Following the STAR to the Cross: Sylvia Rivera as prophetic witness to trans suffering

This essay responds to individualising and depoliticising tendencies in Pope Francis' pastoral approach to trans suffering. These tendencies emerge from an attempt to recover a positive pastoral approach amidst a fundamentally hostile political project. This ultimately aligns them with, rather than against, trans suffering. This paper reads Sylvia Rivera's St Christopher Street Parade speech as a witness to trans suffering against these trends. It reads this witness in dialogue with Edelman's antirelational queer aesthetics, before moving from this to argue for an anti-antirelational 'utopian' reading in the vein of Muñoz. It inscribes these readings into a theology of the Cross by reference to James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree. By allowing trans suffering as witnessed by Rivera and the Cross to interpret one another, it argues that Rivera's speech witnesses both divine judgment over transphobia, particularly in its racialised forms, and the promise of resurrection into true solidarity and trans liberation. The upshot is a theology of the Cross that can form the basis of a pastoral response to trans suffering that, rather than individualising, depoliticising, or even supporting it, orients us towards an effective solidarity against it.