step by step

Well, I began this blog a month ago and we are still getting a feel for what it can do. If we get in the habit of using it as a tool, I think it could be a powerful one. In looking at the agenda for our upcoming meeting, I’ve come to the conclusion that it will be impossible to do the kind of relationship-building that I’d hoped for. We just have so much to do in so little time. We’ll have to build relationships by doing the work together. I’d rather do a little trust-building and getting to know each other first, but hey, we’ll work with what we’ve got.

For those who may be reading this who don’t know much about the committee, the reason for my concern is that fully half the committee is new. Five of the ten people involved (and five of the seven that “count” as actual members of the committee) are beginning new terms in this capacity. Because anti-oppression work is emotional, personal, and often difficult, I’d hoped we could spend significant time listening to one another’s stories and learning why each of us cares enough to devote our time and energy to this committee. If we end up getting stuck, or frustrated, or conflicted about how best to approach the Herculean task we’ve been given, I think it will help to really know each other and understand what it is that has motivated each of us to do the work.

That said, I thought I would begin by telling you my story. It’s my hope that over the next few weeks, you’ll respond in kind. Maybe if we’re lucky some of the folks out there reading this will tell us what motivates and gives them strength to do this work.

But first, my story.

If I had to summarize the purpose of my life and ministry, it would be this: to live in the middle of all the conventional dichotomies and help people see the beauty of all that lies in-between the little boxes that try and fail to categorize us.

What in the world does that mean? Let me begin by listing for you the ways my life has fallen in-between.

First in most people’s minds is that I used to be a woman, but now I am a man. I was born female, in a small town in Iowa, but I grew up to be a man. About seven years ago, I began the hormone therapy that enabled me to make this shift. So when it comes to gender, I know a lot about what it’s like to be a girl, a mom, and a woman. I am learning much about what it is to be a daddy and a man. And, when it comes right down to it, I am and will always be both. While I move through the world as a man, I can never forget how it was to be a woman. And so my life is enriched and made more interesting by being able to understand how it is to live on either side of the “gender line.”

That part of my story is what a lot of people focus on, but it is actually not the heart of why I chose to serve on this committee. What is the heart? Well, what is closest to my heart is my thirteen-year-old son, who is African-American. Learning to parent, to love, to cherish a child whose experience of race is so different from my own has been a challenge and an amazing gift. It would take me thousands and thousands of words to even begin to explain what I mean, but I will tell you one story that I hope is illustrative.

When people ask me, “What’s it like to have a black child?” (And yes, people still ask things like that all the time.) I tell them this story. Before I had my son, racism was a monster out there on the edges of my world. I disliked it, marched against it, railed at it, and even sometimes hated it. I was completly and totally against racism. It was, in my mind, an ugly and hideous monster. Then I woke up one day and my baby was in the monster’s teeth. So anti-racism and anti-oppression work is no longer an abstraction for me. I live with the monster. I also live with the gift of having my world opened to cultures, experiences, and strengths I never knew existed. It is the hardest and best thing I have ever done. While I have not, perhaps, crossed the “race line,” I have been able to look and love across it and begin to learn how to break down the crazy concepts of that go with the “race boxes” that we’ve lived with for so long.

That might be enough, but it’s not all. I was raised with wealth and privilege, the beloved daughter of a radio man who was a “big fish” in a small town. We had the means to live without financial worry and for the first eleven years of my life I got every thing I wanted. Then my father left my mother and she and I lost the house and almost everything we had. For most of my teenage years, my mom worked nights as a hotel desk clerk and we struggled to survive. When I had my son, in the middle of my college years, we lived on welfare for a few years. Now, as UU minister, I am financially stable and comfortably middle class. I’ve crossed the “class lines” a few times, and I believe class issues are one of the most powerful, but silent, issues of oppression in UU congregations.

There are other boxes that I don’t comfortably fit into. Theologically, I am a humanist and a mystic. As far as sexual orientation goes–well, when one’s gender and one’s partner’s gender have both shifted over a lifetime, what labels fit? My family is interfaith and in many ways, my closest colleague is my mother-in-law, who is a rabbi at a large synagogue in California. Oh yeah, and I used to be a fundamentalist.

As you can tell, my journey has been–um—unique, but never boring. I am ever grateful for the many people who have loved and supported me along the way and kept me alive and sane through so much. I’m passionate about the work that this committee has been charged with doing because breaking through these crazy boxes and into the beautiful world between and beyond them will enrich the world so very much. If we can get a little closer to true justice, equity, and compassion, we will have made an amazing difference.

That’s why I’m here.