“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” ― Flannery O’Connor (Mystery and Manners, 1969)
“The freak went from one side to the other, talking first to the men and then to the women, but everyone could hear. The stage ran all the way across the front. The girls heard the freak say to the men, “I’m going to show you this and if you laugh, God may strike you the same way.” The freak had a country voice, slow and nasal and neither high nor low, just flat. “God made me thisaway and if you laugh He may strike you the same way. This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain’t disputing His way. I’m showing you because I got to make the best of it. I expect you to act like ladies and gentlemen. I never done it to myself nor had a thing to do with it but I’m making the best of it. I don’t dispute hit.” Then there was a long silence on the other side of the tent and finally the freak left the men and came over onto the women’s side and said the same thing.” ― Flannery O’Connor (A Temple of the Holy Ghost, 1955)
The Contested Territory of Normative Chastity
Freaks. Perhaps no other word I know carries so much contradiction. This polyvalent word expresses difference, the desire for difference, and the fear of that desire. As a transfeminine Catholic, I know something of enfreakment. In a time of simultaneous hyper-visibility and hyper-invisibility in the American Catholic subculture, the political implications of our theology are deadly serious. The Catholic Catechism and its particular tradition of socio-morality at once poetically and assertively emphasize Chastity as a commitment to integrity, a prudential conformity to the truth of our bodies as inscribed in us by our Creator. Normatively understood today, this truth circumscribes our genders and the right ordering of our sexual behaviors to heterosexual, and (at least in principle) procreative marriage. This tradition anchors today’s conservative Catholic opposition to transness, transition, and consequently trans people. Supporting that anchor are anti-trans interpretations of body-soul integrity, conjugal integrity, and divine sovereignty. These, in turn, all integrate into each other to form a bulwark against heretical mind-body dualism, sex/gender non-binarism, and all pretense to autonomous self-definition, respectively. In this view, those who reject this ‘truth’ violate the theological structure within which soul to body, man to woman, and Creator (read Sovereignty) to Creature each ‘properly’ relate.
Integrity theologies like these work together as supposed self-defense against the inherent trans(a)gression of trans existence, underpinning an expanding Catholic anti-gender movement, which launched in earnest after the Roman Catholic Council for the Family propagated the term “gender ideology” (Butler, 2024). This movement constitutes one more recent expression of the structure that Jules Gill-Peterson calls the “Global Trans Panic” (2025). Since its objectifying reduction to an ideology and pathology, transness has become a key scapegoat for today’s White Christian Nationalisms, as well as traditionalist Catholicism (whether conservative, integralist, or Schmittian). In other words, those partaking in this simulacra of traditionalist Christian theology made trans people, among other targets, into their freaks. However, advocates of the Integrity Chastity stances tend to miss dissident voices in the periphery of their vision and in the margins of theological discourse.
An example of what this impoverished approach of tacit or active enfreakment loses is the important theological insight within Flannery O’Connor’s work. This essay cannot provide a comprehensive guide to O’Connor and gender as a theme in her work. Instead, I will use one of her satirical carnivalesque stories to explain how the Hillbilly Thomist’s uncannily faithful approach to political theology implicates both gender and chastity in unexpected ways.
Flannery O’Connor and A Temple of the Holy Ghost
Flannery O’Connor wrote the story that most plainly addresses her identity as a devout Catholic in a majority-Protestant region in 1953. A Temple of the Holy Ghost tells the brief tale of a pre-teen Catholic girl who rudely judges everyone different from her—a stand-in for the author. Ironically, her conversion moment arrives when a traveling circus comes to town. Then, she hears from her sisters and their friends about a “freak” who is a “man and woman both.” As she wrestles that night with the seeming newness of God’s creation, she imagines this freak, an intersex performer, preaching a sermon to the onlookers in the audience. In the heat of that night, the piercing tones of the calliope puncture her simple view of the world. The next day, she prays at the presentation of the Eucharist during Adoration for mercy and in wonderment of the similarity between the holy mystery of the sacrament and the ‘freakish’ mystery of difference. Later, she learns that religious leaders and the police ran the carnival out of town.
Even though she attempts to undermine some dimensions of normative gender, I will not claim that O’Connor would have supported transition even if she somewhat supports intersex people’s rights and acceptance. That all said, O’Connor expresses a deeply Catholic perspective that refuses to fully comply with today’s traditionalist anti-trans theology or its mobilization of Integrity Chastity.
As O’Connor states in a letter, “Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it. A Temple of the Holy Ghost all revolves around what is purity” (The Habit of Being, 1988). Just as chastity is political, we might attempt a political-theological reading of this story. Through its uncanny usage of the carnivalesque mode of literature, I believe Temple opens up pathways towards chastity that do not discard or demonize transness, and rather unmasks the objectification of trans people by trans-exclusionary chastity theologies.
From Dualistic Disembodiment to Incarnational Embodiment
In the first half of Temple, O’Connor depicts her protagonist as narrowly obsessed with her mind as something separate from her body. Throughout the story, the child prides herself on her precocious intellect as she callowly categorizes the world around her. Her excessive and often disrespectful laughter carries a carnivalesque character, the self-elevating guffaws and chortles seeming far more grotesque than the objects of the child’s scorn. At another point, the child fantasizes about having her head cut off as a martyr, imagining her disembodied head flying straight to heaven. This contrasts with the embodied sensibility of the orthodox view of Jesus, who was born of flesh and blood to redeem all things, both our souls and bodies. In the last sentence of Temple, after the girl finally repents of her meanness and pride in her intellect, she looks up at the sky to see a red sun. Noting this omen of the changes occurring in her own body, she relinquishes her desire for her mind to rule her flesh.
Through these images and their theological foundation, O’Connor warns us against discounting bodies for their foreignness to minds. O’Connor’s orthodox anti-dualism discourages anyone from maligning physical creation or forgetting that, uncannily, these indissociable components actually make up the same living creature. Though anti-trans theologians often link seeking transition to mind-body dualism, we should question the anti-incarnational quality of this very accusation. For non-affirming writers like Abigail Favale (Ignatius, 2022), there are no gay or trans people, just individuals experiencing same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. This pathological framing of mental sin against the body ignores the fact that many trans people say transitioning enables them to feel more present in and to their bodies. As writers like Favale say, we are our bodies– but Jesus makes us anew in both soul and body, often unexpectedly and in radically unique ways. While some rudimentary accounts of gender transition prioritize choosing mind over body (such as the problematic ‘wrong body’ analogy), robust trans affirmation accounts can argue that trans people are their trans bodies. Transition can be a way of seeking peace in one’s body by listening to what dysphoric bodies tell us they need, coming to accept the beauty of embodiment through responsiveness to that corporeal witness.
From Monological Conjugal Integrity to Dialogical Difference
Centrally, Temple asks us to witness the violence of enfreakment. O’Connor negatively depicts the child and others in the story laughing at and demeaning what they perceive as different, foreign, or opposite. This takes the form most obviously in the child protagonist insulting protestant neighbors for their ignorance and bigotry. This appears as a standard commentary on ecumenical relations, but the introduction of the intersex preacher, related to the child through the older youth, brings a twist. The “freak” preaches like a charismatic Protestant, soliciting ‘amens’ and moving about the circus tent from the men’s side to the women’s side, unheld and unfettered by the binary division in carnivalesque, unfinalizable glory. As the performer exhorts the crowd to look on with empathy and reverence, they cry out, “God made me thisaway and if you laugh He may strike you the same way.” This likely echoes Jesus’s willing presentation of his own body in the upper room before his disciples, or as well as the compelled presentation of the same vulnerable body when he was stripped of his garments by the police. In O’Connor’s eyes, what makes this freak different mediates Divinity to us, inspiring piety.
Christ’s face is found in the faces of the freaks, but anti-trans theology upholds enfreakment. Anti-trans Catholics often claim that transness violates Conjugal Integrity’s image of asymmetrical communion, symbolizing the Church’s relationship to God mediated through the Incarnate Christ. Abigail Favale and Marc Barnes (2023) claim that non-binary expressions of sex and gender suppress the beauty of women being innately different from men, biologically hardwired for motherhood. In their model, God gave us genders as fixed, distinct domains–presentations vary over time, but feminine presentation and roles always differ from masculine ones. The assumption is that the difference necessitates separateness. Their dedication to this polarization of gender obscures the unrepeatable, unique givennesses of each person, and it requires that trans people give up transness and conform to cis-ness.
Our liturgies are in vain if we fail to humble ourselves before the God who is both our closest friend in the shape of the stranger and Holy Otherness wrapped in flesh. To partake in that Communion wholeheartedly, we must face the ‘freakishness’ in ourselves. Once we confront our own nonconformity within enfreakening structures that demand our investment, we can repent of our attempts to fit in at the cost of excluding others. A more profound expression of conjugal integrity experiences difference not in two categories of embodiment, but through the specific idiom of each person. This has the potential to refurbish our idea of chastity as the principle enabling connection across difference, rather than an objectifying, monolingual exclusion.
From Sovereign Transparency to Agonistic Opacity
In O’Connor’s stories, God tends to get the last laugh, but always with cautionary nuance and the reversal of expectations. While the girl learns her lesson, tragedy strikes when others fail to metabolize that same wisdom. In Temple’s final scenes, the preachers and police “inspect” the circus and shut it down. Originally evoking the political and religious leaders who condemned Jesus and his movement, this also resembles today’s strip searches, mass surveillance, and proposals to have law enforcement inspect the genitals of suspected trans people attempting to enter gender-segregated spaces. What is hidden must be uncovered, by force if necessary. Anti-trans Catholic commentators play into these wider discourses when they assert that ‘Gender Ideology’ diabolically rebels against the divinely created order, effectively producing the illegibility of transness.
In contrast to the forces of human judgement, the intersex preacher demonstrates an admirable orientation toward their own agonistic opacity when they repeat, “This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain’t disputing His ways.” O’Connor’s intersex preacher’s willingness not to “dispute” their own agonistic opacity as a divine gift indicates a broader, alternative way of encountering our own creation–and that of others–with greater humility. When the audience imagined by the girl responds, “Amen, amen,” they model a posture of spiritual porousness which allows all of us to receive the Kingdom of Heaven through the act of intimacy across the opacity of others. We didn’t create our neighbor, and we can’t see their soul, so even though we should try, we can’t ever see them as fully as God sees them in this life. Likewise, we cannot create ourselves. In this reading, all people (not just Trans folks) partake in this mystery by working with God through faith, reverence, and humble uncertainty, rather than clinical, abstract theologies that wave away lived experiences not familiar to us. This posture helps us receive the ongoingness of our givenness as it unfolds on God’s terms, accepting our invitation to participate not as an expression of our individual will to be sovereign, and not as subservience to earthly sovereignty, but as active receptivity.
Conclusion
In closing, O’Connor reminds us that the Incarnation’s downward momentum reveals the God who seeks to rescue us by living among us. Jesus communes with the people who earthly powers deem most impure through the opacity of Christ’s own paradoxes–both human and God, both alive and dead. As Jesus ministers, he conflictually holds distinct and unseparated natures in one mysterious hypostatic union, which O’Connor echoes in the intersex preacher. Trans givenness keeps on giving through our own social participation, against the designs of the individual and the State. While our increasingly Schmittian state purifies the polity through its ‘mythic violence’ (the unrestrained force of policing that creates law), O’Connor’s uncanny polity of the carnival comes nearer to reflecting the body of Christ, making it a key touchstone for theology in this climate. While discussing Temple, Flannery O’Connor wrote in one of her letters, “As I understand it, the Church teaches that our resurrected bodies will be intact as to personality, that is, intact with all the contradictions beautiful to you, except the contradiction of sin.” Transness, when enfleshed, dialogical, and in love with mystery, beautifully contradicts outdated theological constructions of chastity devised to limit creation’s diversity. Trans bodies and our Catholic theologies point to the contours of a Catholicity beyond the lies of enfreakment.
