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Speaking of Gender

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A reflection by Lindsey

In many conversations about faith and sexuality, people frequently emphasize one’s sexual orientation over one’s gender identity. Those attempting to talk about LGBT issues often overlook the last letter of the acronym. Questions about gender and gender identity get shifted into the background, pushed behind the stage, and were rarely welcomed into the conversation in the first place. Sometimes, concerns for fundamental equality between men and women can obscure why gender identity might matter.

I’ll be the first to admit that I feel out of my league when I try to speak of gender. I grew up thinking that gender was little more than a biological tag that indicated what restroom you used in public areas. I never had my gender flouted in front of my face to tell me that I couldn’t do x, y, or z. In many ways, I consider myself fortunate that I never encountered gender as an obstacle that blocked opportunities or prevented me from deciding how I wanted to express myself.

That doesn’t mean gender is easy.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to see how gender saturates the world around us. I’ve been lucky enough because I have never been able to be bothered with the “right” way of expressing myself. If you look at photos of me beginning at the age of 5 and continuing to present day, you’ll see that my self-presentation has been more or less constant for 25 years. Sure, there was a blip on the radar in 7th grade when I was experimenting with what it might look like to have long hair, but we all know that junior high students try on a range of self-presentations. In many ways, I feel safer because 5-year-old me knew how to be Lindsey no matter what other people might think. That’s one part of my 5-year-old self that I’m glad to still be holding onto to this day.

Yet, I wonder if we’re starting to see a shift in how we talk about gender. I’ve become increasingly aware that it’s possible to label another person’s self-presentation as “gender non-conforming.” In some ways, I wonder if conversations around gender identity are starting to diversify in a way akin to the many different conversations about sexual orientation. When people began discussing sexual orientation, the dominant word used to describe the minority sexual orientation was “gay.” For a good bit now, the dominant word used to describe the minority gender identity was “transgender.” I find myself welcoming the broadening of the discussions as people with degrees of gender variation begin to experiment with ideas like genderqueer, bigender, and agender even as these terms have exceptionally fluid definitions.

For my part, I’ll admit to being somewhat lost in the shuffle about what all of these terms mean. None of these terms seem especially comfortable for describing my own situation, but I’ve been on this journey long enough to know it’s okay that I’m not ready to go out and buy assorted buttons to broadcast my preferred vocabulary to the universe. I’m profoundly grateful that so many people over the years have related to me simply as Lindsey without asserting the various rules of gender identity, performance, and expression to control my activity. Since having my own awakening as to how gender manifests itself in our world, I’ve experienced some rather jarring discomfort when I notice people actively enforcing gendered boundaries. I joke that there’s sort of a gender scale that stretches from 1 (gender is not noticeably present in any constraining way) to 10 (gender organizes just about every expectation and interaction), where I’m particularly apt to label my experiences of profound discomfort as Gender 11 moments. I’ve also noticed that when I have my choice of where to be, I’d rather be in environments much lower on the gender scale.

Talking about this topic is hard, partly because I think we’ve gotten so used to the conversation being about sexual orientation that we overlook how people navigate questions about gender. I didn’t even realize that gender might be an important part of how I experience these conversations until just a few years ago. But I wanted to take some time today to open a conversation about gender here on the blog. The door is open, the kettle is on, and I’d love to talk with you more in the comments.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Terms of Engagement

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A reflection by Sarah

On January 8, 2014, one evening before the opening session of the Gay Christian Network Conference, Lindsey and I visited a small, independent bookstore in Chicago. We had spent the entire day driving to the Midwest from our city, since 3 AM in fact, and were exhausted. I was still shaken from a car accident we had experienced just hours earlier, and after meeting up with our friend Alison at the last minute for dinner at a nearby Mediterranean restaurant I was ready to turn in for the evening. Still, Lindsey insisted that we take some time to stroll around the bookstore and see what hidden gems we might find. We split off into different sections for a while. Later, Lindsey met me in the adventure books where I was perusing a copy of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. We began talking about all the amusing situations we’ve found ourselves in since we first met, and I noticed a positive shift in my mood. Ultimately, we ended up in a conversation about how our life together is turning out to be the craziest adventure upon which either of us has ever embarked.

That discussion was one I’m sure I’ll never forget. It was the evening when, after months of discernment, Lindsey and I affirmed to each other that we feel called to continue living our celibate vocations together for the rest of our lives. We came to a decision that after spending the next year to reflect further, we will pursue some form of legal protection and find the most appropriate way to honor and celebrate our family. A couple pursuing marriage (however one defines that term) might consider such discussions characteristic of “engagement.” But we aren’t preparing to enter a marriage, so most people we know are baffled by our discussions of commitment and share life.

As I’ve reflected before, Lindsey and I have always struggled to find the best words to describe our relationship and our way of life. The English language and societal expectations don’t make it an easy task: there isn’t exactly a concise term for “couple committed to living a celibate vocation together that isn’t a marriage, but still allows for financial security, the ability to make health care decisions for each other, etc., etc., etc.” There’s no option for “preparing to live fully into a lifelong celibate partnership” on Facebook’s “relationship” dropdown menu. Even more significant a complicating factor is that our Christian tradition offers us little language beyond “celibacy” for describing our vocation and no guidance at all for developing a meaningful way of life in our specific circumstance.

Another layer of difficulty in determining what language to employ is that people in our lives don’t always understand why we believe it important to use certain descriptors and not others. At one extreme, we have acquaintances who urge us not even to identify as being in a relationship with each other. They encourage us to describe ourselves as “best friends” and “roommates.” In most cases, these same people become uncomfortable when we use the phrase “lifelong commitment” in relation to each other, but experience no discomfort with the idea that monastics enter lifelong commitments to each other in their communities. On the other hand, we know people who have trouble recognizing why, as an LGBT couple doing life together in a committed relationship, we wouldn’t want that referred to as a marriage. Many of these folks urge us to discuss our relationship in spousal terms, and some have indicated that our disinterest in doing so sets us in opposition to the movement for marriage equality. With minimal availability of comfortable terminology and an abundant presence of people ready to tell us how we ought to define ourselves, the quest for the best words can leave a person (or a couple) feeling very isolated. Yet despite these experiences, we are heartened by the number of people who, in diverse ways, have been unapologetically supportive of us in our vocation. We have many friends who offer us encouragement daily and show interest in helping us engage with the tough questions, regardless of what conclusions we reach and how those may or may not match with their own conclusions.

As of now, we find that the terms “family” and “team” roll most naturally off the tongue when describing ourselves to others. “Partners” also seems to fit well because this word implies shared work and a shared journey. Despite the fact that many equate the word “partnership” with “sexually active relationship,” we feel drawn to the basic meaning of this term, as we do understand our vocation to be shared responsibility for serving others and serving Christ.

It’s regrettable that people in various types of relationships aren’t always free to define those relationships such that all involved parties feel comfortable with the language used. Language around relationships is highly politicized. How one identifies one’s relationship can raise all kinds of associations for other people. In America, both religions and the government define marriage. In the eyes of a public audience, one’s willingness or unwillingness to define a particular relationship as a marriage often carries ideological connotations, regardless of whether one actually identifies with said ideologies. If any freedom to define one’s relationship and not be pigeonholed into a political category ever did exist, it seems that freedom is now gone. The terms of engagement for discussing our own life situation do not belong to us, and that will never change unless we make an active decision to take them back. With this post, consider it done. Lindsey and I are a team, a family, and a partnership, even if those words don’t have the same meanings for you as they do for us.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Whose story counts, anyway?

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A reflection by Sarah

In semesters when World Religions is part of my teaching load, the question “Who has the right to claim a particular religion as his/her own?” emerges regularly. When it does, students are always quick to draw lines regarding who should and shouldn’t be allowed to identify with one religion or another. My Muslim students insist that the terrorists who planned and carried out the attacks on September 11, 2001 weren’t truly following Islam. Likewise, my Christian students passionately declare that members of Westboro Baptist Church and the Ku Klux Klan aren’t true Christians. One student will assert, “Only people who follow the teachings of [holy text] are the real followers of [religion],” and the others begin nodding vigorously. I’ll ask my usual follow-up: “Who determines how to interpret [holy text] properly?” For the better portion of the class period, we’ll discuss who has ownership of certain religious texts and terms. Can Mormons rightly claim the label “Christian” while believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist as three separate personages rather than an undivided Holy Trinity? Is it appropriate for a white American who has never visited India and has no Indian heritage to become a self-proclaimed Hindu? What are the boundaries of these terms, and who gets to decide in the first place?

On the day this discussion arises, each semester, without fail, I spend my evening commute pondering an unrelated, yet similar question: who has the right to claim the terms lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, genderqueer, and so forth? Whose story counts as a legitimate expression of an LGBT experience? This question may appear unnecessary, even ridiculous. On some level, I’m inclined to believe that it is both. But nevertheless, I feel the need to ask it.

Over the years since coming out, I’ve experienced a lot of people in a lot of different contexts telling me, “You aren’t really gay/a lesbian.” A young gay man I knew in college said this to me on the grounds that I was neither “butch enough” nor “femme enough,” and he couldn’t see me ending up in a same-sex relationship long term. My mother uttered those words to me when I was in my early twenties, using the fact that I had dated a boy all four years of high school as evidence for her claim. A number of priests have stated this upon seeing me in confession, asserting that in using the terms gay and lesbian, I am labeling myself by desires rather than by my identity in Christ. One even told me that use of these words marks me for Cesar instead of God. An acquaintance in graduate school informed me that he would not be convinced I was a lesbian unless I was willing to recount having a previous sexual experience with a man, thereby proving I am not attracted to men. And with some regularity, I hear from other members of the LGBT community (and sometimes allies too) that if I’m celibate, I’m not “one of them.” In other words, being celibate means “denying” my sexual orientation. My story doesn’t fit normative expectations, so according to some, I shouldn’t be allowed to use the terms “gay” and “lesbian.”

Not long ago, Lindsey and I received an email from a reader stating the following: “You people have no idea what it means to be gay. If somebody doesn’t support my right to have sex, they aren’t a real gay person. You’re trying to get people to think we can all be gay and not have sex. You’re going to make all of us be held back in the world.” Sometimes, people go so far as to tell us that we’re actually anti-gay. We’ve also received Facebook messages like this one: “Despair to all gay, anti-gay persons. Verily I say! DESPAIR to all gay, anti-gay persons!” I can’t say I was surprised by either message because I’ve heard such claims and exhortations time and time again. Lindsey and I hear almost weekly from people who consider us hypocritical for supporting legal recognition for same-sex couples while not calling our own relationship a “marriage.” Those of us who feel called to celibacy, celibate partnership, or mixed-orientation marriage have to defend ourselves against this judgmental rhetoric constantly. Our supporters, regardless of their own sexual orientations, face these claims—and sometimes the associated dangers—as well. A few weeks ago as I read Nate Craddock’s response to the death threat he received, tears filled my eyes and my heart began to ache. I wondered, how could someone who has undoubtedly endured rejection, bullying, and discrimination of all kinds be so quick to subject others to the same cruel treatment? Doesn’t this person realize that many of the same folks who have harassed and degraded him or her probably do the same to all LGBT people, regardless of life situation?

The idea that only a certain type of LGBT person’s story actually counts is troubling. It contributes to the “us vs. them” mentality that is already far too pervasive in the conversation about LGBT issues in the Church. It harms relationships amongst LGBT people and the few conservative straight Christians who are genuinely interested in the LGBT Christian experience. It vilifies and even dehumanizes members of the LGBT community who hold to a traditional Christian sexual ethic (or support those who do), casting such people as enemies of gay rights, who don’t know what it’s like to experience discrimination or judgment within the Church and society. It assumes that celibacy and mixed-orientation marriages provide some magical form of protection, and that we who choose these ways of life are motivated by self-loathing and fear of the Church. Forget the possibility that some of us might have chosen our vocations freely and find them sustainable, fulfilling, and joyous. And perhaps most strikingly, it leads the LGBT community, a community that prides itself on acceptance of all kinds of diversity, dangerously close to becoming just another elitist clique, where some people are welcome and others get the door slammed in their faces.

Not long ago, a group of students at Wheaton College made headlines for protesting their school’s unwillingness to host LGBT speakers who have reached more liberal conclusions on questions of sexual morality. I commend the students for speaking out on this issue because I believe all stories are worthy of being told and heard. It’s entirely fair to ask why a speaker like Justin Lee would not be permitted to engage students with his story while speakers like Wesley Hill and Rosaria Butterfield are welcomed. After reading several reports, I do not think the students were trying to suggest an interest in hearing only from LGBT Christians who will present modern interpretations of scripture and sexual ethics. It seems what they wanted was appreciation for diversity. I think the LGBT community could learn a great deal from these students and their protest. Willingness to hear just one type of story places an arbitrary limit not only on LGBT experiences, but also on the broader experience of being human. It doesn’t matter whether the story being silenced is about a lesbian couple whose church wouldn’t baptize their son, a gay man who feels called to a celibate vocation in a Roman Catholic religious order, or a woman who chose to marry a man even though she knew that in general, she wasn’t attracted to men. To silence one type of story is to place the freedom to tell any story in jeopardy.

What makes us so uncomfortable with hearing stories different from our own? I’ve been pondering that over the past few weeks of blogging. I don’t have the answer to this question, but I’ve wondered if perhaps, “Your story threatens me,” actually means, “There are people who aren’t willing to listen to my story, but are willing to listen to yours. I’m afraid they will use yours to try and squelch mine.” I could respond flippantly, “That’s not my problem. I’m just telling my story.” But truthfully, it is my problem. When one of my brothers or sisters is being silenced, mistreated, and abused, it is my responsibility to take a stand against these injustices. If someone does use my story against another person, does that obligate me to stop telling it? Not at all. But at the moment I close my mind to that person’s experience of life, I become a rank hypocrite. Christians, myself included, need to do better at listening to other people’s experiences, regardless of whether we agree theologically.

Six days a week, I write with Lindsey as we use this blog to share our own varieties of LGBT experience. My story, and our story together, might not fit within the boxed set of expectations that other people assert as “normal.” But I am who I am, we are who we are as a couple, and we aren’t going to stop writing because there are people in the world who aren’t willing to give us the time of day. I am a celibate, partnered, lesbian woman who attempts to be a faithful Christian and fails daily. I am, as a prayer in my tradition says, the chief of sinners. I am a teacher, a doctoral student, an extrovert, and a gentle person who can easily turn into a bulldog if I learn that a friend or loved one is being mistreated. My life isn’t perfect, but there’s nothing I’d ever consider trading for what I share with Lindsey—every aspect of it, celibacy included. That’s my story, and it might not resonate with your own LGBT experience, but I hope we can leave enough room under this umbrella for both of us.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Defining Marriage

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Since releasing our “Defining celibacy” post over a month ago, we’ve received over one hundred questions about its content from our readers. These inquiries fall into three general categories: 1) questions about how our definition of “celibacy” differs from how many people would define “marriage,” 2) questions about how we would define “marriage,” and 3) questions about how we understand our specific kind of celibate vocation relative to other celibate vocations. We are eager to respond to each of these in time, and today we hope to make a beginning at dialoguing with our readers on numbers 1 and 2.

In today’s post, we make our first attempt at exploring how one might define the vocation of marriage. We are adamant that celibate vocations are best defined by celibate people, and we are equally convinced that the vocation to marriage is best defined by people who are married. We believe it would be inappropriate for us to discuss what marriage is without asking for the input of those who are married. Over the past several weeks, we’ve been collecting responses to the questions, “How would you define the term ‘marriage’? What does ‘marriage’ mean to you?” via our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and through personal conversations with people we know who have been married for varying lengths of time. We’ve communicated with younger couples and older couples, gay, straight, and bisexual couples, religious and nonreligious couples (some with one person of each), couples who have experienced divorce and are currently in their second or third marriages, and couples who have been married for decades. We’ve also spoken with a number of married pastors who have shared with us what topics they find important to raise in pre-marital counseling sessions. What we’ve come to realize is that there are perhaps as many definitions for marriage as there are married couples, and sometimes within a marriage the two partners will have different understandings of the term.

Some of our respondents focused on how marriage provides a way for two people to enjoy life together and become the best they both can be:

“Marriage, to me, is loving someone enough to give things up to help them achieve their life goals, knowing they will do the same for you. And having fun and having intellectual conversations along the way. So marriage is living each day knowing you’re helping making yourself and someone else a better person.” –Shae

Other respondents emphasized emotional intimacy, physical attraction, and commitment as key elements in defining marriage:

“I feel like I’ve found the person who is enough like me that we can truly understand each other and different enough from me that we can have our autonomy and entertain one another. We are also very physically attracted to each other, which, for us, feels important. I think the institution of marriage is neat because once you’ve found someone you truly enjoy and trust, you can make a decision to take on the world together. We make each other better, more productive people. It’s an accountability system in a way. Ideally, marriage also provides you with a partner who cares more about you than anyone or anything else in the world. I have an immense feeling of emotional security as well as physical security in my marriage. We also pick up the slack for each other in areas like household chores and bill paying. We are a team. My favorite thing about being married is having a best friend that I can share intimacy, intelligence and laughter with…but who is soothing and present for me when I’ve had the worst day in the world and just need kind words and for someone else to make me dinner. Which he does.” –Mary

A large number of respondents defined marriage within the context of their specific religious traditions:

“I’m Catholic, so I believe that marriage requires not only a lifelong commitment, but also openness to children. That is essential to the way I believe God intends married couples to serve the world. Whether they actually have children or not isn’t the point. It’s that they’re always open to bringing new life into the world, providing a home for children who were brought into the world by other people, or both. In my faith, that’s what marriage is. But I understand that isn’t how everyone understands marriage. Openness to children isn’t a foundational element of marriage in all religions, or even in other Christian traditions. If somebody isn’t religious, or is Protestant, or is Hindu and decides that being open to children isn’t a necessary part of their marriage, I’m not going to tell them they aren’t really married. That’s just wrong. I think married people need to respect that there are many ways people in the world talk about marriage.” –Anne Marie

We were also honored that a few readers trusted us with deeply personal details of struggles in their marriages, claiming that these trying times have made their marriages stronger and have proven to them that marriage is truly “for better or for worse.” One reader shared with us that after weathering the challenges of post-traumatic stress disorder, job loss, and financial troubles, she and her husband were dangerously close to ending their marriage, but found the strength within themselves to fight for each other and the life they share:

“[My husband] and I have both agreed that if one feels neglected by the other we must wave our flag high at that point and retreat to devote ourselves to one another again. We don’t wait until it’s late in the game either, we find time for one another immediately. We have stayed together and come out stronger through things that would tear most people apart. I can honestly say because all of the horrible times I love my husband more now than I ever did, because he (like I) decided to run this race with me. We have a bond that love cannot even begin to define. I know that no matter what happens, he’s going to be beside me. I’ve thought a lot about prearranged marriage, and while I am thankful that I did get to choose my mate, I know why so many prearranged marriages lasted, while so many “loving” marriages of today don’t last. People today are so ready to give up. They toss in the towel at the first stumbling block, if that. People actually enter marriages with the thought that if they don’t like it they can always get divorced…No one is held accountable to stay married…I’m not saying I’m against divorce and I realize there are certain situations where it cannot be avoided, but the rapid rate of divorce is despicable… If I had to define marriage I would say commitment, along with perseverance and hard work which can lead to an unbreakable bond.” -Kristen

We selected the above responses from the 37 we received in total. If we’d had time to discuss this topic with more people, we’re sure we would have encountered an even greater diversity of ideas about the definition of marriage.

When reading the responses, we began to notice many commonalities. It became clear to us that every married person who responded expressed love for his or her spouse. Other similarities we noticed were assertions that marriage involves doing life together, being present for one another, and experiencing shared intimacy. Among our respondents who affiliate strongly with a religious tradition (mostly Christianity), the eternal nature of the marriage commitment and emphases on shared faith-based values arose frequently. Responses received from married pastors who conduct pre-marital counseling showed a common theme of focusing on conflict resolution and the practical aspects of living out a marriage commitment. Some indicated that “family” and “children” were among the most essential topics, but these were not the majority. Likewise, we noticed that the majority of our married respondents in general did not include “children” or “openness to children” in their definitions of marriage.

Thinking back to our aforementioned “Defining celibacy” post, you might be wondering if all this information has caused us to reevaluate the vocation we feel called to live together. It’s true that many qualities mentioned in these definitions of marriage are also present in our relationship. More than one reader has suggested that when we describe our understanding of our shared vocation, we are actually talking about a “celibate marriage.” If married people tend to agree that marriage involves commitment, intimacy, being willing to work through difficult situations, and sharing a set of values, couldn’t our relationship be considered a “marriage” of sorts? Perhaps. But here’s another bit of food for thought: every item we just listed is also present in other types of human relationships. Perseverance, closeness, willingness to stay when things get complicated, and so on…one could find all of these qualities just as vibrantly in monastic communities as in marriages. Furthermore, many of these characteristics describe healthy church communities and also relationships a person might have with very close friends or his/her “family of choice.” Would we feel comfortable defining all relationships with these characteristics as “marriages”?

Our first try at defining celibacy focused on vulnerability, commitment, radical hospitality, and shared spiritual life. Could all of these aspects also be present in the vocation of marriage? Absolutely. It could be that these four characteristics are at the heart of all vocations, but manifest differently in each. We do not believe that defining a term must necessarily mean defining it against another in every possible way, especially when related to people’s senses of calling in life. We’ve found that if someone asks us to define “celibacy,” more often than not, that person anticipates that we will discuss celibate vocations in terms of how they are different from rather than similar to marriage. However, when we say that vocations allow people to reflect the Kingdom of God, we expect that all kinds of vocation will have certain commonalities.

In the future, we would like to explore more deeply some of the differences we see between marriage and our celibate partnership. One major point of difference that keeps coming back to us is our sense of call to serving the broader world rather than focusing as much on service to a narrower sense family. We do consider each other “family” and have made a decision to expand our family in the future, but we have no idea what that means or who it will bring into our lives. Within our Christian tradition, the majority of married people would contend that openness to children is an essential element of marriage. This is not to suggest that marriages in other traditions (or nonreligious marriages) with other definitions of the term somehow fall short of “true marriages,” but to say that we have a particular framework from our faith tradition that impacts our understanding of what a marriage within that branch of Christianity would look like. While we aren’t opposed to the idea of welcoming children into our life in some capacity, we don’t feel that God is calling us to the specific work of raising children. We would like to explore other ways of opening our home to people with various needs who have no other place to find support, and we see that as an essential part of our celibate vocation. Feel free to ask questions about this, as we intend to address it further in future posts.

Discerning vocation can be, and often is, a complicated task. It is helpful to get to know people living out diverse vocations as we discern the best language for describing our particular type of celibate vocation. We learn just as many lessons from married couples as we do from monastics and individuals pursuing other varieties of celibate vocations. We think that because marriage is such a dominant vocational pathway in our society, many people have cultivated an expansive definition of “marriage.” It is our hope that by discussing the celibate vocation, our readers will come to a deeper appreciation of the diversity within celibate vocations.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

The Language Police

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A reflection by Lindsey

When a person is trying to figure out whether he or she fits somewhere along the LGBT spectrum, many other people are quick to suggest language. If a boy realizes that he likes boys, some would encourage him to call himself “gay” and wear that label with pride. Others would demand that he resist the urge to “identify with his sin” and discuss his realization in terms of “struggling with same-sex attraction.” Members of LGBT couples might be counseled to avoid using any kind of romantic indicator in favor of “friend” or “roommate”… Or they may be encouraged to adopt every form of spousal language, whether that language seems fitting to them or not. Personally, I find the linguistic directives from both conservative and liberal camps drive me nuts. I see these directives as little more than people proudly displaying a “Language Police” badge on their sleeves.

Members of the Language Police overlook that a person on the LGBT spectrum can have a hard time finding appropriately descriptive language. A girl who likes girls might find that the “lesbian” label accurately describes her experience. However, the same girl who likes girls might find that she actually likes girls and boys (where the bisexual label offers a bit better description), or that she feels great solidarity with gay Christians, perceives her sexual attractions as leaning significantly more towards girls than boys, and deems it appropriate to use the word “gay” to describe her experience. A guy who grew up being socialized as a girl might find that “transgender” is the best word to describe his experience, or he might prefer using words like “genderqueer” or “agender.” Every label has a meaning. Moreover, every label is an approximation used to describe some aspect of a person’s experience. Individuals need space to decide what words work best for them.

Each individual adopting a certain label has an active role in determining what that label means. As soon as a person connects the word “gay” to some facet of his or her experience, that person actively communicates what it means to be gay. When other people make claims about the label, they should be reflect on whether their claims speak to the experience of every person wearing the label. If someone says “It’s impossible to be a gay Christian,” that person overlooks or denies the experiences of many gay people who are Christians. When a group gets larger, many labels get boiled down to one essence or another. Many people I know who use the word “gay” to describe themselves focus on the idea that gay people simply experience attraction to the same sex.

Members of the Language Police rarely want an individual to communicate what a label means to him or her. The Language Police assume that if you use a word like “transgender,” what you’re really saying is that you desire medical interventions to allow you reshape the sexed characteristics of your body to align with your gender. Members of the Language Police have a difficult, even impossible time understanding that labels are approximations used by people to describe a part of their reality. Furthermore, members of the Language Police assume that they know the meaning of the label and that the person resisting their interpretation has no appreciation for the English* language. (*Feel free to substitute the name of other languages as is relevant for your situation.) Engaging in linguistic policing requires that the enforcer assumes a position of power and is incredibly patronizing, dismissive, and rude.

I know that we’ve taken time to try and educate our readers on how to talk with others about A Queer Calling. This action differs from the action of the Language Police because we are trying to help other people accurately describe us. We’re trying to be clear about the language we use, why we use it, and what the language means to us. We assume that people actually care enough about us to try to respect our language and get to know us. We do not claim a monopoly on the experiences of all celibate, LGBT, Christian couples. One of the reasons our friends encouraged us to start our blog is that many of them had heard some stories from LGBT Christian couples not called to celibacy but wanted to hear more about how we understand our life together. We care about helping our allies understand our experience; and we do not offer linguistic corrections because we’re trying to deny other people their experiences. We offer linguistic corrections because we want the words people use to describe us to reflect our experience.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.