“Trans-” used to be a simple prefix found in words like transfer, transform, transit, and translate. It signified movement from one place, condition, or context to another. It can also indicate crossing a boundary or going beyond a limit. Today, however, trans has become a word by itself, usually referring to people who have undergone medical or cosmetic procedures for gender realignment.

In public discourse, trans has become a rallying cry for equality, dignity, and social acceptance. In mass media and social networking platforms, the term carries layers of personal, political, legal, and religious meaning.

Against this backdrop, the Feast of the Transfiguration offers another way of understanding trans, which is not confined to reinventing oneself through medical procedures or redefining identity through labels and hashtags. The transfiguration of Jesus shows that trans can mean self-transcendence.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus ascends a high mountain with His three apostles: Peter, James, and John. While up there, they see a spectacular vision: Jesus’s face shines like the sun, and His garments become dazzling white. Moses and Elijah appear, conversing with Him. Then a voice from the cloud declares: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matthew 17:1–9).

At first glance, it seems like Jesus undergoes a dramatic makeover to enhance His appearance and impress the apostles. That is very far from the truth. The disciples do not see a new Jesus. They see the true Jesus. The transfiguration unveils who Jesus has always been. He is not just the son of Mary and Joseph. He is the son of God. As St. John writes, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14).

Here is a deeper insight: The transfiguration is not just about Christ. It is also about us. The manifestation of Jesus’s humanity, which is radiant with divine glory, is a foretaste of what we all can become. St. Paul affirms this when he wrote: “He will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:20–21). The shining face of Christ proclaims that our weak humanity, redeemed by divine love, is destined to transcend every temporal and bodily limitation, even death itself.

The transfiguration, then, is a real trans event, but one that invites us to move beyond our exaggerated preoccupation with reinventing our body, sexuality, and self-identity. It gently but firmly challenges the assumption that we have absolute freedom and autonomy to decide who and what we are. The modern slogan: “You can be what you want to be” sounds empowering, but it can mean that we are self-made projects, that we can, entirely on our own terms, manufacture and market our sex, gender, and identity.

The first pages of the Bible teach us that our identity is not self-invented but received as a gift. We are created in the image and likeness of God and called to share in His divine life (Genesis 1:27). St. John affirms this: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called His children” (1 John 3:1). We become children of God not by altering the blueprint of our being, but by growing into it through continual conversion and spiritual transformation.

To understand trans as self-transcendence is to free that word from being reduced to a process involving cosmetic, surgical, or psychological rebranding. Trans reveals who we were always meant to be: human beings destined not merely for survival, self-expression, or aesthetic enhancement, but for communion with God.

In this light, trans is not about crossing sexual or gender boundaries, but about passing from self-centeredness to love, and from the craving for public validation to the hope of heavenly glory. It is about allowing God’s grace to perfect who we are, thereby experiencing the most beautiful trans of all, as St. Paul describes it: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).