It’s small.
The reason I write. The latest slight. The latest micro in a world of aggressions.
Nothing really,
not in a world in which parents are criminalized for love and young girls are told that they may not play sports with their friends.
Nothing important
in a world when politicians stir their base up to violence and hate toward transgender people, toward transgender chldren.
Nothing nearly
as important as the simple truth that most religions chose to twist words of scripture into hate. They call me a sin based on purposeful misreadings of scripture. The Roman Catholic church claims love in calling me a mental illness. The pope claims love in comparing my existence to nuclear holocaust. My own ELCA makes accomodation for hate with her doctrine of “Bound Conscience” and her willful overlook of Queer existence in the false unity with churches that preach hate.
I feel that hate every time I drive to my seminary through these small towns where people may be affirming, but I can’t know that they are, not when they chose to live their love in silence. My first week, my first day of seminary at Wartburg I peed my pants – not the embarrassing but joyful pee of laughing so hard that a little comes out – no, this was the -I’m-forty-minutes-from-the-seminary-I-have-to-pee-but-I-don’t-see-any-place-safe-with-towns-far-off-the-main-road-or-gas-stations-full-of-trucks- kind of pee. The try so hard to hold it kind of pee.
I got to my room at Wartburg, rinsed off and washed my pants with shampoo in the shower. Put on clean clothes
And made it to my first class.
Understand.
Please.
There is no safe space for transgender people. Even places, people, that welcome Queer draw the limit at us. The LGB alliance is purposefully anti-trans. JK Rowling. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Uplifters of welcome radical inclusion – except for transgender people. We alone are excluded, and the excluders are celebrated for their brave voices speaking
their beliefs.
(I say again. I am not someone’s belief.
I am not an opinion.
I am real.
We are real)
I have come, over the last few months, to begin to believe that maybe, Wartburg Seminary is a safe space. I overlook the slights. I overlook the jokes of men laughing about being the-man-in-a-dress – my identity, their hilarious costume. I overlook the casual comments, the microaggressions, reminding myself that they don’t mean harm.
Harm
is not their intent.
I tell myself that harm
is not their intent.
I overlook the erasure of my existence in our chapel. I hold onto those moments in time when my existence is mentioned. I honor that we had a service for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, for that holy day when we celebrate the lives of people, mostly Black, mostly women, murdered simply for existing. Each year. Killed.
One day of recognition.
On a Monday.
During a reading week.
I celebrate hearing one professor. And one more. Speak of marginalized people, of Queer/BIPOC uplift, of the ways salvation is weaponized. I wait to hear if anyone else might,
in hope,
hopeless.
Hope that individuals might learn to speak routinely, regularly, of inclusive welcome.
And I say it’s enough that a few do speak.
I say that it’s enough for me to hear these few voices, sporadically spoken,
I say it’s enough so I can endure the masculinization of God in “Our Father who art. . .”. In the He and Him in song and prayer. In Gospel by those who choose, knowingly or not, to embrace the Male God. I say it’s enough so I can ignore the erasure of the villification of Queer people in our churches.
I refuse to embrace a Male God. I reject choices to claim that masculine metaphors are without gender and must be used because they speak of a familial relationship, that claim feminine metaphors cannot be used because we who are women are intrinsically tied to our sexual beings and God isn’t sexual. I reject the double standard. I reject the choice to lie.
I reject metaphors of masculinity and of conquering. I won’t use He or Him or Father when our chapel and our church refuses to balance those masculine metaphors with feminine and inclusive metaphors.
But here is where I speak the small, the nothing, that has caused me to
seethe.
I am called to account.
I am called to account for the simple use of inclusive pronouns for God in my part of the service for chapel. In a blessing, I dared say they instead of he. A blessing meant for all, inclusive, but
I am
called to account.
a we need to talk,
a, we-just-need-to-meet-to-discuss-this moment.
No one is called to account
for their persistent, unrelenting boxing of God into Male metaphors.
No one is called to account
for their persistent, unrelenting uplift of cis/het norms in a world of faith that does harm daily.
But I am called to account.
I
a woman.
Queer.
Transgender.
I
a woman
under attack for my existence.
Mocked.
In danger simply for the need to pee. Unsafe even in the community surrounding Wartburg (Have you considered what happens when a woman, obviously trans, out for a walk in the “safe” neighborhood of Wartburg, stops to talk with a young girl who wants to show off the cool bug she found? I adore nature, it is not in my nature to ignore a child. But if I dare stop, I need to be aware of all of the homes around me. Some parent, stepping out, seeing the Obvious-Trans talking to a child, some adult steeped in the hatred of “revving up their base” by conservative politicians naming us as dangerous and worse. Can you see where this “safe” neighborhood is a minefield for a woman like me?
And here, I am called to account for this
small,
this nothing
really
this nothing important of daring to choose
inclusive
as my core.
I don’t claim
anything big in this. Just another micro in a world of micros aimed at the heart of me.
I don’t claim
anything special. What I experience here, in this micro, this moment that I share is experienced by Black, by Brown, by Asian, by disabled, by neuro-divergent, by women, by so so many
daily.
But I also won’t diminish. Because this micro is just one moment in many. This micro is a small betrayal, in a world made unsafe by the so many who live into hate, into exclusion, and so much worse
into silence.