Why non-binary?
Forty years ago, I met a man who profoundly shaped my ministry and pastoral practice. Struggling to know how to manage pastoral care and just generally being a minister, I found in him an inspiration. I copied him.
I say this to introduce a reflection on my recent post Towards a Theology of Gender. While writing it, I could see it would be possible to read the post as a criticism of someone who identifies as male. The post is not seeking to say that. It would never occur to me that my good male friend, such a boon to me, should be anything else other than male. "Well then, why do you need to be this non-binary thing?" someone could ask. "Can't you simply be a male, or masculine, in a non-toxic or non-misogynist fashion?" In other words, why can't I just be like my friend? It's a common-sense question. Another common sense question would be what this means for my relationship with my partner. Well, I adore her, and nothing's changed there. That's because there is no necessary correlation between sexual attraction and gender identity. Which leads us to looking at what gender identity might be.
Why I can't just be like my friend
I start from some "givens."
I take it that most, if not all, societies are set up to favour men. In the west, that means white, heterosexual men. I make no apology for saying to someone who can't see that, "It's time to wake up." Four women have been murdered by men in domestic homicides in South Australia, in this past week.[1]
Paul's words in Galatians 3:28 are an inspired refutation of our human tendency to violent domination which can be seen in such binaries as "Jew or Greek… slave or free… male and female." It is a Christian imperative to live counter to our cultural misogyny. Many folks with male anatomy seek to do this, including my friend and me.
In Christ; that is, within church, race and ethnicity should have no bearing on power, privilege, or service. It should be just as likely that the chair of church council is from a minority culture, indeed even from a despised culture, as being white anglo-saxon. Obviously, the identity of the ruling majorities and ethnicities will change with location, but I'm talking about Australia.
In Christ; that is, within church, it should be just as likely that the minister is a female refugee, and that the church cleaner is a retired white male federal politician, whose opinions garner no more respect than anyone else's. And where one of the recognised spiritual leaders of the congregation is a long-term unemployed person.
In Christ; that is, within church, it should be just as likely that any church council member is a woman, and that the council is chaired by a woman—even a lesbian, as it is that the chair and most of the members (and certainly the members who are listened to) are white men.
All this is basic.
The question is how we live a non-binary life, and how we live as a non-binary church. How does my male friend, definitely staying male, live a non-binary life which is corrective of our cultural gender prejudices.
You see here that I am using non-binary in three forms:
1. The over-arching meaning speaks of a culture which is not bound by either/or, in/out, right/wrong, male/female, simplicities which always tend to exclusion and violence. (See more on this in Towards a Theology of Gender.)
2. Non-binary can also refer to a specific sub-set of that over-arching category. This is where, with respect to gender—the way we organise ourselves as human beings, we seek to transcend simplistic exclusionary binary expression.
3. And to complicate things further, we also use non-binary as a term for a specific kind of gender identification.
The reason for this complication is that societal structures of domination are set up (and have evolved and developed) to be invisible, and to appear natural, and even divinely ordained. This latter claim is most clearly seen in the "complementarian theologies"[2] of groups such as the Anglican Diocese of Sydney. The result is that we are often barely aware of even the first meaning, but take seeing things in "black and white" as just the way things are.
For those of us who look like white anglo men, it is imperative to understand not only that cultures do not "show" their biases, but that they seek to conceal them. And the people who are most blind to the biases and privileges of a culture are the winners within that culture; in Australia, the men. It was a man who grandly and blindly announced in a church meeting that we "have dealt with the woman problem."
Judith Butler says,
It is not enough to inquire into how women might become more fully represented in language and politics. Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of “women,” the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought.[3]
In other words, culture serves, and blinds, those in power—even including those of us who are already to some extent aware of its biases and injustices. And it seeks to restrain and direct our thinking.
It is the rich people who ask why poor people don't budget, blind to the fact that poor peoples' budgeting skills are often the best. It is rich people who suggest the poor buy in bulk, blind to the fact that it is unaffordable for those who live hand-to-mouth. It is white anglo people who are confident that Australia, and that they in particular, are not racist, as they patronise a black woman with a PhD.
I have emphasised all this to make the point that living outside the prescribed and often hidden gender biases of our society is difficult, and requires sustained, conscious, and self-critical effort.
Having said all this, as one born anatomically male, and enculturated to become male (or else), how do I counter the enculturated blindness which goes with that enculturation? How do I live Galatians 3:28?
My friend likes, respects, and listens, to women. He does not seek to dominate them. He affirms and supports his partner's career. Women like and respect him. He is a safe person to be with. I would do well to be like him. And I believe that what I have said of him is true of me. But it is not enough. This is not a criticism of him, but a recognition of something in me.
We are complicated beings. Much of what we call gender—our being female or male—is not an innate thing determined by our biology.[4] We learn to become our gender. Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."[5] Gender is a construct of its culture. I wrote elsewhere that
My first understanding of the cultural basis of gender began in a First Nations community during the late 1970's where the young men often walked arm in arm, or holding hands. An anglo visitor to our community was quite shocked: "Are they all homosexuals!?" A colleague not known for his cultural sensitivity replied, "Of course not. It's how you show your friendship here. It's culture, mate!"[6]
So, according to the norms of our culture, we learn how to be male or female: Boys don't cry. Girls wear pink and like frilly things, and God help any boy who does. One of the key things in this learning and becoming is seen in the statement that gender is performative. The doing creates us.
When we name a child as “girl” or “boy”, we participate in creating them as that very thing. By speaking of people (or ourselves) as “man” or “woman”, we are in the process creating and defining those categories.
However, this work of creating and redefining gender is never finished – for gender norms to hold, they must be constantly repeated. This means in the longer term, gender norms are intrinsically open to change. We can never get them exactly “right”, and if we stop doing them, or do them differently, we participate in changing their meaning. This opens up possibilities for gender to change.[7]
However, this cultural plasticity is not the whole story of gender, as is graphically shown in the tragedy of David Reimer's life.[8] Sometimes, little boys come, unprompted, to their mother and say, "There's been a mistake. I'm a girl."[9] Some folk's male (or female) body revolts them so much that corrective surgery is literally a life-line to survival. All my reading and conversation suggests that sometimes something in a person over-rides our usual enculturation into a gender.
Gender/body dysphoria is much less prominent in my consciousness than in the examples above, although it occasionally flares up and reduces me to tears. I was a little boy who hated a great deal of the experience of being a boy, but who buckled down to doing the right thing, and learned to be male. There was no other option, apart from being beaten up in the playground and also in trouble with the adults. Not that I understood any of that in terms of gender, for I had no language to conceive, let alone perceive, what my feelings might be about, much less any ability to live in another way.[10]
In many ways, I have been quite successful "as male." I've survived and even flourished. The idea that I might not be male sometimes surprises people. But there are two things going on. Firstly, I find I can no longer ignore the "feminine" stuff which I have for so long repressed. I can try, but as another friend says, "It is still there eating away in the back of your head." (They were speaking for both of us.) I'm not only tired of fitting into boots that don't fit, those boots are damaging me.[11] It's time to work out if I can become "more true" to who I am.
But here's the rub, so to speak. The term transgender, used formally,
is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity is different to that which was legally assigned to them at birth. Trans and gender diverse people may take steps to live in their nominated sex with or without medical treatment...[12]
More popularly, however, people understand transgender to mean that as a trans person in an anatomically male body, I would identify as a woman. The thing is, as much as I wonder if I might have done better as a woman, it is now too late to become one. I don't mean only in terms of corrective surgery, but am harking back to the de Beauvoir's statement that "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Neither does one "simply decide to be" a woman: It takes time to learn... and I'm 69 years old in a few weeks. I am so deeply enculturated into being male, including some violent defensive streaks that I used to stay alive as a child, that I'm not sure that trying to live as a woman would be an improvement on life. I'd be putting on another pair of ill-fitting boots. All this at the same time as I can write that
my colleague Elizabeth ... said, 'You have always been very comfortable with women.' And I remembered arriving at a retired minister's morning tea, full of retired male clergy. I took a deep breath and steeled myself to go in. Then I spotted Elizabeth and three other retired women clergy. With them I was comfortable and safe: my people.[13]
So, rather than transgender, I use the term non-binary: neither male or female. I am not sure what that will turn out to be, but it is what I'm trying to live, taking the best of what I have learned in my life so far, and paying more conscious attention to a group of female friends whom I now realise have been so precious to me because I wanted to "be them." They had been, and are, showing me ways to live some of the "feminine" that had been suppressed in me. I'm speaking mostly about observing and learning ways of relating and behaving, although I am learning to see some things about clothes, too. That's the first thing.
The second thing is that there is something odd happening here. While calling myself male, and living as male, I experienced that much of what I was observing about better ways to live (and observing in female friends) remained stubbornly just that: observations. They didn't translate into me feeling as though I was being any different to where I had always been. But choosing to identify as non-binary, wearing some nice earings, removing the beard, letting my fingernails grow, changing my name,[14] gradually beginning go public with all this... all that has changed something. I feel as though I am moving somewhere. I'm certainly a lot healthier and more relaxed in myself. I struggle to understand what is going on in me here, but it's good.
Oddly, perhaps, nice big hoop earings aside, I look much as I always have. I might almost be that non-toxic person I wish to be. As Dave says in The Full Monty, "There's nowt as queer as folk.
Andrea (23 November 2023)
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-23/four-alleged-domestic-homicides-in-sa-this-week/103137634
[2] Wikipedia (as at 23-11-2023} "Complementarians assign primary headship roles to men and support roles to women based on their interpretation of certain biblical passages. One of the precepts of complementarianism is that while women may assist in the decision-making process, the ultimate authority for the decision is the purview of the male in marriage, courtship, and in the polity of churches subscribing to this view. The main contrasting viewpoint is Christian egalitarianism, which maintains that positions of authority and responsibility in marriage and religion should be equally available to both females and males."
[3] The question of “the subject” is crucial for politics, and for feminist politics in particular, because juridical subjects are invariably produced through certain exclusionary practices that do not “show” once the juridical structure of politics has been established. In other words, the political construction of the subject proceeds with certain legitimating and exclusionary aims, and these political operations are effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes juridical structures as their foundation. Juridical power inevitably “produces” what it claims merely to represent; hence, politics must be concerned with this dual function of power: the juridical and the productive. In effect, the law produces and then conceals the notion of “a subject before the law” in order to invoke that discursive formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently legitimates that law’s own regulatory hegemony. It is not enough to inquire into how women might become more fully represented in language and politics. Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of “women,” the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought.
Indeed, the question of women as the subject of feminism raises the possibility that there may not be a subject who stands “before” the law, awaiting representation in or by the law. Perhaps the subject, as well as the invocation of a temporal “before,” is constituted by the law as the fictive foundation of its own claim to legitimacy. Butler, Gender Trouble, pp3-4
[4] That idea is the doctrine of essentialism and is used to justify male dominance.
[5] Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, quoted in Judith Butler Gender Trouble, pp1
[6] Andrea Prior: Towards a Theology of Gender. I love this story because it beautifully illustrates how, despite the complexities of gender theory, we can, in practise, learn quite sophisticated understandings of how we function. My colleague would have been mystified by de Beauvoir and Butler, yet simply "got" what was going on.
[7] https://theconversation.com/judith-butler-their-philosophy-of-gender-explained-192166
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
[9] Or, read Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, which is free to read on Libby.
[10] Andrea Prior: Exploring Being Me
[11] " But I am not male. I scrape along most of the time, but sometimes it's like the over-wet winter I shoved my bare feet into my Dad's rubber boots to clear up some mud. My feet were blistered and my legs ached because everything was the wrong shape. I didn't fit. That's how I feel about me, sometimes; I don't match the shape I'm supposed to wear, and it doesn't seem possible to change. I'm stuck inside myself where I don't fit, and can't get out. And I grieve for what might have been." Andrea Prior: School Girls
[12] https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/lgbti/terminology
[13] https://www.onemansweb.org/men-s-business/exploring-being-me.html
[14] I use the name Andrea specifically because in some languages it is gender ambiguous rather like Elwyn or Charlie.
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