Witness & Testimony on Gender Expression

Content warning: This post has references to hate, genocide, the Holocaust, queerphobia, and LGBTQ+ issues.

No links are included to news reports nor to other online items that amplify hate and trauma.

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These days, creating legislation that calls for the suppression or repression of behaviors that don't conform to a person's perceived gender, and calls for the complete eradication of trans people seem to be current ways for some hurt, fearful people in power to be seen as being among the cool kids on the block. Being anti-trans and making threats or bullying anyone who appears to be crossing what used to be considered "normal" gender boundaries is quickly taking hold across the United States.

To say that it's frightening or unsettling would be a severe understatement. This soon-to-be legalized way of oppressing an entire group of people based on who we are and how we show up in the world is dangerous.

Globally, we've been here before--think The Final Solution in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe; the calls for removing the "savage" indigenous people in Turtle Island; the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda; and modern-day Uganda, where there are ongoing open calls for death to anyone who is gay or lesbian.

In the U.S., when I was an adolescent in the 1970s, homophobic language was about as ever-present and blatant as today, but without the viral nature of social media. Nevertheless, the homophobic language and explicit fears in mainstream America were frequent enough and widespread enough that they reached me, and I questioned and doubted myself in my own uncertainty:

Was I a lesbian? How would I know? Would that mean I had a mental illness? If I were mentally ill, what would happen to me?

As a result of today's increasingly hateful, psychologically harmful, and dangerously inciteful rhetoric, memories of my own self expression as a child, a pre-teen, an adolescent, and a young adult seep into my consciousness. I feel a nudge to bear witness because if anyone comes for my transgender friends--some of whom have lived with me--then they also are coming for me.

MY EARLY GENDER EXPRESSION

Query: Did you ever have a time in your life when you wanted to dress and act the way you wanted, even if it was different from how you were raised or from how your peers were dressing and acting? What was that like for you?

I have a twin brother and a brother two years older than us. Growing up, I knew my body was different from my brothers'; I remember thinking at times how I wanted to be like them. I didn't have words for it back then, but it was more an inward response to the restrictions that I saw my mother and her mother living into: they were the cooks, the cleaners, the homemakers, the stay-at-homebodies. And they didn't express a lot of care for each other, either, just misery and bitterness for the life they weren't living, or so it seemed to me as a child. Why would I want to aspire to that life for myself as a woman?

Growing up with two brothers meant I was exposed to a lot of things that boys typically got to do: play outdoors, be loud, aggressively smash Lego bricks against each other, do some home-based science experiments, go to ballgames with Dad. Thankfully, I was frequently encouraged to "go play with the boys." It was one way my mother could grab some peace and quiet after schooldays and on weekends...

...except when my grandmother, Grandma G, came to visit.

She didn't seem to like how much time I was spending outside, learning baseball, football, and frisbee. She didn't seem to like how many pairs of pants I had and how few dresses, and she let me know it. I still remember the bright afternoon when she and my mother stood at the back door overlooking the backyard where we kids were playing--I must have been about 10--and my grandmother called out, "Liz, come inside and put on a dress!" My heart broke. I don't remember if my mom intervened or if I acquiesced or if I stayed put. I don't know if my brothers heard my grandmother--how could they not?!--or what they made of that command.

Come inside and put on a dress!

My grandmother was a force. She had other commandments, more often expressed as loaded questions:

Why don't you put on makeup? You'd look so much prettier.
Why don't you put your hair up?
Why can't you wear a skirt or a dress more often?

But my grandmother was also generous and often took me shopping -- for clothes. I must have gone with at least one of my brothers each time, because she never steered us into the girls' section; we spent a lot of time in the boys' section (back when the gender binary was on full display). I gravitated toward shirts with broad stripes and durable fabric. Nothing frilly or pink or tailored. Surprisingly, after just a single "Don't you want to look at dresses...?," my grandmother would just let me be and paid for the "boys clothes" I had picked out. To my mom's credit, she never criticized me and never made my grandmother take the clothes back. I was reasonably comfortable; I was me as best as I could be back then.

I was a girl-child who liked playing sports with boys and liked wearing comfortable boy clothes. And in my specific case, I also knew inwardly that I was a girl, not a boy. In school and at home, the word "tomboy" was tossed in my direction, and I never minded. But I want to make this point clear right now:

In my own life, I always intuitively understood that I was a girl; I was female. That congruence was and still is right for me.

Much later on, during my coming out process in my 30s as a bisexual woman, I knew experimentally that who I was wasn't a choice I made; it was a matter of wholeness that I affirmed. Similarly, now as a 60-year-old woman looking back at my childhood experiences, I understand that back then, I was seeking my own form of gender expression, an outward expression of my inward self, through what I wore, what activities I participated in, what norms I valued. And I understand experimentally that being transgender -- or cisgender -- isn't a choice. It's simply about being who and how we each are in our respective wholeness.

GENDER AFFIRMING CARE

Query: In what ways is your sense of wholeness, physical well being, and mental wellness affirmed and cared for? What services, relationships, and activities do you regulary participate in that affirm who you are and how you live?

I want to point out that all my life, I have been receiving gender affirming care. I've had ob-gyn appointments. I've purchased and been given supplies to deal with my monthly cycles. I've had mammograms and related imaging done. I've had a hysterectomy for my own health and general well being. I've had haircuts to my liking and rebuffed efforts to get me to buy and use hair product. I get pedicures; I look for ways to address my facial hair as I age. I wear clothes that make feel comfortable in my body. I cut my nails how I like them and occasionally wear nail polish on my toenails.

All of this is care for myself that affirms how I view myself along the gender spectrum.

To me, the idea of disallowing gender affirming care is repugnant. Why does one group of people believe they can decide what is right or acceptable for another group of people? Colonization, patriarchy, apartheid, white supremacy, misogyny... these are all parts of the dynamic of oppression and

It.
Needs.
To.
Stop.

I share all this because our personal experiences matter. Sharing our stories of who we are help us demystify and humanize the strangers that we don't know yet: our queer neighbors, our gay or lesbian family members, our transgender friends and fellow worshipers.

BEING A PATTERN

Query: Do you know anyone who didn't feel they could be their whole authentic self? Do you know how they felt at the time, or what they thought of themselves?

Testimony is about both how we carry ourself--our "carriage" and letting our life speak--and about the words we use; there should be a consistency between both. Quakers live into the Truth as a way to be a pattern, an example of faithfulness. Living out the wholeness of who we are, what we believe, and whatever our Given measure of Light is a form of embodied preaching that testifies to the Truth of the Divine Principle. George Fox provides a definition of testimony that resonates with me:

Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them...

That is why I share my own experience of how I transgressed--crossed over a line regarding certain gender norms around dress and behaviors as a young person and how I continue to do so as a 60-something aging Friend.

To be clear, I don't actively push against conforming to gendered dress codes or heteronormative roles for the sake of being rebellious or anti-establishment or counter-cultural. I dress as I do and act as I do and pursue justice as I do because it is my expression of wholeness as I know it. When I am in my wholeness, I am happiest. I am able to walk cheerfully over the earth.

CONTINUING REVELATION TO ACCEPT MY TRANSGENDER KIN

My journey to accept myself as I am--my gender as an athletic, boyish girl/woman in a patriarchal society--was more straightforward than my journey to accept my fellow worshipers, neighbors, and friends as transgender. Being trans used to be as unfamiliar a concept to me as a girl wearing pants and boys' tops was to my grandmother. She couldn't wrap her mind or heart around it at first, but she still saw me as her grandchild. She went on loving me as best she could over the years and eventually stopped criticizing me for who and how I was in the world.

This is how I have come to welcome and love my transgender kin. It's the only way I know to grow, weave together, and strengthen the Beloved Community, by getting to know each other by spending time together. Sometimes it requires intentional changes in my own behaviors, like choosing to be more welcoming outwardly in my day to day life. Sometimes it means I have to educate myself about concepts I wasn't aware of before. Other times, it is by Divine Assistance as I feel my way into an openness and acceptance I hadn't known before-a wordless and mystical exercise between my heart and the Inward Teacher that changes me for the better, opening myself to know a greater slice of humanity I didn't understand or acknowledge before.

Building meaningful relationships with people who are different from ourselves helps us demystify the ways of strangers, and our hearts widen so we may know that Love is the first motion--inclusion, not bullying; love, not fear; welcome, not eradication.

Query: Was there a time when you felt you didn't belong, or when you worried if you would be welcomed into someplace new? What and who helped? When in your life were you made to feel truly safe enough to bring more of your whole self forward over time? Are you doing that for other people? If not, what is getting in the way?

Are there other ways that we can be in the world, encouraging the Good to be raised up?