How I Would Like To Live

I am not at all a long-term thinker – on some level, I'm surprised every time I wake up and the world is still here, trundling on as usual, and hasn't become a post-apocalyptic wasteland – but I think I have figured out the living arrangement I would like to have once I am no longer in dorms.

I would like to live with between two and five other people. We would be the most important people in each other's lives. I would not be romantically involved with any of these people; they could be involved with each other in any configuration they chose, but nobody would want or have children. We would just be a little chosen family of three to six adults who wanted to hang out with each other pretty much all the time.

I realize this is a very, very unlikely scenario, because it involves finding a group of Best Friends who also think this is a good idea. Still, in an ideal world, this is how I would like to live.

I want this to be my life, is basically what I am saying.

Dear God, Please Make Me A Cis Boy

I don't want to be a trans boy.

I want to be a boy. I've always wanted to be a boy, as long as I can remember; and, as long as I can remember, I've been told I was a girl. From the K-I-S-S-I-N-G rhymes kids used to chant about me and my closest male friends, to my mother's repeated statements that “boys are great, but I'm so glad I have you for a daughter,” my femaleness was constantly reinforced. Not maliciously, not with any ill intent, but just as a taken-for-granted, self-evident fact of reality. Of course I was a girl.

I wish – I've always wished – that I'd been born a boy.

The truth is, I don't want to be trans. It's hard and scary, and it's a life sentence. Right now I have the immense good fortune to be living in a hugely supportive and understanding community, where most people's only question with respect to a name change is “What pronouns?” – but at some point I will have to face the rest of the world: uninformed relatives, future employers, TSA agents and bank tellers and bartenders. And it's a lifetime of being misgendered, of disclosure and fear, of trying to explain, of dealing with legal names and legal genders, of fighting constantly with bank accounts and passports and driving licenses and filling out forms, of doing Trans 101, of CONSTANT BULLSHIT from a society built for cis people. I don't want to do it.

I feel as though I start each day with a certain allocation of spoons, dependent on my mood and dysphoria level, and then the rest of the day is a zero-sum game of gender-related spoon accumulation and loss.

Getting called “her”: -1 spoon for each pronoun.

Getting called “sir”: +5 spoons.

Getting called “missy”: -9000 spoons.

Etc. etc., and if I get below a certain number of HP spoons, it throws me off for the rest of the day and completely wrecks my ability to get anything done apart from brood and listen to “My Body Is A Cage” four million times.

For certain tasks, I know I have to prepare myself psychologically. Anything where I have to show ID is tough: a trip to the bank, a beer run. There have been days when I wanted booze, but didn't buy any because I couldn't face showing somebody my driver's license with its MISS [FEMALENAME]. (And anyone who knows anything about my relationship with booze will know that that really means something.) I dread going to the bank; because of course when she calls me “she” the teller is only acting on the information available to her. She doesn't know that it feels like a blast of “Harrison Bergeron”-esque white noise to my brain, throwing me for a loop like an air-raid siren going WRONG WRONG WRONG. She can't know that unless I tell her; and who has the spoons to explain their preferred name and pronouns to every bank teller? It's hard enough explaining that stuff to your friends and your parents, the people who know you and care about you and will want to get it right.

People say stupid things. Even here, even where I'm surrounded by trans people and supportive friends and students of queer theory, people say really stupid things. Gold medal thus far goes to the person who earnestly told me they could “kind of understand” what it's like to be transgender because they “changed religious identities.” (Silver goes to the dearly beloved friend who reacted to the very mention of top surgery with a frantic, “You know people pay thousands of dollars to have breasts like yours??”)

I have so much left to figure out. I have to get therapy. I have to get on hormones. I have to try to get my name and legal gender changed, while living as a non-resident alien on a student visa. I have to decide how to fill out my PhD application forms. God help me, I have to tell my parents.

I just want to wake up tomorrow morning and have always been a boy.

"Wings on a Pig": The Inevitable Rise Of The Christian Left

I know I link to him all the time (it's because he's awesome), but the very reverend Mr John Shore has a new book out. It's called Wings on a Pig: Why the “Christian” View of Gays Doesn't Work, and you all who are able should definitely buy it, because it is a most excellent collection of Shore's refreshingly direct essays on the topic of homosexuality and Christianity (ending with the clearest, most brilliant, most faithful and biblically-sound refutation of the clobber passages I've ever read), interspersed with letters of testimony from gay Christians, one of which may or may not be – well, they're anonymous...

(BUT YOU GUYS I TOTALLY WROTE ONE OF THEM)

Aside from the excitement of seeing words what I wrote in eInk, I think it is a super-important book. (Did I mention that I contributed to it?) On the ground, the issue of Teh Gays really is causing major upheaval in America's churches (and to a lesser extent, if only because of the vastly lesser role of religion in UK society, in Britain's).

This makes me think there's a very striking disconnect between the theologies of my queer progressive Bay Area seminary and the theologies of Middle America. Here, we don't talk about whether God has a problem with gays, because we're all gay or gay-adjacent. Here, admitting “actually I believe that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human and that he died for my sins” is tantamount to outing yourself as a paid-up member of the Religious Right. Here, being a far-leftist as well as a Christian does not make you a *~~*special snowflake*~~* (you should see the amount of activism and support on our campus toward the Occupy movement).

And yet, during my two years in a conservative Christian church, being a far-leftist gay Christian did make me a *~~*special snowflake*~~*; and, for tons of people all across this country, the same is true. The testimonies in John's book assure me of that.

Even so, I do have hope for the future of Christianity in this country. While I was living across the Pond, getting all my US news from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Rachel Maddow Show, and AlterNet, I very much got the impression that the Religious Right was the primary – if not only – vocal Christian movement in the States. Progressivism, of course, went hand-in-hand with secularism – a universal extrapolation I, like many others (including prominent theorists who really should know better), made from the example of Western Europe.

But that's not how things are going in America. Religion is still a hugely powerful force in this country, uniquely so among industrial nations, and that's not changing anytime soon. (Did you know how much effort and money the '08 Obama campaign put into religious outreach? Because it was a lot.)

What could – and, I hope, will – change soon is the tide of religious feeling. Contrary to the messages of much of the media, the religious left is a dynamic force in the United States, and I believe it's on the rise. It may still be a smallish force, but it's gaining momentum among the young people and on the internet and in the queer-progressive-heretical seminaries and everywhere that people are having the courage to consider the issues for themselves, seek out resources like John's book, and defy the party line of Christian conservatism.

The religious left is here, it's queer(-friendly), and it's not going away.

Happily Ever After

My grandmother likes to say that, if she ruled the world, she would outlaw ending fairy tales with “...and they got married and lived happily ever after.” Instead, they would end: “... and they got married, and some days were better and some days were worse, but they both worked jolly hard at it and forged a loving mutual partnership, and I guess you could call that happiness.”

Of course, if I were writing fairy tales, they wouldn't involve marriage at all. The happily-ever-after would be something along the lines of “...and that lonely little girl grew up to have multiple kickass friends on several continents, and they were most excellent people.”

Then again, maybe calling that a happily-ever-after is a little premature. As Herodotus put it, “call no one happy until ey dies.” So, natch, I've been thinking: what is happy?

Since I started grad school, I'm happier than I've ever been. I love California, I love my studies, and I love my new friends (I TOTALLY HAVE FRIENDS HERE, YOU GUYS). Never before have I so quickly and easily found a place where I slotted in, made friends, felt at home: in both high school and undergrad, it wasn't until my second year that I really got comfortable, whereas here I felt totally settled by my second month.

That doesn't mean some days aren't difficult (though so far I've only had one really awful day, and most of that was fury at a profoundly horrible decision on the part of the UK government), and it certainly doesn't mean I'm in a perpetual state of bliss. I'm still human and this is still a human situation.

The thing about happiness – or this thing that I'm calling happiness while I'm still alive, at any rate – is that it necessarily carries with it an undercurrent of sadness. I've noted this at other times when I would characterize my general state as happy (final year of high school, spring through fall of my second and third years of undergrad, my summer 2010 travels around Europe with the then-girlfriend): true happiness is, for me, always accompanied by an awareness that this too shall pass.

Maybe it's different if you're a real, settled grown-up with, like, a career and stuff, but as long as you're planning your life in increments of two or three years, every period of joy you find also brings you the pain of knowing that it will be over soon. I'm in a two-year master's degree program; even next year won't be the same, as some of my friends will have graduated, and the year after that – who knows?

And that's the looming shadow of mortality. Any day, any minute, I or one (or all; oh hai, San Andreas fault) of my friends could snuff it, and it'd be sayonara to this precarious happiness. Any account of the good life has to encompass the tragic transience of human existence; and that knowledge, I think, is what transforms mere surface happiness into the deep, sorrow-tinged contentment that is joy.

This too shall pass: it's a source of sadness, and it's a clarion call to carpe diem, to make the most of this fleeting delight for as long as you're graced with its presence.

Nerd Theology II: Response to a Response

Victoria of Gaudete Theology wrote a critique of my post Nerd Theology. I'm thrilled to respond, both because the back-and-forth makes me feel like a ~*real academic*~ and because dialogue is essential to any meaningful exercise in process theology (which “Nerd Theology” most certainly is).

“In this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling.”
2 Corinthians 5:2

“[In Heaven] there will be no animal body to weigh down the soul in its process of corruption; there will be a spiritual body with no cravings, a body subdued in every part to the will.”
Augustine, City of God XIX.17

There are two major frustrations I have with human physical reality as we currently know it:

1. That the human body is so limited. I can't number the times I've wished for a second pair of arms. Or stalk eyes. Or the ability to fly. Or – the most frustrating aspect of being human – the ability to function without needing to waste a third of my life sleeping. (As brilliant and important a field as it is, I don't want to get into disability theory just now; all I'll say is: read The Chrysalids, and don't accept the popular conception of the non-disabled body as normative, whole, and ideal.)

2. That the human body limits understanding. One of the earliest lessons you absorb with your baby formula is “don't get strung up by the way I look, don't judge a book by its cover” (N.B. If as a small child you absorbed the lesson in exactly this formulation, you are probably a much more awesome person than I am). But grounding my essential personhood in the particular physical body with which I am currently lumbered is doing exactly that. When you look at me and judge me to be a woman, you're reducing my personhood to a socioculturally constructed identity. Everyone, of course, makes these judgments all the time, every day, because we have no way of connecting mind-to-mind, personhood-to-personhood, and really understanding one another.

This is where God comes into it. Victoria points out that the incarnation collapsed the one true dualism of Creator and created; for Christians, this collapsing is perennial because of the Holy Spirit, the aspect of the Creator God that is now a part of us. This universal Spirit makes us one body – it connects us, mind-to-mind, personhood-to-personhood – but in our current physical reality we have no way of truly concretely experiencing this connection. The point of a transhumanist, biotechnological theology is to seek real and tangible ways of exploring our unity in the Spirit.

She's right, of course, to point out that I risk succumbing to Cartesian dualism. (Oh, irony – in seeking to avoid one form of dualism, I get sucked into another.) I suppose her point is that, whatever issues I personally may have with it, our experience as humans unquestionably encompasses the physical realm. I suppose my point is that I believe our experience of the physical realm could and will be radically different without the loss of our humanity.

And I do think the resurrection supports this belief. Jesus' post-resurrection body retains what is awesome about having a physical body (and I do recognize that some things about it are awesome; just because I'm so often uncomfortable in my own skin doesn't mean I don't enjoy good food and hot baths and hugs from those I love), while adding a number of upgrades and bugfixes. Teleportation? Yes please! Ability to pass through matter? Bring it on! The resurrected Christ is arguably the first post-human.

Keeping The Faith

When I finished my BA, this time last year, I hadn't the slightest idea what to do next. My profound joy at bidding farewell to the hated Greek participles of my degree would seem to rule out further study; finding a job seemed less than likely, given the recession and my utter lack of useful skills. (An encyclopedic knowledge of schlock cinema, contemporary US sitcoms, and up-to-the-minute politically correct terminology does not, it seems, constitute a valuable skillbase in today's job market.)

And so I sought ways to avoid even thinking about it. I traveled Europe with the then girlfriend (good for 2 months of the rest of my life). I traded on the subsequent distance-enforced breakup for as long as possible (another 6 weeks or so). I earned a little bit from a one-off editing job (2 weeks). I slept on my brother's couch whilst undertaking an assortment of unpaid work experience (kept me going till Christmas). Finally, though, I was out of money and out of ideas, and I had to submit to the post-college experience most dreaded by graduates and their parents. It was time to move back home.

Forced, however unwillingly, to contemplate The Rest Of My Life, I committed to some soul- and Internet-searching. Much to my surprise, I found two ambitions had taken root in my heart and grown there intertwined. The first was to move to California; the second, to study theology in an academic setting. The two joined together when I found one particular, very exciting course, to which I underwent the arduous process of applying: taking the GRE, writing an academic statement, filling out the online forms, emailing the university, convincing three erstwhile lecturers to write me references, and having my transcripts couriered, at vast expense, across eight time zones.

And then – I waited.

My parents were dubious. Might I not want to apply to some other courses, just in case? Ought I not to have a plan B? Shouldn't I at least look for a job of some kind?

I didn't dismiss these gentle suggestions out of hand. I looked at other courses at a variety of institutions, both British and American, but found nothing that seemed worth the Herculean effort of applying. Nothing else set my heart pounding like this one course. I searched for jobs in the realm of publishing, which seemed the only field even vaguely appealing to me, but there was nothing for someone in my position. I pounded pavements until I found a minimum-wage customer-service job to tide me over.

And, at last, I got accepted into the program; and, after a couple of nerve-racking weeks, I got my funding.

My mother tells me she feels humbled by my faith, by the way I ignored her (perfectly reasonable) counsel to have a back-up plan and clung to the belief that this was the thing I was meant to do. But I don't feel at all that I was being especially faithful. Certainly, as I worked on my application, I felt a powerful sense of rightness; but, looking back over the past year, my overwhelming emotion was fear. I believed then, as I believe now, that God planted that initial longing for California in my heart two years ago as an arrow pointing in this direction, and that in fact all the strands of my life woven together form a giant flashing neon sign pointing in this direction, but I was still beset with debilitating doubts and fears.

Please don't count me among the great faithful, because I really, really am not. I've been so afraid – so consumingly, devastatingly afraid – and the best I can say is that God used that fear to make me depend less and less on myself and more and more on God. God works through the least of us, and the least faithful of us: God worked through Jonah, and God worked through Peter, and God is working through me, and God is working through you.