experience of the complexity and nuance gender in ways that rub raw the would of stigma and discrimination I’ve encountered from so many Christians since coming out. Yes, this devotional stirs up feelings — both affirming and challenging — that can move forward the prayer life of a broken community: Those who are not trans and not intersex may never have thought about these things the way Suzanne has brought them to you here. Those who are gender minorities are relieved for a moment from the nearly thankless, constant work of having to educate, argue with and defend ourselves from those in our own faith family. We can come together here to pray, each as we are, as one community in faith.