Divided No More
I want to begin this morning with a story I heard on NPR back in May.[1]
Their names were Bradley and Jonah - two little boys all of five years old or so with so much in common. But all that changed after Bradley came home one day from a trip to the playground with his baby sitter. His forehead cut open with a gash running deep into his hairline, Bradley was covered in blood.
His mother, Carol, tells us how in that single afternoon her vague concerns for her son suddenly came into sharp focus. "What had happened was that two 10-year-old boys had thrown him off some playground equipment across the pavement because he'd been playing with a Barbie doll - and they called him a girl," Carol says. "So that sort of struck me, that, you know, if he doesn't learn...he was going to get hurt."
For as long as his parents could remember, as far back as the age of two, Bradley had always preferred things that our culture associates with little girls. Dolls, dresses, the color pink, female action figures and female children for playmates. Bradley seemed to gravitate naturally to these things. But his parents hadn't really thought much of it. He wasn't playing with guns, they figured. He wasn't smoking cigarettes. As Carol remembers back she says it had really never occurred to her to say to him, "I'd really rather you played with a truck."
But after the playground incident, Bradley's parents got scared, and things changed. They decided to seek out help, and Bradley's school referred them to a psychologist in Toronto named Ken Zucker. Dr. Zucker diagnosed Bradley with gender identity disorder, a label given to children who believe that they were born into the wrong biological body. This is a controversial label to be sure - and it encompasses more than effeminate boys or masculine girls. When applied according to psychological standards, gender identity disorder refers to people - and in this case to children - who believe they are girls even though they have a male body, or who believe they are boys, even though they have a female body.
Dr. Zucker, who has been treating children labeled with gender identity disorder for the past 30 years, recommended his typical course of treatment for children under 10. His goal - to make them as comfortable as possible with the body they are born into.
Filled with the fear that as he grew older Bradley would continue to get hurt, that he would not be accepted by any peer group, Bradley's parents did their best to follow the doctor's advice. They removed all of Bradley's Barbie dolls and Polly Pockets - a significant stash for a child of 6. When the confiscation began, Bradley did his best to hide his favorites - the rainbow unicorn found shoved to the back of his closet and the female action figure pushed deep into the couch - but his parents took their charge seriously and out everything went. No longer allowed to play with girls or girlish toys or to even imagine himself as a female character when playing - Bradley didn't know what to do. He ignored all of the boy-ish toys his parents brought into the house.
"He turned to coloring and drawing," his mom, Carol says, "and he just simply wouldn't play with anything...I think he was really lost. ... The whole way that he knew and understood how to play was just sort of, you know, removed from his house." But even Bradley's drawing was problematic for his therapy. Bradley filled his pictures with all of the toys and images he had lost - princesses with long flowing hair, rainbows in pink and purple, fairies with beautiful gowns. And under the doctor's direction, his parents challenged him again. Can you draw us a picture of a boy, they asked. Can you draw a boy in that picture? Soon Bradley took to hiding his drawings, too.
Some time has passed for Bradley, and his parents admit that he and they have struggled with the therapy. At the beginning, they say, "He was much more emotional. ... He could be very clingy. He didn't want to go to school anymore," she says. "Just the smallest thing could, you know, send him into a major crying fit. And ... he seemed to feel really heavy and really emotional."
After eight months of therapy - Bradley's parents feel like he is making progress. Bradley is now playing with a few male friends and says that he likes boy things. When his parents ask him if he still wants to be a girl, he gets angry and defensive - screaming No at the top of his lungs. They know that it is a stock answer at this point, that their son is likely still, as they say, living a double life. But in their minds the difficulties are worth it. They want their son to change. They don't want him to be hurt, to struggle with the burden of living as the opposite gender as an adult - and this is the path they have chosen to help him.
And then there is Jonah, the other little boy I mentioned at the beginning of this story. In many ways, Jonah and Bradley share so much in common. From the age of two, Jonah also preferred toys typically associated with girls - shunning the fire trucks and balls his father brought home for him to play with. As Jonah grew older, his preferences became more pronounced, and he was visibly thrilled when casual acquaintances at the check out line would mistake him for a girl. At the age of 3, Jonah started taking his mother's clothing. Dressed in one of his mom's t-shirts with a belt cinched tight at his waist, Jonah basked in his new outfit for months until one day when his mother Pam found him crying inconsolably. He couldn't get the T-shirt to look right, she says.
Pam remembers watching her child in that moment. She says she knew what he wanted and she turned to him and said, "You really want a dress to wear, don't you?" Jonah's eyes lit up.
Later that day the two piled into the car and went to Target to buy Jonah two dresses. "I thought she was gonna hyperventilate and faint," Jonah's mom, Pam, says, "because she was so incredibly happy. ... Before then, or since then, I don't think I have seen her so out of her mind happy as that drive to Target that day to pick out her dress," Pam says of Jonah.
Pam and her husband now refer to Jonah as "she" - thanks to the help of their psychologist, Dianne Ehrensaft, a gender specialist in Oakland, California. Ehrensaft doesn't use the label, gender identity disorder with her patients, instead, she refers to children like Bradley and Jonah as transgender, and she does not believe that they need to be cured. She even discouraged Jonah's parents from putting him into any kind of therapy at that point - if your child is not depressed or anxious or experiencing anything else that would necessitate them coming into therapy, she advised, "then don't put a kid into therapy until they need it."
And while Ehrensaft is clear that she doesn't advise a one size fits all approach for all kids, it was clear to her and to Jonah's parents by the time that Jonah was five years old that he wanted to live as she, and Jonah entered kindergarten as a girl. She dropped the "h" from the end of her name, wore dresses to school and was addressed by classmates and teachers as she. And while Pam and her husband, Joel, were initially nervous about how all this would go, their fears were soon put to rest. Jona is thriving. She is now one of the most popular kids at school, and she is undeniably happy.
As you may have already guessed by now - these kids' therapists - Dr. Zucker and Dr. Ehrensaft - represent two poles of opinion on how transgender kids ought to be treated. The parents and psychologists of these kids are concerned for their safety, their happiness, their wellbeing. None of them say that there is one right answer for everyone -and lots of questions remain. Should doctors be "helping" patients fit into the body they have, or should they be helping kids and families learn how to cope with the teasing and taunting and pain that comes their way when others identify them as different? Should doctors be helping their patients to conform to society's norms or to follow their own instincts and intuitions - sometimes learning to live within the biological sex they were born into, sometimes transitioning to the opposite gender and sometimes learning to live within the spectrum that is transgender?
For many folks, the word transgender is an umbrella term that describes a diverse spectrum of people - from cross-dressers and transvestites, to folks who describe themselves as genderqueer, intersexuals, third gender, transsexuals, or self-identified trans people just to name a few of the options. The one thing that all of these people have in common is that they transgress the culturally accepted binary gender system of male and female. Most of us accept without thinking that there are only two genders - male and female - and we believe that everyone will fit neatly into one of those two categories. But the truth is that over the course of time, different cultures and societies have not only recognized but even revered those who believed that they were born somewhere in between.
People who would likely understand themselves as transgender today - people like the two-spirit Native Americans, the Siberian "soft man", and Joan of Arc, just to name a few - these individuals who transgress gender boundaries exist throughout time and across cultures - and they were often held up as uniquely worthy and spiritual beings. But somewhere along the line of time things changed - and our society's attitude toward people that don't neatly fit into socially prescribed roles moved from reverence to revulsion.
And this isn't true only when it comes to gender. Sure, we know without a doubt that rosy cheeked boys who sing in the choir are often hunted down on the playground - teased and taunted and even beaten for being different than some of their football playing peers. Some of them are even being conditioned by parents and therapists to live a double life for their own safety - putting aside the things that bring them joy and doing their best to embrace the things our culture tells them are right and appropriate. And the sad and tragic truth here is that this experience of living a double life is not the exception, but the norm in our culture. The sad truth of things is that our culture asks and at times even demands that we live our lives divided - shunning the things or the people or the activities and expressions that bring us joy so that we might fit in to this world around us. So many of us are pushed to be what someone else expects us to be. So many of us go along with what other people want out of us - setting aside our own anger and joy - just to be safe and fit in.
In her book, Gender Outlaw, Kate Bornstein says it this way. "This Western culture of ours tends to sacrifice the full range of experience to a lower common denominator that's acceptable to more people; we end up with McDonald's instead of real food, Holiday Inns instead of homes, and USA Today instead of news and cultural analysis. And we do that with the rest of our lives. Our spirits are full of possibilities, yet we tie ourselves down to socially-prescribed names and categories so we're acceptable to more people. We take on identities that no one has to think about, and that's probably how we become and why we remain men and women."[2]
Living a life divided is exhausting - and it surely diminishes our spirits. All I have to do is think of those two little ones - all of 6 years old now - Jona thriving and happy and open and Bradley - screaming his stock answers to his doctor and parents, squirreling away his toys in the back of his closet, retreating more and more into himself - to know what a divided life can do to a person. Some of us can hide our passions and joys and expressions of self more easily than others - but I for one am eternally grateful to those who cannot hide, who will not hide, who throw open the sash on the man behind the curtain and remind us all that true happiness and wholeness are possible if we follow our hearts - no matter what boundaries we must cross.
And I don't know if you've had a chance to see it close up, but it is truly one of the best parts of my work. When folks decide to live divided no more - whether by expressing their true gender identity, leaving a job or a relationship that does not fit them, walking into a church that truly supports and values their beliefs, or making a choice that leads them towards health and wholeness - their whole body changes. Light comes into their eyes, their hunched up shoulders drop, imagination and creativity return to their minds, smiles come more easily to their lips. There is loss, of course, and fear of the path unfolding before us - but none of that compares to the feeling of relief and release that comes with living into your true self - with living, as some say - aware for the first time that the divine lives within them, too.
As Unitarian Universalists, we have long been boundary breakers and category questioners. Our martyrs held fast to their beliefs even upon pain of death, and our ancestors charted a different religious path - a path that honors individual conscience and reason and experience above any set dogma or creed. We are asked by this faith, as my dear colleague and friend says, to answer the unique question that is our life. We are called by our faith and by our hearts to live not divided, but whole lives - and to create a community here on earth that allows and even expects others to do the same. "We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been," the theologian, Starhawk, writes. Home to "a place, half-remembered, and half-envisioned" a place "we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace we can be free."[3]
This, my friends, is the world that we are called to create. A beloved community that holds us up when we falter, that celebrates when we come into our power, that joins with us in strength to do the work that needs to be done. This faith of ours calls us to create that beloved community we long for. In our families, our homes, our churches and our nations - it is up to us to create a place where all of us are expected to live divided no more - not cut off, not even by the slightest partition, from the law of the stars.
May it be so, and Amen.
July 20, 2008
- Spiegel, Alix. "Two Families Grapple with Sons' Gender Preferences: Psychologist Take Radically Different Approaches in Therapy." All Things Considered, May 7, 2008; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90247842.
- Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw: Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, 1995, pp. 64-5.
- Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics, 1982.