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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July 8, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org
Unitarian Universalist Children and Youth learn about gender identity, sexual preference, gender presentation, and all the other terms in the multicolored universe in our curriculum called Our Whole Lives. There is an adult version, too. Here are some bits of information that might be new to you!
Call to Worship
from James Howe, Totally Joe (The Misfits, #2)
I hated that the soldier doll had my name. I mean, please. I didn’t play with him much. He was another Christmas present from my clueless grandparents. One time when they were visiting, my grandpa asked me if G.I. Joe had been in any wars lately. I said, “No, but he and Ken got married last week.” Every Christmas since then, my grandparents have sent me a check.
Meditation Reading
Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
A man once asked me… how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. “Well,” said the man, “I shouldn’t have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing.” I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.
Sermon
When I had my first child I was determined that all the gender expectations were not going to have any effect on us. I dressed him in yellow. I did not refuse to tell people his gender, but I tried to raise them as free from those structures as I could. I did not let him have a gun as a toy. I don’t think he even knew what one was. We watched videos. I was a kind of crunchy granola mom. When he was about two we went on a playdate to a friend’s house. He was looking at the kids toy chest. I just saw his bottom as he dove into the toy chest, flinging toys over his shoulder to get to the one he wanted. It was a silver six shooter. He raised it above his head, his eyes following the gun as if it were the Lost Chalice of Jerusalem. As if it glowed with power. He played with it the whole time we were there, and as we were leaving I had to pry it from his fingers. After that he made guns out of bread, out of cheese, out of sticks. I finally gave up.
I didn’t bother as much with his brother, since his brother wanted to do everything that first born son did. I did not have any girl children for contrast, but I saw my friends grow children. Some of them were rowdy and rough and some liked pink and were not interested in chasing trains through the town or stopping for hours by construction sites to watch the big machines. There was a moment one August before first grade when my first born wanted a Barbie lunch box. I thought okay, here it is, this is my test. I try to act nonchalant and told him he could pick whichever one he wanted. He ended up with GI Joe on his lunch box and he got the doll as well. Action figure, sorry. When it’s a boy toy we don’t call it a doll we call it an action figure. I get it. One time I asked the man at the paint store what the recipe for this paint was. Formula, he said, with a stern look.
When you ask yourself what are masculine quality is in what are feminine qualities, how do you try to answer? We all know the rules, and the rules do change. Women can wear pants now without any approbation unless they are Pentecostals.
First you’ve got gender. If you oversimplify you say that nature is binary you’re either male or female. Nature, in fact, doesn’t see it that way. There are males and females and then there are those whose gender is somewhat indeterminant. The doctors and the parents have always chosen at Birth which gender to fix the child to conform to. What if we left that alone and let people be inter-sex? Some cultures have a place for people who are both and neither. They are sometimes seen as holy people, touched by the Gods.
So Nature has more than two genders even though most people are born into one or the other. Now, what about your brain? What gender do you feel you are? If either?
I remember being at General Assembly one year and listening to Dan Savage, sex columnist from San Francisco, say there are two genders, pick one. He got a lot of push back from the entire universe lists, who wanted to make room for there being a continuum of gender. Maybe you can identify as a little bit masculine-of-center or a little bit feminine-of-center or all the way to one side or the other. Why not? In fact, that seems to be the reality. And what does feminine-of-center mean anyway? We are humans with our human expressions. When I was a little girl I wanted two six-guns. Because I was masculine? I wouldn’t let my mother put me in pants; I had to wear skirts all the time. Because I was feminine? Why do we even have to put those characterizations on our self-expression? Was I expressing my gender with my frilly skirts and my six-guns or was I expressing my spirit?
So there’s what you feel like in your brain, whether you are male or female or something in between. Some people want to answer the question and some people don’t feel they can adequately answer the question in the words that are culture gives us with which to answer. What you feel like in your brain is a gender identity. How you express it is your gender expression or just your expression? Some women like to dress from the men’s department because that kind of clothing expresses what they would like to communicate about themselves. They feel most comfortable dressing from the men’s department. For others it’s because men’s clothing fits them better, lasts longer, is cheaper, and has pockets.
In our culture, because men are more highly valued than women, it is much easier for a woman to dress like a man than it is for a man to dress like a woman. If a girl is like a boy, she’s affectionately known as a tomboy. If a boy dresses like a girl, he has more problems. Needs parental support. There are men who are straight in their sexuality who like to dress as women. Being straight in their sexuality is another way of saying there sexual preference is for women. But they like to express themselves as a woman too. Does that make them a straight-male-gay-woman? See how ridiculous that is? There are men who like to dress as women in there daily lives, and men who dress as women in order to perform drag. Does this mean they wish they were women? Not usually. This a lot to get our heads around? Most definitely.
In most youth groups these days it is part of check-in to introduce yourself and let the others know which pronouns you prefer. Many people prefer the pronouns they-them-theirs, so that they can be free of the his or hers pronouns. Other people are comfortable with him-his-hers-her and sometimes pronouns change. Sometimes teen-age years are a time to try on different identities, and sometimes kids know from the time they are three or four what gender they prefer to be and how they want to express. You can call it gender-nonconforming, or genderqueer. Queer is a word that is no longer seen as pejorative, but kind of jaunty and descriptive. It is even used by academics as in queering history, queering The Sciences etc. There was a wonderful talk given at General Assembly many years ago called queering religious education. I hope you get to see it sometime.
Let’s talk about sexual attraction. Some people are attracted to one gender their whole lives and other times people shift. Some people can be attracted just to the smell of a person or the side of their hands and it doesn’t matter what their gender is. Some people stay non-binary in their gender and some people are attracted to all kinds of folks and some are not attracted to anybody.
I think the upshot of all of this is that maleness and femaleness we used to think we would know it if we saw it, but it’s such a social construct even though it is for Reaching Across the planet, maybe people can slide on the continuum, maybe people can stake out their place and stay there, maybe it doesn’t matter.
Why do we need to know what gender a baby is. Why do we need to know whether to say, “Oh what a handsome baby” or “what a beautiful baby” or say to the girls “I love your little shoes” or say to the boys “those shoes make you look like you could run fast”! It’s such a deeply embedded part of our culture and many people are just born knowing they don’t like trucks cuz they’re a girl and they don’t like paint cuz they’re a boy. Can our hearts be big enough for all of us. Because we need all of us. And we need to be able to focus on what matters. Truth. Compassion. Community. Love.
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