I was still twenty-two when I began worshipping with these people. They were Mennonites with their own house church. I was weary of the charismatic fundamentalism to which I had been accustomed and my dalliances with the Catholic charismatics and with the Christian social justice movement had left me feeling a strong itch for something different. I was at the time living in a rather intense and dysfunctional Christian Community associated with an evangelical-fundamentalist organization called Youth With A Mission (YWAM or Y not WAM?). I had a friend there, an American who had just spent nearly a year in Kabul, Afghanistan, shortly before the Russian invasion, in a Christian community house called Dilaram, or Peaceful Heart in Farsi. It was a more liberal, humanistic and culturally diverse version of YWAM and this person really inspired me to embrace social justice as part of my Christian witness. None of the Christians I knew at the time seemed interested or in agreement with the need to embrace this type of activity so on Jeff's recommendation I began to visit and worship Sundays with the Green House.
It was I that named them the Green House. It was a no-brainer. They lived in an old green wooden house in East Vancouver that they collectively owned. Five of them lived there. I was not ready for the riot of visual stimulation the first time I visited. The walls and almost every surface were covered with original art, art objects and antiques. Five people lived there and four others including your humble scribe visited to worship together Sundays. The people were kind and very hospitable, if a little stiff and formal in some ways. my very loose and casual hippy demeanour seemed to both charm and annoy them and I soon learned that apart from Sunday worship, if I wanted to visit I would have to phone and book an appointment first. In those days, no one I knew phoned first and everyone just dropped in on everyone else. Now that I am much busier I understand now the wisdom of phoning first and I would never dream of dropping in unannounced on someone.
They were Mennonites and they sang from a Mennonite hymnal. Some were classically trained musicians, including our organist. They had an antique pump organ that took up a good part of the living room. Our prayers together were mostly silent. We were each given pieces of paper and pencils with which to write down our intercessions and prayer requests and the moderator would gather them up and read them aloud. Following the service we convened for lunch, though in the summer, since we met at 5 it would be for dinner. We each took turns providing salad, soup, bread or cheese.
As well as inquiring as to how best to glorify Christ in working for peace and justice we were doing a kind of informal gender studies course together which was rather ongoing. We used as a founding hypothesis St. Paul's teaching that there is neither male or female but all are one in Christ. This wasn't simply Biblical Feminism but an attempt to understand gender outside of the patriarchal and cultural blinders of traditional Christian teaching. We believed that all people are essentially androgynous and that sex roles and stereotypes are so deeply taught and entrenched that we are all virtually brainwashed from infancy to live-out very narrowly defined gender roles of socially acceptable masculinity and femininity.
For me this was a huge breath of fresh air, given that I had never felt strongly male or masculine. While I have never identified as female I have always been androgynous and worshipping with a faith community where this was approved and sanctioned was like manna from heaven for me. Never in my life have I intentionally dressed or wanted to dress or present myself as female and I have to admit that my wardrobe is strongly traditionally working class masculine. The person I have always felt myself to be is something altogether different. I have always been creative and pacifist and non-competitive with a strong nurturing streak. I have never been interested in sports, or cars, or business, or dating, or making sexual conquests or stupid idiot male jock behaviour. Yet I have also always had a strong temper and a flair for ribaldry and borderline and often very sick humour. And I enjoy cooking. And baking. Et Cetera.
Where we were a bit mistaken was in our insistence that all people are androgynous in denial. There has since been plenty of research done more or less proving that gender differences are every bit as genetic as they are acquired, but not in every single case, so I think there is a need here to take care that diversity is fully respected and encouraged. Still I think it is appropriate and I think beneficial and even essential that men, regardless of their score on the masculinity scale, acquire a bit of yin (feminine) to balance and temper the masculine yang and vice-versa for women.
I do feel unsettled about gender reassignment, not because I am against transgender people (I most certainly am not) but because I think this kind of surgery to be something really drastic and invasive. Yet many people who have undergone the surgery claim that their wellbeing and quality of life has skyrocketed since going under the scalpel. It rather flies in the face of one of my beliefs, that our bodily integrity is a holistic part of our personhood, which is to say that being born female, regardless of your gender identity, that that should be left sacrosanct and that as a condition of growth one should learn to reconcile the paradox of being a man in a woman's body, or a woman with the body of a man. Perhaps with transgender people there is a refusal or an inability to accept that perhaps they are really androgynous and not recognizing this brings into an exaggerated focus the gender with which they identify, or to put it another way, they are not able to get past the traditional black and white thinking of socially defined gender roles and eventually end up having to undergo this drastic reassignment surgery in order to feel good about themselves. I could be mistaken and I am only offering a guess and perhaps a very lame guess at that. On the other hand, if the essential biological identifier of femininity or femaleness is the ability or at least the potential ability of conceiving and bearing children out of one's body, then there is no man in the world with gender dysforia who has even a snowball's chance in hell of becoming a real woman regardless the surgical and hormonal interventions; and neither will any woman be able to conceive a child as a man.
Whether male or female, masculine, feminine transgender or androgynous or whatever I think it is really important that we try to stay away from gender definitions as much as possible in the way we define our humanity. The best human qualities: love, faithfulness, trust, loyalty, integrity, gentleness, strength of character and honesty are universals and not the sole property of either gender. Also a good dose of non-judgmental acceptance and respect for those who undergo gender reassignment and supporting them in the difficult and often challenging process of transitioning from one gender to another.
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