Gender Benders
April 28, 2002
The Rev. Gretchen Woods
READING
from TransLiberation:
beyond pink or blue by Leslie Feinberg
The sight of pink-blue
gender-coded infant outfits may grate on your nerves. Or you may be a woman or man
who feels at home in those categories. Transliberation defends you both.
Each person should have the
right to choose between pink or blue tinted gender categories, as well
as all the other hues of the palette. At this moment in time, that right is denied
to us. But together, we could make it a reality.
. . . I am a human being who
would rather not be addressed as Ms. or Mr., ma’am or sir. I prefer to use
gender-neutral pronouns like sie (pronounced like “see”) and hir )pronounced
like “here”) to describe myself. I am a person who faces almost
insurmountable difficulty when instructed to check off an “F” or an “M” box on
identification papers.
I’m not at odds with the fact that I was born female-bodied. Nor do I
identify as an intermediate sex. I simply do not fit the prevalent Western
concepts of what a woman or a man “should” look like. And that reality has
dramatically directed the course of my life.
I’ll give you a graphic
example. From December 1995 to December 1996, I was dying of endocarditis – a
bacterial infection that lodges and proliferates in the valves of the heart. A
simple blood culture would have immediately exposed the root case of my raging
fevers. Eight weeks of “round-the-clock” intravenous antibiotic drips would
have eradicated every last seedling of bacterium in the canals of my heart. Yet
I experienced such hatred from some health practitioners that I very nearly
died.
I remember late one night in
December my lover and I arrived at a hospital emergency room during a
snowstorm. My fever was 104 degrees and rising. My blood pressure was pounding
dangerously high. The staff immediately hooked me up to monitors and worked to
bring down my fever. The doctor in charge began physically examining me. When
he determined that my anatomy was female, he flashed me a mean-spirited smirk.
While keeping his eyes fixed on me, he approached one of the nurses, seated at
a desk, and began rubbing her neck and shoulders. He talked to her about sex
for a few minutes, After his pointed demonstration of “normal sexuality,” he
told me to get dressed and then he stormed out of the room. Still delirious, I
struggled to put on my clothes and make sense of what was happening.
The doctor returned after I
was dressed. He ordered me to leave the hospital and never return. I refused. I
told him I wouldn’t leave until he could tell me why my fever was so high. He
said, “You have a fever because you are a very troubled person.”
This doctor’s prejudices,
directed at me during a moment of catastrophic illness, could have killed me.
The death certificate would have read: Endocarditis. By all rights it should
have read: Bigotry.
As my partner and I sat
bundled up in a cold car outside the emergency room, still reverberating from
the doctor’s hatred, I thought about how many people have been turned away from
medical care when they were desperately ill – some because an apartheid “whites
only” sign hung over the emergency room entrance, or some because their visible
Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions kept personnel far from their beds. I remembered how a
blemish that wouldn’t heal drove my mother to visit her doctor repeatedly
during the 1950’s. I recalled the doctor finally wrote a prescription for
Valium because he decided she was a hysterical woman. When my mother finally
got to specialists, they told her the cancer had already reached her brain.
(Feinberg, Transliberation, pp. 1-3.)
Sex Education has been
integral to Unitarian Universalist religious education since the 1960’s when
the ground-breaking curriculum for seventh and eighth graders, “About Your
Sexuality” by deryk calderwood, was released by the Unitarian Universalist
Association. This curriculum caused quite a stir because it viewed sex as
healthy and valuable human experience - and it acknowledged homosexuality. Some
of you may recall the most recent incident of media interest when Bryant Gumble
made that curriculum the focus of the first of his most recent TV series.
In the early 1990’s we realized
that the AYS curriculum was in serious need of revision given the rise of AIDS
and of consciousness about the spectrum of gender. The result is “Our Whole
Lives,” geared not only to seventh and eight graders, but with units addressed
across the age spectrum from toddlers to adults.
In the moments we share
today and at the request of the Our Whole Lives teachers, I am looking more
deeply into the broad spectrum of human experience of gender and the
possibilities that opening our vision and understanding may offer each of us,
no matter how we identify. I shall offer a definition, some history, and a
vision for the future.
Some of us experience gender
as deeply polarized into male/female, pink/blue perspectives. In contrast,
Kinsey long ago recognized a bell curve of gender identification with ten
percent in every culture solidly heterosexual in their internal and external
experiences and ten percent solidly homosexual in their internal and external
experiences. The other eighty percent rest somewhere along that bell curve. Yet
our society and religions continue to insist on two, very polarized ways of
being human, rather than a spectrum of human experience.
This polarization does not
take into account distinctions among biology, personal identification and
affectional predisposition, which may or may not fit societal expectations. For
example, a person may be born biologically female, as was Leslie Feinberg, but
hir gender identification may not be female. It is also possible to not identify
as female and still not identify as male. And the person(s) to whom sie is
attracted may or may not be of the opposite biological gender.
Leslie Feinberg tells us:
Today
the word transgender has at least two colloquial meanings. It has been used as
an umbrella term to include everyone who challenges the boundaries of sex and
gender. It is also used to draw a distinction between those who reassign the
sex they were labeled at birth, and those of us whose gender expression is
considered inappropriate for our sex. . .
I asked
many self-identified transgender activists. . . who they believed were included
under the umbrella term. Those polled named: transexuals, transgenders,
transvestites, trangenderists, bi(-)genders, drag queens, drag kings,
cross-dressers, masculine women, feminine men, intersexuals (people referred to
in the past as “hermaphrodites”), androgynes, cross-genders, shape-shifters,
passing women, passing men, gender-benders, gender-blenders, bearded women, and
women bodybuilders who have crossed the line of what is considered socially
acceptable for a female body.
. . .
Transgender people traverse, bridge, or blur the boundary of the sex they
were assigned at birth. (Feinberg, Trangender Warriors, p. x.)
During my lifetime so far, I have known at least one person from each
category Feinberg mentions. I suspect each of you knows at least one person who
fits one of these categories. You just may not know that they do. Certainly I
find myself most comfortable with the label transgender because I have never
felt particularly female – or male, as stereotyped in our western society. I
love certain things about being female, especially bearing children, and I have
often been told “You have a lot of male energy!” and “You think like a man.” I
have been called “sir” more than once.
Let us briefly look at what
we can say about transgendered folks who appear throughout history, especially
as related to spiritual practices.
Historians posit a pre-patriarchal,
post- Stone Age, matrilineal period in which the Great Mother was worshiped in
the Middle East, Northern Africa, Europe and western Asia. Records indicate
that some of her priestesses were male-to-female transsexuals. “Roman historian
Plutarch described the Great Mother as an intersexual (hermaphroditic) deity in
whom the sexes had not yet been split. (Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, p.
40.) Some of the priestesses of the Great Mother “. . . followed an ancient and
sacred path of rituals that included castration. . . Statues of Diana were
often represented draped with a necklace made of the testicles of her
priestesses.” (Ibid.) There is disagreement among scholars as to whether
castration was a chosen spiritual practice or a way to wrest power from the
women who had held it.
Transgender people
have been known as religious leaders in many varied cultures.
“For example, African spiritual beliefs in
intersexual deities and sex/gender transformation among their followers have
been documented among the Akan, Ambo-Kwanyama, Bobo, Chokwe, Dahomeans (of
Benin), Dogon, Bambara, Etik, Handa, Humbe, Hunde, Ibo, Jukun, Kimbundu, Konso,
Kunama, Lamba, Lango, Luba, Lulua, Musho, Nuba, Ovimbundu, Rundi,
Shona-Karonga, Venda, Vili-Kongo and Yoruba.
Transgender in religious ceremony is still reported in the twentieth
century in west Africa. And cross-dressing is a feature of modern Brazilian and
Haitian ceremonies derived from west African religions. (Ibid. p. 44.)
“.
. . many Native Nations on the North American continent made room for more than
two sexes, and there appeared to have been a fluidity between them” (Ibid. p.
43.) In addition, there are records of transgender identities and practices in
every traditional Asian society, according to Pauline Park, who is Korean
American.
In
ancient China, the shih-niang wore
a combination of female, male, and religious garb. In Okinawa, some shamans
took part in an ancient male-to-female ceremony known as winagu-nati, which means, “becoming female.” And trans
shamans were still reported practicing in the Vietnamese countryside in the
mid-1970s.
Female-to-male
priests also exist – and most importantly, even co-exist with male-to-female
shamans. Among the Lugbara in Africa, for example, male-to females are called okule
and female-to-males are named agule. . . Inuit female-to-males serve
White Whale Woman, who was believed to have been transformed into a man or a
woman-man. (Ibid p. 45.)
What interests me most is that Feinberg posits that the historic overthrow
of communalism with a relatively class-free structure is also the root of trans
oppression. As wealth could be stored and stockpiled, men took charge of the
accumulation of wealth. Before that tools, utensils, and food surplus were held
within the matrilineal commune. “Men began to pass on inheritance to their male
heirs. . . These inequalities, small at first, became the basis of the
enrichment of some male tribal members over the women and the tribe as a
whole.” Ibid. p. 52.) From the perspective of Feinberg, Merlin Stone, Gerda
Lerner (in The Creation of Patriarchy) and several other scholars, class
divisions, slavery, and labeling of other people as “different,” resulted
directly from the concept of ownership of property and the overthrow of
“mother-right.”
The
earliest overthrow of mother-right took place in the fertile river valleys of
Eurasia and northeast Africa during the period of about 4500 to 1200 B.C.E. In
this new social structure, riven by inequality, male ruling class attitudes
toward women and trans people grew more and more hostile, even toward
transgendered queens and kings. . .
Hostility
to transgender, sex-change, intersexuality, women, and same-sex love became a
pattern wherever class antagonisms deepened. . .
And I found
that wherever the ruling classes became stronger, the laws grew increasingly
more fierce and more relentlessly enforced. (Ibid. p. 53.)
Feinberg gives us real food for thought with this
unabashed assertion that the development of class distinctions underpins most
oppressions, whether of women, races, or gender differences. I believe it is
worth consideration as we move on.
A Vision for the Future
I have to admit that I still
find it jarring to meet a new–to-me transgendered person for the first time,
even as I self-identify in that category. The lack of usual social cues leaves
me stranded as to pronouns, which I still get mixed up, even with my friends. I
do like the idea of sie , for she/he and hir for his/her, as much
for their sound as their efficacy. Clearly we are called to look more deeply
and to listen more fully to a greater spectrum of human experience (to see and
hear what that is, rather than imposing a limited view), without prejudice for
the roles and expectations we have internalized from our society.
Our Unitarian Universalist
value of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” calls us to hear and
see people who have been rendered invisible and unacceptable from a deeply
polarized view of possibility for human expression. We are called by our faith
to a broader view and deeper love which liberates all of us from limited
perspectives of ourselves as well as others.
Leslie Feinberg puts it this way:
. . .
most of the thoughts and beliefs that we are challenging were imposed on us
from above, were rotten to the core and were backed up by bigoted laws. But
we’re not taking away your identity. No one’s sex reassignment or fluidity of
gender threatens your right to self-identify and self-expression. On the
contrary, our struggle bolsters your right to your identity. My right to be me
is tied with a thousand threads to your right to be you.
Our Unitarian Universalist
faith calls us to join in the liberation struggle for all people to be fully
the best they can be with respect, responsibility, and relish for the process.
This is a spiritual and emotional as well as a political statement.
So Be It! Blessed Be!