Three Dreams

I dreamed that I was back at the conservative evangelical church I used to attend in London, visiting all the people I used to know there for some event. When people greeted me as "Anna," I explained that I'm not using that name anymore and I now go by Max. Then I had to use the bathroom, and went to the Gents'. When I got out, I found that everyone had piled into a coach and left to go elsewhere. Only D, my old mentor who used to do one-on-one Bible study with me, had stayed behind, to explain to me that everyone at the church found my trans*ness unacceptable and would no longer be able to associate with me. I was gutted. Their transphobia really hurt me, even though I knew there was nothing I could do about it.

***

I dreamed that I'd come out to my mother. She wanted me to perform in a piano recital, even though I protested that I had nothing performance-ready, and she forced me to wear a dress. I managed to escape to the men's restroom, which was an endless corridor with urinals and stalls on both sides. I walked through the vast men's room in my dress, looking for the perfect stall.

***

I dreamed that my old high school was having an alum event, for which you were required to wear your old uniform. I still have mine, but I only have a girl's uniform and I needed pants. I don't have any smart pants, so I thought I'd borrow some from one of my brothers. But my younger brother's school uniform pants were far too big, and my older brother's were nowhere to be found. I realized I would have to buy my own trousers.

Refiner's Fire

This Lenten season, I have given up self-loathing.

I'm doing okay so far. Not great, though I never expected to stop hating myself altogether – you don't lose the habit of a lifetime just by deciding to give it up for Lent – but I've at least managed to steer clear of wallowing.

In the week or so running up to Ash Wednesday, it was very, very bad. Curl-up-under-my-desk-and-sob bad. Sit-in-the-back-seat-and-cry-silently-to-myself bad. When I get mired in it like that, it's very difficult to extricate myself, because it's self-perpetuating: I hate myself, and then I hate myself more for being so self-absorbed as to be thinking about how much I hate myself... It feeds itself.

So on Ash Wednesday I said to myself sternly: This ends now. For the next forty days, there will be no wallowing.

I've kept to that resolution pretty well, I think. Usually it present itself as a very stark choice between paths – THIS WAY TO THE QUAGMIRE OF SELF-LOATHING – and I just have to force myself to pick the sunny one. (No, inner voices, you're the worthless pieces of shit.) Unfortunately, I have not yet found a way to shut off the constant lower-level white noise of self-hatred that accompanies my every waking moment.

It feels as though that low-level stuff has stepped up its game in the past couple of months, but I don't think this is actually the case. I think what's happened is an increase in my self-awareness, to the point that I am now fully cognizant of (a) just how much self-loathing I've been carrying around in my brain-holder and (b) the possibility that maybe I should be trying to change that. (I also blame heightened self-awareness for the amplified gender identity struggle, which is not an entirely separate issue from the self-loathing one.)

This is not easy. Externally, my life is as close to perfect as it's ever been, and maybe it's because I feel I don't deserve such happiness that I torture myself so.

Fiction used to be enough. For at least a dozen years now, I've had one particular ongoing fictional world in which I spend at least a little time every single day. It sufficed as a channel, a coping mechanism, for my self-loathing (and, actually, some of my gender issues too). But lately that's not enough. I can't funnel it all into a world of my imagining anymore. I can't pretend my brain is made of tiny boxes. The walls are coming down, and I don't know what to do.

But, in my moments of optimism and faith, I can believe that what I am facing right now is the refiner's fire, and that I will be purified.

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.

Quiet Days

Almost every other day, somebody says to me, “Are you okay? You're very quiet today.”

Recently, after a pleasant dinner with the gang, one friend (who prides herself on her emotional astuteness) texted me: “I can't help but notice that you didn't look okay earlier.” My repeated assurances that nothing was wrong seem to have convinced her only that I am unwilling to share with her my deep emotional pain and trauma.

So I asked another, less emotionally-charged friend if I had looked somehow not okay at dinner. He said to me, “Sometimes you're very talkative, and other times you're very quiet.”

Well, duh. Why does this confuse people?

When we were teenagers, my very best friend, who I have known my entire life, used to say pretty often, “You're very quiet today.” I wondered how many quiet days I would have to have before she cottoned on, but I attributed her repeated confusion to her extroversion (in contrast to my textbook introversion).

Some days, I have a lot to say. Other days, I do not. What is odd about this? What is unusual about this? Do most people have things to say every day, or do they just force themselves to keep talking even on days when they have nothing to say?

I like good conversation, but I am not afraid of silence. I talk when I want to, and when I don't want to talk I don't. In this way I can (mostly) avoid those instances of mindless babbling where I listen to myself talking and think, “My God, would you shut up?”

Some days, I am talkative. Other days, I am quiet. This is entirely logical. Why do people find it so baffling?

And What Did It Mean For You?

I was twelve years old when it happened. Living in Kenya at the time, so it was evening for us, I was at choir practice after school. The mothers used to wait for us in their cars, lined up outside, listening to the radio: they heard it unfold in real time.

Maybe the news report was too confused to make sense of, maybe she just couldn't process it and wanted to talk it over with Dad, maybe she wanted to preserve our innocent, excitable chatterings about the forthcoming choir trip to Europe a while longer; whatever her reasons, our mother didn't tell us until later that night. “Something's happened...”

Of course it was all anyone could talk about at school for the next two days. Did you see the footage on the news? Will there be a war? Could we be collateral damage? (Checking atlases to map air routes from the US to the Middle East, figuring that other African nations to our north were likelier to take a hit...)

By the end of the week, the playground scuttlebutt had moved on to more immediate topics (never borrow a ruler from R; J once saw her using it to scratch her crotch!), but in my life there had been a quiet cataclysm. Before that day, I had never watched, read, or otherwise paid attention to the news; on the Wednesday, I instantly became the news and politics junkie I've been for the past decade.

Talking with some friends this week, I found that most of us had a similarly dramatic awakening to the news, usually at around the same age. Whether it was TWA Flight 800 or Columbine, some horrifying event had left a peculiarly indelible mark on our young consciousness, permanently altering our understanding of the world and our place in it.

Recently I found an old diary entry featuring my initial reaction to 9/11, a short paragraph in a shaky hand. It's an odd mixture of endearing childishness and white-hot fury: a naivete outraged and forever scarred by the realization that humans would actually do something like this to other humans, that atrocities are not the preserve of history class – not something we've as a species outgrown – but are something we still commit on one another.

(The 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi might have been the catalyst for my realizing this, had I been a little more precocious, but at nine I was still more concerned with Polly Pocket than with international terrorism.)

I don't think 9/11 was a direct cause of my seven years as an agnostic – the major impetus, aside from just reaching an age when my critical thinking skills had developed enough to start questioning the beliefs I grew up with, was my close friendship with a girl who had survived the car crash that killed her mother and little sister – but it must have been a contributing factor. When you suddenly live in a world where things like that can happen, all security is gone. A car could kill your family any day. A terrorist could kill you at any time. Can you trust in anything?

I'm indulging in this onanistic little response to the anniversary of a major world tragedy because I don't want to resort to the empty cliches that dog almost every attempt to analyze 9/11 on a national or international scale. No doubt I'm falling prey to cliches of a different sort: the navel-gazing explication of ~What 9/11 Means To Me~ that risks trivializing the tragedy by reducing it to a psychological input for some tedious privileged not-personally-affected westerner. But I'm a member of the 9/11 generation. 9/11, and its aftermath, shaped us and shaped the world we're inheriting. It's our touchstone, our point of contact with one another, our collective awakening to the ugliness humans are capable of: to a sense of our own mortality.

London Riots, Media Narratives, "Scum"

I used to trust the media to tell me the truth, tell us the truth

But now I see the payoffs everywhere I look

Who do you trust when everyone's a crook?

Revolution calling...

--Queensrÿche, “Revolution Calling”

First of all, that is an awesome song off a seriously awesome record. Second of all, it is some cold hard TRUTH.

One of the things I love about social media is its ability to tell us what's really going on. The more I engage with the blogosphere, the more I understand how mainstream news sources are all skewed to a certain framework. It's not a great conspiracy; it's not even necessarily a bad thing – it's just that every part of the media has an agenda. Value-neutral example: earlier this year, when all the US news sources I follow were glued to the protests in Wisconsin, the only US-related item in the BBC evening news was coverage of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. That's because the BBC's agenda is to be the British Broadcasting Corporation, so it skews Britain-centric. What's important is to be aware of the skews and biases in the media you consume – and, ideally, to vary your news media diet enough that you can piece together a picture of the world by seeing it from different angles.

What's astonishing to me is how many people I know are uncritically consuming the mainstream media narrative of the London riots.

David Cameron has called them “criminality, pure and simple” and promised a tough response. An awful lot of people are being very vocal about their agreement with his rhetoric and his tactics.

For days now my Facebook feed has been flooded with snarling, reactionary calls for the protestors' blood. When I posted a request for people not to use the nasty, dehumanizing, highly prevalent term “scum”, I got a wealth of “but they ARE scum!” responses.

Now, I joined Facebook when I started university, so my Facebook friends are primarily people who are attending or have recently attended one of the world's highest-ranked universities – which is a nice way of saying that my friends are predominantly white and middle-class. And, as much as it sickens but doesn't really surprise me to see the awful violence spreading across England, I'm sickened but unsurprised to the same degree to see my Facebook friends spew hatred and violent rhetoric about the rioters.

I don't condone the violence. Obviously. But the braying self-righteousness of these responses is indicative of people who don't want to try to understand. They're not prepared to engage with the complexities at hand. They're not willing to examine the socioeconomic and political contributing factors. It seems to me that they just want to point the finger at looters and arsonists, declare their moral outrage, and sit back feeling smug that they would never act like those scum.

Well, how the fuck do you know that?

Youth unemployment is over 20%. Not everyone can get into a top university and rely on the mater and pater to support them financially (speaking, I hasten to add, as one who did and is doing exactly that). Not everyone can broadly trust the police to not kill them. Not everyone is white and middle-class. Who the hell are you to judge people “scum” when you haven't even tried to understand where they're coming from?

To you, it's just teenage hooligans embracing their greed and lust for violence. To you, it's just mindless criminality. Why not consider the decades of disenfranchisement and poverty, the long-term unemployment and feelings of hopelessness? Do those not factor in at all?

Read this article. Read the comments on this Shakesville piece. Try thinking critically about the narrative spoonfed you by the media-political complex. And chew on this for a second:

Though I'm a peace-loving, Jesus-loving, violence-condemning hippie radical of the far left, it's not the riots that are making me despair for humankind. It's you.

"Hitler shud hav finished em"

I wasn't going to write this post.

I was going to write a nice jolly light-hearted piece on my Top Five Films Of 2011 So Far. Maybe I still will.

But I just checked my Facebook news feed, and I saw that my friend S had linked to an article entitled “Israel killed 1,335 Palestinian kids”. One of S's friends, whom I do not know, commented on her link:

“Adolf Hitler shud hav jus finished em”.

S “liked” this comment.

S, I should point out, is not really a friend. We were at school together about twelve years ago, and it's been a decade since we were last on the same continent, let alone saw each other.

But it's still weird to see a sentiment like this coming from somebody I know.

We all know that the anonymity of the internet fosters the worst in people. We've all seen horrible, awful, hateful words on message boards and comment sections. The anonymity of these words makes it almost as easy to dismiss them as it is to write them.

When it's somebody you know, though; when it's somebody you used to play sports with, somebody with whom you once spent a happy afternoon exploring for secret pathways in the backyard – well, that's an altogether different experience.

Many of Israel's actions have been and are appalling, and the West's willingness to let them slide is even more egregious. Much as I loved the time I spent in Israel, whitewashing Israel's atrocities is mendacious and wicked. But... “Hitler shud hav finished em”?

Really, you're going there?

Maybe it's because I'm one of em who Hitler shud hav finished, but it seems to me you can be sickened at the thought of children being murdered without wishing 13 million people dead. In fact, it seems to me that, if you're sickened at the thought of children being murdered, wishing people dead (children included) is an unsustainable contradiction.

Like I said, I know the same sentiment is expressed daily all across the internet. Whoever you are, you can find a community of people online wishing for your death. I know I should be used to it. It's just that this time, it feels more personal.

Convicted of Sin(justice)

There's this churchspeak phrase, “to be convicted of sin”. Having heard it used mainly by the young conservative evangelicals who remain my primary experience of churchspeakers, I always assumed it meant some combination of low self-esteem and guilt over personal failure to conform to the exacting standards of “traditional morality” – that is to say, the sense of shame with which a religious upbringing garnishes a little alone time with safe search off and non-dominant hand doing the pointing and clicking. As a committed non-subscriber to “traditional morality”, I have devoted the last few years of my life to not experiencing this.

Now, though, I think I'm beginning to understand what it means to be convicted of sin, and it has nothing to do with Madam Palm and her five lovely daughters (or Lady Lilac and her two AA batteries). To understand it, I've had to reframe my entire conception of sin.

Believe it or not, the strict behavioral prescriptions laid down by traditional Christian moralists aren't a bit Christian. They aren't even Pauline, and we all know how much the conservatives love ole Saul of Tarsus and his Romans 1:26 (per their interpretation, the only explicit prohibition of lesbianism in the Bible, though I'm pretty sure it's not contrary to my nature). The current conservative pet causes of abortion and homosexuality are mentioned, respectively, 0 and 3 times in the whole Bible (and it's only that many if you're wearing your right-tinted spectacles when you read it). You know who doesn't think abortion and homosexuality are Very Important Issues For Every Christian? Jesus. You know what he does think is a Very Important Issue For Every Christian? Loving your neighbor.

Both Jesus and Paul make it abundantly clear that the whole entire deal with being a Christian is that you don't have strict behavioral prescriptions to follow. It's literally the central message of Christianity that you don't have a rulebook. You love and trust in God; because you love and trust in God, you spend time with God and with God's people; through these times of prayer and fellowship, your heart is transformed into a heart of love, which manifests itself as good works. I am convinced that these good works comprise one thing and one thing only: helping those in need.

I recently read The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. It's an amazing book that I'd definitely recommend to anyone that doubts whether the mainstream church is doing it right (and anyone that doesn't; it might change your mind!). Shane chronicles his life as an “ordinary radical”, living a life of true Christian love and service in accordance with the teachings and example of Jesus himself. The people of his community have renounced the lip-service Christianity that conforms itself to the easy self-centered capitalist lifestyle; their love of neighbors doesn't give some money to charity and carry on as before, but transforms their lives into something that more closely resembles the passage in Acts so beloved of us leftists. Shane and his people are definitely doing Christianity right.

I've also just finished reading a commentary on the book of James. James is awesome. Whereas Paul, God love him, confuses everyone – not least the church leadership – with his philosophical waxings of an ex-Pharisee and his culturally-specific admonishments to an emerging church, James cuts to the practical chase. He has a lot of very strong words about the importance of helping those in need: without that, faith is literally worthless. First-world Christian communities like to make excuses when it comes to money, about which the Bible is far less equivocal than about (say) teh gays, but the vision I'm getting from my current reading and thinking is uncompromising: Christians get out there and forge human connections with those in need. Diggers dig, teachers teach, Christians hang out with needy people. If you ain't fulfilling the job description, you ain't a Christian, no matter what you call yourself.

And that's what I'm convicted of. I feel the call in my heart, stronger every day, to reject the comfort Christianity of the mainstream and to put myself out there where my fellow humans need me – on the fringes, where my lord Jesus Christ lived his life. Exactly what this will look like, I've yet to find out, but I'm certain that God has major upheavals in store for me – and a transatlantic move is only the beginning.

Coming Out

I don't talk about when I came out. That phrase makes it sound as though it were a simple, closed, one-off action, which couldn't be further from the truth. No, I talk about when I started coming out. You start coming out the day you admit to yourself (or to your diary, if you're an embarrassingly pretentious dork like me) that you're not the hetero you and everyone else always assumed you are; I'd venture to guess that you finish coming out the moment you shuffle off this mortal coil, though I suppose it's possible that the afterlife is also a stew of awkward assumptions and pronoun acrobatics.

It's a truism, but coming out really is a life-long process. And it's bloody difficult, especially for those of us with an inadequate grasp of conversational nuance. Every time you meet someone, you over-analyse and second-guess everything. Is ey assuming you're straight, or staying open-minded? If you drop a reference to a girlfriend past or present, does that constitute “rubbing your sexuality in eir face” (a phrase that always makes me giggle)? As a generally out gay person, how far into a new acquaintanceship should you explicitly let the other party know you're gay? Could this apparently reasonable and friendly human being transform into an ugly and violent homophobe at the first mention of Melissa Etheridge?

As a queer radical, I sometimes feel that I ought to be proclaiming my gayness at the top of my lungs every waking moment: I should get my hair buzzcut, my face pierced a few more times, and my neck tattooed “GRRL LOVER”, and I should greet everyone with, “Hi, I'm Anna and I am a big ole queer.” That, I suppose, would be the purest manifestation of my political ideology.

But I am not a pure manifestation of political ideology; I am a human being with multiple identities, a sense of discretion, and not inexhaustible reserves of mental strength. Queer is something I am, but it is not the totality of who I am, nor even the most important aspect. It's perhaps the most marginalized of my identities, which is why I feel the need to weaponize it; but I just don't have the wherewithal to be in such a constant state of frontline warfare with the dominant culture. Of course, I am in a constant state of warfare with the dominant culture, but most of that is mental: and, given how exhausting that is, I simply haven't the energy to bring it in a loud, visible fashion every day of the week.

Moreover, I'm afraid of retaliation. I admit it: when my political ideology clashes with my self-preservation instinct, not getting punched in the face dominates nine times out of ten.

(Plus, my hair is great. I love it and will not sacrifice it at the altar of extreme butchness.)

The people it's easiest to come out to as gay are often the hardest to come out to as Christian. (And vice versa, no doy.) In my experience, the communities least likely to make assumptions about your sexuality are the most likely to make assumptions about your secularity. It's deeply frustrating: if I can have a great conversation about Jesus with you, I'll be afraid to talk about Rachel Maddow with you; if we're having fun discussing queer theory or your palaeontology degree, I'm going to have a hard time bringing God into it.

And yet I know that there are many, perhaps even a majority of, individuals who are open to the idea of a queer theologian-to-be. My fear of coming out as gay, Christian, or a gay Christian is exactly what the kyriarchy wants. The compartmentalization and conflict of your different identities is one of the ways you're kept fighting yourself and your potential allies, instead of the actual oppressive forces.

We're all afraid to be judged, outcast, or even physically harmed for who we are. Sometimes this fear is reasonable, often it's not, but in the minefield of social interaction it can be hard to tell. However, I do know this: if you don't know about my very personal passion for social justice, or about my mad dorkiness, or about my love for the Big Guy upstairs, then you don't know me.

An Open Letter To The World's Men

Dear Men:

I believe in you. I believe the same things about you that I believe about people of all other genders: that you have access to your fundamental goodness, that you have the divine spark living inside of you, that you are capable of conquering your baser instincts and demonstrating great love and achieving great things.

A few of you seem to be doing your best to make me stop believing.

Some men, when they are in a position of power and influence, use their power to rape or sexually abuse others. Some men in a position of power and influence use their power to cheat on their spouses, almost invariably while propounding a “family values” platform or capitalizing on the alleged strength of their (monogamous, heterosexual) relationships. Some men in a position of power and influence tweet inappropriate pictures of themselves.

But I will not let the few affect my beliefs about the many. I will not succumb to the temptation to draw harmful generalizations about all men. Or about all heterosexual cis men. Or even about all white heterosexual able-bodied cis men in positions of power and influence.

I believe in individuals. I believe that the brain is mightier than the penis. I believe that the conscience can be stronger than earthly power, if we only let it.

I believe in you, and I won't let a few – or even a lot of – horndog politicians destroy that belief.

But, you know, feel free to vindicate my belief in you sometime.

I Have A New Favorite Poem

SURVIVOR
by Roger McGough

Everyday,
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.

It helps
keep my mind off things.

* * *

I came across this in a book called The Nation's Favourite Comic Poems. Thoughts?