transgender – Peculiar Faith

The Courage to Heal

Fire Island Pines is a small LGBT shoreline resort town in New York not unlike the one I currently live in along Lake Michigan. Not surprisingly, the town enjoyed a flurry of festive rainbow flags flying from homes and businesses for LGBTQ Pride Month. One of those flags honored Ritchie Torres, the first openly gay Afro-Latino member of Congress. But Mr. Torres is also a strong and vocal supporter of Israel, so some gay activists tore down his flag and replaced it with one honoring LGBT Palestinians. Not long after that, a gay filmmaker, known for his anti-Muslim remarks, tore down the Palestinian flag.

That tiny town with its competing flags illustrates in painful microcosm the complex wounds of our larger society, and by analogy, the fissures scarring nearly every country on Earth right now. These fractured communities need healing—we all do—but it’s increasingly difficult to imagine what kind of healing we need and where to find suitable salves.

While some people are wounded because of their sexuality, they might also live with the cultural markers of race, which often compels them to wrestle with an impossible decision about whether the color of their skin matters more than whom they choose to love. Others lament that speaking with an accent betrays their outsider status just as pointedly as their indeterminate gender—or maybe one because of the other.

These complexities are manifesting at a time in this country that many commentators are describing as just as grim and grave as the decade leading up to the Civil War era in the 1860s. The social media storm following last week’s CNN presidential debate made those divisions, and their accompanying dismay, all too evident.

Personally, I am so fed up with the vitriol and grandstanding and petty mean-spiritedness around every corner that I’m not sure I even want to heal from some of these wounds, not if it means giving up the resentments that feel like merit badges—I earned this bitterness and I aim to keep it!

And just like that, along comes the Sunday lectionary with a passage from Mark’s account of the Gospel, a passage that carries a timely reminder: it sometimes takes courage to heal.

The portion of Mark’s fifth chapter (5:21-43) assigned for yesterday includes two healing stories, and Mark interrupts one of these stories with the other one, a clue that these two stories should be interpreted together.

Mark is even more direct about weaving these stories into a single garment: in the first story, the daughter of Jairus is twelve years old; and in the second story, the nameless woman has been ill for twelve years. Mark seems to relish telling these two stories as one for a singular point: faith is mostly about overcoming fear for the sake of thriving; faith is the courage to seek healing.

In the first story, Mark presents Jairus as a leader of the local synagogue, a significant religious and civic position whose title Mark mentions not once, not twice, but four times in this short story. Jarius’ social prominence clearly matters for Mark’s purpose, most likely because the conflict between Jesus and the religious establishment keeps worsening with each successive encounter in this gospel. And here, a key leader of that establishment approaches Jesus in public, in the middle of a crowd, to ask for help. That takes courage.

We might also notice how unusual it is for Mark to give this character a name—Jairus. Nearly all the other encounters in this Gospel are anonymous, which some have supposed helps to ensure that the stories remain relevant far beyond any particular first-century person. Mark intends these stories to enjoy a much broader appeal, across time and place.

But Jairus is named and his title repeated, perhaps to encourage people with power and position and privilege—people, that is, with a name—to recognize their own need for courage, and especially where and from whom we can learn such bravery: a nameless woman, sick for years, exploited by physicians, poor and desperate for relief.

This woman takes the initiative for her own healing by reaching out—a risky move indeed. She had no authorized access to Jesus; she wasn’t in his inner circle; her long illness had excluded her from temple worship for all those years—she was ritually unclean.

Mark places her not only at the center of this story but, as one commentator noted (thank you, Andrew McGowan!), this nameless woman is the first character in Mark’s account to be given an interior life; Mark lets us eavesdrop on her own inner dialogue, a dialogue that exhibits a remarkable faith. For Mark, this woman, this courageous, nameless woman, lives as a model of faith: “if only,” she says to herself, “I could touch his clothes.”

Sometimes it takes courage to seek healing. Sometimes it’s easier to stay sick, or remain troubled, or harbor resentments, or simply resign oneself to the misfortunes of fate. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay stuck, even when it’s uncomfortable—at least it’s familiar.

But Jairus and this nameless woman in Mark can inspire us to seek healing, even when it seems foolish, unreasonable, and pointless—especially then, actually, when courage is most needed.

There are others in Christian history who inspire this, too. And it seemed important enough to make this point that I replaced the epistle passage assigned by the lectionary yesterday with an excerpt from the “Showings” of Julian of Norwich.

Julian, a fifteenth-century English mystic, seemed quite untethered to what we today would call “the binary gender system.” She writes about Christ as our mother while also referring to the wound in the side of Christ as the “womb” from which we are born. These odd but compelling slippages in ostensibly appropriate gendering is actually quite common among the mystics, in nearly every religious tradition. And this matters today—it’s actually a matter of life and death.

For some years now most of the targeted violence against LGBT-people has landed squarely on the “T,” on those who push against the edges and boundaries of gender. If any in this Pride Month stand in need of healing and soothing balms for their wounds, it’s anyone mis-gendered, un-gendered, violently-gendered, dis-gendered, or merely beaten to a bloody pulp by someone deep in the throes of gender panic.

It matters that Christians say this. It matters that religious leaders stand up boldly and say this. It matters that we all hear this in churches and create safe religious spaces for the many genders gracing God’s creation. And it matters that we do all this not in spite of the Bible or our theological traditions as Christians but because of them.

Given the horrible track record of religious institutions and communities on nearly every issue related to sex and sexuality, and especially gender, it matters that we can retrieve resources from our very own theological traditions for this vital work of healing—and that’s why we heard from Julian in my parish yesterday rather than Paul.

It’s a scary world and seemingly getting scarier, for all sorts of people. I would say transgender and gender-fluid and gender-queer people are very much today’s “canaries in the coal mine”—if they can’t survive and thrive, then we are all in very serious trouble.

While we have reasons to lament a world like this, many Christians also heard from the biblical book of Lamentations yesterday, which offered a potent reminder: lament is not despair.

In that book devoted to the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah there is a bold declaration of God’s mercies and of an endless divine faithfulness (3:21-25). All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, in other words, God remains faithful.

Julian herself insisted on this, even in the midst of bubonic plague that had decimated Medieval Europe for many decades. With signs of disease and death all around her, she could nonetheless declare that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Embracing that declaration is itself a moment of healing for many of our weary hearts. To find the courage for healing is itself a vital part of our healing.

I can scarcely think of a better reason for working hard to sustain religious communities of faith where we can inspire each other with these stories of courage—we need each other, we all do, to inspire our courage.

Together we can learn, over time, to trust the astonishing words Mark’s Jesus spoke to Jairus when Jairus was told that his daughter had died: “don’t be afraid.”

Don’t be afraid.

Don’t Drop the “T” — Put it First

Childhood friends teased me for “playing with dolls” rather than “playing army.” High school football players called me a “woman” when I auditioned for concert choir. A friend from my church youth group once told me that the “least I could do is sit like a man.” He said this when I crossed my legs by folding my right knee over my left knee rather than resting my ankle there.

All of that happened before I came out – either to myself or to others – as a gay man. Sexual orientation and gender identity are not separate and distinct; they are deeply intertwined. Indeed, at the root of “homophobia” is a thinly veiled misogyny, or more pointedly, a profound gender panic over the erosion of male privilege.

Every gay man should already know this, if not from direct personal experience, then surely from witnessing the treatment of women in our patriarchal society. Sadly yet also understandably, some gay men are among the most sexist. I say “understandably” not to excuse misogynistic postures but to appreciate the depth of patriarchal formation that shapes everyone, even (especially?) gay men, who have been told relentlessly to “act like a man,” or “butch it up” in public, or who puzzle over “straight acting” in personal ads.

The consequences of all this have become more apparent and dire with the increasing visibility of those who identify as transgender. The recent arc traced from former Olympic decathlete Caitlin Jenner’s gender transition to the defeat of a Houston anti-discrimination ordinance has now generated an open letter from some (anonymous) “gay/bisexual men and women” urging us all to “drop the T” from that ubiquitous LGBT acronym. This, they argue, is crucial as “trans ideology” erodes the “rights of women, gay men and children.”

To appreciate just how misguided and even dangerous this letter is, we need to review some ancient history here, both civic and religious, which is far from over and past. That history continues to haunt this present moment in ways we cannot afford to overlook.

Historically, and speaking frankly, sex has most frequently been understood as an act of penetration – a body party of one person is inserted in the body part of another. Gender is mostly irrelevant in these ancient views. Whether it concerns a vagina, an anus, or a mouth, penetration marks what counts as “sex.”

Not just coincidentally, “penetration” also describes conquest, battlefront victory, and more generally how one dominates a weaker party. That’s the point. To “be a man” and to “be a warrior” have been synonymous for most of human history. It’s not just lust that leads conquering armies to rape everything in sight in the ancient world; indeed, it’s not about lust at all but power and dominance – or I suppose we should say the lust for the power to dominate.

For the ancient societies that produced biblical texts, both “good sex” and “good worship” exhibited these dynamics of dominance and submission. As biblical scholar Stephen D. Moore succinctly puts it, sex in the ancient Mediterranean world was basically “eroticized inequality.”

Keep those ancient historical markers in mind and consider these more recent ones:

Christian men in the 19^th century worried about the “feminization” of Christianity and tried to create a more manly and “muscular” depiction of Jesus.
The term “homosexuality” itself was coined by 19th century medical researchers to describe “inverted” men, men who acted as if their genitalia and emotional lives turned inward — just like women.
Prior to World War II in the U.S., only the “submissive” partner in male same-sex sexual acts was considered “homosexual,” because he was “acting like the woman.”
Emasculating African American men (treating them like women) has been a constant tool of white supremacy, from plantation slavery to anti-miscegenation laws and contemporary police brutality.
Joking about the supposedly tiny genitals of Asian men belongs to a larger project of feminizing them for racist purposes.
The Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq involved U.S. soldiers (both male and female) humiliating Iraqi prisoners with sex acts, basically making them submissive, “like women.”
After Gene Robinson’s election as bishop of New Hampshire, conservative religious objections exhibited a significant shift in rhetorical strategy and moved away from the story of Sodom’s destruction, and toward the supposed “gender complementarity” of human beings in the biblical creation accounts.
For decades, street violence and bullying has focused not on loving relationships but gender nonconformity, on “femmie fags” and “bull dykes” and even more on the transgender among us.
More than a few contemporary Christian men have now returned to the anxieties of their 19^th century forebears and are deeply concerned once again about the “feminization” of Christianity and turning Jesus into a “sissy.”

Drop the “T”?

Far from it! It’s actually high time we put the “T” first in our social analysis, political activism, and theological reflection. Perhaps then all us (especially white men) would understand better what biblical theological Walter Wink called “the domination system.” That system – just as pervasive in our civic and religious institutions today as it was in the first century society of the Gospel writers – creates hierarchies of value and sustains them with violence, the very system Jesus sought to dismantle.

Drop the “T”?

No way. Not when so much of our distress — from racism and colonialism to militarism and ecological disaster — is fueled by the deeply entrenched denigration of all things feminine. Not when so many gay men think that “marriage equality” protects them from the patriarchal-industrial complex that no amount of “straight acting” will blunt. Not when white, affluent gay men have never paused to consider what their civil rights have to do with working class women of color.

Drop the “T”?

That’s a great idea if you want people to focus on trivialities (like who uses public bathrooms) rather than the urgent task of dismantling the systems that place men over women, white over black, straight over gay, and humans over all other animals and their ecosystems.

Drop the “T”?

Absolutely not. To the contrary, the peculiar faith of Christians would urge us to put the “T” first for a world of peace and justice in which everyone can thrive and flourish.

Brazen Women, Cross-Dressers, and Canine Caskets

That’s one way to summarize the recently concluded 77^th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, and apparently the preferred way for no less an American institution as the Wall Street Journal.

Religion can make people a bit crazy. But what exactly is in the New York City water supply that would lead a WSJ writer to describe General Convention as a spectacle of “sheer ostentation” loaded with a “carnival atmosphere”?

Was WSJ’s Mr. Akasie writing under the influence of martinis (a fault of my own, which I freely admit) when he described the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church “brazenly” carrying her staff of office? Brazenly, really? Or perhaps it was a martini or two later that led him to describe Bishop Jefferts Schori as “secretive and authoritarian” during her “reign” thus far. (Anyone who knows her – as I do – finds that ludicrous in the extreme.)

Granted, name-calling is actually quite effective – but in grade school. Presumably we leave behind such childish behavior in adulthood, and if not in our personal lives, then certainly in our professional lives and most certainly if we’re reporting news or even commenting on it in the pages of what was once a prestigious newspaper.

The WSJ was not alone in its bizarre spin on the business of the Church in Indianapolis. Bloggers are of course free-range anyway, but some online sites have come to be trusted locales for thoughtful reflection and reporting. Belief.net used to be one of those trusted sites. Alas, that train left the station some time ago.

If anyone needs any further evidence for Belief.net’s demise, the recent screed by its “senior editor” about General Convention should suffice. There we learn that the pioneering action of Convention to include gender identity and gender expression in the church’s non-discrimination canons amounts to an endorsement of “cross-dressing clergy.” (Seriously, I couldn’t make this stuff up.)

If nothing else, the Wall Street Journal and Belief.net make The Rev. Dr. Kendall Harmon look reasonable and mainstream by comparison. I wrote just recently about Fr. Harmon’s description of the Convention as “unbiblical, unchristian, unanglican, and unseemly.” (I will try to resist wondering whether Fr. Harmon paid these other writers to look foolish…)

So, yes, religion can make people temporarily insane. I get it. But here’s what I believe is the real take-away from all this absurd reporting on General Convention: religious patriarchy is shuddering in its last gasps.

I’ve written on this before (here) and it’s not going away. So here are just two more reasons why all of us who care about the gloriously peculiar faith of Christians need to focus our attention on male privilege, and then I’ll add a final Pauline note. (Oh, and don’t miss this great piece from the Bishop of Arizona about similar topics.)

1. Men Aren’t Brazen (Even When They Are)

So when’s the last time you heard the Archbishop of Canterbury described as “brazen”? I might be out of touch with language on the street, but I have never, ever heard the kind of description of a male bishop that Mr. Asakie used to describe the Most Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori:

Bishop Jefferts Schori is known for brazenly carrying a metropolitan cross during church processions. With its double horizontal bars, the metropolitan cross is a liturgical accouterment that’s typically reserved for Old World bishops. And her reign as presiding bishop has been characterized by actions more akin to a potentate than a clergywoman watching over a flock.

Where in the world does anyone begin to parse that bizarre paragraph? I would of course love to know what it means to carry a cross “brazenly.” Did this man pass high school English? More to the point: Women are “brazen”; men never are, even when they do exactly the same things.

Still more: why the gratuitous description of our Presiding Bishop’s tenure as a “reign”? That word might well have appeared in stories about the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope or occasionally other male bishops, but not very often.

kjs_jetway — The Presiding Bishop leaving General Convention (thanks, Susan Russell). Note: no “brazen” staff in hand.

God forbid that women reign over anything.

2. Men in Dresses Kill Puppies

Ludicrous? Yes. Nonsensical? Yup. But that’s what we get when we combine the Wall Street Journal with Belief.net. Mr. Asakie took great pains to include the resolutions concerning liturgical rites for companion animals in his article (apparently just the attention to non-human animals is enough to spark ridicule, and that speaks volumes).

Meanwhile, on Belief.net, Rob Kerby finds news from General Convention “stunning” and for mostly the same gendered reasons:

The headlines coming out of the Episcopal Church’s annual U.S. convention are stunning — endorsement of cross-dressing clergy, blessing same-sex marriage, the sale of their headquarters since they can’t afford to maintain it.

A friend of mine on Facebook said it all (and I paraphrase a bit): “Men who dress like mothers and insist on being called ‘Father’ are objecting to transgender inclusion?” Well, indeed. But that’s not all. Please do not miss that property management and finances are linked in a single paragraph to gender issues: women can’t deal with money. (Oh, I am so glad my mother is not reading this…)

Look, if a supposedly “senior editor” at belief.net equates transgender concerns with “cross-dressing,” we have some issues to discuss, not least would be how men treat all those who don’t “dress” like creatures worthy of care, respect, and dignity – like non-human animals.

The link between misogyny and animal abuse deserves its own blog post, and I’ll do that soon. For now, suffice it to say that the denigration of women and the facile dismissal of the rites for companion animals belong to an important constellation of issues around male privilege.

3. St. Paul Screwed Things Up – Thank God

Don’t even try to create a coherent theology from Paul’s New Testament letters. I think it’s much more fruitful to notice where Paul gets carried away, where he waxes eloquent and crazy. Where he just can’t contain himself because of the wildness of the Gospel and pushes all the known boundaries, his own included. There are many examples of this in his letters. I have Galatians 3:28 in mind right now.

I know that’s overused. It’s critiqued, parsed, sliced and diced to within an inch of its life. But let us try to listen again to Paul’s exuberance: “In Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.”

Just try putting yourself back in first century Palestine, a Roman province, and consider the implications of what Paul wrote. He upended, overturned, dismantled, and dissolved all the basic social and religious distinctions shaping his society.

Whatever that biblical passage might mean for us today (and there are so many things!), surely it’s time to rethink how much energy and time and money is spent on maintaining gender role distinctions – okay, let’s be honest: male privilege. That would actually be a rather modest reading of Paul’s letter, but let’s just start there.

Those of us in Christ would no longer describe women as “brazen” when they do the same thing as men. We would no longer describe gender difference with terms that men use to belittle women. We would no longer abuse non-human animals as if they were women. Actually, we wouldn’t abuse anything at all.

I think that might count as progress. And if Christians actually lived this peculiar faith, journalists might be less willing to look so terribly foolish.

Oh, and lives might be saved, too…