transgender – Feminism and Religion

A Transgender Man’s Perspective on Purity Culture Got This Cisgender Woman Thinking by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

“Ewww, there’s been a boy in our cabin!” One of my cabinmates squealed. We were at sixth grade camp. Others chimed in quickly: “Gross!”

The evidence? A pair of boys’ cargo shorts, held gingerly between a thumb and forefinger as if they had cooties.

“Ew!” “Weird!” “How’d he get in here?”

The shorts were mine. But I did not admit this.

As a kid, I sometimes wore hand-me-down clothing from my older brother. It made sense. I didn’t have strong opinions about fashion, and the clothes felt just as comfortable and fit just as well as the girl clothes my parents bought for me.

My elementary school classmates didn’t seem to notice or care. But this was sixth grade. This was the first year of middle school. Things were changing, and I hadn’t quite realized the full extent of these changes. Showing up at sixth grade camp with hand-me-down boys’ shorts was taboo.

Expanding the Possibilities of Being: Transness and the Practice of Freedom by Mark Gardett

Imagine a tree.

This tree lives in a park, surrounded by other trees. There’s a lake in the distance, and the tree has plenty of space to spread its leaves to the sun. In the summer, its leaves are lush and green, and in the winter, its bare branches shake in the wind.

Now imagine this tree saying to itself, when its leaves turn brown in the fall, “I am so ugly—the other trees won’t like me.” Imagine the tree next to it thinking, “I am the smart tree,” or “I am mom’s favorite tree,” or “I’m a failure–I will never be a good enough tree” or “I’m going to be the richest and most successful tree.”

It doesn’t seem likely. Yet as humans, we have these kinds of thoughts all the time. They’re called identifications, and every practice of yoga, despite all the incredible diversity of lineages and traditions, is designed to teach us how to let them go. No matter what school of yoga you study, this is the goal: liberation from our identification with the impermanent, changing, and ultimately unsatisfying temporary self, so that we can reunite with the true Self beneath.

Queering Herstory Profiles by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

We are back with a new volume of uncovering and focusing on extraordinary persons. We start our first post of Volume II with 4 figures who in many ways throw history, narrative, and the status quo off their axis. All 4, if alive in 2024, would find solidarity and kinship with the Queer Community. So let us being.

Hatshepsut (1508-1458 BCE) Egyptian Pharaoh.

Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I, wife to Thutmose II, and stepmother to Thutmose III. Her husband died while his heir was too young to ascend the throne. Hatshepsut became not only the acting regent but full fledge ruler. She would reign for 21 years as the 5^th Ruler of the 18^th Dynasty of Egypt. Her reign was prosperous including funding for art, statues, and monuments that have stood the test of time and active destruction. Deir –el-Bahari became a significant temple for Hatshepsut.

In Memoriam, Rachel Pollack JIA (8/17/45 – 4/7/23) by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

How do you speak about someone who not only rocked your own world, but those of countless others? Whose fertile imagination and generous nature inspired and transformed so many lives? My friend, teacher, and mentor Rachel Pollack died in April. It’s hard to wrap my head around what a huge loss this is, not only for me, but for the world. She had an encyclopedic knowledge at her fingertips of mythology, tarot, historical trends, cultural trends, ancient civilizations. She was a storyteller at heart, using personal stories, universal stories to teach. She encouraged and guided each of us to discover and tell our own stories. Her stories won both the Arthur C. Clarke and the World Fantasy Awards. I call her the Grandmother of the Tarot because her work in that area has been so ground-breaking, far-reaching and depthful.

I write JIA, instead of RIP, special for Rachel. JIA means Journey In Adventure. Rachel was adventurous to her core. Rather than resting in peace I see her continuing her immensely adventurous journey just now on the other side of the veil. I see it as a continuing wondrous, magical ride that she has earned.

The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia, Book Review by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Dreams are a confluence of lifefragments, swelling and dissolving in waves, perpetually on the verge of meanings. What in Physics is called ‘potential energy,’ I refer to as ‘potential meaning,’ the maximum of which is dreaming.

The Fifth Wound, pg 34

There is so much to like about this book even as it is painful to witness Mattia’s journey. It is also confusing at times which might be by design because life, itself, is so confusing. The prepublication material describes this book as a love story between Aurora and Ezekiel. Both Ezekiel and Aurora begin by describing themselves as “fairies.” Ezekiel remains so, Aurora transitions. She calls herself a tgirl or a transgirl.

Mattia leads a life that refuses to be boxed into any “norm.” The vulnerable wounds that she collects as she navigates this challenging path are both internal and external. Ezekiel and Aurora know and love each other both before and after Mattia’s gender confirmation surgery. It takes some work to understand the hardships of those who don’t fit into societies’ norms; these are norms that too often float through our consciousness often without our even being aware. I believe that wrestling with such issues expands our humanity and for this (but not this alone), The Fifth Wound is an important book.

Prehistoric Feminine Icons

In this blog post I’d like to take you with me on a recent visit to the special exhibition “Arts and Prehistory”* in the Museum of Mankind (Musée de l’Homme) in Paris.**

Like the Feminine Power in London exhibition I wrote about last year, this is another ode to human imagination and creativity in connection to the mystery of life.

The exhibition features women figurines and cave paintings from dating between 26.000-34.000 years old, and I wonder how these prehistoric icons can inspire us to look at female bodies today…

Re-Anointing the Body by Eline Kieft

How ‘at one’ are you with your body, and what reasons might there be if your body-sense got separate(d) from your soul-sense?

This piece starts with the difference between feminine and masculine spirituality, and introduces a few reasons why living in a physical body isn’t always easy.

It then invites a shift to the beloved body and how we can start to re-instate our body as a sacred place and love it from within.

Lifting the Veil – #WontBeErased by Joyce Zonana

Samhain is upon us. Halloween. The Day of the Dead. All Saints’ Day. All Souls’ Day. That liminal time of year when the doorways to what the Celts called the Otherworld, Annwn in Welsh, are open. In New York City, we have the 45th annual Village Halloween Parade, a queer extravaganza of puppetry, masquerade, and cross-dressing that draws some 60,000 participants and over 2 million onlookers. Elsewhere, we have children in costume and lawns covered with plastic skeletons and illuminated ghouls. Everywhere, if we’re lucky, we might catch a glimpse of “the piper at the gates of dawn,” the vision granted Rat and Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: “something very surprising and splendid and beautiful”—Pan the goat-god, boundary-crosser, Friend and Helper, trans-being.

jz-headshot Just last week—a few days after the New York Times reported on the Trump administration’s efforts to define transgender out of existence—I read for the first time Welsh writer Arthur Machen’s 1894 novella, The Great God Pan, today considered a classic of horror fiction. Condemned as “morbid” and “abominable” by most critics when it was first published, the tale was hailed as “un succès fou” by Oscar Wilde, recuperated in the 1920s by H. P. Lovecraft, and particularly praised more recently by Stephen King, who called it “maybe the best” horror story “in the English language.”

440px-Title_page--The_great_god_Pan — Original edition with cover illustration by Aubrey Beardsley

The “queer” tale (the word “queer” recurs frequently throughout) is told by a series of straight-laced Victorian men, each of whom is horrified by the unspecified behavior and bearing of a mysterious woman, Helen Vaughan. Readers are led to suspect that Helen is guilty of some sort of sexual excess or transgression, but nothing is specified until after her suicide, when the medical examiner reports that he was “privileged or accursed” to see the “skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, beg[i]n to melt and dissolve”: Continue reading “Lifting the Veil – #WontBeErased by Joyce Zonana”

Redeeming Gender, Softening Extremes by Chris Ash

Christy Croft Last month, I attended a lecture by Anglican theologian Adrian Thatcher on his recent book, Redeeming Gender. In this book, Thatcher draws upon the one sex and two sex theories described by Thomas Laqueur in his book, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Laqueur posits that until the eighteenth century, it was believed that women and men were two expressions of the same basic sex – that women were men whose reproductive organs were similar but found in the “wrong” places. Ovaries were internal testes, the vagina an inverted penis, and the labia a parallel for the scrotum – all making women flawed expressions of man.

This sets up a continuum in which there is one sex rather than two, with men as more perfect expressions of man, and women as inferior expressions. Thatcher argues that if the language, liturgy, and doctrines of the church arose in the context of the one sex theory, then Christianity’s foundational beliefs and practices are already compatible with acceptance of a spectrum of gender identity within a one-sex model, opening up new interpretations that allow for full participation of women and LGBTQ+ people within the church. While the old one sex theory as described by Laqueur is a spectrum from more to less perfection, from more to less like God, the spectrum Thatcher proposes is clearly progressive – one in which all places along the spectrum share in the same equality.

And yet it is still a linear spectrum, with extremes envisioned as opposites, as distant from each other. Continue reading “Redeeming Gender, Softening Extremes by Chris Ash”

I’ll Go With You: On Bathrooms and Theocracy by Chris Ash

Last month, I took a dear friend on a trip to the North Carolina mountains. Throughout the trip we were sharply aware that we were no longer in the progressive enclave where we both lived – the tiny area whose deep blue always stands out in votes-by-county maps after elections and whose responses to discriminatory legislation like HB2 – the controversial “bathroom bill” that prevented trans people from using the restrooms that correspond to their identities – has always been resistance.

Even in our progressive bubble, though, transphobic people found themselves empowered by legislative support to speak louder and more harshly to gender nonconforming people. Leaving that bubble for two days of rural travel with a trans friend meant a thread of tension that followed us throughout much of our trip, as every glance, every bathroom break and every interaction with strangers had the potential to become upsetting or frightening. Continue reading “I’ll Go With You: On Bathrooms and Theocracy by Chris Ash”