No, not Santa Claus. Catholic saints. Genevieve McCarthy of the College Fix reports that the artist got a few things wrong.

‘Queer Santas’ art show is clueless on female saints and gender roles

In her art show at the Pacific School of Religion, “Queer Santas: Holy Violence,” artist Alma Lopez portrays a number of traditionally feminine Catholic saints androgynously. In doing so, she asks the viewer to “reconsider our ideas of religion, beauty and gender,” according to Kimberly Winston, who wrote a review of the show for Religion News Service.

While such a request initially seems innocuous, the comparison Lopez makes between select Catholic saints and transgender individuals is at best superficial and at worst a misrepresentation of the worldview to which these saints adhered.

The show includes depictions of Saints Wilgefortis and Liberata, who according to legends grew beards after praying to God that they might be able to keep their vows of chastity. Saint Lucia, also depicted, either had her eyes gouged out when she prophesied the destruction of the governor of Syracuse or removed them herself to dissuade a suitor, according to different versions of the legend.

(As a side note, Wilgefortis and Liberata are no longer on the Catholic Calendar of Feast Days, meaning their historical existence cannot not be verified. Because Wilgefortis is the German version of the name Liberata, it is likely that the legends about these saints concerned the same person, whose legend is a pious fiction.)

Lopez, a visiting artist at UCLA who calls herself a “radical Chicana feminist lesbian,” wanted to show how these saints “tried to step out of the expected role for a woman of her time and, as a result, was the victim of terrible violence,” Winston says. Justin Tanis, a teacher at the school, tells Winston that these saints “were queer and violence was done to them for it.”