Tag Archives: gender

Books, Gender and Sexuality, Religion

A weird boy, but definitely a boy: Freestyling it again for chapter 4 of “Changing Paths”

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This Friday, I’ll be blogging some of my thoughts from reading Chapte 4, “Religion and Gender” of Yvonne Aburrow’s1 book, Changing Paths. Once again, I’m totally ad-libbing this post, as none of Yvonne’s wonderful prompts and exercises for this chapter jumped out at me or seemed suited to my blogging purposes.2

It’s taken me a bit to figure out what I was going to say about this chapter. To be honest, my gender was not a huge issue during my Christian upbringing. Certain, my sexual orientation was a huge issue, but in terms of gender, I was a cis man, which evangelical and other authoritarian forms of Christianity tend to practically cater to. Certainly, there are gender expectations within such forms of Christianity that I could not meet as a gay man — namely the idea of becoming a faithful husband and father of the next generation of culture warriors.3 But as a cis male, I was not seen as someone destined to be in a subservient role or someone trying to go against God’s design (again, other than the whole being gay thing).

My church also did not get too explicit about the gender essentialism either, nor did they push strict gender roles. While my church certainly wasn’t a bastion of full egalitarianism. no one there would have dreamed of releasing an official church statement reaffirming that wives were to submit to their husbands, to give just one example.4

In some ways, ideas about gender is something I still had to deconstruct when I converted to witchcraft and Paganism. I found a lot of freedom in being able to embrace a female deity, though it took me a few months to a year to resolve the idea of Divinity being at least partly female.5

It’s been interesting for me as a man primarily dedicated to and working with Freyja. It seems in some Pagan and witchcraft circles that it’s typically thought that men will dedicate themselves to a god and women will dedicate themselves to a goddess. In Wiccan circles, the High Priestess typically invokes the Goddess or has Her drawn down into her. and her male working partner invokes the God or has HIm drawn down into him.6 So in some ways, I’m a bit of a oddity in at least some Pagan and witch circles.

Another thing that is always in the back of my mind is something that doesn’t have to do with religion directly is a conversation i once had with an online feminist friend. (I think it was the blogger who went by the name Fannie Wolfe, but don’t recall for sure.) She observed that it is often the case that what it means to be a man is defined in opposition to what it means to be a woman (and then presented as being superior to it). I often come back to that thought when I’m trying to figure out what it means for me to say that I’m a man. I have yet to come up with a good definition. though listening to people like D.E. Anderson7 has helped me gain a vague perspective.

I also think this is one of those areas where Paganism as a whole tends to muddy the waters from time to time. After all, there’s a tendency in some Pagan circles to classify everything as “masculine” or “feminine,” and those often fit our wider culture’s gender stereotype. For example, masculine energy is often described s that which is “active” and “aggressive” while feminine energy is seen as that which is “passive” and “receptive.” Those of us who work closely with a goddess like Freyja are left laughing and/or scratching our heads.8 Our own deities don’t fit well into the masculine/feminine divide!

Working with Freyja has also helped me to accept that fuzziness around what it means for me to be a man is just a part of life. In fact, I don’t think that what it means to be a man is that high a priority for me.9 I know that whatever it means for me and no matter how I perceive myself, my deities will accept me and honor who I am.

Footnotes

  1. It occurs to me that while I’ve linked to Yvonne’s Threads profile multiple times, I have yet to mention that they also have a blog or provide a link to it. Consider this footnote my initial effort to correct that. ↩︎
  2. I hope it’s clear that I’m not intending this as a criticism of Yvonne. I think their prompts and exercises are fantastic and can see why other people reading this book will likely find them helpful to being the point of a god-send. But I’m also probably not quite the best exemplar of their target audience for the book, either. I went through the majority of my faith change(s) over two decades ago. (If only Yvonne could go back in time and release this book back then.) ↩︎
  3. I’ll also note that the whole Joshua Generation movement didn’t get started until the early-to-mid 2000s, roughly half a decade after I left Christianity altogether as an adult. So while there was a general consensus that Christian parents should raise faithful Christian children when I was growing up, there wasn’t the explicit message about raising up a generation of Christian soldiers to take over the country, either. ↩︎
  4. I’ll also note that gender roles were not strictly held in my own home. For example, my father frequently did laundry on the weekends. This was because my father was a practical man who (1) realized the laundry still needed to be done on weekends when my mother was working at the hospital and (2) was often just looking things to do to keep busy. I have always admired my father’s practicality and like to think I’ve inherited a bit of that from him. ↩︎
  5. At the time, i said that I considered God to be “genderless” and therefore the idea of applying any gender to the Divine struck me as weird. In time, I’ve come to realize this was a bit of self-delusion on my part. God in my mind had been male because male was the default. Granted, I’ll also note that I tended to link gender with sex and anatomy at the time, which made it that much easier to convince myself that God was “genderless,” because what does God need with genitals? Needless to say, my understanding of gender has evolved since then and continues to expand, particularly as I learn more about/from my trans friends. ↩︎
  6. I want to stress that I’m talking about what I understand to be common or typical. There are exceptions. In fact, a cursory search of Yvonne’s blog (because I just knew they must’ve said something about this topic at least once) found a blog post talking about how roles in ritual are and can be assigned. In the comments section, they even come out in support of drawing down deities across genders. I’d invite Yvonne (or anyone else who, unlike me, is actually Wiccan) to offer further resources in the comments of this post as well as any necessary corrections to my statements on the topic. ↩︎
  7. Mx. Anderson uses their full first name when writing professionally due to the fact that their first two books were published before they came out as non-binary. However, in more social settings, they tend to go by their first and middle initials. As I tend to spend a good bit of time socializing with them online, I tend to go with their initials when speaking to/about them.. ↩︎
  8. I could spend a day coming up with adjectives for Freyja and “passive” would never come up or be met with hysterical laughter if it did. ↩︎
  9. I acknowledge that the ability to say that is a sign of cis privilege. After all, it’s easy to not worry about what it means to be a man when it’s rare for anyone to challenge whether I have any business calling myself a man and every fiber of my being agrees with my self-assessment that I am a man. ↩︎
Gender and Sexuality

The shocking discovery that women are sexual beings too

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[Content Note:  Sexism, Rape Culture, Objectification of Women]

Don't tell him that some women hit on guys. I fear his head may explode!
Don’t tell him that some women hit on guys. I fear his head may explode!

I didn’t get a chance to write a blog post for today as i was having too much fun celebrating my birthday yesterday.  However, I wanted to spotlight Libby Anne’s post from today.  In it, she discusses a preacher who is pro- modesty movement and who recently wrote an article in the Christian Post in which he discovers that (heterosexual and bisexual) women experience sexual desire when they see men.  I love and fully agree with Libby Anne’s response to this discovery:

He had never considered it.He had never considered it. Twenty years of ministry, twenty years of preaching modest, and he’d never thought about the fact that women are also sexual beings. This alone is illustrative of a huge blind spot in the circles that preach modest, if you ask me.

Of course, experience tells me that this isn’t just a problem with people in the modesty movement.  The idea that women are sexual beings seems to escape the notice of a lot of people, especially a lot of men.  There are too many narratives about men being the sex-seekers and women being the gatekeepers of sex.  Those narratives also tend to ignore the idea that women might actually want and seek out sex rather than try to prevent it.  In many ways, the erasure of women as sexual beings with sexual desire is a key component of treating women as sex objects and the proliferation of rape culture1.

So I’m not entirely surprised that this minister missed the memo that women have pantsfeelings too.  After all, we live in a society that too often ignores a lot of things about women, including the fact that they are fully human and therefore sexual as well.  And it contributes to a lot of problems.

At any rate, be sure to go read the rest of Libby Anne’s post if you haven’t yet.  It’s great.

1As an aside, Libby Anne’s blog is a great resource for exploring how both the modesty and purity movements influence and reinforce the objectification of women and rape culture as well, despite the fact that their stated intent is to uphold the value of women.

Gender and Sexuality, Trans*

Thoughts on “Transgender Basics”

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After the trans* panel discussion on Thursday night, I talked to Kelly, one of the allies who had spoken.  She suggested I watch and blog about a video as a way to promote ongoing discussion.  The video that she suggested I blog about is called “Transgender Basics,” produced by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center in New York City as part of the Gender Identity Project.  I’m embedding the video here:

There’s a lot that I could and would like to say about this video, and I suspect I may do multiple blog posts about it due to the vast range of thoughts I had and my limited time today.  Part of me is tempted to hold off on this post for a few days so I can work more on it, as this topic deserves a great deal of thought and consideration.  However, my desire to keep my commitment to talking about this today is going to take precedent.  I think it would be way too easy for me to use “working on a better, more considerate post” as an excuse to procrastinate.

I think one of the things that interested me is how the Authentic Gender Model breaks down and separates physical sex, gender roles, and gender identity.[1]  Having done some reading[2] on gender essentialism and the growing body of evidence that most of the traits and roles that we tend to consider inherently gendered is a matter of social conditioning, I’m well aware that physical sex and gender roles can be quite distinct.  The idea of gender identity being a distinct paradigm separate from gender roles, however, is somewhat new to me.  It’s quite possibly the one take-away from this video that I need to think more about.[3]  I hope to get a better understanding of what it means from a trans* person’s perspective when zie says their gender identity is as a man, a woman, or neither.

The other part that I found interesting about the AGM was the fact that it presents even physical sex as a spectrum.  Before this video, I had never considered that there’s more to physiological sex than which genitals someone has.  The video rightfully points out that even in terms physiology, sex is much more complex than the simple binary we tend to make it out to be.  To me, this strengthens the already strong argument that our understanding of gender needs to be even more complex when we start to move beyond physiology and think about roles and identity.

My first take-away from this video is an even bigger understanding of just how nuanced and complex gender actually is, and that being trans* is first and foremost about recognizing that complexity and rejecting society’s attempt to force one to fit into the simplest and most inaccurate model in favor of embracing the far more complex and unique reality for oneself.

One of the things that I noticed about both the panelists from Thursday night and the trans* people who spoke in this video is that they are unique, authentic, and compelling people who are seeking to live authentic lives.  As one of the speakers in the video says, she desires people to avoid reducing her to a transwoman and see the incredible person[4] that she is overall.  I hope and trust that by allowing her and other trans* people the freedom to express their gender identity authentically, we enable them to show what incredibly unique and and complex individuals they are in other ways as well.

What are some of your thoughts on the video?

Notes:
[1] I’m intentionally leaving out the fourth component of the model, sexual orientation, for this initial post to focus on the first three.  There will be time enough to talk about sexual orientaten and how it relates to gender later.

[2]  Thank you for guiding me down that path, feminists.

[3]  I’m also hoping that the resources at the Gender Identity Project site will provide me with deeper insight.

[4]  I’m hesitant about saying “person” here rather than “woman.”  On the one hand, I want to stress that her identity includes far more than her gender identity and that she’s incredible for more reasons than just her gender identity.  On the other hand, I don’t want to deny or ignore that identity either.  Her gender identity may not define all of who she is, but it is an integral part of who she is, and I don’t want to deny or invisibilize that part of her, either.