Trans/cending Belief

My closest friends are trans-men and lesbians, along with a few "normal" straight people and a gay guy or two. I write that partially out of disbelief, partially out of pride. One of the most difficult things since moving to Berkeley has been attempting to navigate queer culture. I am from the Midwest, after all, where there are males and females and most people are straight, though some are not. It was all so much simpler back home. You are, more or less, what you look like--if you look like a man, you are a man; if you look like a woman, you are a woman. Here, though, looks are often deceiving. The binaries which are so ingrained in me that I don't even think about them--male/female, straight/gay--are essentially meaningless. Instead, I am learning, and often stumbling over, a whole new vocabulary--straight, queer, gay, lesbian, trans, intersex, cis, they (as a single pronoun) and so on and so forth. It has been, in many ways, more overwhelming than being a PhD student. 

And I have been struggling with it. A LOT.

I joke about being from the Midwest, but it really does explain so much about me. I mean, I grew up in an area where no one was gay, or at least no one was willing to admit to being gay because we all knew that homosexuality was one of those deadly sins that sends you straight to hell. The first gay person I ever (knowingly) met was my freshman roommate in undergrad, and that was a bizarre experience--she told me the first night she was gay and that thirty second conversation was the longest conversation we ever had. It was not until I got to seminary that I encountered and became friends with gay students. It was at that point that I had to rethink my understanding of homosexuality and its relationship to sin. It also helped that I was taking Greek, where we specifically learned about the Greek behind the passages that are (mis)used against homosexuality. But here these people were, my friends, who are just like me, good and God-loving people. How could I determine that they were hell-bound? And so my theology changed.

Of course, being gay or a lesbian is different than being queer and it is most definitely different than being trans. I had no conception of what it meant for someone to be "queer," and, well, weren't transgender people essentially saying that God got it wrong? I mean, doesn't God know if you are meant to be a boy or a girl? But then I moved to Berkeley and actually met people who are trans, and lo and behold, they too are just like me, good and God-loving. Once again, I am left asking myself how they could be excluded from God's family. Once again, my theology is changing.

These past couple of weeks, since I took the Greek exam, I have spent a lot of time pondering questions of what it means to be trans or queer or gay or lesbian or even straight. And I have been talking to my friends about it, especially my trans friends. I want to know how to talk about these things without making ignorant and unintentionally hurtful remarks. Because I am still figuring it out. And I have a feeling I will continue to be figuring it out until I get a chance to ask God face-to-face. Does God get it wrong sometimes? Or have we gotten it all wrong with our strict binary system? Did God make them, male and female, or did God make them ha'adam, gender-less and gender-full? Have we complicated things by trying to reduce everything to two simple options--male/female, straight/gay, right/wrong?

I tell my mom stories about my friends and my experiences, and she says, "What is the world coming to?" I say, "You can't judge something you don't know." 

Talking to a friend today about gender identities and all the variations, I finally asked, partially out of frustration, partially out of a deep longing, "Can't we all just be people?" Trans, female, straight, male, gay, queer, intersex, lesbian, cis--whatever "label" one is--aren't we all still people? Are any of us any less made in the image of God because our sexual or gender identity doesn't align with what someone else thinks it should? God breathed life into ha'adam, that mysterious creature whose gender is indeterminate, and so regardless of who you are, regardless of how you identify, I am discovering that the breath of God in me longs to meet and know the breath of God in you.