A LADY WALKS IN AS I’M LEAVING, AND
Pause. “Am I … where I am supposed to be?”
Petite, the pastel-two-pieced figure bars
My exit, eyeing me confusèdly
And blushing as it dawns on her she errs
In one of two both-mortifying ways.
I muster my most womanliest smile
And, firmly unoffended, meet her gaze:
“I know! We’re used to queuing!” I freestyle.
She breathes relief. I take my person out
The unambiguously coded door –
As order mollifies her nagging doubt –
And lose the mask. I shrug it off, secure
In my admission by the status quo;
But every body needs some where to go.
Carolyn Whitnall, 2019.
I’m cautious to write about gender because I don’t want to seem to weigh in on matters that are outside of my comfortably protected (cis female) experience. But one thing I do know a bit about is anxiety, and I see a lot of it (especially among Christians) in response to increasing societal awareness and embrace of gender diversity beyond the assigned sex binary. Every now and then I find myself on the momentary receiving end, simply because I’m quite androgynous-looking and don’t choose to exaggerate my femininity. [1]
The warmth towards Jordan Peterson – a famously outspoken critic of trans rights – from certain corners of the church is, I think, telling. His broader thesis (guessable from the title of his popular book Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos) largely amounts to ‘order: good; chaos: bad’. (Spoiler alert: it also emerges along the way that ‘order = male; chaos = female’). He is big on innate binaries and ‘natural’ hierarchies and the importance of resisting the “increasing call to deconstruct [our] stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based.” (p138) Don’t mess with what ‘works’, he urges. Nevermind that a system that has long ‘worked’ for abled straight cisgender middle-class white men has consistently worked less or not at all for many others.
He makes some trivial points that few would argue with. It is destabilising when established and understood social categories and arrangements of power are questioned and dismantled. Such change is uncomfortable at best and often legitimately frightening, even to those with the least to lose now – who knows what worse arrangement might emerge in the aftermath? [2] And yet, Peterson’s own portrayal of the order that he celebrates and seeks to protect seemed to me so obviously toxic and oppressive [3] that my key takeaway from the book was an increased resistance to ‘order: good; chaos: bad’ as a criterion for truth-seeking. I’m not recommending we aspire to chaos – at least, not while there are other ways to accomplish change – but when our own cherished stabilities seem in turmoil, perhaps we should curtail the instinct to control and instead look for opportunity; potentiality; the ways in which God might be at work creatively to break harmful rigidities and establish newness.
Which brings me back to gender. Theologian Miroslav Volf describes gender identity as a “dynamically constructed” duality rooted in the sexed body and “negotiated in the social exchange between men and women within a given context” (Exclusion and Embrace, p181). That is, maleness and femaleness are not fixed and unchangeable essences cemented in our biology and/or the Bible; rather, they exist in ever-evolving relationship to one another, ideally with a mutual commitment to Trinity-like self-giving as the basis for exchange. I find Volf’s understanding a helpful starting point in working out my own, though I’d want to add the caveat that a macro-level connection between sex and gender need not imply a fixed individual-level correspondence (after all, even biological sex itself is not a strict binary).
The most visible Christian responses to the ‘continual renegotiation’ of gender, at least in recent decades, have been geared to resist it – but I don’t know that we get to do that. The New Testament provides instruction about how to live liberated, godly lives within the socially constructed roles of its time (including slavery, which few would think to defend as timelessly ordained today). But it also hints towards a ‘now and not yet’ deconstruction of those roles at a deeper and more lasting level: in Christ there is no “male and female” (Gal 3:28); at the resurrection “people will neither marry nor be given in marriage” (Matt 22:30); and the trajectory of God’s creation is not back to the Garden of Eden but on to the New Jerusalem – an envisaged heavenly city in which many of the usual distinctions and hierarchies underpinning social stability have apparently been dissolved (Rev 21-22).
Not that it was given to the early church to action this vision as a social agenda … but their future hope gave them courage to live transformed and unfearful lives within their sometimes oppressive ‘now’ – taking worldly freedom where possible, but persevering in worship and neighbour love either way (e.g. 1 Cor 7:21-24, 39-40).
What might this look like in our own ‘now’? How do we live liberated, godly lives within a strikingly different social framework – one that has begun to recognise trans, non-binary and genderqueer identities but is meanwhile fraught with aggressive, often ugly and dehumanising, pushback? With Jesus' two greatest commandments in mind (Matt 22:34-40) here are some suggestions:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” As image-bearers together, we can look for ways that gender diversity reveals fresh glimpses of God, expanding our knowledge and enriching our worship. In particular, the struggle often felt to conceive of personhood apart from binary gender has helped cement a mental image of God as ‘male’, even though most of us would agree, when pressed, that God transcends gender. Maybe the ‘disruption’ of this binary presents an opportunity to know God beyond our limiting masculine conceptions. Maybe it also helps to expose and topple some of the idols we have set up around sex, marriage and ‘family values’ – priorities that have grown out of proportion compared with their place among the early followers of Jesus (e.g. 1 Cor 7:8).
“You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” The expansion of our vocabulary around gender has given many people language and concepts by which to understand themselves more fully. To the extent that we are willing to listen, and not presume to understand a person better than they understand themselves, we have the opportunity for closer relationships and more authentically inclusive community. Maybe we even catch a glimpse of the coming New Creation in the doing so [4]; maybe we get to reflect it in compelling invitation to a watching world.
I leave you with some wisdom from poet-priest-theologian Rev. Rachel Mann, and an enthusiastic recommendation to listen to the Nomad interview from which it’s quoted: “Our humanity is not to be simply reduced to essentialist categories and I do think an invitation to us all, whether we are trans or not trans, is to see that gendered categories are not the measure of us all. And for me as I have said earlier, in transitioning, this wasn’t about me somehow wanting to go against nature, wanting to go against God, it was in order to be in a place where I could begin to live life – in the kind of way that I hope we all live life, so that you are in a position to actually encounter transcendence, encounter God, encounter good news...”
General note: Please don't think I'm suggesting that this somehow 'wraps up' everything the Bible has to say about gender! These are reflections based on selected portions, consistent with my own in-development view of the whole, but not pretending to comprehensively account for it.
[1] I feel quite strongly about rejecting the shame that this used to make me feel, as I’ve written previously.
[2] I agree with him, for example, that the partial achievements of feminism have had some negative repercussions: bitterness among men who have been taught to aspire to qualities that are now deemed punishable; resentment among women who now feel an obligation to succeed in the public sphere whilst still being burdened with the greater share of domestic labour. It just seems plain to me that the way to address these problems is to dismantle gender injustice more thoroughly, not to re-embrace it.
[3] As well as being shamefully poorly argued considering the book’s large and enthusiastic following. His self-help recommendations seem sound enough to me (at least, many of them overlap with my own mental-health-managing habits), but I found the ideology he promotes in between to be self-serving, ahistorical, manipulative of the source material, and peppered with logical fallacies.
[4] Rev. Jody Stowell writes beautifully about this in her contribution to the book Journeys in Grace and Truth.
[5] Although the interviewers take a little bit of bearing-with, especially when they feel the need to re-explain the conversation in their own words at the end!
[Thumbnail image by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.]
Comments