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The Holy Ghost is Trans

“Before queerness was politicized, it was priesthood.
Before it was punished, it was power.”

The Holy Ghost Is Trans journeys through ancient gender roles, suppressed spiritual truths, and the emergence of sacred digital sanctuaries. This essay honors the wisdom of those who live in-between—and reveals why their light is essential to the future of the sacred.

If God is everything, why are we still insisting God is either/or?

What we call Spirit has always existed beyond the architecture of gender. But the human impulse to categorize, to control, to contain what makes us uncomfortable, did what conquest always does—it narrowed the infinite. It carved binaries into being and dared to call them Divine.

The Holy Ghost is not bound by biology.
It has no fixed form, no singular voice, no allegiance to the constraints of flesh.
It moves as wind. As fire. As presence.
And if I’m being honest, it moves like queerness.

But still, institutions try to make holiness legible—palatable.
They put the sacred in a suit and tie. They give it a father’s tone, a pastor’s cadence, a theology of walls.
And they call anything outside that boundary unnatural.

Yet before any of us could spell transgender, two-spirit, or non-binary, there were cultures who not only understood these identities—they revered them.

Among the Fon of West Africa, Mawu-Lisa was both moon and sun, male and female—creator and container. They understood the divine as dual, unified, indivisible. Holiness didn’t divide itself to be understood—it expanded itself to be felt.

Among the Navajo, there is nádleehi—one who walks in-between.
Among the Lakota, winkte, whose visions were trusted, whose roles were sacred.
In the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, dual-spirited people are seen as mediators between realms.
The Yoruba didn’t weaponize fluidity—they encoded it into the divine. Ọ̀ṣun does not explain herself. She simply is. And she is never just one thing.

Before queerness was politicized, it was praised.
Before it was punished, it was priesthood.

This is sacred memory—passed through story, through ceremony, through blood.
It’s a remembering older than the language trying to erase it.

The Holy Ghost is trans because Spirit has never needed to choose.
And maybe the reason that makes some people so uncomfortable…
…is because they’ve built their entire sense of holiness on the assumption that God looks just like them.

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Before gender was boxed and labeled, it flowed—between bodies, across borders, through breath and ritual. It lived in those whose presence reminded the community that the sacred was never singular.

In Diné (Navajo) culture, the nádleehi—"one who is transformed"—embodied both masculine and feminine traits. They served as healers, spiritual guides, mediators. Their existence enriched the community, woven into the spiritual and ceremonial life of the people. (source)

The Lakota recognize winkte—those who move between gender roles, who hold spiritual functions no one else can. Winkte have long been respected as ceremonial leaders, dreamers, mediators—carriers of wisdom that lives between the lines. (source)

In Burkina Faso, the Dagara call them gatekeepers—individuals who live on the threshold of gender and spirit. Their presence sustains cosmic balance. They are tasked with bridging the seen and unseen, anchoring the spiritual health of the village. (source)

Within the spiritual traditions of the Fon people of Benin, Mawu-Lisa embodies a divine duality—Mawu, the moon goddess associated with night, fertility, and compassion, and Lisa, the sun god linked to day, strength, and power. Together, they represent a harmonious balance of feminine and masculine energies, illustrating that the sacred transcends binary definitions. (source)

In Yoruba cosmology, the orisha Ọ̀ṣun dances through contradiction—seductive and sovereign, nurturing and destructive. In her, gender is not a limit but a language. The divine doesn’t collapse into male or female—it expands. (source)

When colonial powers arrived, they did more than conquer bodies—they redrew cosmologies. Imposed hierarchies. Rewrote the sacred in their own image. What was once holy became forbidden. And the ones who once stood at the center were cast out.

But power doesn’t vanish. It adapts. It remembers.

Today, the flourishing of Black transgender and gender-expansive life is a revelation. A recognition. A sacred architecture being rebuilt in public view. And what people fear isn’t the visibility—it’s the vibrancy. The truth that wholeness doesn’t need approval to shine.

Naming and honoring these truths is an act of recognition. Of resurgence. Of returning what was never lost—only buried.

I write this not as someone speaking for trans and gender-expansive people—but as someone who honors them, learns from them, and knows that Spirit rises wherever truth is welcome.

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Spirit has always adapted. It traveled in drumbeats and dreamscapes. It etched itself into scar patterns and language. And now—it hums through fiber-optic veins. It slides between screens. It speaks in 1s and 0s because it knows we still need it to speak.

For those the church exiled and the temple ignored, the internet became sanctuary.
Not a perfect one. But one where Black, trans, and gender-expansive bodies could begin again.
Where the altar wasn’t built of marble, but interface.
Where a livestream could hold as much power as a laying on of hands.
Where divinity didn’t ask me to apologize for being complicated.

These digital sanctuaries weren’t born from convenience.
They were carved from necessity.

When physical churches turned us away, we coded new temples.
When sacred texts erased our names, we wrote new ones—in blogs, on social media accounts, in voice notes between chosen kin.
When the systems refused to see us, we built mirrors that could.

Because Spirit has never required a building.
It requires truth.
It requires presence.
It requires a body willing to hold what cannot be defined.

Spiritual technology is more than apps and affirmations.
It’s memory coding.
It’s knowing how to make meaning in exile.
It’s making a ritual out of reclamation.
It’s turning digital space into devotional space—because when your existence is politicized, worship becomes reclamation.

And who better to engineer the future of the sacred than those of us who have always lived in the in-between?

This is the reemergence of the original code.
The sacred rising to meet us in every form we’ve ever taken.

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There is nothing more threatening to a system built on control than the sight of someone it tried to erase—thriving.

To dance in a body they said should be hidden.
To love in a way they said was broken.
To call Spirit into a room and have it show up looking like you.

That is consecration.

Because joy, in its rawest form, is design. It remembers what the world forgot. It restores what doctrine tried to unwrite. It doesn’t just outlive shame—it rewires the frequency altogether.

Black trans and gender-expansive joy is not a side effect of healing. It is the healing.
Not a prize for survival, but a method of it.

This kind of joy doesn’t wait for permission.
It doesn’t ask if its softness will be palatable.
It doesn’t lower its volume to make others comfortable.

It anoints.
It takes up space.
It weaves laughter through the grief and says, “We’re still here. We’re still sacred. We’re still becoming.”

And in witnessing it, I learn too.

As a queer Black woman, I’ve watched how the binary limits not just others, but me.
How the rules about how to be “feminine” or “spiritual” or “good” don’t actually fit the mess and majesty of who we are.
And how the more I deconstruct what I was told holiness should look like, the more Spirit begins to resemble people I was taught to fear.

What if joy is the ceremony?
What if queerness is the prayer?
What if we are the ones building the altar—each time we choose truth over safety, aliveness over assimilation, soul over spectacle?

They don’t ask for answers.
They summon presence.
They open the door to the sacred already breathing beneath our names.

We were never meant to fit inside temples we didn’t build.
We were meant to be the temple.

To remember joy not as indulgence—but as data.
As design.
As divine.

One love, ESS xo

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References

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