Here’s the story of how I became queer-affirming in a conservative Christian environment. This is the fifth installment of a six-part series. For context, check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
Although my skin color was not a barrier to fitting into this cis-het-white-man’s world of biblical studies, my gender was. At the same time, however, I’d been lulled into a false sense of my body’s acceptability in my chosen field of study.
This doesn’t mean my gender was irrelevant (far from it). Gender had troubled me since my undergraduate days. I tend to think of gender as more expansive than a binary now, but when I first began studying the Bible formally, the world was divided into Men and Women and I was placed squarely in the Women category.
In an earlier draft of this section, a reader wondered why I used the term “gender” here – why didn’t I use the term “sex” if sex is allegedly about biology and gender is a social construct? Let me pause for a minute and clarify (as best I can) the difference between sex and gender. The two are related, but distinct.
Sex and Gender
Sex is a biological category based on the anatomy of a person’s reproductive system and secondary sex characteristics. Sex and gender are often conflated, in part, because we tend to talk about both sex and gender using the terms “male” and “female.” In the context of sex, for example, we refer to specific genitalia as male (e.g., penis, testicles) and female (e.g., vagina).
However, even thinking exclusively in these binary terms about sex is misleading since we know that not everyone has exclusively male or female anatomy. Intersex people have variations in sex characteristics (e.g., chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, and genitals). Even when it comes to biological features, the idea that there are only two sexes is a myth. The binary breaks down. In fact, you can even be intersex without knowing it, as intersex anatomy doesn’t always show up at birth. For a more expansive and detailed explanation, see the Intersex Society of North America’s FAQs.
Even though sex is a biological category, it’s still a social construct, as the ISNA points out: “Intersex is a socially constructed category that reflects real biological variation.” The ISNA likens sex anatomy to the color spectrum:
[N]ature presents us with sex anatomy spectrums. Breasts, penises, clitorises, scrotums, labia, gonads–all of these vary in size and shape and morphology. So-called “sex” chromosomes can vary quite a bit, too. But in human cultures, sex categories get simplified into male, female, and sometimes intersex, in order to simplify social interactions, express what we know and feel, and maintain order. So nature doesn’t decide where the category of “male” ends and the category of “intersex” begins, or where the category of “intersex” ends and the category of “female” begins. Humans decide. Humans (today, typically doctors) decide how small a penis has to be, or how unusual a combination of parts has to be, before it counts as intersex. Humans decide whether a person with XXY chromosomes or XY chromosomes and androgen insensitivity will count as intersex.
What, then, is gender? Gender is, well, complicated. Gender Spectrum has a decent article on understanding gender that is worth reading in its entirety and quoting at length:
Generally, we assign a newborn’s sex as either male or female (some US states and other countries offer a third option) based on the baby’s genitals. Once a sex is assigned, we presume the child’s gender. For some people, this is cause for little, if any, concern or further thought because their gender aligns with gender-related ideas and assumptions associated with their sex.
Nevertheless, while gender may begin with the assignment of our sex, it doesn’t end there. A person’s gender is the complex interrelationship between three dimensions:
· Body: our body, our experience of our own body, how society genders bodies, and how others interact with us based on our body.
· Identity: the name we use to convey our gender based on our deeply held, internal sense of self. Identities typically fall into binary (e.g. man, woman), Non-binary (e.g. Genderqueer, genderfluid) and ungendered (e.g. Agender, genderless) categories; the meaning associated with a particular identity can vary among individuals using the same term. A person’s Gender identity can correspond to or differ from the sex they were assigned at birth.
· Social: how we present our gender in the world and how individuals, society, culture, and community perceive, interact with, and try to shape our gender. Social gender includes gender roles and expectations and how society uses those to try to enforce conformity to current gender norms.
To be honest, I’m still not sure how to talk about gender. I can’t name it exactly, but I felt there was something deeply beautiful and true about Ashleigh Shackelford’s descriptions of gender in the essay You Could Never Misgender Me. God, just forget my blog post and go read that essay. It’s more poignant than anything I would ever be able to write about gender here.
The Realm of Men and Women
I use gender instead of sex in this post because, although I didn’t know the different between the two until a few years ago, I think what I was experiencing was more about gender than sex. I understood myself as a woman and my body was read by society as a woman’s body, even if I was often frustrated and conflicted about what being a “woman” meant.
My desire to pursue biblical studies professionally made being a Woman a problem, and vice versa. Desire does that to you–problematizes all your neat categories.
While several of my undergrad professors (all cis men) encouraged me to study the Bible, only a few believed it would be permissible for me to teach the Bible in a church context. Armed with that question of what God allowed people in the Woman category to do, I’d hunkered down with my commentaries and exegetical tools and tried to figure out whether the Bible said I could even teach it (and if so, where).
My formerly rigid attachment to gender binaries was starting to break down in subtle ways. I’d imbibed patriarchal language from evangelical purity culture as a teen, and in my first years in college continued to mimic it, writing for the school newspaper about how men needed to lead and be assertive and how women needed to not get upset when men opened doors for them. I loved the patriarchal fantasy of Captivated and Wild At Heart because it spoke to many of the very real and raw emotional wounds inflicted by my father in very unhealthy yet compelling ways.
But in high school, being a girl hadn’t caused problems for me in many overt ways. I hadn’t wanted to do much besides write stories and poetry. And I was permitted to do that. Now that I was becoming interested in biblical studies, people were telling me I wasn’t allowed to teach the Bible because I was a girl.
This tore at the fiber of my being. While I was influenced by patriarchy in more subtle ways, I’d very rarely been told growing up that I wasn’t able or allowed to do something because I was a girl. And in those rare cases, it angered me. I think I knew on a gut level that this is the ultimate attempt at erasure. You tell someone that their destiny is inscribed in the cosmos without any reference to their desires or abilities. What they want doesn’t matter. What they love is irrelevant.
Love–that’s it. There’s no room for love here. What they desire makes no practical difference. It’s about control.
The borders of their body have been decided before the foundations of the earth were laid. They can do nothing to change these limits and to attempt this is rebellion. God may let them carry on for a little while, press against the borders, but it’s only a matter of time before he takes them in hand. “You’re just not supposed to do what you can do because someone bigger and stronger will feel threatened by you. So just don’t. Contract yourself.”
One of the Boys
I knew I was just as intelligent than any of the boys in my Bible classes (in truth, I was smarter, but I didn’t know it at the time). Apart from the fact that I had different secondary sex characteristics (and how people treated me differently when they noticed them), I didn’t feel like I was substantially other than the boys. And complementarians were always quick to point out that it wasn’t because of lack of intelligence that women couldn’t teach or had to be subject to the authority of a man or husband to do so. It was because the very picture of marriage was a symbol of Christ’s relationship to the church. In other words, complementarianism came with the tacit admission that gender assignments (and attendant gender roles) were arbitrary–it’s just that in this case it was God who assigned gender, so it was okay.
Before pregnancy and childbirth, I’d mostly been able to blend in as “one of the boys” in biblical studies if I dressed conservatively. I don’t know if people really forgot I was a woman, but I mostly did. But then my body started to swell with child, and by the codes of conservative evangelicalism, that is the most feminine of things. And then I had a baby and the jig was up. I was now perceived as a Real Woman. And Real Women, while they might be allowed to do lots of things now (like wear pants and work outside the home and be doctors and stuff), still had a primary and Higher Calling of Motherhood.
I had been initiated into the guild of Womanhood and excised from the Realm of Men. No, I wasn’t kicked out of school or told I couldn’t be both a mom and an academic (not in so many words anyway). And there were even a handful of people within the evangelical academic system who tried to help alleviate the tension I was experiencing. But the sum of all the microaggressions, combined with the growing sense that my body’s belonging here had been an illusion, set the stage for me to keep questioning the whole white cis-hetero-patriarchal system until its credibility fell apart entirely.
In short, it was the realization of my own body’s unacceptability that made me start to wonder whether any of this system worked for anyone’s body. As I started to listen more, I realized that bodies of color were not acceptable. Femininity was not acceptable in any body, and masculinity was acceptable only in select bodies. Not being straight was not acceptable.
From there, it was more human encounters that facilitated my transition to queer-affirmation. I graduated and started working for a progressive Christian social activist. Although this activist was not himself queer-affirming, he worked with a lot of people that were, and this exposed me to several people who were both Christians (or people of faith) and openly, exuberantly queer.
In this justice-oriented context, I also started to understand that all this arguing about what bodies were acceptable to God extended to the affirmation or denial of basic human civil rights. I saw how the church’s refusal to accept queer humans as good and holy contributed to mainstream society’s queerphobic stories that resulted in violence (verbal and physical) against queer people. I started to see sexism, racism, and homophobia as part of the same power matrix–all linked to the same colonizing myth about the supremacy of one specific type of body.