Get Her Words Out

Why alone?

Why is it 6 or 11 years since intimacy, or even closeness?

I've thought about this today and come up with several answers and they probably all contribute to it.

The first and largest is that I have spent most of my life hiding.  Even before I had words like transgender for who I am, I knew that I was different and that I needed to hide.  It was easier and often more fun to be alone than it was to be with other people.  When I was alone I could be me, I didn't have to filter my reactions or worry that I was going to give something away. 

Then, my self-image was so bad that I truly believed that people didn't want me around.  I knew me, it seemed to me that not wanting me around was a perfectly rational way to feel.  This belief ended up being very circular:  I believed that people didn't want me around them, so I would distance myself from them.  Which they would perceive as my not wanting to be around them, so they would distance themselves from me.  Which only reinforced my original belief.

The third thing is that while I was busy hiding and distancing myself, other people were learning things like flirting and dating.  I don't know how to flirt, I don't understand flirting, and I don't think that I would recognize flirting if anyone was ever inclined to flirt with me.  I have watched people doing things that are labeled "flirtatious," watched people playing girl-boy games, and I just don't get them, I don't know how they work, or why they would be good things to do.  It is very problematic to try to recreate behavior that you don't understand, because you also don't understand the limits.

Now, I am not hiding anymore, and I am learning to believe that people do want me around, but there was no one waiting at the end of the tunnel, and I don't know how to find someone, or where to look, really.

On the plus side, I have started to make real, close friends for the first time.  Four afternoons this week I went to Starbucks with friends to just sit and talk.  Last night, a friend called and said, "we're trying to figure out what to do tonight, come join us."  In the old days those things would have been unheard of.  To have a couple of hours to sit and talk to someone, to have their attention for that long would have been something to cherish for months, and it happened four times this week.

Things are getting better.  It's hard to remember that sometimes, especially at 3 a.m.

trans gender
trans-gender
transponder
transcend
transgenic
Edit...
Ignore all
Add to dictionary

labeled
la bled
la-bled
lab led
lab-led
Edit...
Revert to "labled"

no one
no-one
none
noon
Nonie
Edit...
Revert to "noone"

Ranting at 3 a.m.

We're in between terms here and I've really got nothing to do, which always ends up being a problem.

Anyway, for no good reason, I started to watch Two and a Half Men on CBS tonight, which I have done maybe once before.  I had to turn it off after five minutes because the premise of the episode was so offensive and painful.  The episode was about how hard it was on the Charlie Sheen character to be in this relationship with a beautiful woman and after an entire month to not have had sex with her.  They even had a video montage of scenes showing frustrating it was for the poor man.  I didn't know whether to scream or cry.  This is just as offensive as that stupid 40 Days and 40 Nights movie a few years ago.   Are there truly real people in the world who are traumatized by going a whole month without sex?

There is this whole genre of comedies that are based on how terribly hard things like this are on the beautiful people in the world, over on ABC there's Emily's Reasons Why Not to show us how difficult it is for Heather Graham, Heather Graham, to find a good relationship.  Not just a relationship, but the perfect relationship.  What could I possibly take from that except to confirm that I am doomed to be alone for the rest of my life, because if it is that hard for Heather Graham, it's going to be impossible for me.

They all just make me want to scream at the TV, "you think that's bad?  Try my life."

I've talked to people about how lonely and disconnected from the rest of the world I feel, but I don't know if I ever really manage to communicate just how deep those feelings are.

I was recently telling  a couple of people about how I often come to meals in the school's cafeteria not to eat but because I am lonely.  One of them seemed surprised that I would feel lonely at breakfast time.  I just said yes I do, but I really wanted to explain that I am lonely when I wake up, I'm lonely when I go to bed and I am lonely in between.

For most of my adult life the norm has been for me to go home after work and to have no human interaction until I went back to work the next morning.  And when I was not involved in a church, that meant that it was not uncommon for me to go from Friday afternoon to Monday morning without talking to another person.  At least with a church, I only had to make it to Sunday.

Right now, it has been six years since I was close enough to someone, intimate enough with them, to hold their hand, to sit with my arm around them as we watched TV, to kiss them.  Six years.  And I have no reason to think that that is going to change anytime soon, the last interval was eleven years.  I guess that I just don't have the stamina that I used to have, I really don't know how I'll make it another five years, but I'm afraid I am going to find out.

And as for poor Charlie Sheen and his whole month without sex.  The first time I had sex I was 19 (She was also my first kiss).  The last time I had sex I was 19 (Same woman).  I am going to turn 41 in March.  To say the least, I have very little sympathy for him.

The Final Version...

...of my letter to the Presbytery is up in "Other Writings" in the sidebar.

The Second Question

And here's what I have for question number 2:

The second question that I hear is, “by doing this, aren’t you going against God’s will or plan for you?”  Or, “isn’t what your doing unnatural?”

Yes it is true that I was born in a man’s body and not in a woman’s.  It is also true that I was born with poor eyesight and high blood pressure.  If working to make the first one more bearable is unnatural or against God’s plan for me, how can we say that the things I do to deal with the others are not?

   

Psalm 139:1  O LORD, you have searched me and known me. 2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. 3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

Who I am is no surprise to God.  As the Psalmist says God is acquainted with all our ways, and just as I said earlier that God has the power to bring good out of bad, I also have faith that God plans for us as we are.

God’s plan for me includes that I am who I am.  Getting stuck in wishing that things could be other than what they are is a human failing.  God is a realist.  God works with what God has.

This is a hard path, but God does not call us to always follow the easy path, nor has God ever promised us responding to God’s call will be easy. 

We see time and again through out the biblical witness that Israel being God’s chosen people did not mean that they would never see hardship, that their path would always be easy.

As the great theologian, my mother, has asked, if being a Christian meant that bad things would never happen to us, how could we ever relate to the people we are supposed to carry the Good News to?  How could we relate to them, how could we help them in their pain if we never know any pain ourselves?

We speak of there being two components to a call, a personal, inner sense of call that drives a person forward through this process, and a communal, external understanding that pushes that person along.  Before I started dealing honestly and faithfully with who I am, my self-esteem and self-understanding were so low that I was relying almost exclusively on the second component.  People I knew, people I trusted kept telling me that I was called to this work, and pushed me to come to seminary.

An amazing thing has happened since I living into my true identity: I have grown in confidence and have learned to see myself in a positive light, to believe that I can do this work and that I am called to it.  I believe that this growth has been reflected in a great improvement in the quality of my sermons and in my ability to provide pastoral care.  Until I could see myself as a person of value, I could never really treat others as valuable.  What convinces me that I am following the right path is that the farther I have gone down this path the more sure I have become of my call.

I know that God knows me and has always known who I really am, even when I didn’t.  Through both external and internal evidence I have come to believe that I have been called by God to the work of ministry.  Those two things together say to me that there are people that God needs me to serve, as the person that God truly knows me to be.

The First Question

What I have so far:

The first question that people raise is “do you think that God made a mistake?”  In other words, do I blame God for this circumstance?

It would be very easy for me to beat my breast, tear at my hair and wail about how I have been cursed by God with this affliction.  Not only would it be easy, there would be a certain comfort and freedom there.  If this is God’s fault, if this is something God has done to me, then I am freed from struggling to get beyond assigning blame and I can settle into a warm and comfortable place of feeling sorry for myself.

But, as tempting as it may be to play Job, I don’t think that’s a place where we are supposed to stay.  Self-pity and blaming our problems on God are not what we are created for.

God looked at creation and called it good, Paul tells us that “all things work together for good,” but he also tells us that creation is groaning in labor pains waiting for the coming times.

We know that through the redeeming death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has done what needs to be done to redeem us and all of creation.  But, we don’t take that knowledge to mean that every thing should always go the way that we want it to go.  The processes of nature are complex and we don’t expect God to interfere with them simply we want them to be different.  We don’t expect God to stop the rain just because we want to go golfing, and we don’t blame God when the bread falls butter side down.

No, where we meet the power of God is not in God’s preventing bad things from happening to us, but in God’s ability to bring good out of worst that happens to us.  My comfort is not that God will wrap me in cotton wool and keep anything from happening to me, my comfort, my only comfort is that in life and in death, and through everything that happens to me is that:

I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Do I think God made a mistake?  No.  I trust that the sovereign Lord of all creation doesn’t make mistakes.  Do I blame God for my being Transgendered?  No.  I believe that whether society or I decide that being Transgendered is a blessing or a curse, God has the power to use me and my condition for good, if I but trust in God to guide me.

For the non-Presbyterians reading this, the quote is the answer to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism, "What is your only comfort, in life and in death?"

Two Questions

I've made it back to Atlanta, and it's time to go back to school.

In the next couple of weeks, I also have to write a scriptural and theological defense of transgender.  I go up in front of my Presbytery to become a candidate in February and my CPM has asked me to have this written by the 17th of January.

Right now, I think I'll go at it through addressing two questions that are asked of me, over and over.

The first is "do you think that God made a mistake?" The second is, "by living into this transgendered identity, are you going against God's plan for you?"

Needless to say, I have some pretty strong opinions on both those questions.  I just need to work out how to frame those opinions in a biblical and doctrinal framework.

I'll post what I come up with here and, if there is anybody out there, I would love to get some feedback on what works and what doesn't.