More Exploring Being Me
My story may have things in common with other folks', but nothing about it is prescriptive for theirs, or yours. It’s just what happened. And this telling is organised with hindsight; life as it was lived was not so neat!
I’ve tried to wriggle out of this. I've told myself I am making it up. But I cannot get around the fact that I am, at some deep level I do not yet understand, female. For a child of the 1950's this is deeply confronting. I walked into our bathroom once, happily thinking about something immediately driven from memory as I was brought up short by a man standing in front of me. It was my own refection in the mirror, somehow both shocking and yet "of course" for the younger woman that I was. I am learning there is no arguing my way out of this, only a living with it and through it.
I am telling this story because it helps me understand myself, but also because I hope you may find some comfort here if you also live in the strange "in between" places which do not fit gender norms and binaries. A friend once announced something on Facebook with these words: “Ladeez and Gentlemen, and all the glorious people in between..." They are correct about us glorious people. As is James Alisoni when he says something like this. "There are not simply two genders." Nor, I might add, do we fix this by simply suggesting a third kind of in-between trans-gender. Rather, "there is a myriadii of genders as we grow more fully into the image of God." This is gospel.
It is also troubling. Any reflective child understands gender is imposed, even though they don't know the words "imposed" and "gender." They will have been told boys don't cry; be a lady; nice girls don't... and been sanctioned if they do not conform. But seeking to understand gender, and to shuck off its imposition, opens us to the frightening enormity of freedom as we step into the myriad. To simply say I am female would be to remain subject to the already imposed binary, for "female" is not only defined by heterosexual malenessiii, but proves to be a surprisingly arbitraryiv concept. To put this in simple language: If I were to express my sense of being in some way female by wearing a dress, would I merely be fitting into the male defined norms of what it means to be female? How do I cherish and take seriously the feeling of being "not male" rather than simply stepping from one imposed category to another?
As I grew up, I thought in terms of the sex and gender binaries of "male" and "female", so I will begin with that experience, and then try to make sense of what has happened.
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As a solitary farm kid, starting school was a delight. There were people to play with! I remember the little-big girls of Grade Two and Grade Three looking after me on those first few days as I was a little bit lost, and bewildered, and teary. It was glorious. I had friends. And then one day, a month or two in, three big girls at the school bus-stop began to pick on me. I know now that it was relatively benign in the schemes of human abuse, but it was absolutely devastating at the time. I never again felt like I fitted in.
Fortunately, I was smart. That gave me a certain status even though it was still an outsider status. I found a way to survive by being the clever, good little boy. I related mostly to adults, particularly women, although I didn’t then notice the gender bias. Leaving home for the state capital and university was a great freedom. But everything was still done from within the frame of being a loner, and always from a defensive stance. And my real friends were women.
Ministry training a few years later brought with it the ethical imperative to understand myself so that I didn’t too much inflict and project my peculiarities upon my congregants. A counsellor pointed out how my defensive—read: offensive—stance had enabled my survival as a child but was now undermining my life. I understood immediately, but could not conceive how I could become different, and it has taken 40 more years to gain a little freedom from that defensiveness, so foundational had it been. This wise man also said during one of our discussions, "You would really rather have been a woman, wouldn't you?" As far as I could remember, this had never occurred to me, but I instantly knew it to be true, there was no real surprise. "Of course," I replied, "But there's not much I can do about it, is there?" (All said within that defensive carapace which made it sound like I had known this all the time.) He allowed me to change the subject.
Perhaps my lack of surprise at the question was due to the fact that early in our marriage, well before theological college, I had told my partner that I wished I had been a woman. The reality of who I was seems to have periodically bubbled up, and then been "forgotten," or been present unrecognised in other interests.
Today, I understand that first bullying at primary school, and its follow-ups, not to be as I first thought, the cause of my being an outsider. It was a symptom of being someone who didn't fit. None of us little fifties-born country kids understood anything about gender and sexuality, of course, but all of us, like children and people everywhere and always, knew who was just that little bit different.
My difference began with an allergy to, and fear of, being male. Something about being male made me deeply afraid. I knew very well that any show of emotion or fear would lead to having the shit beaten out of me. This is still true for far too many boys. I could not be male but I had to be male. So, I fitted in, sort of, with a group of boys who also couldn't quite make it with the ocker alpha-male group. And even here something about us was not quite safe. We didn't really know how to be. They were no role models. You couldn't be like your mum, or like the girls at school, who had a thing or two to teach us, because that would immediately mark you as a target. So, we had our own occasional outbreaks of violence and cruelty that we had no idea how to handle.
I knew girls could do a class act of being bitchy, but now see that they also had some protocols for managing it; behavioural norms which often helped stop them going too far. My odd little group of friends didn't have that. Quite what I would done without the gentleness of my father, and the atypical masculinity of one of my high school teachers, I do not know.
I was self-aware enough to know that my resentment and anger was dangerous. For the most part, I began my new life at university keeping it tightly under control by maintaining distance, not getting too close, and withdrawing rather than engaging when emotions were tweaked or triggered. I made a whole group of female friends, some of whose hearts I broke as I became close to them, and then shied away when emotions interfered.
Up in the desert after university, I met a young woman whose life story included serious personal cost because she was Christian. I was smitten. Here was a hero who could complete my life because she was the brave person I so longed to be, and the gentle feminine being which my deep self wanted to be, but could never go near. I was aware of the hero worship, but I had no idea what it was also pointing at.
When we went to theological college, I decided during my second year that I needed to take some time off to try to integrate some of the new thinking I was meeting. College gave me this time, and even gave me a job working in the college garden because dear Terry, our college gardener, was seriously ill at that time. By year's end I had read 40 theological texts cover to cover, and numbers of journal articles. I was driven. And very aware the majority of these texts were feminist theology. I thought it had to do with knowing how much my mum had suffered the misogyny of our country town, and to do with my sympathy for my partner who was confronting the still deeply ingrained misogyny of the church. It took me much longer to see that I was also reading about me, and who I longed to be and become.
Shortly after I was posted to my first parish, a friend publicly outed himself as gay, and expressed his desire to be ordained. Suddenly every congregation, including ours, needed to have a meeting about "the homosexual issue". Our parish had been Methodist in pre–Uniting Church days, and had strong feelings about the place of alcohol in the Christian life, and it so happened that at this time the Social Justice Unit of the church had pointed out in a discussion document, that alcohol was a part of God's good creation, and that perhaps we needed to rethink our traditional understandings. Our Parish Council took about two minutes deciding we needed to meet over the "homosexual issue," and spent over an hour debating if we would also have a meeting about "the alcohol document", before deciding that we would.
At our weekly meeting the other minister and I decided I would chair the meeting on alcohol, which he would resource, and he would chair the meeting about "the homosexual issue," which I would resource. It was a long time before I realised that, no matter what had happened, he had no chance of being the resource person for that meeting! I dived deep, and was enthralled by what I was reading from LGB sources, especially from Catholic sisters.
Again, I realised that I seemed to be unexpectedly passionate about this issue. Where was this passion coming from? I reasoned, quite correctly as it turns out, that if there wasn't room for gay people in the church, then there wasn't room for me. Not because I was gay—I'm not—but because if gay people were not acceptable, then neither was I, nor my understanding of God. That has indeed been the case, with denomination after denomination censuring clergy who have supported LGBTQI+ people.
I even noted that despite my passion in this area, I remained rather distant from it. To my shame, I didn't get involved in the LGBTQI+ support group within the Uniting Church. I wasn't particularly vocal in my congregations beyond making sure that there was acceptance of LGBTQI+ people. As with my passion for feminist theology, my interest here was mostly about me and who I really was. I suspect that, deep down and unknowing, I was quite threatened by the implications of my interest.
Life continued, with the occasional bittersweet moments where I was offered fuller insight but couldn't see. There had been a time in my past where I had evangelised—read: hectored, my parents about a deeper faith. One afternoon at their house, my father cornered me in the kitchen, and gave me a gentle but serious evangelising lecture on why I should be more involved with Friends of Unity, the UCA's LGBTQ plus support group of the time. I found this reversal of roles rather hilarious given my previous behaviour, but failed again to see what may have been underlying it all. Not only was I in a kind of void of self-understanding about who I was, but when I look back on my dear father, now long dead, I wonder what he was dealing with. What would it have meant for him to have been born 60 years later, and to have met the term non-binary?
I remember the day we delivered a load of wheat to the local silos. It was market day, and on the way out of town my father parked the truck, and we walked over to a group of farmers. I gritted my teeth and prepared for the usual ocker onslaught that I knew from school. One of the men said, "G'day, Mel. How y' going?" They greeted him with warmth, and with respect. I was stunned! He taught me much about how it was possible to survive as male whilst being gentle. I regret the conversations we never had, and that I was unable to see the hints which he gave me, perhaps unknowingly, about who I was.
The last unrecognised piece of my life concerned friendship. I was not good at maintaining friendships. Clergy move constantly. I have lived in 24 different places since leaving home. I'm an introvert. That seemed reason enough to explain my solitary nature, which meant I failed to notice that I had lots of long-term comfortable friendships with women. I always felt comfortable with women. It was men I could only relate to on a functional level; relationships which faded quickly when the task that brought us together was completed.
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In college, I had begun to imagine life as something like a mosaic. God graces us with the ability to move the tiles of our experiences and memories and build, and rebuild, ourselves as a person. I think God delights in our becoming free to shift pieces from where society told us to put them, and create something else, as we work out who we are and what we may become. My first great rearrangement came as I realised that there is no finalised, tidy picture of who we are. There will always be bits of experience, stray memories, contradictory tiles that won't fit neatly, or are left over from the picture we create. I realised that an understanding of life which claims to fit everything in without contradiction, is proof of its own error.v
I understood very early that re-imagining ourselves and rearranging the tiles is difficult and frightening work. Sociologists suggest that we typically do not change much once we pass our early twenties; it's too hard. But the gospel calls us to change, to grow, and one aspect of grace is God's breaking invi with the offer of rearrangement, with the gift of seeing ourselves anew, and being released from old habits and wounds. It's in this that we are healed. It's extraordinarily hard to change on our own. We seem to need a crisis to crack us open, and then we sometimes see God offering us a new freedom.
I spent years working three or more jobs. I was good at it. I had a well-practised discipline for remaining healthy and was energised by a clear sense of my calling. The crisis slipped into my life almost unnoticed: I had thought to work a few more years until my partner retired, when a major project fell apart. As I wondered where to go next, a small, unexpected voice in my mind said, "You can access your super. You don't have to do this." I arranged three weeks sick leave to think about it; I needed a break in any case. After three days I knew I was finished. I was profoundly exhausted. I began to see that the strategies and disciplines which had enabled me to work were like walls and girders holding my life-mosaic together; walls I had not chosen. Once I stopped working the whole picture sagged and crumbled. It was not only time to rebuild, but time to rebuild or die.
Does crisis ever arrive unaccompanied? Things had been happening.
My wife's fabric art sometimes moved me deeply, but I had no way to articulate what I was seeing. I experienced growing distress at my aesthetic illiteracyvii, looking at pretty clothes, mourning my monotone wardrobe, and grieving my inability to put colours together.
I had also begun to see that I was brimful with emotion I could not understand and could not release, at its mercy because I had never really learned what to do with emotions.
A friend told my partner and I that they were transgender. This was no surprise to us. But it was as though they had bumped the table where I had laid out the mosaic of my life, and everything had been moved a little out of place. I began to wonder if this word "transgender" described me; my friend and I had things in common. I talked with one of my oldest (female) friends, a psychologist-priest, who wondered if I was looking for a different kind of masculinity. My emotional turmoil seemed to be about more than that, but I decided that whatever was going on with me, I was not transgender. It seemed to me that I had none of the body dysmorphiaviii that I knew often deeply distressed transgender friends. To call myself transgender seemed utterly disrespectful of their pain, despite my own dysphoriaix. Besides, although I felt I'd have managed life better as a woman, I was nonetheless somewhat ambivalent about being female. I didn't fit with what I knew about being transgender.
The oddest things trigger a change.
I am a long-distance cyclist. If two cyclists meet anywhere north of Clare, we always stop to compare notes. It's almost always another male, of course. And the conversation is about the wind, water, bikes, and so on—nothing intimate. The last time I was heading towards Blinman, I met a young woman. She was riding the Mawson Trail, solo, on an absolutely gorgeous pink bike. We stopped to talk, as you do. Instant rapport for me. When we set off again, I was energised, delighted, and quite deeply moved by a few minutes' conversation with a complete stranger.
Why, I wondered? Yes, she was physically attractive, but it wasn't about sexual attraction. She reminded me of one of my oldest female friends; she has the same accent, and you'd not be surprised to find they were cousins. But neither was it the pathos of fond memories and regrets. She reminded me of my partner, and my daughter: strong and brave. She was everything I wanted to be: all the bravery and physicality of the long distance cyclist, with empathy, gentleness, and… femininity—I can find no other word.
A few weeks after that meeting, my bike frame broke. In the Covid shortages of the time, I could find nothing suitable to replace it in the local bike shops. I began to trawl the websites of smaller and more expensive Australian bike builders, and spotted a photo of that beautiful pink bike, and its owner, who identified as non-binary.x
I've had this experience before. An idea, a realisation, arrives fully formed, almost instantaneous.xi In this case: I am non-binary. There is a name for me. And then you begin to work out the implications of the insight.
Giving something a name, and developing a language around it, has two results. It defines that thing. Definitions are too often set by those in power, and to their benefit. Despite this, that same defining of concepts also give us the ability to see things that were previously invisible to us. (Kant said perception without conception is blind.)xii
So, I began to realise, for example, that I had (and do) experience some body dysmorphia. I had thought this was simply what happened to a boy as he grew up. Now I see something different. Also, the fact that I related to women so much more easily, and my deep interest in feminism, and in sexuality, suddenly made a lot more sense. Indeed, I realised that a group of female friends for whom I have a deep and abiding affection are all rather similar: They are the kind of person I would like to be; I have been modelling myself upon them.
But what does this mean for the way I live, and for who I am and who I might be? Some things soon seemed clear:
One: I can't become a woman. Judith Butler begins her book Gender Trouble with these words from Simone de Beauvoir: One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one. This becoming is the work of a lifetime, and I am already close to 70. I sense, also, that I am now so enculturated as male, there are aspects of "femininity" which would be in their own way as oppressive as the enforced masculinity of my school days and youth. All this while aspects of my maleness distress me and I long to "be female" in other aspects of my life.
Two: I understood that gender is performativexiii. That is, we are who we are not in some essential sense perhaps determined by our biological sex. We are who we are because of how we live. This is not merely from practice but is also creative of who we are. For example, I knew a left-handed child who suffered a fracture of that arm just as they started school. The enforced practise of using their right hand for a couple of months as they were learning to write did not mean they became "ambidextrous." They became, and are, right-handed. I understand that to do different is not simply to look different—"a pose," as we used to say; it begins to recreate us at a deep level.
Three: I knew I don't want to be, and have tried not to be, "male." I have "gone along with" being male because, as I said to my counsellor all those years ago, "There's not much I can do about it, is there?" I could not imagine any alternative, even though I refused to "join in with the boys" in many ways beginning with my early school days. But the insight triggered by the rider of that pink bike said there is something I can do. Some of this has arisen unprompted. In a moment of frustration listening to someone's distress, not understanding, wanting to interrupt and give them a solution—I've got that part of being male down pat—my inner voice silenced me. "No, be quiet. This is who you are. You can listen. This is what women do." This was not a thought heard as though coming from a third person as some kind of conceptual idea or imperative, but experienced as me, as personal.
Four: As a Minister of the Word, I experience an ethical imperative in all this. The Faith understands that as human beings we are incomplete, deeply flawed, always compromised in our beingxiv. James Alison says
What was revealed, then, in the light of the intelligence of the victim [especially the victim Jesus] is that all human societies...base themselves on victims and are blind to their complicity in victimage. Therefore the possibility of the beginnings of the new unity of humanity, based around the self-giving victim [Jesus], is not essentially linked to any geographical, racial, cultural, or linguistic group, but rather can begin absolutely anywhere where two or more people come together, forming the unity as something received from the self-giving victim rather than forming a fake unity at the expense of some victim—a unity based on penitence at complicity in violence rather than the much stronger-seeming sort of unity that comes from shared hatredxv.
This new unity demands an end to the binary structures of society, to inclusion vs exclusion, right vs wrong, either or. In Galatians 3 Paul says
23Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. 24Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. 25But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, 26for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27As many of you as were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (NRSV)
Paul has taken three of the great dividing binaries which defined that unity which comes from shared hatred in his world. Speaking to a community which was turning back to binaries—who were bewitched, as he said, and turning to Law with all its exclusions in an effort to "guarantee grace"xvi and ensure their own inclusion in God's grace, Paul utterly repudiated binary solutions. The Faith is, in its essence, non-binary. His threexvii chosen examples are still relevant: Religion/race, slavery, and gender, are still used to control the world.
Paul was working to help people break out of the paradigm of the Mosaic Law, but is surprisingly resonant with current gender debates. Judith Butler says in her preface to Gender Trouble
To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: The prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble.xviii
The "disciplinarian of the law" itself is a part of the matrix described by the myth of redemptive violencexix, the idea that we can use violence to stop violence. Law, binary culture, redemptive violence, are all part of the "ruse of power." To be Christian is to understand that much our scriptures, and their conception of God, is infected by the myth of redemptive violence. And to be Christian, to live by faith, is to trust the vision that unity can be found in nonbinary, non-coercive, ways of being. This does not mean that we deny obvious differences such as biological sex, nor does it mean there is something inherently wrong about identifying ourselves as male or female in the sense of gender. But it is to recognise that all of our categories and self-identifications are political and culturally boundxx. My faith is that seeking to live as the Jesus of the Gospels lived, crossing boundaries, and being compassionate—which is to be vulnerable and sit with those who are excluded, and therefore a repudiation of the binary life—this way of living will move us closer to "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female." It may address how we think of ourselves as male or female, but can equally affect how we manage staff at our employment, or care for folks in the aged care home which employs us.
Finally: I do not wish to lose this moment in my life. There have been moments of clarity about my "being more female than male" before now, and they have been forgotten, pushed underground, crowded out, too hard to imagine. In this moment of grace, it is time to hold on to what I have seen. And that means to be performativexxi of who I am. As I noted above in Point Two, we are who we are because of how we live. If I do not live differently, this moment will be lost, drowned out by "doing male."
Sex and Gender
All this left me deciding to do a deep dive into the nature of what we call sex and gender, and that's where things get complicated. I had thought to make the distinction between sex and gender, where sex is a description of our biology and gender is how we identify and think of ourselves. The trouble is that sex is already a gendered conceptxxii. The way we perceive and think about our biology is dependent upon the politics; that is, finally, the power structure of our society. Sophie Chappell makes this clear in an article recently published on the ABC Religion site.
According to the ideology of gender that still dominates our world today, biology itself vindicates the idea of a world that is and must be authoritatively and definitively binarily divided between the masculine and the feminine. But biology itself does no such thing. Biology certainly recognises a distinction between the male and the female bodies, but biology also recognises distinctions between rhesus-positive and rhesus-negative bodies, left-handed and right-handed bodies, tall bodies and short bodies, and so on as above. Which of these distinctions between body-types we choose to foreground, and which we choose to pass over as less important or not important at all, is not a biological decision; it is a political one.xxiii
So, despite its use as a scientific term, as a biological descriptor, "sex," like all language, is affected by the conventions and prejudices of our wider society. We frequently use a person's "sex" as a method of social control. Humanity is defined by maleness and herteronormativityxxiv. Butler says in her preface
What continues to concern me most is the following kinds of questions: what will and will not constitute an intelligible life, and how do presumptions about normative gender and sexuality determine in advance what will qualify as the “human” and the “livable”? In other words, how do normative gender presumptions work to delimit the very field of description that we have for the human? What is the means by which we come to see this delimiting power, and what are the means by which we transform it?xxv
I am currently working to understand theologically how we might escape heteronormative masculinity based around Paul's Galatians 3 statement.
Changing the Piston Rings
There is an old joke about the cardiac surgeon who became good friends with the mechanic who maintained his very high performance, yet finicky, car. One day the mechanic said he had been looking on Google at the structure of the human heart. "Frankly, that car engine of yours looks a lot more complicated. How come you get paid so much more than I do?" The surgeon said, "Can you change the piston rings with the engine running?"
Life, including ruminations upon gender, has the engine running. All the words we use, sex, gender, non-binary, are contested conventions defined to suit the forces controlling society, or to challenge it. Where do we fit into this!? How can we talk about these things coherently?
Even if we define our terms in such detail that our text is almost unreadable, we are not doing this from some stable, unbiased position. Our engine is running, and always has been. We have not so much grown up in a culture as been formed by it.
Our subjectivity is an objective fact about us, and we cannot be objective except in such a way as works through our subjectivity. And our subjectivity comes from what is outside us and precedes us. We ourselves are largely functions of public desire.xxvi
What does it means to say, "the fact that I am, at some deep level I do not yet understand, female," which is where I begin this essay, when it appears that "female" is a heavily culturally dependent term? What is it that we feel? How do we manage the times of doubt when we wonder if this is all imagined?
Andrea Prior (March 2023)
Footnotes
i I am quoting https://www.onemansweb.org/exploring-being-me.html, but have not been able to find the original text. I note that at Some Notes for a Girardian Reading of the Book of Revelation, Fr. Alison's words reflect a similar understanding:
"What the Temple visionaries perceived very clearly is that all the negative paring away by which, when talking about God, we remove necessarily human cognitive elements concerning time, space, power, goodness, gender, colour, species, number and so on, should not leave us with an hygienic, blanked-out, nothing-faced God. Quite the contrary: when we say God is one, this is not a mathematical use of the number one, as opposed to say, seven or sixteen. It means that God is so vastly more pullulating with both singularity and multiplicity than anything we can conceive that only our number “one-as opposed to nothing at all” can begin to hint at the sheer richness. When we say God is neither male nor female, and has no gender, this is not so as leave us with a dehydrated, desiccated being of indeterminate gender identity, but to point towards the hugely more gender-abundant nature of God for whom “male” and “female” in their existing created forms are unimaginable understatements of real qualities. When it is said that God is the unmoved mover, this is not an indication of a tediously stationary or indifferent quality: it signals a boundless and untrammelled energy of protagonism in motion such that nothing secondary is in any sort of rivalry with it at all, and so has no possible sort of leverage over it."
ii Butler has similar thoughts. In the preface of the reissued edition, she says of the original Gender Trouble that "The point was not to prescribe a new gendered way of life that might then serve as a model for readers of the text. Rather, the aim of the text was to open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized. One might wonder what use “opening up possibilities” finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is “impossible,” illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question.
iii The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual. Monique Wittig, as quoted by Judith Butler
iv Judith Butler, Gender Trouble " If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained."
v This rigidity and claim to fit everything in is one of the key problems with Fundamentalism as it denies its insecurity. See my pages at: https://www.onemansweb.org/fundamentalism.html
Underlying everything I will say is an understanding of how we make meaning for ourselves. I learned it from a scholar who spoke at our theological college when I was a relatively new student. I didn’t quite follow what he was saying but knew enough to recognise some more senior students were most uncomfortable with his thesis. They began that kind of nit-picking which is a defensive strategy to avoid the challenge of new ideas. Eventually, the scholar said, with some irritation, that all life is a puzzle, and so is theology. There will always be pieces—ideas and issues— that don’t fit into our picture. I know now that any understanding of life which claims to fit everything in, is proof of its own error. And I have experienced several dramatic rearrangements of the pieces that make up my self-understanding. Each had pieces that didn't fit, but each time the new picture seems to have been a more accurate description of where I am, and who I am, than the previous picture. Gradually, or in fits and starts, I think this rearranging of our picture is how we grow.
vi I get the notion of "breaking in" from James Alison's book Undergoing God, dispatches from the scene of a break-in
vii https://www.onemansweb.org/on-the-way-home.html
viii Body dysmorphia is wider than gender; for example, the pain experienced the perception of their body by a person suffering from anorexia. Gender dysphoria is anxiety and depression because "who we are inside" doesn't fit our biological sex. What my friend has described, and I am calling body dysmorphia is about body perceptions related to their gender mismatch.
ix Ibid
x https://www.onemansweb.org/contemplations/exploring-being-me.html
xi This is not a rational experience where one can map out step by step how a decision was made. I understand it more as a sort of tipping point, a moment when a whole lot of data realigns almost of its own volition. It is somewhat like shifting from one paradigm to another; what could not be seen beforehand is suddenly clear and obvious. I think that such experiences demand critical assessment, but to deny them or refuse them is to impoverish ourselves.
xii See, for example, https://www.bartleby.com/60/144.html
xiii "One thing to note about Butler’s theory...is that “performativity,” though it uses a theatrical metaphor, is not the same as “performance.” Gender is not a costume one puts on and takes off, like a Shakespearean actor playing male characters one night and female characters the next.
Rather, the technical term “performative” means for Butler an act that not only communicates but also creates an identity. Some examples offered above of performative speech include saying “guilty” at a trial, which turns one into an inmate, or saying “I do” at a wedding, which turns one into a spouse. Performative acts of gender do a similar kind of work, not only communicating to others some aspect of identity, but constructing that very identity, only they do that work through repetition. As de Beauvoir argued, we are not born a self, we become, or create, a self, through social pressure to conform and through “reiterating and repeating the norms through which one is constituted,” Butler writes. https://www.openculture.com/2018/02/judith-butler-on-gender-performativity.html
xiv I understand that the doctrine of Original Sin is an attempt to articulate this. My go-to book here is James Alison's The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes (Crossroad Publishing Company 1998)
xv Ibid, pp 90.
xvi Andrew Prior "Not only have we been searching for grace, but underlying our cyclical Uniting Church arguments has been an attempt to guarantee grace. Our struggles with each other have been a search for the power and authority to know objectively— to know for sure— that "we are saved." We preach that "by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God," (Eph 2:8) but our human frailty can never quite believe this, much less live with the reality that a gift does not have guarantees, but is… a grace we must trust! Grace flickers in and out of focus. We glimpse grace, and then fear that we will lose sight of it in all the noise and contradiction of the world. We glimpse grace and then fear God will withdraw it from us. " https://www.onemansweb.org/what-just-happened.html
xvii Three is clearly a rhetorical tool; three examples sounds better than two or four. This implies that these three are not an exhaustive list, but call us to recognise all the other binaries that operate in the same way.
xviii Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, in the preface to the original 1990 edition.
xix Read Walter Wink "Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence" http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/cpt/article_060823wink.shtml and then watch any action movie to see how deeply this undergirds our culture. From the text: "This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today... In short, the Myth of Redemptive Violence is the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo. The gods favour those who conquer. Conversely, whoever conquers must have the favour of the gods. The common people exist to perpetuate the advantage that the gods have conferred upon the king, the aristocracy, and the priesthood.
Religion exists to legitimate power and privilege. Life is combat. Any form of order is preferable to chaos, according to this myth. Ours is neither a perfect nor perfectible world; it is theatre of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the Domination System is founded in every society.
The Babylonian myth is far from finished. It is as universally present and earnestly believed today as at any time in its long and bloody history. It is the dominant myth in contemporary America. It enshrines the ritual practice of violence at the very heart of public life, and even those who seek to oppose its oppressive violence do so violently." I will say more on this myth later in this essay.
xx This thought is prompted partly by words from Richard Beck as he reflects on Buber's work. He says, "As Buber says, if I have "both will and grace" to see the tree as a Thou "I become bound up in relation to it." Importantly for Buber, in the I-Thou encounter I don't have to give up my scientific understanding of the tree. There is "no knowledge that I would have to forget" about the tree. Organic chemistry still applies. It's just that this scientific understanding of the tree is only a small part of "a single whole." We don't abandon who we are; we seek instead to see the larger picture, "the single whole." (http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-enchanted-imagination-part-6-i-thou.html) Sophie Chappell addresses my claim that all our categories are socially and culturally bound. " According to the ideology of gender that still dominates our world today, biology itself vindicates the idea of a world that is and must be authoritatively and definitively binarily divided between the masculine and the feminine. But biology itself does no such thing. Biology certainly recognises a distinction between the male and the female bodies, but biology also recognises distinctions between rhesus-positive and rhesus-negative bodies, left-handed and right-handed bodies, tall bodies and short bodies, and so on as above. Which of these distinctions between body-types we choose to foreground, and which we choose to pass over as less important or not important at all, is not a biological decision; it is a political one." Politics is the exercise of power. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/sophie-grace-chappell-is-consciousness-gendered/101987396
xxi I am quoting here a summation of Butler's thought by Will Fraker, which can be seen at: https://aeon.co/ideas/gender-is-dead-long-live-gender-just-what-is-performativity
"It’s against this background that Butler provides her definition in Gender Trouble (1990): ‘gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be’. The basic idea is that gender is created by the very words and actions that appear, superficially, to be simply describing it after the fact. Earlier, in a 1988 essay, Butler had likened gender to ‘an act [in a play] which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualised and reproduced as reality once again’. Gender is not a thing so much as a process by which patterns of language and action come to repeat themselves.
"Embedded within Butler’s concept are two key expansions upon ‘performative’ as Austin or Searle used it. For one, gender does not occur with language only: it’s very much about bodies doing things, such as shaking hands or wearing clothes. Secondly, performing gender is not something that is done by a pre-existing, unfettered individual. Here Butler is re-appropriating Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), that ‘there is no “being” behind doing … the deed is everything’. That is, gender is not a role that someone simply chooses whether or not to step into, a decision made by a detached, pre-social, conscious mind. Instead, the very identity of the actor is fashioned via the actions themselves – and these actions are often unconscious and at least partly coerced.
"Take shaking hands, for example. A ‘masculine’ handshake between two male-identifying individuals is not really a choice, but rather a compulsion rooted in previous actions – both their physical performances (the firm clasp, the decisive shake) and the way they’re spoken or thought about as ‘masculine’ (‘Don’t trust a man with a limp handshake’; ‘He has a good, assertive grip’). There’s an unspoken choreography that moulds the encounter between two men – and indeed, the less it is thought about, the smoother it operates. The moment the performance is brought to the level of awareness is precisely when it comes to feel clunky and unnatural, because this reveals the fact that the sequence could have been executed differently. So, while gender is performed, Butler argues, it is not a truly voluntary performance. Rather, it is made to feel ‘natural’ by virtue of its banality and repetition. The handshake makes the man, not the other way around."
xxii Butler pp9-10 "Can we refer to a “given” sex or a “given” gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is “sex” anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such “facts” for us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.
"It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts."
xxiii Sophie Chappell https://www.abc.net.au/religion/sophie-grace-chappell-is-consciousness-gendered/101987396 Professor of Philosophy at The Open University. The post comes from Professor Chappell’s upcoming book “Trans Figured: On being a transgender person in a cisgender world.”
xxiv A great definition is this: "Heteronormativity is what makes heterosexuality seem coherent, natural and privileged. It involves the assumption that everyone is ‘naturally’ heterosexual, and that heterosexuality is an ideal, superior to homosexuality or bisexuality." (European Institute for Gender Equality https://eige.europa.eu/thesaurus/terms/1237)
xxv Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, xxiii (from the Preface to the 1999 edition)
xxvi James Alison, Undergoing God, dispatches from the scene of a break-in pp64
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