Rationalizing Love
May 10, 2008
Allyson Robinson has a post with notes from a presentation by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott about the seven reasons why “congregations should embrace the trans community.”
Frankly, the whole thing just creeps me out.
Why the hell do we have to justify our inclusion in congegations? What other humans have to do that?
Why do we ask for them to embrace our “community,” whatever that is? Shouldn’t they just embrace transpeople as people, and not as members of some projected identity group?
I’m not going to argue that Ms. Mollenkott has detailed some of the gifts that transpeople can bring to a congregation. We do offer a view beyond boundaries of expectations, a statement of common humanity and all that.
But more than that, we offer a chance for people of faith to open their hearts to a calling in others that is stigmatized and shunned. We offer a chance to for congregations to open themselves up and defend the faith by being love, rather than defending the faithful by offering rules of separation and comfort.
At root, though, I guess I balk at casting transpeople as shibboleth, tokens that allow others to see lessons of faith or doubt.
In my experience, every transperson I have ever met has been a human, beautiful and wounded, eternal and bloody. Each one of us offers our own set of gifts and challenges to any community that we enter. Not all of us come as spiritual mentors, and even if we do come as that, well, we also come as hurting humans.
There are things to be learned from engaging transgender, but they are basically the same things to be learned by engaging any trans, engaging any liminal space where people walk between group identities and reveal a fundamental humanity in the light of essential difference. In the end, the ultimate lesson is always that our greatest power comes where we cross worlds, whatever that means, because it is in the connection and fusion of what some may see as separate that we bring the spark of the divine.
I value the idea that transpeople have gifts to offer, and that many have seen those gifts over time and cultures. Those gifts come from removing expectations of separation and embracing commonality, no doubt.
To me, religious groups should embrace all their members. They should help each and every one of their members make better and more inspired choices, choices that more reflect divine and universal love and less reflect immediate self-interest.
And that’s why, I guess, the idea having to justify our presence in communities of faith just creeps me out.
May 10, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I really appreciate your thoughts on this, Callan.
To say a brief word in defense of VRM, she delivered her keynote to a group of people who were familiar at some level with her body of work. She didn’t really need to explicitly offer that group a “Reason Zero” (“Congregations should embrace their transgender members because love demands it”) because it was widely understood by her audience to be her most basic premise.
I think her goal in offering this keynote was to acknowledge the pain you expressed so eloquently when you wrote, “The most painful thing about trans is not being able to give your gifts and have them accepted.” She reminded the trans people in her audience that we do indeed bring much-needed gifts to the congregations to which we belong, and she reminded the allies who were present to accept those gifts. Personally, I left feeling encouraged and empowered to offer my gifts more willingly.
May 12, 2008 at 9:54 am
i am not a living opportunity for other people to become enlightened – or as is more likely, pat themselves smugly on the back for their “willingness” to be open to something that they essentially perceive as bizarre.
i am not someone else’s lesson, and my gifts are not tokens.
May 13, 2008 at 8:12 am
In my experience, the idea of abjection and the idea of brave lesson are often tied tightly in the minds of those who consider themselves normative.
If they see us as abject — “A person in the lowest and most despicable condition; a castaway” — then they stop seeing us as human and see us as brave lessons in facing what breaks humans.
Of course, a key lesson of most religions is that all humans are broken, that living a finite & fleshly life means we suffer the frailty flesh is heir to. To enter our own abjection is to engage our own humility.
Reynolds Price talks about how his illness seemed to lead people to believe they had a right to ask questions they never would of someone who was not visibly sick.
When people treat me as a lesson, not a human, I see them treating me as sick. If they also engage their own brokenness, their own sickness, their own queerness, then they come as equals.
But if they see me themselves as normal and me as abject, and therefore a lesson, well, that really makes me queasy.
June 9, 2008 at 9:46 pm
You might appreciate the writings of gay Catholic theologian James Alison:
http://jamesalison.co.uk/
He argues that the sexuality/religion issue should not be framed as inclusion of yet one more identity group in the liberal-pluralist mosaic, but as an opportunity to see the emptiness and sinfulness of all these categories we create to shore up our selfhood at the expense of another, so we can come together with acceptance of our universal brokenness.