Emancipation is not a pie: Imagining better metaphors for liberation

As I write this, my country (the UK) sits under the shadow of a red flag alert for genocide against trans and intersex people.[1] This is a situation that has not come about by accident but has been driven intentionally, including by groups and individuals who claim to be motivated by a Christian faith.

Often, theology which seeks liberation is directed at injustices within the church. This is, of course, desperately needed and by no means a misguided goal. Racism, misogyny, homophobia, trans and intersex exclusion and many more systemic injustices still have a grip on the church and need to be dealt with. However, the consequences of warped theologies are not confined to our hallowed walls.

Theology does not happen in a vacuum, insulated and isolated from the real world, from politics and society. We are perhaps familiar with the idea of evangelical Christians wielding high-level political influence in the US, but this is not a phenomenon restricted to the other side of the Atlantic. Here, in the UK, organisations such as The Christian Institute, Christian Concern (and their ‘Christian Legal Centre’), LGB Christians, the Evangelical Alliance, and others turn their gaze beyond the church and to the public sphere. These groups are among those actively seeking to influence public policy in trans-exclusionary ways. For example, the Evangelical Alliance write in their statement in response to the April 2025 Supreme Court Ruling that, ‘the Evangelical Alliance has engaged in this policy area for well over 20 years, from the origins of the GRA [Gender Recognition Act], and have maintained an interest in both the legal policy aspects as well as the pastoral implications for churches’.[2] Christian Concern, meanwhile, are currently supporting several individuals in legal battles against institutions that attempted some form of trans-inclusion. As well as assisting direct legal action, they write that ‘Christian Concern supports and advocates for policies which uphold the male-female distinction for the good of all’.[3] The list of religious groups that promote hatred and rejection of trans people is, of course, not confined to these few. However, these serve as examples of the fact that this is not a ‘domestic’ intra-church issue. Our theology needs to be better for the sake of our churches (and the trans and intersex lives they touch), yes, but also for the sake of our public policy.

I want to take perhaps a slightly unusual approach to this topic.[4] I don’t want to get into the weeds of definitions, of statistics that are skewed this way or that way, or biblical arguments. I want to talk about metaphors. Specifically, I want to examine the metaphors that are often employed in the discourse around trans rights (and the restriction thereof). [KO1] As we will see, metaphors are powerful tools that shape our thinking, as well as our language. Using metaphors that reflect reality and help us to imagine a fairer future is therefore crucial to building a better theology.

A lot of ‘trans discourse’ (anti-trans rhetoric) revolves around trying to define what a woman is. This is because, largely, anti-trans fearmongering centres on the desire to ‘protect’ (certain kinds of) women. Following scholars like Alanah Mortlock,[5] Kyla Schuller,[6] and Ruby Hamad,[7] Alison Phipps draws the links between colonial weaponising of White women’s ‘safety’ to justify violence against and oppression of people of colour, especially Black men, and modern reactionary feminism. Such so-called ‘trans-exclusionary feminism’, she writes,

relies on accounts of sexual victimisation, set alongside a construction of trans women as predatory and essentially male. … Trans women are made responsible for acts of violence committed by cis men, through narratives that naturalise the penis as violence and stick this organ to the trans woman via an intrusive and violent obsession with her surgical status.[8]

This narrative serves several goals, but perhaps the most important one is that ‘it uses the device of White women’s tears to deny humanity to the Other’.[9] Hamad calls this phenomenon ‘Strategic White Womanhood’.[10] Victimhood is a powerful political tool, one which, in this paradigm, is the sole privilege of bourgeois White women. Strategic White Womanhood constructs the world in such a way that the suffering of other marginalised and oppressed people groups is not so much invisible as it is illegitimate.

This attitude is reflected, for example, in a statement from one of the organisations mentioned above. In ‘A Response to Christians Decrying the Supreme Court Ruling’, LBG Christians write that, ‘all that sound and fury [arguments for trans rights] has turned a complex debate into a contest for victimhood. It has exposed people to backlash, and set the cause of toleration back by years’.[11] The implication is that there should be no contest for victimhood since it belongs to a certain group inherently. Questioning or threatening this status, even implicitly, is an intolerable threat.

Not only is victimhood, then, the prerogative of bourgeois White women, so is emancipation. That is because, like victimhood, rights are imagined as a limited resource. If trans people are acknowledged as oppressed, if they are shown sympathy, even granted certain rights, White women (or, in the above example, gay, lesbian, and bisexual people) must cede their own rights. Thus, Hands Across the Aisle’s mission statement reads: ‘We are radical feminists, lesbians, Christians and conservatives that are tabling our ideological differences to stand in solidarity against gender identity legislation, which we have come to recognize as the erasure of our own hard-won civil rights.’[12]

It’s as if emancipation is a pie. If one more person gets a slice that means someone else’s will not be as big.

This paradigm is obviously not new or confined to trans people. As Phipps points out, it has been used against people of colour and against women, as well as gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, working class people, the list goes on.

So, how can we share the pie more equally?

By realising that there is no pie.

The idea that rights are a limited resource or that emancipation must be shared between people groups is a metaphor, a conceptual metaphor. Eve Sweetser and Mary Therese DesCamp write that ‘Metaphor is a matter of thinking, not a matter of language: human beings use metaphors to conceptualise one mental domain in terms of another’.^[13] According to conceptual metaphor theory (which sits within cognitive linguistics, itself an aspect of cognitive science), metaphors are not only or merely clever rhetorical tools with which we may embellish language to make our arguments more convincing or our poetry more seductive. Rather, metaphors are conceptual tools that allow us to think, especially about difficult or abstract ideas.

Many conceptual metaphors we use fly under the radar. Phrases such as ‘We’ve come a long way in our relationship’, ‘I see your point’, even ‘She’s in trouble’ read like literal statements. Actually, they all make use of a source domain (here: ‘a journey’, ‘seeing’, ‘being in a location’) to understand a target domain (‘a relationship’, ‘understanding an idea’, ‘a state of being’). Concepts like meaning, emotions, morality, faith, and truth have skeletal literal meaning. So, we use metaphors to flesh them out, couching them in terms for which we have a more concrete reference.

The power of metaphor is strikingly demonstrated in a study conducted by Paul Thobodieau and Lera Boroditsky.^[14] The researchers were interested in the difference the choice of metaphor could make to people’s attitudes towards crime and appropriate responses to it. They presented US American participants with a report about crime in a city. The report contained statistics and language that made use of one of two metaphors. One group read reports that described crime as a wild beast (preying on communities, lurking in every neighbourhood), while the second group was presented with reports which imagined crime as a virus (infecting communities, plaguing every neighbourhood). They found that participants who read the report that used the metaphor of the virus were in favour of investigating root causes and healing the city with social reforms. Meanwhile, those who had read that crime was a wild beast suggested investing in rounding up criminals more efficiently and enacting harsher penalties. Strikingly, when asked to explain their reasoning, the participants pointed to the statistics (which were identical in both reports), not the metaphors. This was regardless of political persuasion and gender; across the board, metaphor shaped the approach people felt was more appropriate. Clearly, metaphors are powerful conceptual tools that shape our thinking, often without our being aware of it.

So how can this understanding of metaphor help to challenge the destructive narratives detailed above? Firstly, understanding that it is a metaphor can help to put this narrative in perspective. This is one way of conceptualising emancipation. If we can offer a better one, we can show that it is not an objective inherent fact but simply a lens. For instance, we might stay in the realm of baking and suggest that maybe rights are more like yeast. They must be distributed evenly throughout the dough that is society for the whole thing to rise beautifully. Or we might avail ourselves of a new metaphor. Maybe emancipation is more like a business venture: increased investment into key neglected areas sees increased returns for all stakeholders, whereas cutting investment leads to a vicious cycle of worse product and diminishing returns for all.

Ensuring the rights of trans women does not diminish the rights of cis women. Quite the contrary: The stories are already piling up of gender-nonconforming cis women who have been harassed for not being obviously feminine enough since the ruling was made in April.[15] There is simply no space here to go into the myriad troubling implications for feminism and women’s rights and liberation inherent in this trend, on top of the obvious individual harm and distress.

When seen through the lens of these new metaphors a sentence such as ‘we also need wisdom to pastor trans people who may be struggling with the decision and many in the wider congregation who should be encouraged by a ruling that protects women.’,[16] with which the Evangelical Alliance closes its statement, becomes completely nonsensical. Distributing the raising agent through only half the dough does not make that half better. It makes the whole loaf inedible.

Though this article is written by one person it is the result of many conversations and informal collaboration with other feminist and trans scholars.

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[1] ‘Red Flag Alert on Anti-Trans and Intersex Rights in the UK’, Lemkin Institute (30/06/2025).

From the website of the Lemkin Institute: ‘The Lemkin Institute issues Red Flag Alerts when developments occur in countries and regions that exhibit several red flags for genocide. We understand red flags as immediate developments that have the potential to radicalize and/or bring together destructive historical trajectories and move a society further towards a mass atrocity event aimed at destroying one or more collective identities. Our Alerts focus especially on developments that we feel are not being adequately appreciated for their genocidal potential by the global public and media, and that therefore need reconsideration within a genocide prevention framework.’ ‘Red Flag Alerts for Genocide’

[2] ‘What Is a Woman?’, Evangelical Alliance (24/04/2025).

[3] ‘Gender’, Christian Concern (accessed 28/08/2025).

[4] For a more in-depth discussion, see: Max Strassfeld, ‘Transing Religious Studies’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34, no. 1 (2018): 37–53, https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.34.1.05. Strassfeld concerns himself specifically with legacies of transphobia in religious studies and theology, and with the impact of transmisogyny in religion.

[5] Alanah Mortlock, ‘Trauma, Escape and Claims to Black Metaphysical Space: Black Feminist Engagements with “Transracialism”’, Feminist Theory (2025): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001251336159.

[6] Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism (Little, Brown, 2023).

[7] Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color (Trapeze, 2020).

[8] Alison Phipps, ‘White Tears, White Rage: Victimhood and (as) Violence in Mainstream Feminism’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (2021): 88.

[9] Phipps, ‘White Tears, White Rage’, 88.

[10] Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars, 124.

[11] ‘A Response to Christians Decrying the Supreme Court Ruling’, LGB Christians (10/05/2025).

[12] Quoted from: Phipps, ‘White Tears, White Rage’, 89, emphasis added.

[13] Mary Therese DesCamp and Eve E. Sweetser, ‘Metaphors for God: Why and How Do Our Choices Matter for Humans? The Application of Contemporary Cognitive Linguistics Research to the Debate on God and Metaphor’, Pastoral Psychology, vol. 53, no. 3 (2005): 215.

[14] Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky, ‘Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning’, PLoS One, vol. 6, no. 2 (2011): 1–11.

[15] Libby Brooks, ‘“I’ve Been Spat on”: Gender Non-Conforming Women Tell of Toilet Abuse after UK’s Supreme Court Ruling’, The Guardian, 12/08/2025.

[16] Evangelical Alliance, ‘What Is a Woman?’

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References

Brooks, Libby. ‘“I’ve Been Spat on”: Gender Non-Conforming Women Tell of Toilet Abuse after UK’s Supreme Court Ruling’. The Guardian. 12/08/2025.

Christian Concern. ‘Gender’. Christian Concern. accessed 28/08/2025. 

DesCamp, Mary Therese and Eve E. Sweetser. ‘Metaphors for God: Why and How Do Our Choices Matter for Humans? The Application of Contemporary Cognitive Linguistics Research to the Debate on God and Metaphor’. Pastoral Psychology, vol. 53, no. 3 (2005): 215.

Evangelical Alliance. ‘What Is a Woman?’. Evangelical Alliance. 24/04/2025.

Hamad, Ruby. White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color. Trapeze, 2020.

Lemkin Institute. Red Flag Alert on Anti-Trans and Intersex Rights in the UK’, Lemkin Institute. 30/06/2025.

LGB Christians. ‘A Response to Christians Decrying the Supreme Court Ruling’. LGB Christians. 10/05/2025.

Mortlock, Alanah. ‘Trauma, Escape and Claims to Black Metaphysical Space: Black Feminist Engagements with “Transracialism”’. Feminist Theory (2025): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001251336159.

Schuller, Kyla. The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism. Little, Brown, 2023.

Strassfeld, Max. ‘Transing Religious Studies’. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34, no. 1 (2018): 37–53. https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.34.1.05.

Thibodeau, Paul H. and Lera Boroditsky. ‘Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning’. PLoS One, vol. 6, no. 2 (2011): 1–11.

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© Iona Curtis, 2026. This article is a part of a series in collaboration with the FTN (Feminist Theology Network). FTN social media: https://www.instagram.com/feministtheologynetwork/ and @feministtheology.bsky.social

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: roam in color, on Unsplash.