(no subject)

[the_fantastic_ms_fox]

Gender Studies 200 is too basic for me and lacks crunchy application. Still, it's good to think about these things.

I didn't so much learn gender norms from religion as have religion confirm what my my mother and extended family taught me: gender is a fallacious anachronism with no more topical relevance than bloodletting. There was no male-specific advice save that it was one's duty to challenge gender norms. Thus, a boy or man who cooks, provides childcare, cuddles, or cries, shows both character and modernity. For years, I assumed that this was common sense and that, since the Church agreed with them on other issues, it confirmed their claims about gender as well.

The first time I encountered a conflict in gender in religion was during a sermon on "The Feminine Face of God." This confused me: surely if god is immaterial, I thought, it is neither boy nor girl; since God is perfect, or at least wise, it would not have a gender even if it had a sexed body, so God-as-She is as silly as God-as-He. Only as I write this do I realize that the predominantly elderly congregation would have considered referring to God as "She" to be a stretch of their faith.

Gender next arose at the Chilliwack conference in the early 90's where Tim Stevenson became the first openly Gay minister in the United Church, and, I believe, Christian Canada. While this stood out in my mind as a sign of Church-headed progress over gender roles, it again occurs to me only now that this occurred at a conference because not everyone agreed that we should have Gay ministers.

Outside of these cases, the Church said little of gender, largely confining its social critiques to courtesy, poverty and militarism. The only other salient gender cues were that our ministers were a heterosexual couple (though a handful in the church objected to paired leaders); our Sunday School teachers were mostly female; most of the biblical characters were male. This largely replicated the respective gender norms of my daycare, my school, and the fiction I read, and so I ignored these patterns as normal, and, when I thought about them, saw them as holdovers from a waning past.

Speaking of myths of progress, others in 1980's Kelowna might have expected that, within their lifetime, they would see lunar vacations, a nuclear holocaust and/or The Rapture. Many Christian traditions, and much of colonial European thought, posit that history has a direction: away from Creation/savagery/nature; to Christ/Pagan empires/Barbarism, to Christendom/ Industry; and then (some would say "very soon") the Apocalypse/Millennium of peace/immortality. The United Church, like other churches involved in social-justice, took this myth and re-fashioned it into one of an immanent era of enlightenment that would cap humanity's ascent from ignorance. For me and, I imagine, others, this combined with other eschatonic myths of immanent justice verging off from colonial Christianity: the soft-Marxist gradual reformation held by the unionists and NDP-supporters in my family's social circle; the Age of Aquarius that my aunts and uncles heard of during their hippie years; a technate of egalitarian plenty advocated by Arthur C. Clarke and other sci-fi authours. I expected that over the course of my lifetime, racism would fade, poverty would end, war would be abolished and gender would die. The people who stood in the way of this vision would learn better in time, or, failing that, be deprived of political power through democratic change.

I expected my generation to be the latest step towards an androgynous future. Growing up in Kelowna, a city between the ridings of Darryl Stinson and Stockwell Day, I came to expect that my and my Church's place in the ideological minority was temporary. The feeling of always being among ideological underdogs led me to equivocate being in the educated minority with being correct. Thus, I reacted to my first transgender inklings by waiting and hoping that, like the rest of the world, time and education would fix the disjunction between my feelings and reality.

The first image I held of God was a face that emerges from slow-roiling clouds, only to vanish as one looks at it. Later, I realized that the face in the clouds came from a portrait of my great-great aunt. For me, God was always immaterial; beyond gender - potentially feminine (potentially human?) but not explicitly so. I see god as a universal presence, springing out of the collective unconscious common to all sentient things. My identity validates (perhaps because it corresponds to) a deity that transcends or ignores sex, gender, species, and especially individuality. It almost seems that in attempting to transcend conventional binaries, I've set up new ones: "gender/transgender," "human/transhuman," "thought/analyzed-thought," "solitary/collective," or in other words "constrained by convention/transcending convention." A dualism and perhaps a fallacy; but it's strange that the better in each pair is the exception to the rule. I guess this comes from growing up in a society that conflicts with the values I learned at home and in church. In other words, I've turned to spirituality to revel in deviance; an attitude that comes in handy when one is trans.

Not only has religion affected and reinforced my view of gender, but my gender affects and reinforces my view of the sacred and how I interpret religious practice. This then affects my reception of religions, and whether and how I allow them to socialize me to their gender norms.

I used to attend meetings of Sokka Gakkai International, a faction of Nichiren Buddhists. Their official take on gender paralleled my desire to kill it, but I left. I told myself that I departed because I disagreed with their interpretation of the Four Noble Truths, but I later admitted that I was disturbed by their Japanese social norms, especially those surrounding roles of gender, age and epistemological authourity: while the North-American-socialized members fell within comfortable gender patterns, the idea of having separate men's and women's activity groups, the characteristic silence of the younger female Japanese members, and the expectation of respect for the elder male president bothered me. I think this was aggravated by SGI's contrast to the Church where I grew up.

I infer that people seek out their ideal archetype in sacred stories, but, as with "the feminine face of god," worshiping gendered deities makes me uncomfortable (this inturn, tipped my off as to me own gender issues). I keep my distance from Neo-Paganism in part because of my aversion to (predominantly female) adherents worshiping the Earth-Mother or another goddess, while a few (mostly male) among them venerate the Horned God, or other male deities. I am even bothered by the seemingly transgender-friendly Daoist conceptions of Yin and Yang, and the common trend of genderqueer-written narratives on androgyny to focus on intersex figures of myth and legend. In other words, I've had it with gender roles in religion. I'll identify with any god, heroine, or spirit I choose.