Is gender identity a secularized version of the Christian soul? This talk explores the religious prehistories of the apparently secular clinical apparatus that manages trans life today, beginning from a curious point of departure: Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 utopian fiction The Blazing World and its obsession with “the Jews’ Cabbala.” Gordon places Cavendish’s flirtation with Jewish mysticism into conversation with the work of nineteenth century sexologists, who proposed kabbalistic explanations for psychosexual inversion.