Our True Words Are Powerful Things

Last week, I finally wrote my piece in response to the It Gets Better Project. I sat on the idea of writing it for a long time, unsure of how to talk on this website about my experience, because, while I've written about my gender and sexuality here before, this site has become increasingly more public to friends and family over the last year. In the end, though, I knew that I had to do it, no matter what judgement I might feel from friends, family, and the internet at large, because, although I am happy and comfortable in my own skin now, this was not always the case, and I would have given anything to see myself reflected in the world like this in my teens and twenties.



And so, I wrote about how hard it was while I was hidden and about how much better life is now that I'm on the other side of the closet:

I didn't really start talking about the real truth of who I am until I was in my thirties, and, even now, I don't mention it very often. Coming out, though, writing it down and being open about my identity and experiences, has been nothing short of liberating. I have shifted from someone who felt unworthy and invisible to someone who feels and is worthy and seen.

I am beautiful, and I am loved, and I am here fully in this life in a way that I only dreamed of when I hid what I once thought of as my great sickness but I now know is the gorgeous fact of my personhood and humanity.

As much as I received a lot of positive feedback on that entry, though, time passes quickly on the internet, and it doesn't take long before you feel like your message has been buried and forgotten. I learned today that this is only partially true.

Some of what we write here does get lost under the reams of content we pour into the internet every day, but some of it sticks with people and gets carried further while we're not looking. Some of it keeps going in conversations in middle schools in Iowa, which you find out through an email from a friend:

I was at a girlfriend's house the other night talking with her, another friend, and her 14-year old daughter. The subject of sex came up and then homosexuality and cross dressing. Ultimately, we started talking about the myth of choice and stereotypes.

I brought up your story and the way you have described sexuality and gender as being on two different spectrums. That analogy has always been so powerful for me, and I could tell it made a lot of sense to them.

The next day my [friend] relayed something her daughter had said. She said talking to me really opened her mind up and she went to school and talked about it with her friends.

Middle school kids in small town Iowa are having a better conversation about gender and sexuality this week because you shared your story. Perhaps someone at their lunch table will recognize themselves, or maybe they will remember that conversation later in life when a friend tells them their story. Maybe it will just be an interesting talk they had one day.

Wherever the ripple goes, I wanted you to know it was moving here, too.

Thank you for your courage. I'm so grateful you've been given the gift of communication so that you can share your story with us, with me.

...

Britt Reints

I cried after I read this email, because it confirmed my greatest hope: that what I said changed the way a few people thought about people like me, and that not only did what I wrote changed minds, but it changed the minds of people who likely will never see my original words. You know you've expressed an idea worth sharing when the specific words you put together matter less than the idea they seeded that continues to spread.

I hope those kids' conversations continue. I hope that they take those conversations home with them. What I hope most of all, though, is that there was some kid like me there to hear that they are not alone, to know that their peers might be more receptive to them now, and to understand that it really can get better.

Most importantly, Britt's email confirmed for me that what we do here — when we write out true things on our blogs and record it in videos and share it in photos — matters. What we do here matters not just during that few days when people bother to leave comments but for weeks, months, and years afterwards. We can't always see the offline effects of what we create when it moves out into the world beyond the medium in which we expressed it, but what we do continues on without us in places we do not imagine, shifting the minds and hearts that build our culture as it moves.

Our true words are powerful things.

I'm Speaking My Truth and Spreading the Word, Because It Does Get Better

I hesitated to publish this, because there may be family members reading this weblog now who are not aware of my sexual and gender identity. When I read it out loud to the Palinode, though, I broke down in tears when I got to the part about feeling so proud of these kids speaking their truth at Brigham Young University, and my pride for them coupled with Didactic Pirate's coming out story earlier this last week won't let me keep this to myself. No one should have to hide.

Thanks, Heather, for making me aware of the video at the end of this entry.

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I grew up a very lonely child, because I grew up instinctively knowing I was different and that that difference was not necessarily welcomed by those around me.

I fell in love with girls. I crushed on boys. I felt I was born into the wrong body, but I didn't necessarily want a boy's body. I was a combination of things I had never heard of before. Kids at recess made jokes by giving creepy, overly intimate handshakes and then saying "Lez be friends", because apparently lesbianism was hilarious, but nobody shook my hand like that and said "Lez be friends but also look at boys and maybe dress up like we're intersexed with a male-leaning gender experience."

That last one might not have caught on because kids in grade five in 1982 lacked the vocabulary. Also, it was a little long to be catchy. I'm pretty sure that was it.

So, I kept quiet about it. Secretly, I wrote coming out letters to my parents and rehearsed magnificent speeches under my blankets at night about who I was and why I should still be loved. In my fantasies, I was the Martin Luther King of my kind, leading my protest of one, but I never let my truth be said out loud. I didn't know how to start without a vocabulary that could convince them. If I had no words for what I was, I certainly had none that would help them to understand what I was.

I grew up in a world artificially devoid of anything that deviated from heterosexuality. Throughout elementary school, when people did mention homosexuality, it was done with a sneer at the sexual acts engaged in by faceless men. They were Other. We didn't know them. There was no mention of love. The concept of being gay was reduced to its pornography. It was disgusting, it was animal, it was a degradation of humanity's higher nature.

I eventually came to believe this about my own desires, about who I was becoming as human being, only I was certain that it was much, much worse in my case, because I wasn't just gay. I was GAY. My desire for girls was gay because I had the body of a girl, and my desire for boys was gay, because I was in the wrong kind of body. I concluded that the mere existence of my desire as it stemmed from my experience was an abomination. By the time I was fifteen, I was terrified that I was some kind of sexual monster whose sure end was in pedophilia and beastiality, because isn't this what my kind of spiritual debasement led to?

I tried, as they say, to pray the gay away. I thought surely that a loving God would remove this horrible affliction from my heart. I was a Mennonite kid, but I slunk around the parking lots and grounds of Catholic churches, attempting to screw up the courage to enter a confession box. I had sins I could speak to no one, and I felt bereft of God's presence. I needed an intermediary. I wanted redemption. I needed to know that I was not condemned.

When my deviance didn't disappear, I weighed the possibility of suicide, sure that it was the only option for someone so soul-deep sick. I felt as though God had denied me as his child, and I wrote the note that would explain my death as a kind of gift to those whom I was sure my deviance was hurting.

People knew that I was sad then, but no one knew the depth of it or why it was there, because I had no voice to share with them who I was. When I look back on that time now, I feel so very lucky that I stuck it out and that I can be here living this beautiful life I get to have on the other side of that silence.

I didn't really start talking about the real truth of who I am until I was in my thirties, and, even now, I don't mention it very often. Coming out, though, writing it down and being open about my identity and experiences, has been nothing short of liberating. I have shifted from someone who felt unworthy and invisible to someone who feels and is worthy and seen.

I am beautiful, and I am loved, and I am here fully in this life in a way that I only dreamed of when I hid what I once thought of as my great sickness but I now know is the gorgeous fact of my personhood and humanity.

When I watch younger people in their teens and twenties speak out about their identities as queer and transgendered people, especially out of an environment that can make them feel less than loved like the students at Brigham Young University have in the video below, I feel so much pride in them, and I am nothing short of down-deep-in-my-soul grateful that we have come to a place in our culture where we now have the vocabulary and the means to speak out, share our stories, and find our tribes.

If you are gay or trans or some other variant of the vast spectrum that makes up humanity who has felt silenced, I want you to watch the following video and know that you are, really and truly, by thousands if not millions of people, believed and honoured and loved.



Speak your truth and spread the word, because it does get better.

Gay Marriage And The Lovely Jains

I really have a bone to pick with the Christian right. I was watching “100 Huntley Street” this morning, and I would have been yelling at the television if not for my cement-block lungs and wretched throat. (No, it is not a part of my regular television viewing, but I do indulge when I am ill. That show is one of the best places to find out where the Christian right stands on things). I had read somewhere a while ago that David Mainse, the “100 Huntley Street” host for twenty-six years, was retiring from the show and leaving his son to take over. Mr. Mainse Sr. was leaving the show in order to pursue his evangelical ministry across the country, because he has become very concerned about our native peoples and also wants to represent the “...Canadian clergy’s concerns regarding the redefinition of marriage at the federal level and within the public sphere.” What this actually means, as he was stating as a guest on today’s episode, is that including room in our laws for gays to be able to declare their unions on a public and legal level like everyone else is “evil” and against the safety of our children. Then Mr. Mainse Sr. suddenly launched into how a police officer he knows called the internet “a window of evil.” With barely a breath taken, he held up what he called a “resource sheet” called “The Fight Against Child Pornography.” Without bothering to explain the links he was making between these topics, he attempted to tie them up together neatly by what he assumed were the obvious connections his audience would make, be they uneducated and emotional responses or not. It is absurd. Homosexuals in long-term, committed relationships who want to get married are somehow deeply connected to the “window of evil” that is the internet and so are obviously the controlling major force behind child pornography. He managed to find time to hold up and mention this "resource sheet" three times while talking about his church's stance on gay marriage, marrying the two ideas in the viewers' minds. This is not out of hate, mind you, because Christians can feel anger and still love, he assured us, the listening audience.

Why does this bother me so much? It bothers me, in part, because these people appeal to a lot of other people’s knee-jerk reactions on the subject, and so have the ability hold a good deal of political sway if they play their cards right. It also bothers me, because they do not seem to see the difference between their religious culture and government law. These are two different things. The Canadian government has no intention of forcing churches to marry homosexuals against their church body's beliefs. The church has hardly made a stink about the fact that the government started marrying people non-religiously. They do not seem to mind much at all that the government saw fit to move such a holy union partially out of the church's grasp and to give itself the right to unite man and woman in a legal union by the same name the church gave it. There is a distinct difference between church and state marriages – one is done under the eyes of God and one is done under the eyes of the law, one is religious and one is secular. So why do some Christian groups feel that they have the right to lobby the government to change its standpoint because these views go against their religious beliefs and practices? Our government should not be an extension or a representative of any particular religious organization, and as the Bible says: “‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s’” (Matthew 22:21). Church and state are separate matters, folks. No matter what decision our government comes to on this matter, although I am hoping it falls on the side of allowing all who want to marry to do so, it does not bear on the spiritual values of any church body. Marriage, as it is known by the state, is not about making us holy, but is about a legal definition and the social rights it affords to those who have entered into such a commitment. Honestly, I can’t figure out why they are so up in arms about this issue. Christians can still continue to hand out or take back whatever rights they see fit amongst their church members no matter what the state says.

The third thing that truly gets my goat, (and I promise I will stop after this point): certain Christian groups feel that they have the right to lobby a non-religious organization, the government, on a religious basis in order to limit what I, as a non-religious member of this society, believe in whole-heartedly and see as a great leap forward for humankind. Honestly! The nerve! Wouldn’t we all be super pissed off if particularly puritanical Jains came along and insisted on strict vegetarianism (this means no beer!), covering our mouths to avoid inhaling any life forms, and sweeping the ground before us as we walked to avoid crushing bitty creatures? Those of us who are not Jains would be incensed, because we are not Jains, and no beer is no fun. (I mean no offense to Jains, because they are not the imposing kind whatsoever). So, to all Christians who are being politically vocal about stopping gay marriage from a religious standpoint, shut the fuck up! Maybe you haven’t noticed, but this is not a solely Christian country with a Christian government. There are many of us here who would prefer not to be under a religious group's political leadership. Religious arguments have no place in a secular government's decision-making when it affects a great number of citizens who cannot abide by that rationale.

Jainism Facts and Links:
* If you are into religious texts here are some sacred Jain texts.
* I have always loved cartoons based on religion.
* Listen to the different “Obeisances.” They are short and not very loud, so you won’t have to worry about alerting too much attention.
* Check out "Saroj’s Cookbook" for Jain recipes.
* A brief introduction to Jainism.
* Somehow, reading about great ascetics and the lengths to which they will go is almost pornographic, or am I alone in this? (Again, no offense meant to Jains. This is only a personal feeling).

Lord Mahavira was a Jain monk, and Jain monks may often take a vow to accept food only when it is possible to observe a set of pre-determined special conditions. The practice originates with Mahavira himself. A few months before he attained Keval Jnan, continuously fast until offered food by only that individual who met 10 untold and seemingly impossible conditions. He would accept (1)only urad lentils,(2) offered in a winnowing basket, (3) given by a person standing sideways with one foot on the threshold of a dwelling place and the other foot outside, (4) who was a princess turned in to a slave, (5) who had a shaven head, and (6) whose legs were bound by chains. She had to be (7) a chaste woman, (8) at the time performing the penances of attham (3 days’s fast), and would serve him (9) only after all other mendicants had rejected her food offering, (10) with tears in her eyes.

* And last but definitely not least, a jam-packed Jainism site that will keep you busy for hours if you so desire. I did not.