An old chestnut which is frequently re-roasted to feed trans ignorance and misdirection is that transgender people are modern 'gnostics', or other kinds of 'heretics', who ignore God's 'good creation; and material reality for the sake of falsely perceived inner realities and self-help means of salvation. Such crass allegations are surprisingly even occasionally made by scholars who really should know better. For it is a truly absurd charge. Indeed it is quite upside down.! Transgender people are not aiming to escape this life and our own bodies. Rather, more than many, we are seeking to live more fully within them. We may indeed in the past have had imposed on us false idealised mental conceptions of who and what we are However, in accepting ourselves as loved and accepted chilldren of God, we are actually throwing them off and participating in the making real of our wondrous divine image in the here and now.
For gnosticism is certainly a spiritual temptation. It was a powerful entity in the first centuries of the early Church and it appears in different ways at other times in history. Transgender people however are not contemporary examples. Rather it is sometimes some of those religious people who oppose us who display such tendencies. Too often, certain ideas of God and Christ are over-egged: making them akin to gnostic 'saving knowledge' detached from living and growing in the very material, fleshed-out, world in which we live. For this world is full of rich diversity which calls us all to deeper engagement not escape from mystery. If anything, transgender people may thus be potential gifts into deeper 'orthodoxy' (understood both as 'right belief' and right glory').