Wendell Berry Comforted Me Through My Gender Transition

The late, great Wendell Berry found me at a unique time in my life: I was in the early stages of transitioning between genders.

Up until that point, part of me had always assumed that I wouldn’t connect with Berry’s writing because the people who recommended it to me were usually vaguely conservative men who wanted to live self-sufficient agrarian lifestyles. These people certainly had softer sensibilities than the more overtly militaristic conservatives I knew, but nonetheless, it sometimes felt that their idyllic worldviews and theologies didn’t have much room for people like me.

Nonetheless, when I began to read Berry’s novel Jayber Crow during a trip to the beach one summer, I started highlighting the quotes and sentences that stood out to me. By the end, entire stretches of pages and chapters were drenched in yellow ink and double underlined to maximize the impact they’d had on my heart. As a transgender woman, my life experience could not be more different than Berry’s, or the characters he wrote about. But even amid our many paradoxical differences, somehow Berry’s life and legacy feel like part of who I am today.

As a transgender woman, my life experience could not be more different than Wendell Berry’s, or the characters he wrote about. But even amid our many paradoxical differences, somehow his life and legacy feel like part of who I am today.

To start with the obvious: Contrary to the generally conservative impression that I’d received from devotees, Berry’s life never fit snugly into any of the modern political categories we labor to uphold. He was a devoutly committed follower of Jesus who had intense criticism of the church in its current “God and country” form. He was an impassioned lover of America as a place, and he also frequently castigated the “American way.” He often extolled the rewards of a responsible and honest work ethic, and lambasted the destructive nature of capitalism and self-perpetuating economic growth. He was skeptical of big government and big corporations in equal measure. He held marriage and family in high esteem, and also frustrated many traditionalist Christians by refusing to say that the government should ban gay unions. Put simply, Berry was a man of committed principle who did everything in his power to structure his life around his convictions, and never modulated his message for broader support or popularity within any given tribe.

Berry’s essays and poems are magnificent, but his fiction was where I learned to understand his values lived out in the realm of a story. Many of Berry’s novels are styled as memoirs from the fictional residents of an imagined, tightly knit Kentucky town. It was his 2004 novel, Hannah Coulter, that spoke most dearly to my soul.

Hannah Coulter is the recollection of a woman in her late 70s as she parses through the long journey of her life: twice-widowed, surrounded by the vast industrial and economic changes of post-World War II America, and deeply held and comforted by her “membership” in the close community that formed her. Hannah’s story is full of heartbreak and beauty in equal measure, and reading it, I found it nearly impossible to believe that she was not a real woman simply recalling her most intimate experiences from memory. This is the magic trick of Berry’s fiction in particular: He lived such a deeply embodied life that even his imagined characters feel similarly embodied and real.

To this day, I can’t quite describe what resonated with me about Hannah. Maybe it was how she frequently oscillated between the warmest sentiment and the most sardonic frustration, not unlike myself. Maybe it was the way Hannah had learned to befriend the seemingly disparate lives she’d lived, acknowledging that her story was not linear and that she was not obligated to remain the same person she’d been in her memories. As someone who has experienced the grief and disorientation of my entire life story being upended and redirected, Hannah showed me that even the greatest tragedies might be met with little redemptions. And perhaps this was the truest resonance I found: Hannah’s long and storied life as a woman tenderly held by community showed me the kind of woman I wanted to be when I reached her age, too.

I’m sure that I’m not alone, as a queer person, in saying that it feels complicated to find profound truth in the writings of authors who may have held views contrary to our very lives and identities. Lots of people of faith seem to assume that their favorite authors—particularly those who are dead—would have agreed with them on theology or politics. For better or worse, I haven’t often had that luxury. In fact, I think that many marginalized people actually have the unique superpower of appreciating an artist’s work and insights without assuming their total agreement with them.

Berry never wrote or said anything publicly about transgender people, which was characteristic of his inclination to let his work speak for itself. Even his musings about gay marriage were primarily pragmatic in nature; he spoke less about sin and more about what the government has a right to do and not do. He was adamant, in fact, that homosexuality was too often used as a wedge issue and basis for exclusion in Christian communities that should be defined by greater love and responsibility to each other. In his many critiques of such judgement and tribalism, he wrote that “categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob, which makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob overflowing with righteousness, as there was at the crucifixion and has been before and since.”

READ MORE: Wendell Berry, Voice for Land and Neighbor, Dies at 92

Nonetheless, many others have extrapolated Berry’s general worldview to score ideological points against transgender folks. Columnist and editor at large at Christianity Today Russell Moore quoted him to make a point in an essay about “the Transgender Debate” in 2017. It can be hard to escape the feeling, in much of Berry’s writing, that things in our world are largely getting worse—and that the new and unfamiliar are usually vehicles of dehumanization and mechanization. Berry was long skeptical of progress for its own sake—and in conservative spheres, queer life is often associated en masse with the forces of progressive modernity, technology, urban city-dwellers, and secularism.

It is true, in some sense, that when reading Berry’s fiction, I sometimes had to wrestle to find my place in the picture of the world he was painting. It was easy to aspire to be Hannah Coulter, but what if I was actually her daughter, Margaret, who moves to the city and loses touch with her roots by embracing the many seductions of modernity? There are no openly queer people in the Southern small-town world of Berry’s novels, which usually makes sense, given the setting and time period. For some, this is proof enough that queer people don’t belong in a vision of a beautiful community, just as our absence from the Garden of Eden in Genesis is damning evidence that we were intentionally excluded.

And yet, the fictional world of Port William resonated with me anyway. I was moved by the vision of a place where all were “members of each other”—including those who were unmarried or otherwise on the fringes. I was touched by Berry’s statement that “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives.” I was enchanted by the calling to live that kind of life of embodied conviction—to intimately commit to a place and a people, to become inseparable even through tragedy and challenge, and to trust in God’s grace through it all. For me, that place and people have looked different than the ones in Berry’s writing. Like most Berry readers, I do not live on a farm. But the spiritual truth (and challenge) of his words inspired me to seek out what God wanted to do with my life all the same, and delight in it. These concepts and feelings are not foreign to the queer experience; in fact, they are native to it. They are native to being a human being, and no tribe has an exclusive claim on believing them and feeling them.

Berry writes (through Hannah’s voice) in Hannah Coulter:

“You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything, give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”

Those words were exactly what I needed to hear in a moment when I was desperate to wish myself away from the life I’d been given: the life of a person who was inescapably trans. Part of why I was so desperate to escape that reality was that I believed that it meant my life would never be as beautiful and idyllic as the ones in Berry’s books. But that was my mistake: The characters and communities in Berry’s fiction are not beautiful because they are idyllic—they are beautiful because God redeems them. Midway through Jayber Crow, he remarks, “I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.”

I am grateful to say that I have been led too, and that Wendell Berry was part of my leading.