All Angels are Trans, Girl of Swords and How Queer Artists are Reclaiming Their Theological Ancestries

Words: Emma Cieslik

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At the start of 2022, Girl of Swords (@grlofswords) released a black and white fine-line drawing of an angel. Six wings stretched outwards from a mass of 16 eyes, two more wings crossed below, surrounded by the words “All Angels are Transsexual.” Created in collaboration with Gaven (@necrob0yfriend), the print materialised on t-shirts and even as a tattoo. It is one of many genderqueer angels that have proliferated on the Internet in the last five years as part of the Angelcore movement - a countercultural aesthetic dedicated to embracing and exploring the ethereal and otherworldly through art, spirituality, and a mix of both.

Within the last five years, the Angelcore movement has exploded, perhaps most commonly visualised by hazy photos of women in pastel, poufy dresses that have appeared on social media. Like other aesthetics, such as cottagecore or weirdcore, the movement takes its name from its root, a fascination with the divine during the Rococo period (1720-1789). Defined by excessive opulence, Rococo art commonly incorporated saccharine angels, or putti - naked, often winged children - as divine messengers traveling between heaven and earth. 

Implicit in these depictions of childlike angels were and are ideals of purity and innocence that reinforce some of Angelcore’s associations with hyper-femininity and further the “Coquette Catholic” aesthetic that genders religious material culture and iconography. But this limited view of the Angelcore movement denies the darker and perhaps even more important, genderbending dimensions of modern angel iconography.
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Trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive artists within this movement largely reject the gender essentialism of modern angels. Their art, including that of Girl of Swords and Seraphina (@sancta.seraphina), a 33-year old queer illustrator and writer defiantly argues that angels have always been undeniably queer and by visualising them as such, asserts that not only are queer people divine but they are inseparable from Christianity’s history. 

“In art history, they are frequently depicted as beautiful and androgynous,” Seraphina explains to me about art exploring the ‘biblically accurate angel’, “But when we get into scripture, that ambiguity increases. Some of them are no longer tied into human ideas of gender, they start becoming something totally separate from humans.” Depicted sometimes as interlocking wheels with hundreds of eyes, biblically accurate angels often veer into the genre of horror, and at least, something unknowable to humans. 

“Depictions of angels with top surgery scars, intersex angels, angels with breast implants exist because trans and queer artists see the power of visualising their own bodies as divine.”

Modern artists have emphasised that this transcendence of the human body reinforces their existence outside of human constructs, but Seraphina is quick to note that there are many misconceptions about biblically accurate angels. “If looking solely at Biblical texts, angels have both been described as ‘a man’ in Genesis 32:24 and a Seraph in Isaiah 6:2.” While Isaiah describes the angels as having six wings in the Bible’s Old Testament - similar to that of Gaven and Girl of Sword’s initial print, others are sometimes said to have human faces or voices. This bodily mysticism reflects the gender ambiguity of angels in art history and scripture. As St. Thomas Aquinas stated in Summa Theologica, angels are not restricted to a sex or gender.

“According to Aquinas, they only assume a body on behalf of humans,” Seraphina continues. “So it becomes very easy to project onto them, or to create angels with various interpretations of sex and gender.” Seraphina explores this deeper in her three upcoming novels, Holiest, The Harrowing, and Heresiarch, in which heavenly angels are able to manifest their bodies as they choose. Fallen angels, Seraphina states, are however restricted to the form in which they fell as. 

Although she is 33, she began creating art exploring angels over 15 years earlier in the 10th grade. In her creations, the Biblical fallen angel Lucifer is both genderfluid and androgynous, although he exists in a form that some humans would describe as male; she pointedly uses the word “trapped” to define this categorisation. For her, she admits, “It would have taken me a lot longer to accept my own natural androgynous features - something I fought with as a teenager - if I did not have my Lucifer character being a similar way.” Androgeny remains a common motif among queer artists to visualise Lucifer as transmasc. Suzanne Shifflett painted a falling angel with top surgery scars, and @MidwesternGothic on TikTok visualised themselves as Lucifer after feeling invalidated about their transmasc identity. 

“These depictions of angels create safe spaces,” Seraphina adds, “To explore gender and reflect on one’s own gender presentation and identity.” Depictions of angels with top surgery scars, intersex angels, angels with breast implants exist because trans and queer artists see the power of visualising their own bodies as divine, and in doing so, express the idea that trans bodies are perhaps older, more beatific, than cis ones, as Girl of Sword’s January 2022 post proclaimed that “to be transsexual is to be closer to God.”

Other artists are exploring queerness as what defines angels. Jacob (@floatyspacecat) sketches angels that combine both human and seraphic attributes, wielding a sword wrapped in the words “The Divine Act of Self-Creation” - a reference to Mallory Ortberg’s Something That May Shock and Discredit You. Ultra shares angel designs based on the colors and patterning of Pride flags on Instagram, and Cas sells stickers of an angel with a halo and top surgery scars, arms extended in classic cruciform. These queer angelcore creators remind us that queerness is as central to angels as their wings - exemplified in the Girl of Swords post of Uno (@starwberyforg)’s script tattoo that reads, “a boy without pussy is like an angel without wings.” 

In the United States, on January 20th, the president signed an executive order declaring there are only “two sexes”, an order that was praised by leaders from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and in a world where gender expansive people are increasingly stripped of their rights - violence justified by a “Christian” construct of binary gender - it feels more important than ever to affirm that gender expansive identities are inseparably tethered to the very religious institutions that seek to deny their existence.