Crossing the Boundaries

My sister-in-the-Spirit Cylene has told me they don’t want to be that any more – not because there is a problem between us, but because their dissatisfaction with being female has reached the point where it can only be resolved by not being that. Cylene has been asking us to use nonbinary pronouns for a while, but this is a step further, a determination eventually to move away from a female physical identity, however that may pan out. For me, having known them for nearly 13 years and having framed my sense of who the person I think of as my best friend around them being a woman, it will mean a bit of recalibration. For my own part (as I’ve detailed before) I have never really identified that much with maleness; though that’s the hand that life has dealt me and I’m perfectly content playing it, all my instinctive sympathies are with the female, and the idea of anyone wanting to become male is very alien. But if that’s what Cylene needs to do to achieve some resolution and peace, it’s their life, not mine. I can sense the excitement as they start to settle their new name, even via text message.

In my previous posts on gender politics here and here, I tried to think through my continued belief that sexual difference exists on some level, a belief which the Christian Church does seem committed to, even if we find it hard to distinguish how much is performative and what might be rooted in biology. I continue to consider it. Conservative Christians (and remember, Mr Putin presents himself as one) point to the Creation order to insist that any suggestion that gender has a performative element and people might change that aspect of themselves is wrong and damaging: ‘God created the adam: in his own image he created him; male and female created he them’. In fact this is a much more ambiguous statement than it first appears. It seems to suggest that the adam, the primeval human, is ungendered, and gender comes in as a secondary consideration. But God is beyond binary gender, and both sexes must embody his image, rather than one more than the other. What if, I found myself thinking, this meant that what God creates here is not individuals with a tightly bounded and defined binary gender identity, but maleness and femaleness both of which discrete individuals might partake of? The language doesn't reveal that, but that’s not surprising. I even began to wonder about Jesus: could he perhaps not be as complicatedly male as we are used to thinking? The earliest images of him, in the Roman Catacombs and the Hinton St Mary mosaic from Dorset, show him as a short-haired, clean-shaven Roman in a toga; it isn’t until the later 4^th century that a beard appears on him. Now of course early Christian art depicted all Biblical figures, from Moses to the Magi to St Paul, as short-haired, clean-shaven Romans in togas: the point is not that those images are in any way accurate, but rather that the picture of Jesus we might have in our imagination is a construct, based on assumptions rather than descriptions. At no point do the Biblical texts give us so much as a hint of his appearance. We can make it up. What if the Incarnate word was intersex – something among the great variety of conditions that term can mean? Could he even be a better representative of all humanity if he had been? Of course I am not saying this is the case (I don’t think we could ever know), only that it is possible to imagine it.

Still, I know people who are increasingly committed to the idea that gender doesn’t exist at all: this is not the line Cylene takes, nor is it something the Church can, I think, go along with. I’ve done some thinking about what the spiritual significance of sexual difference might be in previous posts, but as time goes on I wonder more about the performative and socially-determined elements of gender identity, especially if I am on to something that what God creates is a pair of gender poles and not individuals with bounded, settled identities. If this vital organising structure of human identity and relationships is to an extent socially-negotiated, that makes us dependent on each other. Thinking what there is to question when someone has concerns about their gender identity, Christians might want to suggest that genuine and lasting peace isn’t to be found when we turn inward in an attempt to discover and settle who we truly are, but when we seek our identity in the objective, external things we are committed to; when we look beyond ourselves. This applies more broadly than matters of sex and gender, too. They might want to point attention away from individuality, which is a liquid and unsettled thing, towards God. As in everything, that which leads away from God is to be avoided; that which leads towards him, to be followed. Recognising gender as to an extent socially-determined means that our identity in this area isn’t a thing inside us, bounded and discrete, which we then express: it is something we develop in negotiation with those around us and their understanding of us. God has made us radically dependent on one another as a result, not sovereign individuals, but collaborators in a work, players in a common game.