Monstrously Formed: The Devil & Transgender Liberation
An excerpt from The Devil, now available for purchase
Today, we’re publishing an excerpt from The Devil anthology—the first half of an essay by Charlie Claire Burgess titled “Monstrously Formed: The Devil and Transgender Liberation.”
Charlie is a queer and trans nonbinary author, artist, and witch working at the intersection of spirituality and queerness. They are the author of “Queer Devotion” and “Radical Tarot” and the creator of the Fifth Spirit Tarot and Gay Marseille Tarot decks. They were also the guest editor of The Rebis: The Star. Their writing has appeared in the Tarot in Other Words anthology, The Lambda Literary Review, F(r)iction, and elsewhere.
Thank you to everyone who’s supported The Devil anthology! This print issue features more than 38 writers and artists. It’s a beautiful full-color book with 120 pages of essays (like Charlie’s!), fiction, poetry, interviews, and original artwork. We redistribute all profits to social justice orgs. Read more about our mission.
Monstrously Formed: The Devil and Transgender Liberation
“Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie.”
—Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix”
In 1993, queer theorist Susan Stryker took the stage at an academic conference dressed in threadbare jeans, combat boots, a lace bodysuit under a ripped Transgender Nation t-shirt, draped in chunky chain jewelry and declared, “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster.”
If that statement is startling, upsetting, even angering, it’s meant to be. Stryker’s performance piece, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” is designed to be jarring because its subject matter is transgender rage. She compares herself to Frankenstein’s monster, that creature stitched from the parts and pieces of corpses and animated by lightning only to be abandoned by its creator for its monstrosity. Like the monster’s body, Stryker says, the transsexual1 body is the product of medical science and technology. And like the monster, transgender people are “too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of [our] embodiment.”
Stryker goes on to detail some of the serious, sometimes deadly ways this dehumanization harms trans people. She quotes from a 1986 letter to the editor published in a San Francisco gay and lesbian periodical that describes trans people using such terms as “fraud,” “perverted,” “mutant,” “deformed,” “sick,” “freak.” Nearly forty years later, these same rotten words fester in the mouths of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, tech billionaires with unprecedented power, and Right-wing pundits and congresspeople. Executive orders from the belligerent pen of the president of the United States in 2025 claim trans people are inherently fraudulent and dishonorable and that gender-affirming healthcare is “mutilation.” Parents of trans kids are threatened with child abuse charges for seeking the medical care that every reputable medical and psychiatric association agrees trans children need. Trans people are barred from using the correct public bathrooms due to disingenuous fears of endangering women. Trans books are banned. Trans passports denied. Such fear, hatred, and persecution directed at an estimated 1% of the population, who just want to live their lives in peace. Treatment worthy of monsters, of devils—not of people.
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Tarot’s Devil card carries meanings of oppression, subjugation, compulsion, dependency, and control. I’ve written in my books about The Devil as capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, kyriarchy, and oppression. And it must be said that the malicious persecution of a small and vulnerable minority for the sake of consolidating authoritarian political power is unmistakably Devilish. They call us demons, but they are the ones with pitchforks.
I’m no longer interested in convincing such people of my goodness.
The Devil also means rebellion. It means indulgence, inhibition, pleasure, and the taboo. In tarot decks from the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) back through the Tarot de Marseille and earlier, The Devil has been represented in a form that blends and confounds binary sex and gender, as well as human and animal. The most common image of The Devil card features Baphomet, that infernal entity with the head and horns of a goat, bat wings, taloned feet, and the torso of a human with round, full breasts and an erection.2 This is an exceedingly genderqueer image, a species-queer image, blending male and female as well as human and animal into one devilish, rebellious, norm-defying vision. The sight is destabilizing because it disrupts the expected order of things and births us into chaotic possibility. Baphomet blurs lines, troubles categorization, and confronts the viewer with an incoherent body—or incoherent by the normalized standards of what counts as human, that is.
The Devil’s body is a trans body.
That’s a dangerous sentence to put on the page, so let me clarify: I am a transmasculine nonbinary person, and I emphatically reject the demonization of trans people. Trans people are not devils, nor demons, nor evil. Nor are we angels. Trans people are just like all people: capable of incredible good as well as harm, and a lot in between. Further, trans people are just as “natural” as everyone else—which is to say we are all, trans and cisgender, both organic and constructed. Boob jobs, lip fillers, hair loss treatments, Botox, fake tans. Pace makers, cochlear implants, Lasik eye surgery, insulin pumps. The pills that prolong your life and the Apple watch that never leaves your wrist. We are all, every one of us, products of culture as well as DNA, of science and technology as well as flesh and bone.
It’s not that trans people are devils, but that in the figure of the tarot’s Devil card, we can behold a trans body as we can nowhere else in the deck, and a body that is trans in multiple ways at that (man/woman/animal/human/angel). Even more important, we can behold a trans body that is unashamed. The Devil is unrepentant, rebellious, prideful, and joyous in it.
In The Devil’s shameless, hairy, horny, luscious, monstrous form lies liberation.
Read the rest of the essay by ordering your copy of The Devil.
While today the term “transexual” is often considered archaic or insulting by some transgender people, there are plenty who prefer and embrace the term for themselves. In her piece, Stryker uses “transexual” to refer to the subset of transgender people who choose to medically or surgically change their bodies as part of their transition. One does not have to medically or surgically transition to be transgender.
The erection is sometimes hidden in mainstream tarot decks.
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