Video: Jill Johnston’s Born-Again Lesbianism: Feminist and Trans Histories

March 04, 2025

Wendy Mallette delivered this lecture for Harvard Divinity School's Women's Studies in Religion Program. Wendy Mallette is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Theology at Harvard Divinity School.

This event took place on March 4, 2025.

ANNE: So, glad to see you all here today. Before I introduce today's lecturer, I just want to mention a few upcoming events, tomorrow, actually. In this room, we have a returning research associate giving a presentation on her new book. Ronit Irshai, together with her co-author, Tanya Zion-Waldoks will be-- let's see. There's the title of their talk. It's called Holy Rebellion: Religious Feminism in Israel. Achievements and Backlash. A very salient topic today.

And then we have two more new research associate presentations coming up later this semester. On Wednesday, March 26 at 1 o'clock in this room, we'll hear from Ashley Boschee, who is here. Where is-- oh, there she is. Speaking about her research on the [? Sybil, ?] reclaiming the power of an ancient persona. And then on Tuesday, April 8, at noon in this room, we'll hear from Aisha Hidayatullah. Where's Aisha? There she is. On the end of gender and Islam liberation through another conjunction.

So, we look forward to both of-- well, to all three of those presentations. But I know you're all here today to hear from Wendy Mallette, who we're so happy to have visiting in the Women's Studies and Religion Program. Wendy is visiting with us from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma, where she is an assistant professor. She earned her PhD in religious studies and a graduate certificate in women's, gender, and sexuality studies from Yale University, after receiving a master's from the Yale Divinity School.

She's published articles in all the right places, quite a few of them. And she fall term this semester. This year, she taught our students sex, sin, and race. And I think there might be a few of those students in the class. Glad to see you. Sounds like that class went well. Just to suspicion. I have to say that as someone who was formed by second-wave feminism in the 1960s and '70s, it's a special thrill to have such a gifted 21st-century scholar, taking seriously, and lending her critical eye to some of the really fascinating figures of this period. So, thank you, Wendy. And I'll give you the podium.

[APPLAUSE]

WENDY MALLETTE: Thank you, Anne. Thanks, Anne. And thank you all for being here. It's really wonderful to see so many students who have engaged this manuscript already in classes, friends, and colleagues, and others who have joined us for our conversation today. I want to give a special Thank you to Polly Allen, who was a 1973 research associate here with the WSRP, who is out to visit today. And to thank my WSRP colleagues for just all the engagements and conversations we've had that have made my projects stronger. And lastly, I want to thank Anne and Tracy. Tracy for everything they've done to make this possible.

So, my lecture today is titled Jill Johnston's Born-Again Lesbianism: Feminist, and Trans Histories. In April 1971, an audience gathered in New York City to witness a debate over the validity of the women's liberation movement. The panel, entitled A Dialogue on Women's Liberation, was moderated by the known misogynist Norman Mailer, whose recent memoir had critiqued several prominent feminists.

It was also well known that in 1960, mailer had stabbed his then-wife in the chest with a pen knife. She survived. But this violent act had neither diminished his literary acclaim nor called into question his fitness to moderate this dialogue. Panelists included the literary critic Diana Trilling, the president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, Jackie Ceballos, the proudly heterosexual feminist writer Germaine Greer, and Jill Johnston, who had recently joined lesbian feminist ranks.

Johnston showed up to the event inebriated and wearing an outfit of embroidered denim and leather boots. When her turn came, she veered from expected decorum and gave a stream-of-consciousness monologue that called for women to get less berated, declaring all women are lesbians except those who don't know it. She framed such lesbian efforts in terms of conversion Verily, verily, I say unto Thee, except a man be born again, she cannot see the Kingdom of goddess. A woman must be born again to be herself, her own eminence and grace, the queen, queen self.

Johnston's proclamation offered a playful take on the words of Jesus to Nicodemus in the Gospel of John, implying that becoming a lesbian feminist required changes dramatic enough to be called a Born-Again experience. Beyond Johnston's delightful descriptions of Mailer's event, appeals to conversion have been both cultivated and contested across lesbian, feminist, trans, and queer movements. For example, the 1976 anthem, Glory lesbian nation sings of turning the whole world gay.

It promises to lure them from their husbands and establishment careers and convert them to unrepentant queers. At the lesbian herstory archives, one can find 1980s buttons that read born again lesbian and 1990s lesbian Avenger posters that declare we recruit. Part of what made conversion so attractive to lesbian feminists was the way that it pointed to lesbianism as threatening power.

Betty Friedan, for example, felt the need to defend the National Organization for Women from lesbians who were as she put it, exploiting the women's movement to try to use it to proselytize for lesbianism. Lesbians responded to this charge by staging the Lavender Menace app to interrupt a conference with seductive calls of, does anyone want to join us? These appeals to conversion also responded to homophobic claims put forth by the Save Our Children Alliance. This anti-gay campaign, led by the evangelical Anita Bryant, advocated that homosexuals should be kept out of schools for fear that they would proselytize children.

My lecture today, today, I'll focus on the final chapter of my book, which examines feminist allusions to conversion, to revisit how scholars have articulated the temporal relationship between lesbian and trans histories. Most broadly conceived, conversion narratives offer a retrospective mode to describe how one's present existence came about in relationship to one's past. As we will see, how one narrates the relationship between past and present varies dramatically across different styles of conversion narratives?

My lecture asks, how might Jill Johnston's understanding of lesbianism as a conversion experience open up new vocabularies for scholars to describe the contingency of gender and sexuality? My lecture will proceed in three parts. First, I briefly survey the scholarship on the perils of conversion narratives, specifically their tendency to reproduce violence through claims to the redemptive innocence of one's converted state.

Keeping such concerns in mind, I then turn to conversion narratives of Johnston's 1973 piece, the Communist Manifesto. I argue that Johnston's Born-Again lesbianism offers a retrospective mode of narration that highlights the contingencies of gender and sexuality in ways that can disrupt fantasies of innocence. In the third section, I analyze two examples of retrospective modes of narrating gender and sexuality within lesbian and trans studies.

I problematize how these retrospective modes tend to ossify gender and sexuality into a confirmable identity throughout history. Because Johnston's piece highlights the unpredictability of the future from the standpoint of the present, I suggest that Johnston's Born-Again Lesbianism can challenge the typical ways that gender and sexuality are described across time.

Let me briefly consider the troubling dynamics of conversion narratives, as articulated by scholars in religious studies, as well as feminist, queer, and trans studies. Scholars of religion and theology have traced how conversion narratives have developed to manage perceived threats of racial, sexual, and religious difference. For example, Jonathan Boyarin analyzes conversion in relationship to the production of Christian unity over and against Jewish, Muslim, and Native difference in medieval Spain through its later colonial projects.

Historians like Katharine Gerbner and Kathryn Gin Lum have traced how conversion appears in Christian defenses of slavery and advocacy for westward expansion in North America. As Willie Jennings explains, these forms of Christian conversion combine a civilizing impulse with a soteriological sensibility. They rely on divisions, as Sylvia Wynter has diagnosed between Christian and heathen, redeemed and fallen, occident and orient, civilized and barbaric.

These concerns have led many feminist, queer and trans scholars to be wary of conversion analogies or to question their own use of them. We see this in an essay first published in 1972 by Judith Plaskow, a Jewish feminist theologian and lesbian who was also a WSRP research associate. In her essay, Plaskow reflected on the ways that words like conversion would crop up in her feminist consciousness-raising group, a group predominantly made up of Christian women pursuing theological education.

Someone might describe having attended a feminist lecture and then convey their experience. I am converted, turned around. The pieces of my life fall together in a new way. Plaskow was interested in such a formulation for the way it contributed to both to a feminist-inflected understanding of conversion and a religious interpretation of feminism. However, she also felt the need to continuously question the ways that conversion was coming up, asking whether a prototypically Protestant conception of conversion might hinder other models for understanding how feminism transformed one's life.

In the feminist memoir project, Rachael Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow likewise compare their coming to feminism to a Pauline-style conversion experience. They explain, the scales dropped from my eyes, and I saw all things new, and all things from the most mundane and habitual to the most enormous seemed changed. Yet despite this powerful experience, they caution that it generated an exclusionary, mythic oneness that sutured feminism to its moment of origin.

These concerns point to the way that conversion narratives often function in the words of queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid as an imperial meme, which reproduces itself by reproducing a past. In this colonial model, conversion narratives appeal to a singular mythic origin that erases dissonant pasts. There's an impulse to smooth over the twists and turns of one's life that do not fit into this neat conversion story.

The troubles with this model of conversion parallel what historian Finn Enke calls the lure of plausible histories. And he develops this notion of plausible histories from the writings of trans theorist Sandy Stone, who had also been a sound engineer for a lesbian feminist record collective, Enke explains. In the 1970s, medical practitioners recommended that transsexuals who transitioned create a plausible history that would tell the story of their lives in one consistent sex. The idea was to erase all traces of medical and social transition.

The plausible history version of one's life involved, as Sandy Stone put it, learning to lie by erasing oneself by a denial of mixture and change. And he acknowledges that such plausible histories were often crucial to living in one's gender. With Stone, however, Enke worries that this denial of mixture and change required by plausible histories stabilizes binary constructions of gender identity. Within trans narratives, plausible histories confirm a coherent identity by selectively collapsing time and place into the present, smoothing over the uncertainties, ambivalences, and unpredictability that mark the relationship of one's past to one's present.

As such, conversion narratives, as plausible histories, generate exclusionary dynamics, especially when ossified into a singular narrative to which one must conform in order to demonstrate the authenticity of one's transness, lesbianism, or redemption. With these concerns in mind, I now want to turn to a conversion narrative found in the writings of Jill Johnston, who was perhaps one of lesbian feminism's more zealous converts and enthusiastic proselytizers.

The Communist Manifesto was published in the 1973, lesbian feminist anthology Amazon Expedition. Her manifesto unapologetically declared that all women are already becoming lesbians, while also grappling with the intractable conflicts and uncertainties that such a conviction holds. I read Johnston's womanifesto as a conversion narrative. But of a different than the conversion narratives previously discussed.

Conversion for Johnston is not a singular moment of transition from a sinful state to a redeemed one, or from patriarchal collaborator to lesbian feminist liberator. One's conversion to lesbianism requires dramatic changes, but is never over and done with. Johnston's Born-Again lesbian narrative is more like a call to continuous conversion, to become, in Johnston's words, each and all the women of the world in transition.

Johnston opens her womanifesto by thinking weird all the different places that women find themselves politically, sexually. She notes a tendency to temporally compare herself to other women. Am I already ahead of myself or behind? And is somebody else slightly behind or ahead of that? But Johnston's own conversion to lesbianism interrupts this comparative temporality of ahead and behind.

Where am I now sexually, politically? Since I'm not the me I was yesterday or last year. The discontinuity of Johnston's conversions between now, yesterday, and last year calls into question her own temporal assumptions about progress and the narrative coherence of gender and sexuality. She asks, what are we permitted to assume, much less concerning anybody else? Their total life, their total past who they are, who am I? who am I to them to become, if anything, and so on.

Johnston's sense of discontinuity and ongoing conversion does not, however, make her past irrelevant. She grapples with the fact that we are in a sense, each of us, all the women we ever were, including straight possibly just yesterday. Or in Johnston's case, the last time I slept with a man two years ago, or four years before that in a tenement on Houston Street with two kids still thinking I was straight. And I was even though I was in love with a woman.

Even as Johnston calls for lesbian conversion, there's a solidarity with her past selves, she insists. I still am that woman. I am all the women I ever was. This relationship of her past to her past selves disrupts any simple division between lesbians and straight women. Yet Johnston emphasizes the conflictual nature of feminist sociality. She enumerates commonplace anti-lesbian sentiments.

Well, huff, huff, this woman must be a lesbian because she hated her father and her mother was a bitch, or she got to be a lesbian harrumph because she had a terrible first sexual experience with a man and all that. These views not only reflect, in Johnston's words, but we were all brought up all those centuries to think. But also echo some of the misogynist views that Johnston herself had on occasion put into writing before she came to lesbian feminist consciousness.

While relativizing a binary distinction between lesbians and straight women, Johnston does not back down from the lesbian feminist contention that heterosexuality in practice oppresses lesbians, which of course, all women are becoming. This, for Johnston, is all very good logic. Despite its sound logic, it raises a practical question. Is the one I'm talking to about to sleep with the woman for the first time? In which case, would I cause her not to if I accuse her of oppressing me by being the kind of woman who sleeps with the man.

After all, accusing someone of sleeping with the man might not be the most effective means to recruit them to lesbianism. Johnston explains, even by the sites of advanced ideology, you can't demand that people be where they're not yet ready to be. Simply sharing lesbian feminist insights as sound as they may be with someone in a bar or on the street might not be enough to elicit the dramatic conversions that Johnston imagines will eventually produce the inevitable possibility of a lesbian nation.

Johnston reflects on where she and other lesbians presently find themselves. We now think we're so smart, just because of a few of us now know that lesbianism not only isn't bad, it's great. In fact, it's the best. And when you ponder it, it makes us ultimate feminists. But she wonders how these lesbians who think we're really hot shit can relate to those women who are afraid to even talk to a lesbian.

For Johnston, this question of proselytization is significant. She asks, do we want more of us? Or do we just want to go around saying what hot shit we are, and how you straight women are lousing us up just to make sure they'll go on doing it? Johnston's own experience of Born-Again lesbianism and her life of ongoing conversion points to the unpredictability of the future from the standpoint of the present. She reminds us that we can't know who may in fact be ready to change tomorrow or next year, or who may be putting her life in order to make big changes we don't know about.

Johnston's vision of a lesbian nation is rooted in her conviction about the desirability of Born-Again lesbianism. She predicts that enough women by a few centuries time will become the hot shit we think we are to make a viable Amazon nation. Despite Johnston's utopian commitment to the appeal of lesbianism, she does not romanticize the between times, reminding readers that in 1972, in America, we are a fugitive band who can't afford to isolate ourselves from the woman in the middle.

Her manifesto concludes, we must therefore, as I see it, take all the chances and risk by realizing we are each and all the women of the world in transition, and not placing ourselves thus above and beyond or ahead, but directly in the center of the moving force of our collective conscience. Johnston's manifesto concludes with this call for continuous conversion, and departs from the binary oppositions and temporalities of plausible histories, reminding us that we are each and all the women of the world in transition.

Johnston's narrative shows us that conversion need not function as a mythic origin, through which one purifies a given community. Johnston's Born-Again lesbianism is more akin to the account of continuous conversion, described by Katherine Tanner as a peculiar and retrospective form of Christian narration that highlights the unexpected twists and turns of one's life. Such conversion narratives remind us just how unpredictably surprising the future looked from the standpoint of the past.

Johnston's continuous conversion narrative highlights a retrospective mode that I hope might have the potential to unsettle plausible narratives, to use Enke's phrasing through which categories like lesbian, queer, and trans are imagined. I joined Emily Owens's call for lingering with the messy places where lesbian and meet. This messy meeting echoes what Cameron Orcutt Rich describes as the pain that marks competing theories of gender within feminist and trans histories. He prompts scholars to understand these painful encounters as a fact of being embodied that is not necessarily loaded with moral weight.

This meeting of lesbian and trans sometimes occurs when scholars seek to definitively determine whether a particular figure was really lesbian or trans. Some scholars seek to temper this definitive tenor by employing a conditional mode of retrospection, explaining that a particular person in the past or even one's past self would have been called trans rather than lesbian today. As we will see, such attempts to determine the past often provoke anxieties about the future of lesbian and trans.

An example of these retrospective anxieties between lesbian and trans can be seen in the autobiographical writings of two Butch lesbians, Cherríe Moraga and Esther Newton. Moraga's essay and Newton's memoir offer deeply personal and highly generational narratives about the relationship between lesbians and butches, on the one hand, and trans-masculinity and non-binary on the other. I will focus my analysis on how their modes of retrospection have a tendency to fix gender and sexuality across time.

Consider Moraga's retrospective reflection in 2009. She writes, I remember that as a young person, my palpable hunger to be sexual with a woman made me desperately want to have a penis, all the while denying that forbidden want. Had I been born in 1982, instead of 1952. My own childhood perceptions of my gender would have defined me as transgender. Did I feel I was a boy trapped in a girl's body? Absolutely. At 5 years old and every day for nearly 15 years thereafter.

Now, consider Newton's 2018 reflection. She writes, as a child, I did not think of myself as a girl trapped in a boy's body. I knew full well that I was not a boy, perhaps because I had wished that I were one so intensely. Recently, I saw an excellent PBS frontline film growing up trans. The option of blocking puberty with hormones has become medically available. And the filmmakers captured the viewpoints of the conflicted parents and doctors in the face of determined children who, thanks to mass media and the internet, already called themselves trans.

I had to face the fact that I was seeing myself in these children and realized that if I were a child now, I likely would have wanted that testosterone. Both Moraga and Newton focus on a prevalent narrative of trans childhood, the feeling of being trapped in the wrong body. Moraga strongly identifies with this narrative, and speculates that such childhood identifications would have defined her as transgender. Even as she explains, I did not construct my life as a transgender person. The choices, or lack thereof, came to me differently.

While Newton does not identify with the wrong body narrative, she describes her childhood desire to be a boy and retrospectively, identifies with trans children's desire for hormones. Like Moraga, Newton identifies this difference largely as a generational contingency. For the majority of butches of my generation, that ship has sailed, as my friend Gail Rubin, the great Butch intellectual said, read most generously. We can see Moraga and Newton each striving to reflect on the contingency of gender and sexual desires.

The unpredictable ways in which our desires are shaped by the contingent possibilities made available to us. Such contingencies, of course, do not map predictably onto older and younger generations, even as one's historical location undeniably shapes one's desires. Such gender and sexual desires might be shaped or shift according to various personal, mundane, and structural factors where one lives, what movements, one is involved in, one's economic class, what books one reads. Who one desires, and how these refract what Christina Sharpe calls racial, sexual, gender?

Moraga's and Newton's retrospection brings our attention to the contingencies of gender and sexuality. They also challenge us to take seriously how such contingency entails new and divergent possibilities that are also always wrapped up with pain and loss, especially in a world marked by the kinds of patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist formations that these two butches have spent their lives struggling against. Yet, even as Moraga and Newton nod to the contingency of gender and sexuality, this sense of contingency is severely hemmed in by the ways they seek to close the gap between what was and what could have been.

This gap is narrowed when Moraga and Newton suture their retrospective identifications with trans-childhood narratives to their anxieties about the future. Moraga seeks to speak among queer communities of color, cross-generationally. But she can't avoid placing Butch and trans in an oppositional framework in which trans desires, especially seeking hormones and surgery, according to Moraga, are tainted by racial capitalism and misogyny and colonialism in ways that Butch womanhood is not.

Moraga's framing allows womanhood to embody an innocent site of queer potential from which trans desires are excluded. Moraga's identification with trans incites her anxieties about the future. I do not want to keep losing my daughters to manhood. I do not want Butch lesbians to become a dying breed headed for extinction. Such apocalyptic anxieties can also be seen in Newton's question. Will trans men supplant butches entirely?

While Newton's answer to this question remains ambiguous. It nonetheless rests on fears like Moraga's, that lesbian survival requires the undisrupted reproduction of Butch identity indefinitely into the future. The transformation of this retrospective trans identification into the future extinction of lesbian requires a collapse of what could have been into what was, what is, and what will be forevermore. This collapse, while made possible by reflecting on desire's contingency, translates this contingency into a threatening necessity.

It is as if desires contingent capacity to reorient our gender and sexual lives in an unexpected way becomes a threat whereby trans existence necessarily entails lesbianism demise. And I want to turn to a second retrospective mode that narrates the meeting of lesbian and trans that occurs when scholars attempt to describe polymerise complex gender and sexual identifications. Murray, of course, was a women's labor and civil rights activist who was also a lawyer, poet, professor, and Episcopal priest.

Scholars have variously described Murray as lesbian, trans, nonbinary, and a Black feminist, even as Murray scholars acknowledge the potential anachronism and note Murray's explicit resistance to many of these terms. To avoid the definite tenor that marks debates about whether a historical figure was really lesbian or trans, scholars employ a conditional retrospective mode.

This conditional mode seeks to attend to the gap between past and present understandings of gender and sexuality through phrases like today, we would understand Murray as or, today, Murray would have identified as. While such conditional modes of retrospection crucially avoid fueling this oppositional framing of lesbian and trans, they nonetheless seek to resolve contingencies uncertainty by treating gender and sexuality as a conformable identity across time.

Allow me to highlight three examples. Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography takes up Murray's gender on its first page. After describing Murray's many accomplishments, Rosenberg explains, Murray accomplished all this while struggling with what we would today call a transgender identity. She further speculates, had Murray been born several generations later, she might have embraced a transgender identity.

But in the 1930s, she had no such language, nor a social movement that would have supported her use of it. Likewise, Brittney Cooper's chapter on Murray in her 2017 book recounts various gender and sexual-related conflicts seen in Murray's personal correspondence and medical files. Cooper informs readers. Today, we would understand Murray's rejection of the conflation of her sexual attraction and her gender identity in terms of transgender identity.

But she was born in a female body during a time where there was not yet language to articulate the distinctions between sexuality and gender and to name the possibility of being transgender. The third example comes from Simon Fisher's 2019 article about Murray's time in Harlem. Fisher explains his use of she pronouns for Murray. It was evident to me that if given the option, Murray would have used he pronouns at this time. However, Murray later in life identified more as a woman, and I believe, would have chosen to use pronouns if given the option.

As this was the case when she died, I have chosen to use pronouns out of respect for this latter choice. These three scholars exemplify the conditional retrospective mode that combines the word today with the conditional would to hold open the gap between Murray's present and ours. Here, Rosenberg, Cooper, and Fisher all strive to account for the contingent possibilities temporal, personal, and structural that shape gender and sexuality. Cooper and Fisher especially, are otherwise admirably attentive to particular language, often shifting and conflicting, with which Murray experimented to describe gender and sexuality.

Yet use of wood stitches together are present in Murray's aligning what was, what is, and what would have been. These three scholars conditionally speculate about how Murray would identify today, or what pronouns Murray would have used had Murray had the possibilities offered by our present. They seek to grant Murray a gender recognition never offered in life. But such retrospective identity confirmation risks collapsing the shifting articulations of gender and sexuality across Murray's life and beyond.

Moreover, when Rosenberg and Cooper set the trans possibilities of our present against the impossibility of being trans during Murray's life, they inadvertently obscure the existence of trans lives during and even before Murray's. The retrospective temporalities of Rosenberg, Cooper, and Fisher, as well as Moraga and Newton's identifications, assign a fixity to gender and sexuality that misses their unpredictable contingencies.

In questioning this retrospective narrative mode, my aim is not to abandon trans, lesbian, and queer methods for examining past histories or lives. Instead, I want to experiment with methods that might stave off the impulse toward identity confirmation. To counter how these narratives ossify gender and sexuality across time, I want to compare their retrospective identifications to the retrospective narrative of Johnston's born again in lesbianism.

Johnston's piece, when read alongside trans theorist, Andrea Long Chu's analysis of desire, offer us a promising method to grapple with the challenges that gender and sexuality contingency pose for narrating histories. What happens if we read Johnston's conviction that we are each and all the women of the world in transition? Alongside Chu's assertion that transition expresses not the truth of an identity, but the force of a desire. In reading Johnston alongside trans studies, I take up Enke's call for more mixed-up lesbian, and trans histories, which of course may also mean less plausible histories.

And he reminds us that history-making is highly suspect business, particularly when it comes to identity confirmation. Johnston's womanifesto unsettles our attachment to progressive temporalities by pointing to the contingencies and complicities of our desires. Her Born-Again lesbianism disrupts the ossifying tendencies typical of conversion narratives as plausible histories. This discontinuity of her conversions challenges assumptions, including Johnston's own, about what constitutes progress, conversion, and redemption.

What, after all, are we permitted to assume about the gender, sexual, or political trajectories of our own lives, much less anybody else's? Yet Johnston's sense of discontinuity does not make her past irrelevant. Instead, she grapples with the ineradicable complicities of our individual pasts and collective histories. We are, in a sense, each of us, all the women we ever were.

Johnston's Born-Again lesbianism offers one way for us to linger with what Enke calls the unresolved unsolved dilemmas of non-binary gender, as well as race that Mark lesbian, and trans histories. Instead of resolving the unrelenting contingency of desire by conferring a recognition to Murray, or treating such contingency as a threatening necessity, Johnston's Born-Again lesbianism points us to the complicities, including transphobia, racism, and anti lesbianism that Mark our histories. As Johnston tells us, we are certainly not the hot shit we think we are.

Likewise, the pronouns and understandings of gender and sexuality we use today might not be the hot shit we think they are either. And they're certainly not capable of bringing resolution to the desires or the pain that marked lives like Murray's, Moraga's, Newton's, or our own. The contingencies of gender and sexuality always involve loss, which of course, must be taken seriously. This contingency need not and cannot be resolved through identity confirmation, as if scholars could grant Murray access to the coherent identity. Murray never achieved in life, nor can contingency be warded off through an oppositional framing of transness as a threat to lesbian's future.

Instead, reading Johnston's retrospective lesbian conversion narrative alongside Chu's account of desire, offers one way to affirm Enke's conviction that we should keep the various modes in which we might inhabit categories like trans, woman, lesbian, queer, non-binary, Butch, femme, and so forth open in more ways than we can even imagine. The realities of Johnston's 1972 and our present are in no place monolithic or resolved.

In highlighting the contingency and unintelligibility of our desires, Johnston's Born-Again lesbianism departs from the mode of storytelling that Chu critiques, in which everything that happened could not have happened otherwise. After all, as Johnston reminds us, we can't know who may in fact be ready to change tomorrow or next year, or who may be putting her life in order to make big changes. We don't know about. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

ANNE: Thank you so much, Wendy, for that really stimulating and challenging and exciting lecture.

Sponsor Women's Studies and Religion Program.