Telling Our Stories
Hi, my name is Phoenix, and I’m a Unitarian-Universalist. (Sounds like the opening of a group therapy session, doesn’t it?) I’m also a musician and entertainer, a teacher, a writer, and a nontraditional Pagan... and I have recently come out as a Transgender individual.
For those who don’t know me, I’ll tell you my tale.
My church home is a small UU congregation in balmy southern New England, where I’ve been getting gradually more and more deeply involved since around 2010. I’m a choir member, a committee chair, a contributor of lay services and special music, and these days I find myself involved in wrestling with some of the long-term challenges of helping our congregation move forward after a long period of focus on survival and maintenance.
And just when my community thought they knew me well - well enough to have elected me to the small and select Search committee that helped choose our new minister - I threw them the curve ball of all curve balls: I told them that I’m not really the gender they’ve perceived me to be.
I am a female-bodied person who has spent the last fifteen years or so self-identifying (but not always very loudly) as Genderqueer - an umbrella term for folks who either don’t fit the standard gender dichotomy, or don’t choose to honor it. It was an often frustrating compromise, though I wasn’t sure why or what I was compromising with. I just knew I’d never felt like what I was supposed to be, and I couldn’t seem to find any better way to express it.
Not surprisingly, it took the passing of my mom, who’d been deeply attached to her “little girl,” for my brain to finally start asking the right questions. When an almost violent reaction to the word “daughter" in the eulogy prompted our perceptive new minister to ask me, “So, what’s your pronoun?", I heard myself start to give all of my usual answers: that I didn’t worry about it, that the whole pronoun thing was just too complicated, that I was accustomed since childhood to “she” and “her” anyway so it was no big deal... and, listening to myself, suddenly all of that felt very, very false. I think I stammered something about how maybe I needed to rethink the pronoun thing after all, and changed the subject.
And rethink it I did. It helped that I’d promised to co-lead an LGBTQ-oriented service that Spring, and the thought of getting up there and telling smooth, comfortable lies about where I personally was on the spectrum felt horribly bad and wrong. I needed to figure out what my truth was. I wrote and rewrote my personal reflection until the act of working my way through it became a form of journaling.
I don’t remember how I got there, but I remember the moment of recognition. I think my most coherent thought was: Sh*t. Quickly followed by: Seriously? And then: Unbelievable...
But... true. It was clear as a bell - a big, loud, deafening bell, the kind where they hand you a pair of earmuffs before they let you ring it - and felt completely right:
My pronoun is “he.” “He” and “him” and “his.”
I think I may have repeated “Sh*t...” at that point...
I outed myself from the pulpit at that service. I told my story - and my church community stood and applauded. And if I haven’t said this clearly enough to those of you who were present, and those who have been supportive since then, I’ll say it now: THANK YOU. I could never have gotten there without you. Without a safe and supporting space where people who care about me would make an honest try to understand and embrace my reality, even if it was uncomfortable.
I had no idea how easy or hard that embracing would be, though, or how far it would go. I knew that my congregation had experienced some difficult issues in the past with at least one gender-nonconforming individual. When we did the congregational survey for our recent Ministerial Search, it had turned up just two categories of identity that the majority said they would not want in a minister: one was “Politically Conservative,” and the other was “Transgender”. Ouch!
You can bet I thought about that as I made the decision to come out. Nonetheless, I trusted - and correctly so - that my truth and I would not be rejected out of hand.
And I’m truly glad I did.
But in some ways, the act of coming out is the easy part. Now, in the aftermath of that revelation, I’m still busy processing - because suddenly everything needs reprocessing. My experience of the world, of mainstream identity and Queer identity. My sense of how we all relate to each other as humans, what we need and what we give. My own dreams and goals, and the reasons why I haven’t pursued them. My sense of what church should be all about, and how we can make it that.
And thus, this online journal.
One of the things I most wanted to do by coming out, besides bravely (or perhaps foolishly, but at least loudly for once) stating my own truth, was to open a conversation, an ongoing dialogue about mainstream and alternative experiences of sex and gender... how we differ from each other, what we can learn from those differences, and why that matters. I have long felt that, as UUs, we should be not just a people among whom differences are not rejected (a people of “live and let live"), but rather, a people among whom differences are deeply explored and actively celebrated. In other words, I feel like the standard UU message tends to be, “You’re welcome here, we don’t care who you are” - and I would rather it be, “You’re welcome here, and we’d really like to learn more about who you are, and what new experiences of the world you bring to our community.”
We can be very good at doing this when it comes to belief systems, especially intellectual explorations of religion and philosophy. It’s more rare for us to get down to a feeling level, and to do this with others whose gut experience of the world may be extremely different from our own - those of other racial and cultural identity, socioeconomic background, nonmainstream gender experience or sexual orientation.
I recently helped facilitate a class in which one of our aims was to break the “taboo” that exists around talking about money. Those who were able to stick it out to the end experienced some deep moments of sharing that felt genuinely transformative, both in our individual lives and in our feeling of connection with each other.
I would like for us to begin discussing sex and gender, and our own experiences in that realm, in that same way. Break the taboos... raise more questions... wonder more about the world, share more of ourselves, ask more about each other. Because there is a real divergence of experience here, not only between the mainstream and the LGBT spectrum, but also within each of those realms. Identity is complex, and humanity is a rich tapestry, not just a seven-shade Crayola rainbow.
We need to hear, not just each other’s thoughts, but also each other’s stories.
We like to remind ourselves, in our service opening, that the person sitting next to us may have different beliefs. Well, the person sitting next to us may also have a profoundly different experience of the world (both the inner world and the outer one) than we do. And I think this is not only fascinating, but also infinitely valuable to us as a community - if we dare to make use of it - by stretching our ability to understand the whole of the human experience. And that makes us better able to be a community that genuinely draws, welcomes, and embraces people from all realms of that human experience.
Yet it’s so easy to assume that our own experience is somehow universal, especially when it comes to those “uncomplicated,” baseline things. And to feel awkward about asking someone else how their experience might vary, for fear of offending.
And so I want to close this first entry with an invitation:
I am in the beginning stages of a deep transition of identity that affects not only me, but also those with whom I live and work and play and worship. I’m not easily embarrassed, and I’m not easily offended, so please... don’t dance around any questions you may have, even if they feel silly or intrusive. (If it’s intrusive I’ll explain why, and if it’s silly we can laugh together!)
I invite you to talk with me about this - about my own experience, and about Trans and LGBT issues in general. To reach beyond your comfort zone. Tell me what you think and feel, ask me for information, ponder assumptions with me. Let’s engage with this together.
Because this is one of the most fascinating things I’ll ever do in my life, and I want to explore it fully.
Because this is one of the most important things I’ll ever do in my life, and I want to make it matter.
Because this is life, and we’re all in it together.
For those who don’t know me, I’ll tell you my tale.
My church home is a small UU congregation in balmy southern New England, where I’ve been getting gradually more and more deeply involved since around 2010. I’m a choir member, a committee chair, a contributor of lay services and special music, and these days I find myself involved in wrestling with some of the long-term challenges of helping our congregation move forward after a long period of focus on survival and maintenance.
And just when my community thought they knew me well - well enough to have elected me to the small and select Search committee that helped choose our new minister - I threw them the curve ball of all curve balls: I told them that I’m not really the gender they’ve perceived me to be.
I am a female-bodied person who has spent the last fifteen years or so self-identifying (but not always very loudly) as Genderqueer - an umbrella term for folks who either don’t fit the standard gender dichotomy, or don’t choose to honor it. It was an often frustrating compromise, though I wasn’t sure why or what I was compromising with. I just knew I’d never felt like what I was supposed to be, and I couldn’t seem to find any better way to express it.
Not surprisingly, it took the passing of my mom, who’d been deeply attached to her “little girl,” for my brain to finally start asking the right questions. When an almost violent reaction to the word “daughter" in the eulogy prompted our perceptive new minister to ask me, “So, what’s your pronoun?", I heard myself start to give all of my usual answers: that I didn’t worry about it, that the whole pronoun thing was just too complicated, that I was accustomed since childhood to “she” and “her” anyway so it was no big deal... and, listening to myself, suddenly all of that felt very, very false. I think I stammered something about how maybe I needed to rethink the pronoun thing after all, and changed the subject.
And rethink it I did. It helped that I’d promised to co-lead an LGBTQ-oriented service that Spring, and the thought of getting up there and telling smooth, comfortable lies about where I personally was on the spectrum felt horribly bad and wrong. I needed to figure out what my truth was. I wrote and rewrote my personal reflection until the act of working my way through it became a form of journaling.
I don’t remember how I got there, but I remember the moment of recognition. I think my most coherent thought was: Sh*t. Quickly followed by: Seriously? And then: Unbelievable...
But... true. It was clear as a bell - a big, loud, deafening bell, the kind where they hand you a pair of earmuffs before they let you ring it - and felt completely right:
My pronoun is “he.” “He” and “him” and “his.”
I think I may have repeated “Sh*t...” at that point...
I outed myself from the pulpit at that service. I told my story - and my church community stood and applauded. And if I haven’t said this clearly enough to those of you who were present, and those who have been supportive since then, I’ll say it now: THANK YOU. I could never have gotten there without you. Without a safe and supporting space where people who care about me would make an honest try to understand and embrace my reality, even if it was uncomfortable.
I had no idea how easy or hard that embracing would be, though, or how far it would go. I knew that my congregation had experienced some difficult issues in the past with at least one gender-nonconforming individual. When we did the congregational survey for our recent Ministerial Search, it had turned up just two categories of identity that the majority said they would not want in a minister: one was “Politically Conservative,” and the other was “Transgender”. Ouch!
You can bet I thought about that as I made the decision to come out. Nonetheless, I trusted - and correctly so - that my truth and I would not be rejected out of hand.
And I’m truly glad I did.
But in some ways, the act of coming out is the easy part. Now, in the aftermath of that revelation, I’m still busy processing - because suddenly everything needs reprocessing. My experience of the world, of mainstream identity and Queer identity. My sense of how we all relate to each other as humans, what we need and what we give. My own dreams and goals, and the reasons why I haven’t pursued them. My sense of what church should be all about, and how we can make it that.
And thus, this online journal.
One of the things I most wanted to do by coming out, besides bravely (or perhaps foolishly, but at least loudly for once) stating my own truth, was to open a conversation, an ongoing dialogue about mainstream and alternative experiences of sex and gender... how we differ from each other, what we can learn from those differences, and why that matters. I have long felt that, as UUs, we should be not just a people among whom differences are not rejected (a people of “live and let live"), but rather, a people among whom differences are deeply explored and actively celebrated. In other words, I feel like the standard UU message tends to be, “You’re welcome here, we don’t care who you are” - and I would rather it be, “You’re welcome here, and we’d really like to learn more about who you are, and what new experiences of the world you bring to our community.”
We can be very good at doing this when it comes to belief systems, especially intellectual explorations of religion and philosophy. It’s more rare for us to get down to a feeling level, and to do this with others whose gut experience of the world may be extremely different from our own - those of other racial and cultural identity, socioeconomic background, nonmainstream gender experience or sexual orientation.
I recently helped facilitate a class in which one of our aims was to break the “taboo” that exists around talking about money. Those who were able to stick it out to the end experienced some deep moments of sharing that felt genuinely transformative, both in our individual lives and in our feeling of connection with each other.
I would like for us to begin discussing sex and gender, and our own experiences in that realm, in that same way. Break the taboos... raise more questions... wonder more about the world, share more of ourselves, ask more about each other. Because there is a real divergence of experience here, not only between the mainstream and the LGBT spectrum, but also within each of those realms. Identity is complex, and humanity is a rich tapestry, not just a seven-shade Crayola rainbow.
We need to hear, not just each other’s thoughts, but also each other’s stories.
We like to remind ourselves, in our service opening, that the person sitting next to us may have different beliefs. Well, the person sitting next to us may also have a profoundly different experience of the world (both the inner world and the outer one) than we do. And I think this is not only fascinating, but also infinitely valuable to us as a community - if we dare to make use of it - by stretching our ability to understand the whole of the human experience. And that makes us better able to be a community that genuinely draws, welcomes, and embraces people from all realms of that human experience.
Yet it’s so easy to assume that our own experience is somehow universal, especially when it comes to those “uncomplicated,” baseline things. And to feel awkward about asking someone else how their experience might vary, for fear of offending.
And so I want to close this first entry with an invitation:
I am in the beginning stages of a deep transition of identity that affects not only me, but also those with whom I live and work and play and worship. I’m not easily embarrassed, and I’m not easily offended, so please... don’t dance around any questions you may have, even if they feel silly or intrusive. (If it’s intrusive I’ll explain why, and if it’s silly we can laugh together!)
I invite you to talk with me about this - about my own experience, and about Trans and LGBT issues in general. To reach beyond your comfort zone. Tell me what you think and feel, ask me for information, ponder assumptions with me. Let’s engage with this together.
Because this is one of the most fascinating things I’ll ever do in my life, and I want to explore it fully.
Because this is one of the most important things I’ll ever do in my life, and I want to make it matter.
Because this is life, and we’re all in it together.
~Phoenix, 7/17/2014
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