Why We Are The Future Of Faith

Lately I've found myself thinking more and more about an issue that I ignored and had assumed I would always ignore:  that of the relationship between transgender people and religious communities.

You see, for a long time I told myself I wanted nothing to do with any religion.  Most of the time, when people asked about my faith, I'd say I didn't have any (unless, of course, I grunted "It's none of your fucking business!").  It's a lot easier to say you don't believe in a supreme being or power, or anything beyond this physical world, than to get into arguments about what it is, isn't or might be, or why I don't subscribe to someone else's belief.

Even so, I couldn't help to notice that more than a few trans people are involved with religious communities.  Some, like Eva-Genevieve Scarborough and Joanne Priznivalli, write about their experiences on their blogs.  Outwardly, I expressed astonishment that any trans person would want to be a participating member of a church, synagogue or other organization, let alone study or train to be a cleric.  I told myself such people were misguided, at best.  Sometimes I wondered whether they suffered from advanced cases of Stockholm Syndrome.  What else could explain their desire to identify with institutions and members that, very often, told them they were vile sinners or that they simply didn't exist?

One thing I could not fail to notice was that they--and some trans people who weren't overtly religious--often described themselves as male or female "in spirit" and their processes of "coming out" and transitioning from living in the gender they were assigned at birth to life in their true selves as "spiritual" experiences.

Yes, those words came up a lot:  "spirit" and "spiritual".  I even used them to to describe my own journey.  And on the night after my surgery, I had a very long, detailed and intense dream that, for me, could not have been evidence of anything else.

Perhaps my perceptions were colored by the fact that most of the support groups I attended, and most of the trans-related activities in which I participated, involved people who were beginning their transitions--or simply exploring the possibility of doing so--in the middle of their lives, or even later.  Not a single one of them spoke of their wishes merely in terms of changing their body parts; they all spoke of making their corporeal forms more reflective of their "true selves" or "spirits."  I have come to believe that if you have reached a certain age before embarking upon the requisite counseling and medical treatments, you really can't see your change in any other way.

(To those of you who are young--say, under 40--I hope I don't seem condescending.  If you really understand your identity and why you want to change your body to reflect it, you are more mature than most other people.  On the other hand, I have seen very young people who see the transition only in terms of hormones and surgeries.  They will say or do whatever they think they must--including sex work--to get them.  The consequences are often tragic.)

Anyway, I realize now that the revulsion I expressed at religious institutions was, in part, a response to my own earlier experiences with them.  I grew up as a Roman Catholic and spent several years in a school affiliated with the church.  I was even an altar boy!   Although the Church was, and is, repressive and I had some rather unpleasant (to say the least) experiences with priests and nuns, I have to admit that I received a better education than I might've otherwise had.  And, truth be told, for all of the bigotry that's part of its doctrine, I was safer there as a sensitive and possibly effeminate boy than I was on, say, sports teams or ROTC (both of which I would later participate in).  And, as Richard Rodriguez points out in A Hunger of Memory, there is less socio-economic class prejudice in the Church than in other parts of society.  Growing up in blue-collar Brooklyn, I was aware of that fact, even if I couldn't articulate it.  

And now, it seems, there are some religious leaders--and their followers--who actually understand that following the precepts of their faith means treating as they would other people.  Love thy neighbor--whether trans or cis--as thyself. Thou shalt not kill--whatever the identity of the person.  

Perhaps even more to the point, some are starting to realize that if their faith communities are to have any future at all--let alone carry out their missions--they must include people of all identities.  Actually, it goes deeper than that, as Joy Ladin points out:  Judiasm, of which she is an adherent, as well as Christians, Muslims and others cannot continue to confine themselves to the gender binary. It's not just a matter of the survival of religious institutions; it's a matter of allowing all people to participate in life as fully realized beings.  That, as I learned during my own transition, means understanding the spiritual dimension--forget that, the spiritual reality--of a person's identity.

Video Night

Thank you, Eva-Genevieve!, for linking How To Make Love To A Trans Person on your site:





I would love to have been there to see Gabe Moses performing.  Watching the video, I laughed and cried--and felt so much more.  

It's heartening to see there were no "dislikes" on the page.

On the other hand, 3274 viewers disliked this old homosexual warning video:



I can actually remember being similarly warned about gay men--by people who, like most others, conflated gay men with pedophiles.  (I was indeed victimized by the latter in my childhood.)

Watching that video made me think, in a way, of Reefer Madness.  It's as uninformed and, therefore, deals in stereotypes in much the same way as the "public service announcement" about homosexuals.

Leave it to the Brits to see the humor (or bathos) of such things:



 

My First New Year's Eve

So...This will probably be my last post of the year. It's a little sad to write this: This, the most momentous of my life so far, is ending. Then again, I'm about to start my first full year in my new life.

Tomorrow I am going to Millie's house, again. She seems to think the first day rather than the first second of the new year is more important--to the extent that she thinks of such things. In that sense, she's rather like me.

It seems that almost everyone is happy to see this year end. At least, the people I've heard talking about the topic have expressed such a feeling. At the same time, they seem more hopeful than optimistic about the coming year. In other words, they're hopeful in the same way as someone who comes to New York after his life has fallen apart in Nebraska. That, by the way, is the story of someone I talked with a few nights ago. Maybe I'll tell more about him later.

Anyway...They say that hope springs eternal. Maybe that's why people ring out the old and ring in the new year. Some--not all of them young--have visions of the wonders that the new year can bring. I'm thinking now of what Eva-Genevieve said in the wake of Mike Penner/Christine Daniels' suicide: Many people enter gender transitions with the idea that living full time in their "new" gender will be like a permanent drag ball. They think of the sense of release they feel when dressing up and going out, or the sexual thrill they get out of "kicking up their heels" and expect that the adrenaline rush they get from playing their roles will continue 24/7/365.

In a similar vein, on this night, many people are thinking only of the things they expect or hope to be better in the coming year. The mass media are full of that sort of thing: The economy is going to turn a corner, etc, etc. Of course, one should have hope. But if you've had some difficulty or another for years or even decades, is it rational to expect that problem to change, much less disappear, by turning a page in a calendar?

Back to transitioning: There are probably more things that don't change, at least in the circumstances of one's life, than there are things that change as a result of starting the process of becoming true to one's self. You still have to pay whatever bills you were paying before. In fact, they will probably be bigger and there will be more of them. You still have the same tensions over work, workplaces and living situations, which may be exacerbated by undertaking a transition. And, I've discovered, though the form of some of your relationships may change, the real attitudes of the people with whom you're in those relationships don't shift--at least, most of them don't. The ones who decide they want nothing more to do with you are really acting on attitudes and prejudices they had before you "came out" to them. The ones who change their attitudes either loved you or simply had open minds before you shared your "secret" with them.

The difference is that you may not have known these things about the people in question before you decided you could no longer live in as the person they believed you to be. The truth is, you didn't have to know them. That is part of what having privilege means: You don't have to know at least some of the truth about others. That also defines what privilege I still have. As an example, I know people who lived on the streets at one time or another in their lives. I admire them for having survived and becoming advocates, going to school or doing other positive things with their lives. But, at the same time, I can't even begin to imagine the realities of the lives they lived when their only shelter was whatever place they hadn't been chased away from and the only way they could make a home for themselves was to curl up in a fetal position, as if they were recreating their mother's wombs.

All right...I'll get off the soapbox. I'll tell you another way in which I have privilege. Happily, I acquired it during the course of my transition and surgery. You see, I didn't get a sexual thrill out of putting on female clothes or an adrenaline rush out of going public in a dress. To tell you the truth, I was scared to death when I first did those things. And I was for a long time afterward. Furthermore, I felt completely out of place the one time I went to a "drag" bar: I am a woman, not a cross dresser. The other patrons--most of them, anyway--went back to their lives as boyfriends and husbands and fathers, as horse trainers and construction supervisors and mechanical engineers. I had no such option of "going back."

That was eight New Year's Eves ago.

Today I made it to the appointment with Anna I rescheduled from last week. I had my hair cut a bit and had it treated to so that it's softer than it was. Other women were getting their hair done; two were also being made up by one of the stylists at Zoe's Beauty. I was there for the same reasons as other women; I simply felt normal there. And that is how I felt when I walked the strip of Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint and tried on shoes and clothes I didn't buy: It wasn't a thrill or a rush; it was simply life as I was meant to live it.

And, yes, I had a late lunch/early dinner at The Happy End. I began today's repast the way I've begun every meal I've had there: with their white borscht. This time, I had the grilled kielbasa with onions. The menu said that the kielbasa was "locally made;" it certainly tasted better than any other I've had. And today's meal is probably the only one I've ever had that included two servings of mashed potatoes. Plus, the sides were interesting and tasty: red cabbage, sauerkraut and a salad made of sliced carrots. I noticed once again that the proprietress, who's about my age, was friendlier toward me than to her fellow Poles. She's seen me before, and remembered me, but I'm sure most of those Polish patrons were repeat customers as well.

She was also friendly to two male hipsters who were eating at the counter. Oh my goddess--I hope that's not the end of the restaurant, or the neighborhood!

Then again, should I begrudge a couple of hipsters their privilege? I wished them a Happy New Year on the way out; they wished me the same.

And I hope you have a great New Year, too!

Mike Penner and Christine Daniels

Last night, I checked out Eva-Genevieve's blog and was shocked to find her post that linked an article about Mike Penner's apparent suicide.

You may recall that about two and a half years ago, Penner, a well-respected sportswriter for the L.A. Times, "came out" as a trans woman. She took a leave of absence and, after returning, wrote a number of columns as Christine Daniels. But then, last October, he quietly returned to living as Mike Penner.

I know that some people will take Penner as proof that trans people are indeed neurotic, if not perverted. Others will see it as proof that all trans people will suffer "transition remorse," if you will.

In the rest of this post, I will refer to Mike Penner by his given name and the gender assigned to him at birth only because he was publicly identifying himself by them at the end of his life. However, I hope that you will not read it as my own judgment about his identity. Not having known him, I cannot say whether Mike was indeed transgendered, much less whether the transition was the "right" or "best" idea for him.

However, I more or less agree with Eva-Genevieve when she says that his death is a cautionary tale about one peril of transition: taking it too lightly. It's not something one can "try on for size." At least, most people in most situations can't do, or at least would have a very difficult time of doing, that.

The transition itself is jarring enough for the one making it and his or her family, friends and colleagues. It almost invariably has some unanticipated cost or another, no matter how well one prepares for it. The one in transition might not lose his or her job outright, but colleagues who were previously thought to be allies may undermine his or her work and reputation. Family members and friends whose love and companionship seemed unconditional may decide to end their relationships with the person in transition. And, of course, there are the financial costs.

I am not complaining about any of those things. Yes, I had a few surprises--but some were pleasant. And what I've lost seems in retrospect to be,if not inevitable, at least not so surprising. Most important of all, I now have the strength to continue after those losses.

On the other hand, one might say that I had less at stake than Mike Penner did when I started my transition seven years ago. The number of people who knew me was much smaller than his circle of acquaintances, and although I have been a journalist, the combined readership of every publication for which I've written is probably much smaller than the LA Times. Plus, I had practically no cyber "footprint" as a male. Also, at the time I started, I had been away from academia for a few years, so I was out of contact with my former students and colleagues.

Furthermore, Tammy and I had just split up and I'd moved. Penner, in contrast, was married and had children.

So Mike Penner, at the time he became Christine Daniels, was entangled in a wider and tighter web than any I had ever spun. That meant not only was his transition more complicated than mine, "going back" was even more treacherous than it would have been for someone like me.

I think now that "undoing" his transition must have been, in some ways, even more difficult than the transition itself. He had known almost nothing but success in his life; to return to living as a male was surely seen by some--and possibly himself--as a failure. I would suspect that he might have gotten even more opprobrium than he did when he was making the transition from Mike to Christine.

What's even worse is that he could not have returned to the life he had before his transition. By the time he returned, he was divorced. Most likely, he had lost other relationships that helped to sustain him during his pre-transition days. I do not know whether or not he developed new friendships and other relationships during his time as Christine, but I would guess that if he had, at least one of them wanted to be friends with Christine, not with Mike. And, perhaps worst of all, he was probably seen as something less than a man (any woman--cis, trans, manque or otherwise--is seen that way, at least by some men) in the overwhelmingly male profession he practiced. And, finally, not only are most of his sportswriting colleagues male; so are most of the subjects of his and their work.

What his story exposes is how rigidly gender roles are defined and how little room there is for one to find out who and what one actually is, much less live by it. Most people never have gender identity conflicts; few understand what it's like to have one. And what even fewer people understand is that the only way to learn how to live with it--whether that means some form of sublimation, going for the surgery or something in between--is to live "as" one sees one's self, whatever that may be.

As it happens, in some ways I do fit into most people's notions about a woman of my age, more or less--and, almost as important, a straight woman of that age. That is one of the reasons why I haven't lived in what I call the "gender underground": I can interact with cis people as if I were more or less one of them. I am also very fortunate in that, even with the difficulties I've encountered, every step I've taken on the road from my previous life and in my current one has felt right. Plus, most important of all, even though I have lost relationships and other aspects of my previous life, I have gained new ones, some of which are better than any I could have imagined in my previous life. Not to mention that I also now have access to emotional and spiritual resources I never knew existed, much less that were within me.

Now, I don't know whether Mike Penner would have had such experiences had he continued to live as Christine Daniels. But I suspect that he never had the opportunity to learn what it really would have meant to be Christine Daniels--or Mike Penner. If that is the case, that may be--at least for him--the worst thing about his life and death.