What’s amazing and moving about the amassed stories is how different they are – how many permutations there are of assigned-at-birth – which might be male, female, or intersex – with gender identity, which might be male, female, both, neither, something else, or none – with gender expression, for which the possibilities are as infinite as the person’s imagination. It's a great book to start looking at as we prepare for hosting the Trans lives festival on Sat Mar 29.
Our job – our mission here at First Unitarian Des Moines – is to love radically, grow ethically and spiritually, and serve justly. Today, let’s focus on that first part: Love radically.
To love radically means unconditional acceptance, compassion, and kindness. It doesn’t mean that protective use of force is never called for, but a commitment to love radically does make us more hesitant to resort to it. Loving radically means curbing the fearful impulse to employ protective use of force first and ask questions later. So, yes, this means taking some risks. There’s a chance of being vulnerable and getting hurt when we could have been more protective. So radical love requires the courage to take that chance – to ask questions first unless the danger is immediate and extreme.
Radical love also requires the courage to stand against injustice, oppression, and discrimination, even when that is difficult. To love radically means even when we do have to go to protective use of force, we do so in the most compassionate, kind, and accepting way we can.Loving radically means not judging, not blaming, not expecting others to change. Loving radically means recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of all individuals, regardless of their gender or gender identity or gender expression. Loving radically means recognizing and challenging our own biases, privileges, and limitations to become a more loving and compassionate person. Because it is radical, it is counter cultural.
Loving radically is not transactional. It welcomes reciprocity, but it stays away from any precise measurement of who has done what for whom. Radical love requires being imprecise about that – because being precise means you’re being transactional, means you’re thinking quid pro quo rather than a beautifully vague reciprocity.
Radical love includes yourself, so it doesn’t mean being a slave to other people’s needs. Your needs also count – but radical love recognizes that one of those needs is to help others, because their suffering is yours. So no one has to earn your positive regard, your respect of their dignity.
To love radically is to commit to unconditional solidarity in which all beings, just because they exist, are worthy of being loved. Radical love refuses to flatten people into roles, labels, or projections. Radical love’s enemy is judgmentalism and its allies are curiosity and a willingness to embrace complexity.
To love radically is a deliberate act of resistance, of liberation, and of deep presence – disrupting systems that thrive on fear, hierarchy, and disconnection—systems that benefit when we believe we are separate, unlovable, or alone.
There is a close connection between love and understanding, as the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized:
“Understanding and Love are not two separate things, but just one. To develop understanding, you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you cannot help but love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.”He added:
“Understanding is the very foundation of love. If understanding is not there, no matter how hard you try, you cannot love . . . Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand you can’t love.”So the better we understand, the better we can love.
There are some things we all simply need to know about gender identity – so that we can understand and love radically. Gender identity means a person's internal, deeply-held sense of their own gender, which may or may not align with the sex they were assigned at birth. Gender identity is different from gender expression which is how one presents oneself to the world. In our culture clothing styles, hair styles, make-up and certain behaviors are key ways a person can express gender.
A person's gender identity can be:
Cisgender (aligning with the sex assigned at birth)
Transgender (not aligning with the sex assigned at birth)
Non-binary (identifying as neither male nor female, or both)
Genderqueer (identifying as something outside the traditional male/female binary)
Agender (not identifying with any gender)
Or Bigender (identifying as both male and female).
There’s a lot of possibilities and it can be hard to understand – but love helps us understand and understanding helps us love.
We should all be familiar with the formula, "insistent, persistent, consistent." Children do sometimes have a phase of experimenting with or exploring gender expressions. Of course, give them the space to experiment and explore – it can be fun to try out all kinds of roles and expressions. If they are genuinely transgender then they will be insistent, persistent, and consistent about it.
- Insistent: is the child you had thought was a girl adamant that ze is a boy. Or is the child you had thought was a boy adamant about that ze is a girl?
- Persistent: The child's cross-gender identification persists over time.
- Consistent: The child's cross-gender identification is consistent across different contexts and with different people, rather than just being something ze expresses at home or with certain friends.
We are not sure why these numbers are going up. Growing awareness and acceptance, and decreased stigma, may be a factor in more people being willing to come out. Improved data collection as survey design has improved may be a factor in getting more accurate numbers on what has long been true. Increased access to information might be leading to people recognizing themselves in an identity description they wouldn’t otherwise have thought possible. Some research also suggests that there might be environmental factors, such as prenatal hormone exposure, that contribute to the development of transgender identities. We don’t know how much weight each of these factors would have, but whatever accounts for the growing numbers, it’s not mass Satanic possession.
Lots of cultures have a role for nonbinary people. The Navajo Nadleehi could have been assigned either male or female at birth, but they embody both male and female qualities and fill a respected spiritual and social role.
The Lakota Winkte is typically a male-bodied person who takes on a female role in ceremonial or artistic functions.
The Zuni Lhamana are male-bodied in traditionally female roles respected as mediators and craftspeople.
The Omaha mixuga have cross-gender roles, often involved in rituals or crafts.
The Cheyenne Hemaneh are “Half-man, half-woman” individuals with spiritual or social importance.
The Cree recognized gender-diverse people with unique roles.
The Ojibwe language has a term for people with a man’s body and a woman’s heart.
Looking beyond indigenous North American cultures, in Samoa the traditional culture had Fa'afafine: people assigned male at birth who live and identify in a feminine gender role and are a recognized third gender with social functions seen as natural and important.
Cultures from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal have the Hijra: also recognized as a third gender. Hijra can include transgender women, intersex people, and others who don’t fit neatly into male-female binary. They traditionally had important ceremonial roles.
In Thailand the Kathoey are transgender women or effeminate men, visible often in entertainment or beauty industries. Gender fluidity is normalized.
In parts of the Balkans, particularly northern Albania, some women take on male gender roles and live as men. They are called sworn virgins, and are treated as such, though it’s not based on internal gender identity as we think of it.
The Bugis culture in Indonesia recognizes five genders: men, women, masculine women, feminine men, and bissu, which are gender-transcendent shamans.
Gender is a cultural construct, so of course all the ways nonbinary genders are constructed varies from culture to culture. Most cultures have found some need to recognize and form norms for more than just two genders. That’s an overview of some of the basics that I want us all to know.
Let me tell you my gender story. In the spirit of the book, Authentic Selves, of people telling their stories of finding their way to who they are, I wanted to tell you this morning my own personal story with the concept of gender identity. Sharing my reflections and experiences about my own journey toward self understanding might help you think about yours.
I’m not sure I have a gender identity. It’s clear that I do have a sexual orientation. As a teenager, I was interested in girls in a way that was strange and mysterious and terribly awkward, yet undeniable. My inner, authentic me had this desire for intimacy with someone from roughly half of humanity that felt quite different from the kinds of relationships I felt inclined to have with anyone from the other roughly-half of humanity. Very puzzling. Very ordinary, apparently, yet still very puzzling.
This meant that other people’s gender mattered to me in that way – my own gender, not so much. For some people it’s the other way around. For a bi-sexual person, a prospective romantic partner’s gender doesn’t matter to them in that way – though their own sense of gender identity maybe does. I'm the reverse of that.
I don’t mind presenting as male, and I have the biology that commonly goes with that: testosterone, and reproductive organs, and facial hair, and a low voice, and male pattern baldness, height that’s average for a man but is two standard deviations above the mean height of women, larger hands, more pronounced Adam’s apple – the whole package of traits that often but not always go together. Living life the way that the society I grew up in expects of males has just been easier – the wardrobe is easier, the socially expected grooming is quicker, and I’ve gotten accustomed to being treated the way society treats people it thinks are men.
But none of that means I identify as male. It just means others identify me as male, and I acquiesce to that. If, from my birth, my parents had told me I was a girl, dressed me the way other girls were dressed, had me grow my hair long and put bows or ribbons in it occasionally, taught me to value being “pretty,” and had somehow kept me from finding out about the anatomical differences between me and the other girls, I suspect I’d have gone along with that, too.
I don’t feel the presence of an inner true and authentic “me” in there that would have rebelled against gender assignment as a girl –nothing that would have told me, “this feels wrong.” I feel fine with how I’m perceived and treated as a man, but I don’t feel a strong internal sense of 'maleness' beyond that.
It is possible that I am deluded. Always worth considering. I might be so cisgendered that I don’t even notice it – so comfortable in the match between my assigned-at-birth sex and the gender expression I am content to display that I imagine I would be that comfortable in any gender – when, in fact, I would not have been as comfortable being raised a girl as I imagine I would have been. I don’t know. Maybe.
There are some clues that suggest I might not be self-deluded to think I don’t have a gender identity. First, the literature on gender identity recognizes people like me. For instance, I read that,
“A lot of cis-men and cis-women don’t feel a strong gender identity but don’t notice it because everything about their social role feels frictionless. The idea that everyone must have a deep, internal, self-defining gender identity is itself a kind of cultural assumption—but not a universal truth. Some people have strong gender identities; others don’t. That’s all part of the natural diversity of human experience.”For a second clue that maybe inner gender ambiguity is, for me, authentic rather than delusional, there is the story of my name. My name is Steven Meredith Garmon. From birth through ninth grade, I went by Steven and in high school shortened it to Steve. When I went away to college at age 18, I decided to go by my middle name. I share that middle name with my father, who was Gerald Meredith Garmon, and with his father, who was Orion Meredith Garmon (which means his initials were OMG). Apparently, naming boys Meredith is a Welsh thing, and my paternal line goes through Wales.
Partly, I liked the hint of dark romance about it – Meredith seemed to my 18-year-old self like the kind of person you might find brooding on a moor, like Heathcliff or Ravenel. But mostly, I wanted a name that was gender-ambiguous – in fact, in the US it’s much more often a girl’s name – and that was attractive to me. It was convenient that I didn't have to make up a gender ambiguous name but could switch to using one I happened to already have.
It was 1977, and people didn’t know much about transgenderism – I’d never heard the phrase gender nonbinary. The term more often used back then was transvestite, which was usually understood to mean men dressing in women’s clothing -- that was their kink, as we might say today, but we didn’t understand it the way we now understand gender identity.
I didn’t want to change the way I dressed – which was invariably sneakers, blue jeans, and a t-shirt in summer and a sweatshirt in winter – which was also the uniform of a lot of the young women at my college. I was in favor of unisex everything. Down with constraining gender norms! I wasn’t interested in presenting as female because I disapproved of the very idea that there should be any such thing as “presenting as female.” We should all, I felt, abandon the concepts of masculinity and femininity, in favor of simply “human.”
When I look back on that 18-year-old, ze was actually pretty militantly anti-gender-identity. Forty-eight years have gone by since then, and the world has changed, and I’ve changed. I was wrong to think gender identity was as dispensable as, back then, I hoped it was. For a lot of other people, it’s clear to me now, gender identity is no more dispensable for them than sexual orientation is for me. On a gut level, I don't really get that. I don't feel it. But on a cognitive level, I've now heard from a number of people who say they do have a clear gender identity (which usually comes to light because that gender identity doesn't match what they were assigned at birth), and I have to believe them. On a heart level, love and understanding go together and call for welcoming acceptance. Feeling what they feel on a gut level is not required.
Yet the fact that I thought the way I thought as an adolescent does suggest that being agender-ish really is, for me, authentic. I have been, from youth, pretty insistent, persistent, and consistent about that. You’ve been hearing it when I declare my pronouns as "ze/zir or he/him."
For many people “being a boy or man” or “being a girl or woman” – or even being both or being neither -- is a crucial part of their sense of who they are – I’m just not one of them. And for those who do have a clear gender identity, for some it matches what they were assigned at birth and for others it just doesn’t.
The key, as the book title suggests, is finding and being our authentic selves. But what is authentic for you? We are, all of us, a hodge-podge of conflicting desires trying to balance. We have internalized messages some of which contradict other messages we have internalized. We try to construct the most coherent sense of who we are, and whose we are, that we can, but it’s never fully coherent – we all have some tensions and contradictions in us. So how do we be authentic? Which of your contradictory ideas and desires are your authentic ones?
To answer that question, let’s go back to that idea of loving radically, and apply that to ourselves. Remember, radical love is not transactional. Loving radically yourself is also not transactional. If you’re thinking: “if I be this way, there’s something I’ll get out of it,” that’s being transactional with yourself. You’ve got an internal quid pro quo going on.
It’s not that transactions are always wrong. You go to the grocery store, you buy groceries – it’s a transaction. You need the food, and the people at the store and all their suppliers need your money to meet their needs. We need transactions, but we also need close relationships with family and friends that aren’t transactional – that are reciprocal in an imprecise way -- I called it “beautifully vague reciprocity.”
And sometimes we need to be transactional with ourselves for a bit. We tell ourselves, “I don’t really want to be in this role, it feels a little awkward for me, or a lot awkward, but I can do it for now and it’ll help meet some needs and keep me safe.” To love radically ourselves means that we aren’t always so transactional. Sometimes there’s being what you want to be just for its own sake, not because it gets you anything you could put your finger on. It’s at those times that we are our authentic selves.
So: may your authentic self – whatever it might be -- shine ever brighter. Amen.
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