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Monica Roberts' passing is a huge loss to the trans community. "Unapologetically Black, trans and proud" she'll be remembered for her monumental contributions as a journalist, writer, and activist. We should also remember her complicated and productive relationship with religion.
Roberts' life and story break open some of the ways LGBTQ people make use of the raw materials of religion, negotiate with religious discourses/structures, and forge new religious communities, theories, practices. Topics too often ignored by scholars and historians of religion.
What would it mean to tell Monica Robert's story with an attention to her religious experience, her theological critiques and creations? To acknowledge the dialectical relationship between her religion and her politics?
In part, telling Monica Robert's story as religious history would mean spending time with her own accounts of her faith and her resistance of white supremacist theologies of God. https://twitter.com/TransGriot/status/891313113957617668?s=20
It would mean giving attention to Robert's theological claims about God and God’s love. "God loves us too. We transgender people need to name it and proclaim it to all who will listen. We also need to...believe it with all our hearts as well." https://transgriot.blogspot.com/2009/04/nevr-let-anyone-tell-you-god-doesnt.html
It would mean recreating networks of theological exchange where Roberts, Tammy Faye Bakker, and the Lady Chablis cross paths. Where Black LGBTQ people of faith gather to strategize against attempts to use race as a wedge issue in debates over LGBTQ rights. https://transgriot.blogspot.com/2006/01/black-church-summit.html
Remembering Monica Robert's story as a religious history would mean examining how her criticism of Christian “conservafools” was inextricable from her own biblical hermeneutic. https://transgriot.blogspot.com/2011/12/bible-quotes-conservafools-need-to-read.html
It would mean spending time thinking critically about her theorizations of "faux faith" and her theological critiques of the religious right. https://transgriot.blogspot.com/2006/01/religious-right-ten-commandments.html https://twitter.com/TransGriot/status/742027485756461056?s=20
It would mean analyzing her assessments of the shifts in the rhetoric of religious opposition LGBTQ rights, and her understandings of faith-based attacks against trans people.
https://transgriot.blogspot.com/2013/08/faith-based-bigots-still-trying-and.html
https://transgriot.blogspot.com/2013/08/faith-based-bigots-still-trying-and.html
It would mean writing a religious history of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), Monica’s own involvement, and how the fight over non-discrimination was not primarily between religion and non-religious but between two different accounts of religion.
It would mean extending that story beyond the HERO's failure to account for afterward, how Roberts as head of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus organized a joint statement with Baptist ministers apologizing for the pain their opposition to HERO caused. http://www.offthekuff.com/wp/?p=87617
It would also mean paying attention to how and why Roberts sought to claim space for religion ( https://twitter.com/TransGriot/status/359728467757113346?s=20) and her grappling with the presumed secularism of LGBTQ activism. https://twitter.com/TransGriot/status/859118578645258241?s=20
Remembering Monica's story as a religious history would undoubtedly also include an account of how she was a "trans griot." Of how she lived into, navigated, and redefined that role.
It would include an account of the sacredness of her own activism. How Monica's indefatigable and careful work properly identifying, naming, and telling the stories of transgender people who had died and/or been misgendered was a kind of sacred work.
I hope Monica Roberts is remembered for the complex, varied, and impactful contributions she made in these and many many other ways. And I hope we as religious historians tell her story in all of its urgent and dazzling complexity.
