Reflections on The Transition of Esther

On Esther, Transgender Ideology, Revolutions, and Andor. Not in that order.

Reflections on The Transition of Esther

I won’t lie. I started rewriting Esther with the idea of “What if Esther, but Trans.”

It was a simple idea that I almost tossed aside. It seemed too easy, and I strive towards a little more complexity in my rewrite projects. Plus, I was afraid of dishonoring or diminishing the experience of Trans Women.

But the idea wouldn’t leave my head. And during the first months of the second Trump Administration, I needed a reprieve. So I turned to Esther in search of escape. I planned to have it be kind of a drag performance: a campy reclamation of popular story of feminine courage.

As I read Esther, I realized how little I understood about the book. I knew a diluted version of Esther that came from Veggie Tales. It was a version focused on contemporary morality and the elevation of a few key verses at the expense of a complex, grounded story.

Esther is a political satire. But it is remarkably earnest political satire. It is partisan. It believes in good and evil, or at least in justice and oppression. It bears more resemblance to the Theatre of the Absurd than it does to a short story or a fable. The closest modern comparison might be The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight. But it is a lot more brutal than either those shows have the courage to be.

Esther is not a book of female empowerment. It is a book of feminine desperation subverting the control of powerful men. Esther has so little agency in this book that it makes me furious. She is moved at the behest of men with agendas, both just and unjust. Even the line, “Could it be that you were born for such a time as this?” is just Mordecai manipulating Esther for his own ends. They may be noble ends, but the book frames Mordecai’s agenda as more important than Esther’s life.

In fact, the book is so much more about Mordecai than it is about Esther. Mordecai gets to do everything important. Mordecai gets to confront Haman and refuse to bow. Mordecai gets to declare all the of victorious reforms. Mordecai is perceived as the one who saves the day.

Esther gets one moment of agency in the whole book. In Chapter 7, she uses a strategic combination of sincerity, love, and sex to manipulate the king to choose her, pick her, and love her over the convenience of oppression. And the heart of the satire is that the king actually does pick her over genocide.

Do we actually believe that this could happen in the real world?

Allow me to take a seemingly weird detour.

The Book of Esther reminds me of the show, Andor. To be clear, I love Andor. It’s great piece of anti-fascism. And it’s one of the only pieces of mass media to name the reality of genocide taking over modern geopolitics.

But Andor has a massive masculinity problem. Male power and male expressions of power are centered throughout the whole show. Whenever women get the chance to do anything courageous, their courage is always either fulfilled by men, forced to become like men, or protected by men.

The first example is Maarva. Throughout the first season, she becomes radicalized by the actions of the Rebel Spymaster Luthen Rael. Luthen is cold, calculating, manipulative, and violent. He uses people to accomplish his own ends. He is framed as morally ambiguous, but idealistically unimpeachable.

Maarva agrees, and embraces his message of rising up against the very-fascist Empire. Before she dies from old age, Maarva records her own eulogy to be presented at her funeral. In it, she encourages the residents of her city to rise up and fight the Empire. It’s a great speech, and a great scene. Go watch it.

But Maarva’s rebellion is not portrayed as a feminine act of courage. She is passive. She gets her ideas from Luthen. She teaches Cassian Andor to care about the rebellion. She drives other people to the uprising she desires. Her speech even acknowledges that she didn’t fight the Empire during her life. All the fighting is carried about by the mob at her funeral, and the camera focuses on the men doing the fighting.

The second example is Bix Caleen. The first season shows Bix being tortured by Imperial agents before she is rescued by Cassian. The second season begins with an Imperial officer trying to rape her before she kills him. Midway through the season, she recovers from her PTSD by torturing and blowing up the agent who tortured her in the first season. And by the end of the season, her big act of courage is leaving Cassian (her partner) so that he stays with the Rebellion, claiming that it needs him.

All Bix’s storylines cast her in a mostly passive role, except when she embraces the violence expressed by men in the rest of the show. She continues the terrible media trend of depicting survivors of sexual assault recovering by losing their emotions and taking on masculine violence to stop being victims and be active protectors. Women who suffer recover by becoming more like men.

But then the show walks that back by having her emphasize that Cassian, a man, is more important to the rebellion than she could be. Even in the shows clearest example of female empowerment, it centers masculine expressions of power, courage, and rebellion as the right and necessary path.

The third example, and the one most relevant to Esther, is Mon Mothma. Mon Mothma is a politician, and the first season depicts her contentious relationship with Luthen. They acknowledge that they are both necessary to the rebellion’s cause. But they carry out their rebellion in different expressions. Luthen uses manipulation and violence. Mon Mothma uses diplomacy and negotiation, framed as more feminine expressions of power both in the show and history. Mothma isn’t passive by any means. And the sacrifices she makes to her personal life to advance her rebellion is compelling.

But in the second season, Mon Mothma is called upon to make the declaration of rebellion before the Galactic Senate. She crafts a deft and persuasive speech that will allow her to get far enough into her speech without being silenced. Through her wordcraft, she names the reality of Imperial Genocide and calls out The Emperor as the one responsible! Incredible! Just like Esther!

But her bravery is immediately undercut by the show’s reminder of her reliance upon masculine protection. She is allowed to be brave. But only because Luthen and Cassian stage a rescue that keeps her alive despite the Empire’s attempt to arrest her for treason. Women who are courageous still need men willing to do violence to protect them from other men. Mothma virtually says as much in the final episode.

Now here’s the thing. This is realistic. I don’t think that Andor tried to be patriarchal in its portrayal of rebellion. It tried to portray women as just as important to the Rebellion’s cause as men. But our culture is so wrapped up in patriarchal conceptions of courage, justice, and violence that we do not know what a practical expression of feminine courage and rebellion looks like. At least not one suited for the screen.

We all live under such an oppressive ideology of heteronormative patriarchal conceptions of humanity and action that our imagination is too limited to depict women as neither needing men or needing to be like men to be powerful and courageous.

The Book of Esther is much the same. The Book tries to depict a feminine resistance to power, but Esther relies upon masculinity and masculine power at every turn. Esther must either act like a man or carefully navigate the world of masculinity for protection to fulfill of her goals.

We, in the modern world, have come no closer toward an actual understanding of what feminine power and courage looks like outside the control of masculinity.

So as I re-read Esther to rewrite it from a Transgender perspective, I was shocked by how little I would need to change. The book is not just relevant, it is scarily accurate. I did not need to change anything Haman or the King did in The Book of Esther. I just changed their names to Elon Musk and Donald Trump. The behavior of Esther and Mordecai made just as much sense then and now. To change the agency and activity of Esther in the modern day would be dishonest, because it would imply that we’ve advanced as a society.

The truth is that we have not. Women, Trans and Cis alike, still need to navigate the terrifying world of masculinity in conservative and progressive spaces to make subversive acts of courage that can potentially change the course of history. And like the original Book of Esther, and like Mon Mothma in Andor, the surprising thing is not that a woman does something courageous or how she does it. The surprising thing (perhaps the unrealistic thing) is that men believe her for long enough for a revolution to foment and transform the world. And maybe from this revolution, a new world beyond masculine power will be dreamed into being.

That didn’t happen after the story told in the Book of Esther. It didn’t manifest in the world of Star Wars after Andor.

Will a Transgender reimagining of Esther be enough to convince us that the revolution we need is one of imagination. That what we need, more than faith, more than violence, more than material conditions, more than power is a shift in our ideology? To imagine a world where one powerful man doesn’t act like a powerful man? To imagine a world in which oppressors face justice and the marginalized are given all they need? To imagine a world of abundant safety instead of constant fear?

Can a Trans Esther guide us to imagine what revolution looks like outside of patriarchal power?

That depends upon whether we read the Book of Esther as an absurdist political satire, an earnest call for personal transformation, or somehow both at once.

OK. I wanted to end there with a snappy mystery line. But I owe you an explanation.

My explanation begins with the way I had to reframe my initial approach to rewriting the Book of Esther. Instead of asking, “What if Esther, but Trans?” I had to ask, “Why if Esther, but Trans?” In other words, what changes about the story if Esther is a Transgender Woman?

On the surface, not a lot! In the original work, Esther goes through a forced-feminization process before she is presented to the king. Gender is understood as a hyper-performative exercise. So is class and ethnicity. Esther passes as a Queen because she does not appear or act Jewish. Mordecai performs a pure Jewish identity to his community. Haman performs his class through power grabs and the tossing around of wealth. Identity is not fixed, but in constant transition.

The climactic moment of Esther’s great reveal is when she performs Jewishness before the King. And the King performs an un-Kingly identity by performing love instead of power. The Book of Esther is very Trans already! Performativity! Yay!

But I do think that portraying Esther as Transgender changes something crucial for the modern reader. It reveals that men will never allow women to wield any kind of power. The only path to a just and godly world is to destroy all men. To Trans Everything.

The modern anti-Trans movements root themselves in the belief that Transgender people threaten the equality between men and women. This 21st-century definition of equality relies upon a “separate but equal” understanding of the gender binary. Men have certain advantages, and women have certain advantages. They are best at doing different things, but any one man or woman can do anything. It’s meritocracy applied to gender dynamics, and a lot of people buy into this belief. They buy into it so much that when a Transgender person threatens this binary by daring to change genders and complicate the biological definitions of male and female, their whole system of self-understanding and power dynamics collapses.

I choose to believe that this anxiety is genuine. As much as I hate them, I sympathize with TERFs who are worried that Transgender people will prevent them from finding power in the current system of “equality.” They believe in this system. They believe in its definition of equality and opportunity. They believe that a woman, if she acts and behaves and believes in precisely the right way, can do anything that a man can do.

But this is simply untrue. Not because of any biological differences or inferiorities. But because powerful men will never allow women to become powerful. The equality between genders we are offered in the 21st Century is a lie. It is a deception. Far too many men are committed to never allowing a woman to hold power over them for it to possibly be true. The wealthiest and most powerful women in the world still find themselves bound to the pressures and powers of patriarchal control. Like in Andor, they must allow men to be at the center of their actions, adopt masculine expressions of power, or accept the protection of men.

The Book of Esther recognizes this impossible power differential. Esther does not even overcome patriarchy in her own book. She merely learns to use it for her own ends. The text is well aware of her extreme marginalization. The mere fact that she is a woman makes her sub-human to the King and Haman (maybe even Mordecai) before her Jewishness is revealed. Reading the book from this perspective shows how ludicrous the actions Esther takes really are, and how ridiculous it is that she succeeds.

We need more than the power distinction between men and women for the modern reader. Not because the power balance between genders has improved. Because it hasn’t. But too many people do not acknowledge that it hasn’t.

Too many men and women believe that we live in an equal society, or at least and equal-enough society that it’s better to join that criticize. This is true in the whole spectrum of far-right to progressive politics in America. The marginalized in our society are indoctrinated into the belief that they can succeed by following the system. An entire ideological shift needs to take place in the understanding of self and identity for the revolutionary potential of Esther to be unleashed.

The male/female binary is not enough to force the modern reader to recognize that the plot of Esther is not a feel-good story, but a reductio ad absurdum.

So “Why Esther, but Trans?”

Because Trans-ness is uniquely transgressive to our modern society’s conception of gender. The English language is not set up to accommodate the concept of being Transgender in a society rooted in binaries of power. Modern society’s definition of man and woman is has-power vs. does-not-have-power. If one can simply change their identity, or exit the system entirely, then what’s the use of having binaries of power in the first place? It’s like saying that 0 can become 1, that 6 can be 9, or that you can divide by Zero!

The Anti-Trans folks are right to fear us. Transgender ideology does threaten the epistemology of Western Civilization. Not because Transgender ideology is an aberration of nature, but because the Western epistemology is an affront to nature. It is a way of knowing that is not rooted in reality. It is a knowledge system entirely devoted to lifting up certain people as worthy of power, and reducing everyone else to being unworthy of having any power at all. If this sounds too radical, just do the smallest bit of research into the way that the Scientific Revolution is linked to the projects of White Supremacy.

Trans-ness, the ability of something to become its opposite or become something beyond understanding, is capable of destroying Western Civilization. And it should. Western Civilization is killing the planet. Trans-ness can save us.

But Trans-ness, beyond other forms of Queerness, demands more than tolerance or acceptance. To truly recognize a Transgender person is to embrace your own need to Transition. To recognize them as a human is to step out of the Western epistemology of power, however briefly, and see the full diversity of nature on full display. To love a Transgender person is to become Transgender yourself.

This is what is revolutionary about a Transgender Esther, in the way that the original book was revolutionary. For Mordecai to need the help of a woman was not just strategic, but humiliating. His life was in the hands of a sub-human. Yet it was through her sub-humanity that her people were saved. For the King to respond to the demands of a woman was not just an act of love, but a preposterous, unrealistic concept. He literally began the book by refusing to acknowledge his former wife’s existence. The most powerful man is transformed by a sub-human. But it is through Esther’s sub-humanity that saves himself, his empire, and God’s plan for the world. The Persian Empire was designed to oppress sub-humans. But the empire winds up being restored because it is inherited by those it considered sub-humans.

A Transgender Book of Esther contends that the whole of our country, culture, and world needs to transition if we are to receive the truth of a Transforming creation. The revolution will not come from the right forms of masculinity, but when men stop being men and women stop being women and everyone becomes something beyond our current understanding.

In the Transgender Book of Esther, Esther transitions so that everyone may transition. In the Transgender Book of Esther, Mordecai transitions from a man into the collective Queer consciousness. In the Transgender Book of Esther, Donald Trump transitions from a man into someone capable of loving humans more than money. In the Transgender Book of Esther, Elon and all White Supremacists transition from alive into dead. In the Transgender Book of Esther, America transitions from a settler-colonialist country into a true land of the free and home of the brave, where all who were once considered sub-human inherit the Earth.

The Transgender Book of Esther confronts you with this story of transitions and transformations and expects you to laugh. It is sincere satire. It’s ridiculous. This story would never happen. It could never happen. It’s not worth imagining that it ever could happen.

But shouldn’t it? Wouldn’t the world be better if this story came true? Could it come true? Should we all transition and transform right now?

Perhaps this is the moment for which you were created.