The Prism of a Human Life

A prism in action

The Transgender Day of Remembrance Memorial Service last night was beautiful, moving, and inspiring. Thanks go to the entire planning team (Debra Crawford, Beth Harrison Prado, Jenny Howard, Erin Long, Debra Mumford) as well as to Chapel Ministers Josh Robinson and Bree Harmon for designing and bringing together a beautiful service; to Christine for her moving words about the purpose of the Transgender Day of Remembrance, to musicians Harry Pickens and Carol Kraemer for music that spoke deeply to the spirit and mood of the occasion, and to featured speaker Beth Harrison Prado for her moving, enlightening, and inspiring words.

Thanks, also, to the 40 or so souls who braved the unseasonable cold and even flurries of snow to attend the service.

Special thanks go, as well, to the community members who shared their personal experiences and views with the seminary community at the panel discussion earlier in the day, on transgender experiences of faith communities. Thank you, Holly, Emma, Kayla, and Taylor, and thank you, Tina, for organizing the presentation! It helped put the significance of the memorial service in perspective — the perspective of a community whose members all too often find the doors of chapels and churches closed, and arms crossed in disapproval rather than open wide in welcome.

For those who missed the festive reception in Winn Center following the memorial, the recipient of the 2008 Butterfly Award was this year’s memorial service speaker, and long-time transgender activist, Beth Harrison Prado.

There was more — much more — in yesterday’s events, discussions, conversations, and words than I can include here at this moment. But here is one of the words that struck me with particular clarity: “prism.”

Beth, in her address last night, used the phrase “the prism that is me.” It was in the context of pointing out that all of us are more — much more — than the convenient label (transgender, gay, lesbian, straight, black, white, working class, middle aged, . . . ) that focuses someone’s attention on some single facet of our whole being at some particular moment. Those labels name important things, about our experiences; those labels relate us to an overarching structure in some important way; but each of those things is only part, a fragment, of all that we are.

If we would live into all that we are, if we would speak the truth of our larger selves with our whole lives, . . .

Indeed. Theodor Adorno said philosophy is the prism in which the unquenchable color of life is caught, the unquenchable color that comes from the realm of real possibilities, as yet unrealized. But with all due respect to Adorno, I think Beth is more accurate: not philosophy, but philosophers, are the prism. Philosophers — lovers of wisdom, but more truly, seekers of wisdom, seekers of the wisdom of love* — each one of us, in the end — are the prism that allows us to catch a glimpse of the brilliant possibilities of the world we still work for, dream for, and hope for.

* from Luce Irigaray, The Wisdom of Love

 

White in Memoriam

Transgender Day of Remembrance Nov. 20

Wimminwise is draped in white today, the color of funerals and memorials in China, to commemorate the Transgender Day of Remembrance. (We use white this year, where we used black last year, to remind ourselves and our readers that our use of symbols, even the cultural symbolism of color, matters — and that even in our world, it is not the case that one color must always, everywhere, represent the negative.)

The Transgender Day of Remembrance is being observed on the Louisville Seminary campus today in two events: a panel discussion of “Transgender Experiences of Faith Communities,” 12:30-1:30, in Winn Center; and a Memorial Service that names and remembers transgender lives lost to violence during the past year, 7:00 p.m., in Caldwell Chapel. A reception follows, in Winn Center Lounge, during which the 2008 Butterfly Award for outstanding contributions to the local transgender community will be presented. [More on these events]

We observe the Transgender Day of Remembrance because we believe that every human life, made and given by God, is precious. Every human life deserves our recognition — recognition of our kindred humanity, our relationship, and our responsibility. No human life is disposable, no human life negligible — although the powers of the air* would have us believe otherwise. In naming and remembering individuals who have died — been killed — because of their gender presentation, we affirm our common humanity (. . . the communion of saints . . .), and our faith that death is not the final verdict (. . . the resurrection of the body . . .), but that a gracious God makes and gives life anew ( . . . and the life everlasting . . .).

* Eph. 2:2

 

Soldier’s Girl Screens Tonight

2003 Showtime Film Soldier's Girl deals with transgender theme

The Peabody Award-winning film Soldier’s Girl will screen tonight, Wednesday, Nov. 19, at 6:30 p.m. (doors open 6:00 p.m.) in the Fellowship Hall of Caldwell Chapel. The film screening, with discussion afterwards, is one of the events associated with the observance of the Transgender Day of Remembrance at Louisville Seminary. (More information on the film is available in the Internet Movie Database entry on Soldier’s Girl)

The film dramatizes a true story, the events of which unfolded in nearby Fort Campbell. Its presentation of the relationship of an army private and a transgender civilian, and its tragic end, raises many issues about the complex relationships of gender identity, gender presentation, social roles and expectations, and what constitutes compassionate and ethical response to that complexity.

One of the principal characters in the story, Calpernia Addams, was propelled into transgender activism by the events. A brief tribute to Pfc. Barry Winchell is online at Unfinished Lives, an ongoing project of Rev. Stephen V. Sprinkle and Brite Divinity School.

 

Gender Complexity

I keep wondering just how much the many different configurations of body, gender, presentation and behavior (words from the Trans 101: Terms and Concepts workshop yesterday) that fit under the big umbrella of “transgender” are asked to fit there because of the rigidity of the binary gender packages of “male” and “female”, “men” and “women.” As presenter Beth Harrison-Prado noted at the outset, “transgender” is above all a word — albeit freighted with meaning in our culture — and a word required by people’s growing recognition that gender in real life, rather than in the movies, magazines, and the conventional popular cultural imagination, is complex and immensely variable.

In fact, while probably all of us have heard talk of “natural” gender imperatives, it is reasonably clear that there is a lot of energy devoted to enforcing, culturally, the results those imperatives are supposed to produce. I don’t know how many millions of marketing dollars have gone into convincing my daughter, for instance, that Hannah Montana is the paradigm girl, but I know it’s enough that it’s hard work for Mom to counteract.

This just illustrates, for me, the continuity between what we sometimes call “women’s issues” and our consideration of transgender issues, especially around the time of the Transgender Day of Remembrance. The cultural enforcement of gender “correctness” or “propriety” has taken its toll on women down through the ages, the kind of toll depending on what was considered “correct” or “proper” in the context. Women have been variously deprived of education and books, locked in corsets or in rooms, restricted to one or two lifelong occupations regardless of personal aptitude, . . . well, we could go on.

As we know, the enforcement of gender standards can take a violent and even deadly turn. Hence the Transgender Day of Remembrance. One day, let us hope, we will have faced the reality of gender complexity so honestly that no one will any longer feel the need to enforce a simplicity that is belied by the complexity that now travels under the banner of “transgender.”

 

Transgender 101 Coming Tomorrow

Transgender: one of the facts of life

If you don’t know “intersex” from “cross-dressing,” or more importantly, what it could possibly have to do with preparing a Wednesday night Bible study, then the upcoming Transgender 101 workshop (Thursday, 12:30, Winn Center-McAtee A) is for you!

Beth Harrison-Prado, local transgender educator and activist, will lead attendees through a condensed introduction to basic tems, concepts, and facts about transgender. In the process, she will address some of the silence around transgender, dispel some of the myths (for example, that transgender is a fancy word for being gay or lesbian), and make more clear why knowing about transgender matters for someone preparing a Wednesday night Bible study, whether that person is or is not her/himself transgender.

But in case anyone needs some additional encouragement to attend this basic, informative presentation, here are a few advance reasons the content of the Transgender 101 workshop may be relevant to folks doing ministry (whether or not it’s the Wednesday night Bible study), whether or not they are themselves transgender:

1. You may be the only person in a position to dispel a myth that surfaces in conversation — whether the Wednesday night Bible study or elsewhere — and will want to have the information to do it.
2. Transfolk are always someone’s children, grandchildren, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, . . . so are probably already members of your church family.
3. You will probably want to know at least as much about transgender and transgender concerns as the other parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, children . . .
4. Transfolk are children of God . . . so are definitely already members of that family.
5. Transfolk are often people of faith, and for that reason may find their way to the door of a congregation you lead or belong to, if they haven’t already.
6. Transgender is often silent; you may not get a second chance to let someone know you do want to be their neighbor and friend.

The presentation is brown-bag, but otherwise free and open to the public. Sponsors (More Light, Gender & Minstry Committee, and the Women’s Center) hope to see many colleagues there!

 

On Cats, Logic, and the Transgender Day of Remembrance

I have read that in the middle ages in Europe, people actually persecuted cats. [One source: The History of Human-Animal Interaction - The Medieval Period] There was, so I have also read, a religious argument for this cruelty: “cats are the only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible.” And since cats weren’t mentioned in the Bible, this was taken as evidence that God didn’t care about them, that their lives were not blessed. From here, it was a short step to add fear and suspicion of cats to ideas that they were outside the boundaries of God’s real concern to produce conviction that persecution was permissible.

The argument depends on the logical fallacy of “negative proof.” That fallacy draws the conclusion that, if there is no proof for a particular position, then it counts as proof against the position.

People still use this reasoning, if we can call it that, in relation to human lives they find disturbing. Someone once explained to me, fully seriously, that the presence of the Song of Songs in the Bible proves that God disapproves of homosexual relationships. Because the Song of Songs is a text that extols heterosexual physical love. And there is no counterpart Song of Songs for non-heterosexual relationships. So.

“Negative proof” is the underlying structure of the popular anti-universal-marriage slogan “It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

“Negative proof” is also the underlying structure of some responses to transgender lives. The word transgender does not occur in the Bible. And that is enough evidence, for some, that transgender lives don’t count for God, don’t need to count for their neighbors, and don’t qualify for the same care and protection demanded by all other human lives.

Of course, there’s plenty of positive evidence in the Bible that God cares for every member of humankind — including “the eunuchs” (Is. 56:4) and “the barren” (Is. 54:1), sexual categories that provoke less political discussion these days than in 3rd Isaiah’s time. The God who notices when sparrows fall to earth and who numbers the hairs of our heads (Matt. 10:29-31) clearly sets a high value on all kinds of lives. The Bible has a lot to say about “the least.” The evidence there points in the direction of our obligation to take special care and give special protection to those lives, the lives of “the least,” that are most likely to be disregarded and trampled in the life of business-as-usual.

The LPTS observance of the Transgender Day of Remembrance on Thursday, November 20, is one way we align ourselves with that positive proof, and affirm that the Bible does, indeed, mention transgender lives — for instance, when it tells the people of God they shall “love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18).

 

Transgender Day of Remembrance on the Horizon

While our minds this Domestic Violence Awareness Month keep going to back to domestic violence, and the efforts to end that form of violence against women, we remember, too, that domestic violence is just one of the many forms taken by the spectre of violence. Every form of violence has a gender dimension, since we human beings, who practice it as perpetrators and victims, actors and onlookers, never are apart from gender.

Sometimes (as with the violence of war) we forget to notice the deeply gendered character of the violence.

Sometimes (as with domestic violence between partners, which is overwhelmingly male-doer, female-sufferer violence) we resist acknowledging the gendered character of the violence. [It's not uncommon in conversations about the gender issues involved in domestic violence to hear someone say "But, what about men who are battered? What about women who abuse their partners?" And after acknowledging that this phenomenon exists, we have to ask ourselves, what motivates us to turn aside from the statistic that about twice as many women as men suffer partner violence, and that women typically suffer more serious and sustained violence from their male partners than men do from their female partners.]

Sometimes, gender itself is at the heart of the violence. When transgender people die, at the hands of assailants whose identities are most often never learned, there are reasons to believe that the embodiment of transgender itself is what put these people in danger. Gender difference itself becomes the problem. The deep-seated conviction that gender fits a neat, invariant, this-or-that scheme does not hold up in the court of empirical evidence. But the violence directed against transgender folk shows that some would rather suppress the evidence, even violently, to save the clarity of the scheme.

Against that violence, we are called to affirm truth, however challenging it may be to culturally comfortable categories. This year, LPTS will once again host a community observance of the Transgender Day of Remembrance, on Thursday, November 20, along with opportunities for learning and discussion during the preceding week.