Embodiment, Gender, and RE ‐ligion

Abstract

Embodiment, Gender, and RE‐ligion Stephanie Y. Mitchem Her shirt: “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic when you could just be quiet?” Photo by author from Women's Convention, Detroit, MI, October 2017 Father's sneering comment to his young son: “That's one of them funny people, she used to be a man.” Son: (after a moment of silence) “I hope that never happens to me.” “I'm seriously offended that there is such a thing as this [LGBTIQ+] movement. Society cannot and should not except [sic] this behavior. I have a right to be offended and will always be offended by this fake movement which requires no special attention but by people with an altered ego and fake agenda.” From a Facebook post by Madison County, Alabama, Deputy Jeff Graves, following a black gay teen's suicide. “‘Liberty, Guns, Bible, Trump, BBQ:’ Deputy on Leave After Writing an Anti‐LGBTQ post Mocking Bullied Dead Teen” Kyle Swenson, The Washington Post, April 24, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/24/liberty-guns-bible-trump-bbq-deputy-leave-after-writing-an-anti-lgbtq-post-mocking-bullied-dead-teen/?utm_term=.635fc8265af5 Historians trace eras and anthropologists research societies where a gay or trans‐person had a place and purpose in those social structures. This body of scholarship across time and culture proves that gender categories are socially constructed. In the last fifty or so years, medical researchers and biologists have proven that the binary constructions of sex, strictly male or female, are not true representations of biology, which are much more complex than a simple box 1 or box 2. This essay will not spend time focusing on any of these disciplines. Instead, I'll hold all this as background and foundational for the direction I'm taking: a religious and sociocultural consideration of gender‐focused oppressions and connections with other oppressions. Issues of gender identity had been hardwired into the United States’ various cultures, evident in the above father‐son conversation and in the heartless post by an Alabama deputy responding to a black teen's suicide. However, these ideas of binary‐only identities are being challenged by the number of people recognizing their own sexual realities and publicly claiming their identities. Gendered restrictions are challenged by some who support social acceptance of non‐conforming gender identities. Yet, unlike the woman in the T‐shirt at the beginning of this essay, there is serious pushback against gender diversity. As a result, GLAAD, with the Harris Poll, conducted the 2018 Accelerating Acceptance report and the results are mixed: For decades, as more and more LGBTQ people were out, visible, and threaded through all walks of life, non‐LGBTQ people became more comfortable. This year, more non‐LGBTQ U.S. adults reported being uncomfortable learning a family member, doctor, or child's teacher is LGBTQ. However, 79 percent of non‐LGBTQ U.S. adults still agreed with the statement ‘I support equal rights for the LGBT community.’ But there is another layer of complications: The emphasis on LGBTQIA+ issues often has a male face, particularly in the media. This reflects the male bias in American society. A black gay man who considers himself a progressive wrote: “Masculinity operates like whiteness: It demands control over any space it enters. It plants itself in the center and shoves anything coded as feminine to the edges…. And just as these ideas confine the minds and hearts of men, they corrode public life.” The very extension of the categories—LGBTQIA—causes confusion for some people: Where did all these forms of sexuality start? Is it, as the deputy claimed, just some kind of movement? Is it some people choosing to perform weird sex acts? A bizarre lifestyle? Lesbian and gay, transgender women and transgender men, intersexed and bisexual people, are not new species of humanity caused by, say, recent solar flares. Yet, binary sex identity is promoted too frequently, and anything else is denigrated too often, transmitted on many frequencies, indicated by the father‐son conversation above. Not a choice of a lifestyle, no person can catch LGBTQ, and no person can promote gender fluid identities. The seeming expansion of identities involves people...