Gender: Coloring Outside the Lines
Rev. Kim K. Crawford Harvie, Senior Minister
Arlington Street Church
March 25, 2007 

for Arloa
and with thanks to Mr. Barb Greve for research assistance, and then some 

When I was three years old, my parents and I lived on the first floor of a triple-decker in Wollaston. My playmate, Jody, lived one flight up. Jody had a lot going for her, including the fact that she was four, and that both her parents were blind. She was astonishingly worldly, and naughty. But it was our landlady who really commanded my attention. Her name was Arloa, which I still have no idea how to spell, and she lived alone on the third floor. She wore men’s khaki trousers and a red plaid flannel shirt with a white tee shirt underneath—unheard of in the early 1960s. Most astonishing of all, on laundry day, she hung men’s boxer shorts out on the line to dry.

I asked Jody, “Is Arloa a woman or a man?” Jody said she was a man. I asked my mother, “Is Arloa a man?” She said she was a manly woman, and, she added, a good landlady.

All these years later, I still wonder about Arloa. She was mad brave to live in that “colors outside the lines” way. I honor her as a forbear.

Unitarian Universalists pride ourselves in coloring outside the lines. When we say All are welcome, we mean it. I should say, We mean it, but we don’t always know what we’re talking about! Here in New England, at least, there’s a kind of reluctance to ask questions, maybe for fear of appearing impolite or even, g*d forbid, prurient. What happens, then, is that we haven’t deeply cultivated an atmosphere of openness and healthy curiosity. We say, All are welcome, but who knows who’s really here. 

Maybe it’s just the fate of an extrovert, but I’m not even sure I would know myself if not for others’ openness and curiosity. Feminist theologian and teacher, Nelle Morton, spoke of “hearing each other into speech.”[1] Hearing each other into speech is one of the most revolutionary, counter-cultural gestures we can make: to ask, to listen deeply, and to care. 

In his book The Search for Common Ground, Rev. Howard Thurman wrote, “I want to be me without making it difficult to be you.”[2] On the surface, this is a “live and let live” win-win proposition. On the ground, though, this is hard work; the far more common attitude, whether expressed or not, is

I want to be me
without your making it difficult
for me to make you
be like me.

Do you know Holly Near’s song, Simply Love? She writes, in part,

Why does my love make you shift restless

in your chair

And leave you in despair

It’s simply love—my love for a woman....

Why does my love make you shift in your chair

It’s the bombs across the border

That should make you tear your hair

And yet it’s my love leaves you screaming

out your nightmare

Perhaps you know there’s something you

should fear

If my love makes me strong and makes

you disappear

It’s simply love—my love for a woman[3]

Hard as it is for some of us to imagine now, there was a time, and not so very long ago, when the stranger here at Arlington Street was gay or lesbian or bisexual. By the time most of us got here, though, the congregation had done the good, hard work of hearing each other into speech about gay rights and of radical hospitality, to the point that we hold hands each week for the closing words, and mean it as a blessing for one another and for the world. 

I want to put a finer point on that welcome now, and turn our attention to the T in LGBT, the T—transgender—that even as I speak is holding open the door open behind it to IQQ—intersex, questioning, queer—so that now we are becoming a beloved community of straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, questioning, queer, and, perhaps, there will be more in this spectacular rainbow of ways of being human. Specifically, I want to lift up the T today, inspired by Mr. Barb Greve, who is among us, learning the art and craft of ministry and bringing to us the gifts of a uniquely transgender perspective, and because I know that speaking names and words in this sacred space is a potentially transformational experience. 

My friend and colleague, Dr. Ibrahim Farajajé, writes, “How can we no longer take into consideration the spiritually deleterious effects of all forms of colonization on the very souls of all peoples? .... Our minds have been profoundly colonized. If we are to engage in truly liberatory[4] lives of faith and hope, we must engage in the work of decolonizing our lives.”

He says, “We must decolonize our lives, for our bodies and spirits and dreams and passions are no one’s occupied territories.... One of the greatest acts of resistance and decolonization for our holistic faith ... is to move beyond either/or (binary) thinking.”

Obviously, the English language is a huge stumbling block to moving beyond either/or thinking; our pronouns are he and she, and it  won’t do at all. Until those of us living outside of he and she imagine new pronouns, we’ll just have to ask, in that un-New England way, “Please tell me your name, and is that he or she? “ I am issuing a call to add our voices to a swelling chorus declaring an end to coloring inside the lines. With respect to gender, that means opening up “to far more rich and complex possibilities” than male and female, man and woman; to include those categories, but to interrupt “the fiction of ... gender ... purity,” and know that, as Ibrahim Farajajé says, “what [we] ‘see’ is not always what we get, and what [we] ‘get’ is not always what we ‘see.’”[5]

To live as transgender in this either-or world means that choosing which bathroom to use, when the only choice is either “men” or “women,” can be treacherous. To live as transgender in this either-or world means that going to the doctor can be terrifying, and humiliating. To live as transgender in this either-or world means that obtaining a license—let alone a passport, without with international travel is impossible—can be regarded as acts of defiance. 

There is justice-making work to be done beyond a very personal welcome, and I hope and trust that you will join me in it. We can liberate some restrooms from “men” or “women,” and open them to everybody.  We can support the work of educating the medical, legal, and law-enforcement establishments about gender identity. We can lobby for the augmentation of the categories of female and male with transgender: a third box to check, representing a movable feast of bodies and gender expressions. We can raise our voices for an end to gender discrimination, and, beginning and end, we can hear each other into speech, and tell the true stories of our lives.

I am haunted by the memory of my childhood landlady, Arloa. What was she saying about herself by the way she dressed? What did we miss by not asking her?   What is each of us saying about our self by the way we dress, walk, talk, smile, eat, pray ... or not?   What else—what more – do we want to say? Best to ask!

In 1975, poet Adrienne Rich delivered a paper called Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying. Drawn to rereading her words this past week, as I have so often over the years, I found my favorite passages in a new light. I close with some of them now. Adrienne Rich writes,

“Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other....[6]

“An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which ... people have the right to use the word ‘love’—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to ... [the] persons involved, a process of refining the truths [we] can tell each other.

“It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

“It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.

“It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us....[7]

 

My spiritual companions,
may we go this hard way together,
every one of us.
We are building the road as we walk on it.