You Self-Identify Wrong

A friend recently sent me this talk by Daniel Dennett, “How To Tell You're An Atheist.” Dennett is, I think it's fair to say, the least obnoxious of your Four Horsemen of New Atheism, and the talk is pretty interesting, especially at the bookends: the phenomenon of closet-atheist clergy is enormously fascinating, as is the observation that religious creeds must tend to impenetrability if they're to survive.

However, the talk's very title telegraphs something that thoroughly infuriates me about New Atheism, and that is its evangelical fervor. I realize I run the risk of making a false equivalency here, so let me state forthrightly that I absolutely do not think that New Atheists and the Christian right are like totally the same and both sides are as bad as each other and the truth lies in the fuzzy-wuzzy middle. The fact that the United States (where much of this discourse is taking place) is a Christian supremacist society means that the dynamics at play when an atheist speaks are very different than when a Christian speaks, even if they're saying the same thing. They're coming from different places, they got there in different ways, they have diametrically opposed agendas; but the fundagelical and the atheist telling me I'm not really a Christian are both very wrong.

The intense hostility of much of US culture toward atheists is pretty mystifying for us godless-commie-Europeans, but it certainly exists, and it completely explains the forcefulness of some American atheists. When you're a marginalized group trying to assert yourself to a dominant culture that would prefer to pretend you don't exist, you have to be loud and proud, and if you bruise the delicate fee-fees of your oppressors, well, cry me a frickin' river. I get that. But the marginalization of non-believers in the US really isn't exactly the same as other axes of marginalization and oppression, because belief (or lack thereof) is, as Dennett points out in that speech, entirely internal. His suggestion that Christians who help the poor are closet atheists is breathtakingly cynical (and that's coming from a thoroughgoing cynic), but his point stands: no matter what someone says and does, we can't know what they truly do or don't believe. Dennett's theory is that, for an awful lot of people, their behavior and their beliefs do not align. Christianity, on his reading, is teeming with closet atheists for whom the social consequences of admitting their lack of faith are just too high.

Now, I sympathize with the goal of making it socially acceptable to be openly atheist. Frankly, I find it nonsensical that it's not acceptable here. But I have a lot less sympathy for the accusation of widespread bad faith or false consciousness – for the practice of telling self-identified Christians that, if they're thinking people or not fully orthodox or lefties, they're probably not really Christians.

Since Dennett himself uses the analogy of gayness (which is totally not in any way a cheap shot or a false equivalency), let's roll with that. I am a queer person, and if I'm perfectly honest straightness baffles me. On a gut level it weirds me out and repels me, and, though I'm surrounded by self-identified straight people, I just don't get why anyone would be straight.

I could make the argument that they shouldn't be. I could say that, once upon a time, I thought I must be straight too, before I knew it was possible to be anything else; that I understand the fear of social consequences that keeps people closeted; that probably there are tons of straight-identified people who are really secret queers, but they're too uninformed or afraid to admit that they're anything other than straight.

To some extent, I think this is true (though the numbers are probably fewer than I'd like them to be), just as it's true of closet-atheist Christians. But that doesn't mean I think it's right to second-guess all straight people, to tell them their identity as a straight person is a lie (at best to everyone around them, at worst to themselves as well), to redefine the parameters of straightness so as to exclude a lot of straight-identified people (because I understand straightness better than they do? because I know them better than they know themselves? because I've put a lot of thought into this whole issue, and the fact that they still call themselves straight proves that they haven't?). My goal might be the noble one of encouraging self-actualization and greater self-understanding, but this tactic sucks. It's aggressive, it's arrogant, it's domineering, and it's hierarchical.

Saying “if you call yourself straight, but you've ever thought about kissing someone of the same gender as you, then you're actually a big flaming 'mo” isn't helpful. For straight people who are not ready to think deeply about sexuality, that statement sounds like a threat. For straight people who have thought deeply about sexuality, it's insulting and delegitimizes their process. Either way, it's accusing straight people of a false consciousness and co-opting their identity.

Of course, if your ultimate concern is swelling the ranks of people you can call queer, then I suppose this is the optimal tactic. But if your ultimate concern is giving people the tools for greater self-awareness, better critical thinking, and a richer engagement with the world and people around them, then you're better off sticking to education. Despite his title and some of his more condescending moments, Dennett does recognize this in that speech, and that is why I have more respect for him than for Dawkins et al.

By all means, be as loud and proud an atheist as you want. God (or whoever) knows the world needs more thinking people who will stand up boldly for what they (don't) believe in. People need to encounter others who think and live differently than they do. It's the only way to learn and grow as a person.

Tell me how you self-identify, what you think and believe, and why; I need to hear it. Just don't fucking tell me what I am.

So It Begins

So, I finally bought a binder.

I've been wanting one for so long, but I was too afraid to actually get it. Oh, they're too expensive. Oh, figuring out the sizing is too confusing. Oh, making one is beyond me because I have no arts-and-crafts skills. (Am I still allowed to be part of the queer and/or blogging communities if I admit that I have no arts-and-crafts skills?)

A week ago, the excuses ran out. I just couldn't stand it any longer. I ordered one online, and yesterday it finally arrived.

I'd been really on edge waiting for it. I knew it was ridiculous, but I just felt like putting it on for the first time would be this ~magical moment of truth~, an epiphany where everything fell into place and I would be able to stand up straight and tall and say LOOK AT ME, WORLD, THIS IS WHAT I AM.

Of course, this is not exactly what happened. It's a nice thing to have; I like what it does to my body shape a lot; but it doesn't make me completely flat, and it certainly doesn't solve all my issues in one swoop. But I did think that my first day wearing it out would be a day without (or, okay, with less) dysphoria.

It started out grand enough. I went into the city with a group of friends. It was a beautiful day, and I was wearing my new binder under one of my favorite T-shirts. I felt okay about myself, or at least as close to okay as I ever get.

Then we went to a bowling alley, and I nipped to the bathroom. There were non-gendered bathrooms, which was nice. I adjusted my binder and made sure I looked okay, and then went to join my friends in the bowling alley. They'd already paid for two lanes and entered everyone's names. They'd split up the group into “men” and “women”, and included me among the latter.

Do you want to know what the dysphoria felt like? I will tell you. It felt not unlike a panic attack: waves of nausea would crash over me, so intense I could barely stand upright, and then recede just enough to make me think I could cope before hitting me again in full force.

I am not very good at confronting issues head-on, and anyway I didn't want to ruin anyone else's fun, so I did not say anything. And it's not that I expect my friends to read my mind or anything – I haven't spoken about it openly with many of them and I don't expect them all to be totally sensitive about it – but they see the gender-neutral pronoun buttons I wear; they know gender is kind of a difficult subject for me; they know I prefer gender-neutral language wherever possible.

They should've fucking known this would upset me.

Like, I don't know, maybe gender dysphoria is trivial or a joke to them; but it's really, really painful for me. Every time someone uses female pronouns for me, it stings a little; every time someone calls attention to my assumed femaleness in a major way, it's like a punch in the gut. It really does feel like a physical injury.

The other day one of my friends referred to me as a “girl”. I didn't say anything, but afterward I cried about it in the shower.

All my life, I've been suppressing this. At a very, very early age I intuited the need to suppress it. I assumed every girl wanted to be a boy, but nobody talked about it because (a) it would upset their mother and (b) there was nothing you could do about it anyway. I channeled all of these feelings into fiction: I desperately sought out novels written by female authors from the perspective of a male character as legitimation that it was okay to do this, and I wrote all my own stories from the perspective of boys or gender-non-conforming girls. I guess the gender policing I encountered as a very small child made it clear to me that “not being a girl” would have to sit alongside “walking with dinosaurs” and “solving mysteries” as belonging to the realm of pure imagination.

Well, guess what? I give up. I give up trying to be who everyone wants me to be. I don't have a clue who I am, but I know who I'm not. The bowling incident has made that crystal clear: if I were a woman, it would not have upset me so much to be called one.

I packed up my not-girl-ness in a box marked PURE FANTASY at a very early age. Inside the box, it festered and grew; now it's a big ugly mess that has burst free of the childhood fetters, and what it will look like once I've given it two decades' worth of care and attention is anybody's guess.

Coming Out To Myself

Some people face a lot of hostility when they come out. They lose friends. Their parents disown them. They get beaten or killed.

I am not one of those people. All of my friends were super-cool; my parents were a bit weird at first (well, they still are sometimes), but they mostly got over it; I've been threatened, but never subject to physical violence. I've had the tremendous good fortune to live in queer-friendly communities.

I am very, very lucky. The biggest obstacle in my coming-out process was myself.

The hard part of coming out to myself was not actually figuring out my attractions. It was entirely clear to me quite early on that I did not want to have sex with boys and that I did want to have sex with girls. That, to be honest, was never in doubt.

That's why one older queer person's advice to me when I admitted my confusion about my sexuality – “Have sex with a guy and have sex with a girl, and see which one you like more” – was so profoundly unhelpful. Which one I would like more was definitely not the issue.

What was the issue – what I mean when I refer to “coming out to myself” – was deconstructing my internalized heterosexism.

By “internalized heterosexism,” I mean the deeply ingrained idea that straight is default and gay is Other. This idea pervades our culture like air, and is similarly taken for granted. I feel like a lot of straight people don't ever think about it.

Take my parents. They're good upstanding bleeding-heart liberals; they'd be horrified if anyone had ever suggested that they were homophobic. “We have gay friends!” they would say. “We'd never dream of saying there was anything wrong with being gay.” And of course they wouldn't; but they brought me and my brothers up with the assumption that we would be straight – that we would be like them. When we were small, they would talk about “one day when you get married,” “one day when you have kids.” My mother would give me unsolicited advice about dating men, which I would remember and be grateful for “one day.” And, sure, as we got older we were periodically told, “If any of you are gay that is totally okay,” but there was an almost dismissively hypothetically tone to it. If you were gay, we would be totally fine with that. But you're not, because being gay is something that happens to other people.

I honestly believed that. When I was a teenager, I would write shit in my diary like, “I'm not gay – I'm just homosexual,” because I couldn't be gay. Gay was Other; straight was default; to myself I am the ultimately default, and therefore I cannot be gay. The fact that I fit all the apparent criteria for being gay – 1. be gay; 2. oh wait that's it – was not sufficient for me to overcome the internalized heterosexism that told me I couldn't be gay. There must be some additional criterion, some test you had to take, some qualification you had to earn, some card you had to have… something that granted you gayness the way a power ring makes you a Green Lantern.

It took me a few years, but eventually I realized that there is no external criterion of gayness. There's no gay Guardians of the Universe, bestowing the quality of being gay on those who have proved themselves worthy. I had been unnecessarily problematizing my gayness by positing a false consciousness whereby the Otherness of “gay” required external validation before I could self-identify as such; but there is no difference between “I think I'm gay” and “I'm gay.” The only thing telling me there was a difference was my internalized heterosexism: the mechanism whereby gay was Other, and therefore Not Me. When I finally let myself participate in gayness – visiting websites for gay people, watching TV shows with gay characters, simply writing down “I am a lesbian” – I was able to dissolve that mechanism. Goodbye, internalized heterosexism. Hello, self-actualization.

It was tremendously freeing, letting all that deeply ingrained ugliness go like so much dust in the wind. Now I just have to figure out how to do the same thing with my internalized cissexism.

Prog-Rock Theology

When I was a child, I had a much easier time relating to people of my parents' generation than my own. Other kids were cruel and demanding, and half the time I had no idea what they were talking about.

Did you ever read that book About A Boy? With the nerdy twelve-year-old who listened to his mother's records and was isolated from his peers and their pop culture? When I read that book, also at age twelve, I identified with the protagonist to a painful degree. This was a text that understood how important pop-culture touchstones are: how, if your touchstones are completely different from those of the people around you, you might have a very hard time making friends.

The book ends with the nerdy kid declaring his hatred for his erstwhile favorite musicians and going off with his friends to, like, listen to Nirvana or something (it was written in the mid-nineties). I myself have never reached the point of disavowing the dad rock I grew up on – I adore the Who and Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel and Rush, and I have no intention of ever apologizing for that ever – but I have discovered the value of generational touchstones.

I embarked on this process maybe seven or eight years ago, when I relinquished the shackles of parental indoctrination and started to take television seriously. Since then, I've been an unabashed pop-culture junkie, and (coincidentally or not) I've also found it a lot easier to make friends my own age.

Just because you're compensating for who you used to be, however, doesn't mean you lose continuity with that person; and sometimes you experience moments so thoroughly of your past that you have to pause and take stock of how you got from there to here.

I had one of those moments the other day, during a classmate's presentation on the religious element in Jethro Tull's Aqualung.

This classmate, being of my parents' age, spoke of the personal resonance of a record that came out at the very moment when she, as a young teenager, was beginning to seriously question the faith of her religious upbringing. At a time in her life when she was querying the assumptions she'd always taken for granted, and finding the institutional church frustrating and inadequate for her needs, Aqualung was a locus of meaning and a source of spiritual significance.

This makes perfect sense to me. I too began to question my religious upbringing at age eleven or twelve, and I too found enormous meaning, far beyond anything I could have hoped to articulate, in the music I loved at that age – specifically, in English prog-rock concept albums of the 60s and 70s:

Tommy

Dark Side of the Moon

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

Tales From Topographic Oceans

I don't know if I consciously made the connection at the time, but all of these records tackle explicitly religious or existential themes. They're fundamentally about the Big Questions, and, for a young teenager obsessed with Big Questions of identity and purpose and the nature of life, they provided a site of engagement with these questions in a way that the formal religion in my life at the time did not.

After I had spoken up in class to this effect, three other people of my own generation spoke in turn, and they all said that their experience had been the exact opposite. Church had been, for them, a haven of meaning and spiritual nourishment in the face of the relentlessly superficial pop music of their childhoods.

I realize that this sample is skewed. I'm studying at a seminary, so naturally there will be a higher than average proliferation of people who do ultimately have use for the institutional church. But it's still interesting to me that the prog-rock concept albums of my dad's record collection could provide a space for doing theology in a way that the bubblegum radio pop of the nineties and early aughts apparently could not.

Hello, Culture Shock, My Old Friend

I've undergone transcontinental relocation enough times to know better, but I honestly thought this time would be different.

This time, I was in my twenties – old enough to cope; not like when I was a child, trying to grow up at the same time as adjusting to new places.

This time, I was moving to from the UK to the US – a paltry cultural difference. Was I not a connoisseur of American TV/movies/internets? Had I not lived from the ages of one to seven in Alabama? Surely I was entirely prepared for all aspects of life in the States.

This time, the decision was wholly mine – not dictated by my parents (whose choices, admittedly, I don't recall ever objecting to, and sometimes actively encouraged). I'd never wanted anything more than I wanted to move 5000 miles west and take my rightful place as a grad student in ~California~.

And, of course, it really did seem that way at first. I instantly felt as though I fit in. School was everything I hoped it would be. New friends were abundant and wonderful. The weather was gorgeous. For about three months, it was like being ever so slightly drunk all the damn time.

For the past three months, though, it's been more like being ever so slightly hungover all the damn time. This is literally textbook culture shock, and it's really stupid that I wasn't prepared for it. I just... thought it would be different.

I thought it would be easy, because I was comparing it to the last transcontinental upheaval. That was when we moved from Kenya to Scotland, which is a hell of a cultural transition. That was when I was thirteen, which is a hell of an age. In comparison, this move should have been a cakewalk.

I thought it would be easy, because I imagined that I would be used to this by now. I am a third culture kid. Wanderlust runs in my veins. I crave new places. Not for me the desire to be settled. Not for me the need to feel from somewhere. Not for me the constant belittling comparisons of the new place with the vastly superior place where I last lived. Me, I positively revel in the fact that everywhere on Earth I am a stranger in a strange land. You can't feel homesick if nowhere is home.

I thought it would be easy. I was wrong.

Open The Book

“And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Except they did say something to someone – we're reading it. By existing, the last sentence of Mark contradicts itself.

Mark's Gospel ends on the Greek particle gar. That's not grammatically sound. You don't end a sentence on gar. The sentence is not over.

They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid; then, evidently, because this text exists and you are reading it, they mastered their fear and said something to someone. Something: this text, Mark's Gospel, the empty tomb. Someone: you, the recipient of this text. You have to deduce the rest of the sentence – “then they mastered their fear and said something to someone” – for yourself. The ending of Mark's Gospel makes you finish the sentence. It makes you carry on the story.

If there's one message to be gleaned from all of Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition, it is this:

Keep interpreting.

Genesis opens with two non-identical creation accounts. The New Testament begins with four non-identical gospels. Throughout the Bible, as in rabbinic midrash and churches' teachings, there are doublings and recapitulations, glosses and rewrites, the same story told over again but differently. You can't reconcile the differences between alternate versions of the same story. You aren't supposed to.

The ambiguities, the discrepancies, the omissions: they're there so that you can interpret, and keep interpreting. What you must never do is stop. If you declare one particular interpretation to be singularly authoritative and let it rest there, you leave the text lifeless in the tomb. A text lives as long as you interpret it – as long as you read it and retell it and explore it and criticize it and learn from it. If you are afraid to let the text live – afraid to open yourself to the possibility that the text might change you – you will have nothing to say to anyone, and you may as well have left the book unopened.

Keep reading. Keep telling the stories. The stories will change, and the readers will change. This is good. This is the point. Keep interpreting.

Master your fear. Say something to someone.

Back To Green Gables

These days I don't reread; there are too many books and not enough time. When I was a child, though, it seemed to be the other way around, and my favorite books got revisited as often as my favorite albums and my favorite movies. Books that are in tatters on my shelf are engraved in my memory, as deeply and comprehensively as the events of my own life: His Dark Materials and the first three Harry Potters and The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler and Anastasia Krupnik and Matilda and The Phantom Tollbooth...

What makes rereading interesting is that you change. The words on the page might stay the same, but each rereading is a different textual encounter – you've changed, and so the text you read has changed too. This was abundantly clear to me in my devoted twice-yearly rereading of His Dark Materials throughout my teens (oh, what did you expect, “geek” is right there in the blog name), when each read-through was granted new depth by something that had happened to me in the preceding six months: some allusion brought to my awareness by my other reading, or some emotional resonance heightened by a personal experience. Every single rereading gave me a better understanding of both the book and myself, and I marveled at the apparent infinitude of meaning I could mine from the text.

In the same way, I marvel at the freshness of my most recent encounter with a beloved childhood book. I just finished rereading Anne of Green Gables, on a whim, for approximately the eight billionth time, and it was a remarkably new experience. I read this book literally dozens of times as a child, but I have never read it like this before.

The first thing I noticed is how completely female-dominated the story is. From the opening paragraph, focalized through the formidable Rachel Lynde, to the whole farcical setup of cohabiting siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert accidentally adopting Anne instead of the boy they wanted, it's made quite clear that this a story of women.

There are maybe three male characters of any significance in the entire book, and they're all striking for what they are not. There's the schoolmaster, whom Anne hates and whose role is completely overshadowed by his replacement, Anne's passionately beloved teacher Miss Stacy. There's Matthew, whose quietness and passivity contrast strikingly with the active and opinionated women around him – Rachel Lynde, Marilla, Anne, Josephine Barry... Actually, it's possible to read Matthew as an explicit example of queer masculinity. Check out his response to Anne's asking him whether he ever went “courting”:

‘Well now, no, I dunno’s I ever did,’ said Matthew, who had certainly never thought of such a thing in his whole existence.

Queer as a fish. Welcome to the club, Matthew.

And then there is Gilbert Blythe. Ah, Gilbert Blythe. Can I just state for the record how hard I ship this particular OTP? I love that Gilbert doesn't get easily forgiven for being an asshole just by apologizing, but has to be ignored by Anne for a long time: he's the one at fault, so the reconciliation isn't on his terms. I love that Anne doesn't become friends with him after he saves her from the river, but (her own love of sappy romance stories notwithstanding) defies the “damsel in distress falls into her rescuer's arms” narrative. I love that she is at least his intellectual equal, if not his superior, and the first five years of their acquaintance are characterized by fierce academic competition.

What I'd forgotten, though, is the fact that the reconciliation takes place on the third-to-last page of book. The charming courtship and marriage I remember so fondly occurs entirely in later books. Throughout this book, Gilbert's presence is an absence. Anne refuses even to let his name pass her lips. She is far more concerned with her female friends, the “kindred spirits” – a phrase I'm still prone to using, much to the bafflement of people who never read this book growing up.

As a child, I naturally identified strongly with Anne. Although I certainly had none of her charm or popularity, I saw aspects of myself reflected in her prodigious imagination, her desire to be good but inability to control her temper or impulses, her constant getting into scrapes. Plus, you were supposed to identify with her. She was the protagonist, wasn't she? Her name was right there in the title.

Now, however, I'm struck by how much I relate to Marilla, the older single woman who takes it on herself to raise Anne right. (Matthew is told not to interfere, on the ridiculous premise that “Perhaps an old maid doesn’t know much about bringing up a child, but I guess she knows more than an old bachelor.”) Marilla is opinionated and judgmental; she doesn't know what to do with her emotions, and expresses affection by being kind of an asshole. All of this I can personally identify with, but I don't think it's just me. I think this is intended to be Marilla's story just as much as Anne's: the story of the transformation of her life brought about by Anne's presence in it.

After all, many of the mistakes Anne makes can ultimately be traced back to Marilla's own errors (the liniment cake, getting Diana drunk, the incident of the amethyst brooch), and by the book's end Marilla has grown and changed at least as much as Anne has. She has learned how to be – not a parent, that is made very clear, but – a person guiding and taking responsibility for another person, and growing in self-knowledge as she does so. Toward the beginning of the book, Marilla scolds Anne for her unconventional prayers and her deeply personal (“positively irreverent”) exegesis of a picture of 'Christ Blessing Little Children'. Toward the end, on Anne's departure for further education, she “wept for her girl in a passion of sobs that appalled her when she grew calm enough to reflect how very wicked it must be to take on so about a sinful fellow creature.” Her professed theology hasn't changed, but her lived theology – how she relates to other people – couldn't be more different. She is the same person, and yet she is changed beyond recognition: much like the adult reader returning to a beloved childhood book.