Naming as a sacred practice

I've been working on my own English translation of The Mozi for the last six years or so. I hope to get around to sharing it one day. But as I've been working on my most recent round of edits, I was drawn to something from the later sections. There are several curious bits that touch on the names, distinctions and categorization of things. These sections are engaging with broader debates in China at the time, which later became known as the School of Names. And during Pride, as I've been reflecting on why we humans keep looking for ways to misrecognize one another and call it holy, I've got something I'd like to share.

But first I want to say I don't think this essay even needs to exist. Trans people do not need ancient Chinese philosophy, Paul, Jesus, or my clever little argument here to become worthy of dignity. They already are. What I'm trying to examine is something else: why people, especially religious people, so often trust their categories more than the person standing in front of them.

What draws me to the strange cluster of debates around the School of Names is the idea that we may miss out on some significant aspects of experience and truth due to our linguistic habit of categorizing things. Giving things names helps us navigate the world, but are we also creating a certain framework and forcing the world into it?

Gongsun Long's famous paradox, "A white horse is not a horse," is meant to be mind-blowing, and honestly, I don't get it. But what it opens up for me is the possibility that we may become more distant from the truth of things through our habit of slicing everything into categories with language.

The word "horse" helps us communicate. It gives us a shared handle for a certain kind of animal. But "white horse" is already something else: the animal filtered through color. Add more labels - old, ornery, blind - and eventually the thing itself begins to disappear beneath the categories we keep assigning it. The problem is not that categories are useless. The problem is that as they multiply they can become more and more precise while distancing us from the particular thing in front of us. What do we lose when we force labels onto everything?

I think an interesting biblical comparison is Paul's refusal to let culturally significant categories have the final word in Galatians 3:28, when he says that in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female. These are ethnic-religious, socioeconomic, and sexed/gendered categories that have long been used to sort, rank, and control people. I don't think Paul thought these distinctions didn't matter at all, but he says they no longer determine who belongs and who is fully included.

Christianity, at its best, offers a relational understanding of what it means to be human. We are not most truly ourselves because we fit neatly inside a label. We are most truly ourselves in relationship: with God, with neighbor, with the world, with the self we are becoming in love.

Jesus also consistently disrupted the boundaries of who was "in" and who was "out." He does not treat people according to the labels that could easily be assigned to them. He sees the person in front of him: their pain, their hunger, their exclusion, their faith, their possibility. He refuses to let the label have the final word.

The School of Names, in its own strange way, warns us about the same danger: when we cling too tightly to categories - when we say "only this counts as a horse," or "only this counts as a woman," or "only this counts as a man" - we risk mistaking a label for the individual in front of us.

To say that a trans person is not really the gender they name themselves is not merely a disagreement over vocabulary. It assumes that names are static, externally imposed, and owned by the observer rather than responsive to the complexity of the person being named.

It's not that names and categories are evil. It's not that words don't matter. Names can clarify, but they can also erase. They can either honor reality, or be used to negate or police it.

Again, none of this is what makes trans people worthy. It only helps expose the strange machinery by which people talk themselves out of recognizing that worth. To question a trans person's dignity, or their right to be recognized as they understand and name themselves, does not reveal some brave commitment to truth. It reveals the old human habit of trusting our categories more than the person in front of us. That is the philosophical mistake the School of Names helps me see, and the theological failure I see running through the trajectory of Paul and Jesus. It uses naming not to recognize, but to exclude. Not to tell the truth, but to protect a human system.

To the extent that names shape the world we inhabit, honoring someone's name, pronouns, and self-understanding becomes a spiritual practice. It is an act of humility. It says: I do not possess you. I do not get to reduce you to the category that makes me comfortable. I will meet you as you name yourself.

The School of Names reminds us that language has the power to either clarify or distort the truth. Christianity, at its best, teaches us that human dignity transcends the categories we too often use to distinguish and manage one another. When we use names with care, humility, and compassion, we align ourselves not only with logic, but love. And maybe with God.