A Transgender Man’s Perspective on Purity Culture Got This Cisgender Woman Thinking by Liz Cooledge Jenkins – Feminism and Religion

“Ewww, there’s been a boy in our cabin!” One of my cabinmates squealed. We were at sixth grade camp. Others chimed in quickly: “Gross!”

The evidence? A pair of boys’ cargo shorts, held gingerly between a thumb and forefinger as if they had cooties.

“Ew!” “Weird!” “How’d he get in here?”

The shorts were mine. But I did not admit this.

As a kid, I sometimes wore hand-me-down clothing from my older brother. It made sense. I didn’t have strong opinions about fashion, and the clothes felt just as comfortable and fit just as well as the girl clothes my parents bought for me.

My elementary school classmates didn’t seem to notice or care. But this was sixth grade. This was the first year of middle school. Things were changing, and I hadn’t quite realized the full extent of these changes. Showing up at sixth grade camp with hand-me-down boys’ shorts was taboo.

I thought about this recently, when I read Shannon T. L. Kearns’ book, No One Taught Me How to Be a Man: What a Trans Man’s Experience Reveals About Masculinity.

As a cisgender woman, I don’t know that I’d quite thought about evangelical Christian purity culture in the way Kearns does. But when I read his reflections, they resonated. He writes:

“Purity never quite made sense to me. Women were supposed to dress modestly so as not to make men stumble, but at the same time, we were constantly told that men are turned on by everything. So there was this dichotomy: dress modestly, but also know that even if you were in a burlap sack, men could still be aroused by you. This modesty conversation was particularly weird for me personally because by all standards of modesty, I was crushing it. I wore baggy pants, and when I wore shorts, they went below my knees. My T-shirts and sweatshirts were oversized. I was definitely modest. And yet because I was dressing ‘too masculine,’ it overrode my modesty and became some different kind of sin. It was like they wanted me to be hot but not too hot.

I was somehow subverting the idea of purity by dressing the way I did, but what no one would come out and say is that it was because I was violating gender norms. I was dressing too ‘masculine,’ and that somehow threw the whole idea of purity out of whack.

That’s how tightly the entire system was wound. That’s how fragile it all was. My baggy shorts threatened to bring down the entire edifice.”^[1]

I found Kearn’s reflections fascinating. In evangelical Christian culture, or at least some subsets of it, girls are expected to dress modestly—but never in ways that are considered unfeminine, as Kearns’ baggy pants and oversized sweatshirts (and, of course, my own hand-me-down boys’ cargo shorts) most definitely were.

The “Ew, there’s been a boy in our cabin!” incident happened at a sixth grade camp hosted by my public middle school in the progressive Seattle area, circa the year 2000. No one escalated it to the level of complaining to a camp counselor, as far as I’m aware—but if they had, and if I had been found out as the source of the boys’ shorts, I imagine a counselor might have gathered our little cabin group together and said something like this:

Different people like to wear different kinds of clothing, and that’s okay. We can all wear what we’re comfortable in. There’s nothing “gross” about it. And don’t worry, no boys have been in your cabin, as far as we can tell.

They might even have followed up with me in particular and made sure I still felt safe and comfortable around the rest of those girls.

(I don’t know this, of course. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine.)

If the same thing had happened at an evangelical Christian camp, though—I imagine an entirely different result. I imagine I would have been the primary recipient of a talking-to:

Let’s talk about these shorts and why you brought them with you. Do you often wear boys’ clothes? Do you realize that’s not normal for a girl your age? Maybe there’s a pastor we can refer you to for counseling.

(Again, I don’t know this, but it seems reasonable.)

I don’t know that anyone in authority at that hypothetical Christian camp would have directly told me that, as Kearns writes, I was subverting purity culture and violating gender norms—and that this threatened their fragile system. I don’t know if they would have been even able to articulate this for themselves. But they likely would have been operating from this framework. And it’s so damaging—to trans people, to anyone who dresses at all unconventionally, and really, to everyone.

I don’t think Christianity is for everyone. But for those who do choose to keep engaging with Christian faith communities, I hope we can keep talking about these things.

I hope we can live out a kind of feminism that makes room for people of all genders to be their full selves and express themselves freely—through clothing and otherwise—in ways that feel authentic and right.

After all, those who seek to follow Jesus are following the one who came to liberate, to set captives free, to release the oppressed from their oppression. And of course, we walk in the tradition of the apostle who proclaimed that there’s no longer male and female, but we are all one in Christ.

I hope we can move toward a world where gender norms are not enforced or policed. Where no one feels shamed by religious people for their gender expression. And where all of us learn from trans people like Kearns who are thinking deeply from their own experiences about what a liberated world looks like—where we follow their lead in dismantling purity culture and healing from the damage it has caused.

^[1] Kearns, Shannon T. L. No One Taught Me How to Be a Man: What a Trans Man’s Experience Reveals About Masculinity (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2025), 168.