Rainbow Journey Series: Meandering Along the Trail
Gender along the journey– a gender gander, if you will
Content warning: mentions of queerphobia, transphobia
Whenever the topics of gender identity and gender performance arise, I can’t help but think of one of the first pre-teen arguments I had with my mother. Since I was starting middle school, she said I could no longer wear basketball shorts to school; she was adamant it wasn’t “lady-like.”
I was confused. I’d been allowed to wear basketball shorts to school up to this point. I didn’t even wear them every day, like the super-athletic girls did. I usually wore them during the hotter months of the year and I preferred them to skirts (as I’d already discovered the painful horror of inner-thigh chafing). I couldn’t see the difference if my calves were bare due to a skirt versus basketball shorts.
After a long back and forth, my mom responded with exasperation, “Well, if you’re going to insist on wearing shorts to school, you have to start shaving your legs.”
I know my mother was trying to keep me from getting made fun of at school, especially since I’m naturally hairier than most cisgender women. I also didn’t enjoy dressing terribly femininely, so I didn’t. In her mind, I’m sure it was a recipe for middle school disaster.
It’s also worth noting that I have polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). While some of the symptoms are a little more covert (like incredibly unpredictable menstrual cycles), others are a bit more obvious– like the hair growth. On the plus side, the hair on my head is luxuriously thick.
I never enjoyed shaving. But I also knew that in order to “successfully” present my femininity to the world, I couldn’t get away with not shaving the way some of my peers with less hair of a lighter color on their legs could.
As I’ve gotten older, the hair growth has only intensified– even when I take birth control, the primary treatment for PCOS. Toward the end of grad school, I started to get facial hair on my chin. At first, I could pluck them. But pretty quickly, the hair grew so rapidly and thickly that the only reasonable way to remove it was to shave my face. Every time I shaved it off, I couldn’t help but think that I wasn’t doing it for me, but to make others around me feel more comfortable. I was hiding something about myself in order to make them feel at ease.
Photo by Thomas Tucker on Unsplash
As I’ve leaned into the radical acceptance of my body –hair and all– over the years, I’ve made several decisions. I’ve stopped shaving my legs (which has led to fewer sunburns in the summer, as hair is great natural skin protection).
I also stopped shaving my chin beard, which is actually thick enough to warrant the title beard. I began to take care of it, regularly treating it with beard oil and trimming so it’s well-groomed. I have a beard care regimen that I consider a sacred part of my self-care. That beard is part of me, and I want to treat all parts of myself with compassion.
My beard –coupled with my short hair and natural preference for male clothing– often leads people to see me as what queer comedian Hannah Gadsby calls “man at a glance.”
But what does it mean to be a woman? A man? If being a man is all about facial hair growth, then my beard can actually put several of my male colleagues’ beards to shame. If being a woman is all about smooth legs and frilly skirts, I’ve never been good at it (or enjoyed it). If being a man is all about strength, I counted it a source of pride that I could carry more folding chairs than most of my male classmates could whenever we set up for college worship in undergrad. If being a woman is all about being gentle, I suppose my compassionate nature fits the bill.
Prince’s famous lyric “I’m not a woman. I’m not a man. I am something that you’ll never understand “ comes to mind as I wrestle with my own gender identity. As such, I began to dip my toe into what it might mean for me to be somewhere further away from the feminine end of the spectrum.
Photo by calvin chou on Unsplash
Last year, I leaned heavily into occupying an in-between space regarding gender expression. Among other things, I toyed with getting a binder (and finally purchased a couple a few months ago). Every day is a different adventure, but it’s one that feels worth doing.
Exploring this space in between and outside of the male/female binary has given me a deeper appreciation for the mysterious in-between spaces God created. I’m particularly inspired by the work of trans Bible scholar Austen Hartke and his book Transforming: The Bible and the LIves of Transgender Christians. In this book, Hartke explores how trans themes in the Bible can help us better understand both the Bible and transgender people.
One of the most powerful parts of the book is his discussion of the creation narratives in Genesis. He highlights that the narrative only presents created order in binaries: land and sea, birds and animals of the land, day and night. He then reminds us that, although the Creation story doesn’t mention them, God made the bogs and the marshes: too wet to walk on like land, too dry to swim through like water. God also made the platypus: fur like a mammal, but has a beak and lays eggs like a bird. God also made twilight: the time of day when you can’t see the sun or the moon, in between day and night.
These parts of creation don’t adhere to the binaries explicitly mentioned in the Bible, so are they fictitious? Abominations? Sinful for simply existing? Or are those binary lists implying to us that God made everything on the extreme polar opposite ends of the spectrum, and also everything in between?
If all of that in-betweenness can exist in creation, why not in God’s pinnacle of creation? Why not within us? Ages ago, other cultures figured out that genders between and beyond male and female exist and celebrated those identities. Why couldn’t we do so now? Why couldn’t I do so now?
In that exploration, I’ve found a lot of peace. I feel a large level of contentment in existing in the in-between. It’s also been exhilarating and made me aware of so much more diversity in God’s creation. The shades of color between the main colors on the rainbow now catch my eye in ways they never have before (what do you call the color between indigo and blue anyway?). It opened an entirely new world to me and it’s exhilarating.
Unfortunately, not everyone celebrates the divine mystery of the in-between.
Photo by Raychel Sanner on Unsplash
Last summer while I was in the beginning of this exploration, an incident at my non-ministry day job shook me to my core. I was assigned to work with a new client. Before even speaking with me, that client looked me up online, saw images of me, and assumed I’m trans. He then complained to my superiors, demanding to work with someone else. Because I would have been working with his teenage child, he went so far as to say that the company needed to “disclose” and “get permission from parents” before assigning a trans person to work with minors. It was hurtful to see the ludacris far-right mentality around trans people being sexual criminals weaponized against me.
Thankfully, my work was incredibly supportive. The company refused to work with the family. They reimbursed me for the therapy sessions I used to process the incident and even compensated me for some of the hours I was going to miss on that paycheck. This incident also led to the company updating certain policies to ensure that other employees would be similarly supported if clients behaved this way in the future.
In their support, though, more than one colleague made the comment, “And the funny thing is, his complaint wasn’t even valid because you’re not trans.”
All of a sudden, the joy I’d found in exploring the space in-between was stripped away. I know they were simply trying to underscore the ridiculousness of that man’s behavior, but now even the people who were in my corner expected me to choose a side. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I just nodded and walked away.
Photo by John Lockwood on Unsplash
Our society too often demands easy answers. This or that? Yes or no? Good or bad? No time for nuance. No space for complexity. Give me a simple answer so we can all move on.
I get it. In this era of late-stage capitalism where most of us are working ourselves to the bone only to pay rent, get groceries, and maybe have enough left over for that Netflix subscription that allows us to dissociate until we go to bed, most of us don’t have the mental energy for complex discussions around identity.
That doesn’t change the reality that our world is much more complex than we want to believe it is. When we pretend that complexity doesn’t exist, we miss the intricate, kaleidoscope-like beauty God created.
I don’t want to live in a world with only two colors, two times of day, two temperatures, two feelings. I want to experience the full color palate of God’s Creation.
Despite the seeming impracticality of it, I’m going to continue to take up residency in the in-between. In that space, I encounter the Jesus who is simultaneously part and completely human, part and completely God: an entity who exists beyond the binary of human/divine we attempt to force him into.
In that regard, Jesus is queer. And I am, too. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
That’s the conclusion of the Rainbow Journey Series for Pride Month! Thank you for allowing me to share part of my story with you. Stay tuned next week as we kick off our July series Stories from the Community.