Getting To The Heart Of The Matter: Crossing The Gender Divide With the Radfems and Trans Friends

“Let us begin where Quakers claim to be most comfortable when tackling difficult questions – with our own personal spiritual experience.  Quaker discussions traditionally start from this point, or are recalled to it if the discussion seems to be losing its way.”

–      Margaret Heathfield, Swarthmore Lecture 1994

When I think about the word discernment, I realize it is a shiny new word for me.  Previously, I might have used decide or choose to describe this process of uncertainty.  Now, when I use discernment as a process, I realize I am looking at the nuances; the subtle ways in which I am tempted to approve of one over the other because someone, or something, once told me it was better. 

This process of choosing often has subtle emotional implications.  I try to sense a nudge to choose one over the other because someone somewhere once felt pain or joy in relationship to it.  I want people to heal and to feel loved.  Other times, I am jealous, angry, or insecure.  Choosing one over the other would release some ache in me or in someone I love.

Difficult decisions often come to me in community with others.  I want to feel connected to and approved of by all.  Because this seems an insurmountable task, I pass through moments of fear, exhaustion, suspicion, self-preservation, and a hunger for perfection. Remaining open to the possibilities of that surprisingly good feeling that comes from unanimous decision-making is something I return to again and again in difficult moments.  It is a physical memory, like the feeling of being hugged by someone I love.

Target Practice, acrylic on wood,
7/2014  by Glee 

Occasionally, I am given the gift of community discernment that leaves me transformed.  

Recently, my Quaker community in Portland found ourselves deciding to either honor the right to free speech of the Radfems group, who has openly denounced the rights of transgendered women to seek refuge under the umbrella of anti-patriarchal activism.   Or to cancel the space rental of their conference entitled Radfems Respond, intended to bring peace to the conflict between their movement and transgendered activists.  Radfems want to move toward a world without gender discrimination, but due to its overt invalidation of the transgendered experience in America, it clearly falls under the description of a hate group by Southern Poverty Law center. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) definition of a "hate group" includes those having beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_group

Our community did not come to unity as to whether we should cancel the proposed conference, but it was cancelled after members of our own body of Friends (Quakers) came to share personal stories of the pain they have experienced as a result of the Radfems activist work with sex workers and an urgent environmental movement advocating force.  Here is an excerpt from a petition written by an attender at our meeting:

As Quakers and transgender activists, we are calling upon you, a community dedicated to peace and non-violence, to cancel the Radfems Respond conference. Radical Feminists are a hateful group, increasingly defining themselves by their hatred of trans people as this stance becomes less and less acceptable in mainstream feminist dialogue. By allowing this group to use Meeting space, you are choosing to alienate trans people and be complicit in the violence against them.

http://www.change.org/petitions/multnomah-meeting-clerks-cancel-the-radfems-respond-conference-at-multnomah-meeting-house  -Hollis Proffitt, Seattle WA

Both views have the potential to bring our world into a place of healing unity, at least as a theological/paradigmatic change. As a Friend, I believe humans can accomplish deep and lasting peace among all beings by using non-violent means.  I also believe in the right to free speech, even if what one is saying is hurtful and wrong.   If we can’t learn to listen, their silence may become violence.  Dialogue is essential.

Forever Free, acrylic on wood
7/2014 by Glee

During the above mentioned discernment process, I was left feeling that there was potential for a charismatic leader to influence a group of people seeking a vision of utopia (equality and acceptance) by doing away with individuals who do not fit into, and perhaps even invalidate the premise of, the vision of the movement.  In this case, it is the leaders of the Radfems. I was surprised, at the end of this process, to hear that many individuals in our Friends community were not in favor of the cancellation.  I did not feel that good feeling of unifying community discernment.  Instead, I felt the ache of uncertainty and divide.  Somehow, I had to go back to my work co-clerking a planning committee of a Quaker Women’s Theology Conference taking place just a month later.  I had just returned from attending the first ever women only 13 Indigenous Grandmother’s event, carrying a message of peace beyond factions and environmental healing of the Earth.  Even though these two groups were open to transgendered women, how could I move forward carrying the weight of exclusivity? 

This began my process of discernment. 

It is difficult to know where or when this story begins.  I’m forty-three years old and I can’t recall the moment in my life when I decided, chose, or discerned my gender.  As a child, what I did and how I acted seemed separate from the esteemed title of “girl”.  How others treated me seemed directly related to their perception of my lowly assigned condition of being a “girl”. (Note that putting quotes around something, my six year old pointed out to me recently, is an indication of falsehood.  In this case, however, quotes are being used like an agnostic would put quotes around “God”, as if ascribing truth to a word would indicate certainty in the heart of the author.)  

The inner knowing I understood in me differed from what others perceived.  So often, as a child, there were no words given to describe this condition.  I think language is powerfully disempowering in this way for children. 

My friend is learning Russian and was baffled by the omission by his teachers, thus far, of the word for fire.  He’d learned air, water, tree, and things like this, but the one word he needs to describe the movement of Spirit in him was not yet available.  I am left wondering about the overt disempowerment I experienced through the language and culture in which I was raised. 

I recall very clearly the moments when I re-awakened to the external perceptions and treatment of my unfortunate title of “girl” and then “woman”.  It is the implicit categorization according to the title I carried that differed from my inner knowing.  To describe my inner knowing would have involved something that feels like arguing without words. 

So, wordlessly, I came to associate with the sensitive nature of the frog.  I could find my true self in the life of an amphibian, in its effortless movement from one world to another.  It gave me so much joy, to know that a frog knows how I feel, and that I had a kinship with the non-human world.   I could not become a frog, but I could feel like one.

New Beginning, acrylic on wood, 7/2014
by Glee 

I have a visceral memory of the times I re-awakened to the condition of my body and of my learned vulnerability as female in my culture.

  I knew I was the meat into which the fork and knife were to pierce.  I knew I was the creature who would be consumed.  It was only a question of when my weakness would become noticeable.  I was aware, in those moments of my place in the hierarchy of life.  I didn’t feel weak, though.  I felt invincible.  I felt free to love and to be loved.  But, the more I lived into my power and strength, the harder it was to move up.

The conflicting stories I heard about my body were tearing me apart.  I was afraid.  I felt like my body was going to be separated from its power and strength if I were raped.  The stories the women around me were telling me were about loosing their souls.  They were telling me about being separated from their bodies through violence an disregard and that they were no longer whole.  

I carried their anger, sadness, and separation.  I wanted to unite us all with our bodies again.  It almost seemed as if there had been a larger, more devastating separation, the great separation between male and female, masculine and feminine. 

To me, it was a matter of science and evolution.  A trained anthropologist, I had become enthralled with knowledge of sexual selection, and of Lucy, the missing link.  I memorized the description of her pelvis, her smaller body, and her upright posture.  I had been introduced to feminist anthropology, the assertion that female anthropologists were privy to a different perception of the culture being studied simply by virtue of their gender.  It had become apparent to ethnographers that male anthropologists were not allowed into female spaces and therefore had a skewed view of the culture.  So, now anthropologists had to sort through gender and perception.  This also meant that we, as outsiders, could describe our own divide by observing and recording other cultures.  How confusing! No matter how hard we try to become a fly on the wall of understanding, we are still imprisoned by our gender identity. 

All of this describing through science wasn’t helping me heal this great separation in which I found myself very personally involved.  I suddenly knew what I didn’t know.  I felt I could never know how it feels to be a man and that I would always be excluded from knowing.  I had learned to pull things apart, to categorize and to describe.  I had learned to categorize myself as female.  This felt like a process of rationalization. 

So, I returned to my inner knowing, because, after all, it had been the only constant from my earliest memory.  What was it, I wondered, after so much hardship in my female body, that made me wake up each day with renewed vigor to continue a search for truth and wholeness? 

I laid out in the back yard to sleep one summer night and woke up at three in the morning.  Looking up into the clear California star-filled-sky, I had the overwhelming sense that I was not alone.  It was more than a sense of being in the presence of something greater than myself.  It was a feeling that I had become the Earth and everyone on Earth, and that I was witnessing as all of humanity, that we are not alone in the universe.  Beyond that, I felt that my body is never separate from the whole.  I was so excited, so overjoyed at this news.  I have no idea how long I laid there enveloped in this certainty. 

I live in Portland, now.  I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends, where I feel validated and loved.  I am married and have two children.  As I sit on my porch, writing, I hear a newborn baby crying and my body becomes alert.  I remember feeling the milk in my breasts drop when my babies were hungry.  I see the mother and a baby come down the street and sit down under the old oak tree on the lawn of the vacant house across the street.  The mother pulls the baby from its pouch and begins to nurse.  The baby quiets for a time.  I cry with relief that I live in a neighborhood where a mother can do this.  Where a body is a gift to life and life a gift to the body, and it is a choice to bring life.  Even more, I feel it is possible that this mother has a symbiotic relationship with this child and with another who is co-conspiring with them to walk through life together.  My hope is that they will all have a relationship free of inequality. 

My Rainbow Flag, 7/2014, by Glee 

I need a word, now, for the experience the nursing mother is having that is so much a part of my own experience, both painful and beautiful.  The ability to share this common experience feels like compassion.  As they sit now, a calm baby in the arms of the holder, I see between us the rainbow flag my kids and I bought and put on our house two weeks ago.  I am happy to live in a state where this flag can mean tolerance and the power of love.  I feel as if I have finally pushed past the black and white of pigments and moved into the full spectrum of light.  

I am reminded of the description, heard on Radiolab (http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/), by the first people to realize that a crystal is splitting light to reveal its whole spectrum and not that the crystal was transforming it into something new.  Yes, this perception makes a big difference.  The crystal, for me, is science, the search for truth, the need to see more.   The light is what I am looking with.  Without light, I could not see. 

Now, the person nursing the baby is gone and I am left with my soft belly, changed breasts, warm softness, and the frogs to define my gender experience of forty-three years. 

The hope I find in this experience is the possibility of symbiotic relationships between masculine and feminine.  I learned about symbiosis in high school.  I remember the moment I got it.  I walked around trying to change my perception of moss, lichen, and bacteria.  Thirty-eight years later, I realize that my entire experience as a being is symbiosis with all living things and maybe even the Earth, and that nothing exists separately from anything else.

I imagine how it might feel to bring the inner knowing together with the way one is perceived externally.  This seems like a spiritual experience.  The question is whether it is the effort of the person to express the truth, though there are not words for it?  Or whether it is the effort of the observer to allow the true colors of the inner knowing to emerge?

I want to say something here about the quandary of gender and of the gifts I have received from the notion of gender.  Healing from the great gender divide somehow requires a battle in the United States, one of balancing power and expressing our pain.  I have come to this after two years of searching for a way to describe spirituality beyond the gender divide, even looking for a way to balance the damage already done, especially in Christianity.  I felt deep healing when I found myself in women only gatherings, recently a Quaker women’s gathering and a first ever women only Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers gathering, where kindness and compassion toward the men in our lives was encouraged.  I learned that women have to live the kind of power we would like to see in the world. Why was I learning ways beyond violence in circles of women?  What do we gain from separating ourselves from men? 

I feel that if we humans can return to a symbiotic relationship of rainbow genders, we may be able to see a new paradigm, the paradigm of those who cross over. 

Last week, in deep silence with Quakers (Religious Society of Friends), I came fully into a different paradigm.  It was one of awe and gratitude for those who cross over.  I understood those who have braved the great divides, those of color, gender, disability, age, sexuality, culture, religion, and more.  If not for these brave souls who can choose no other way but to leap across the abyss of our categories, titles, and external perceptions, we may never realize that the rainbow is none other than the light that allows us to see. 

How can we let the light heal us from our separations? 

 Learn More:  

New Yorker Magazine: What Is A Woman (read the article)

Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that focuses on the hypothesis of patriarchy as a system of power that organizes society into a complex of relationships based on the assertion that male supremacy[1] oppresses women. Radical feminism aims to challenge and overthrow patriarchy by opposing standard gender roles and oppression of women and calls for a radical reordering of society. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism

The mission of the San Francisco Trans March is "to inspire all trans and gender non-conforming people to realize a world where we are safe, loved, and empowered. We strive to create a space for our diverse communities to unite and achieve the social justice and equality that each of us deserves."[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_March

“A few weeks ago, I was reading Eleanor Roosevelt's "Tomorrow Is Now," which was recently reissued by Allida Black, a mentor and former college professor. President Bill Clinton and Dr. Black wrote in its introduction how it was one of ER's most important books. While I was reading it, I was blown away that half a century after her death, she still has the power to speak to the challenges of a dangerous and uncertain world.

"Learning to be at home in the world," she writes, "is, I believe, the surest way we have of reducing our fears. For fear, after all, is too often fear of one's inadequacy in the face of the unknown."

If we care enough, we can give ourselves permission to journey into the shoes and lives of others we don't understand. You choose the language and identity that you are most comfortable speaking: "I'm queer, Muslim, Christian, Iranian, American, South African, straight, trans, male, female, black, white..." it really doesn't matter. What matters is that underneath these identities and within these beliefs is a real intention to "be at home" in the world.

"[We] must learn to live with other people," ER writes. "If [we] are going to belong to a world society [we] must be trained to cope with it, neither to follow nor to dominate, but to cooperate as mutually self-respecting human begins."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-ward-iii/caring-for-others-will-save-the-world_b_3428309.html Caring for Others Will Save the World  Posted: 06/12/2013 11:31 am by Joseph Ward III Director, Believe Out Loud