Honey

I love and subscribe to Free Will Astrology. When I was just a young fella living on Capitol Hill in Seattle, I looked forward to the next new edition of The Stranger, just so I could immediately flip to the back and find my inspirational message for the week. Since leaving Seattle and reading everything on screen rather than in print, I’ve been receiving my astrology every week via email. It’s extremely convenient and still inspiring.

Just because I love it, doesn’t mean I understand it. This week’s reading leaves me a bit confused and I’m hoping that by sharing it with you and completing a little homework assigned by Rob Brezsny himself, I’ll find some clarity.

I’m a Libra, so all you other Libras out there, this one’s for you, too:

Just below this bit of interestingness was a homework assignment:

And so, here goes:

You should know this about me: I am obsessed with the end of the world. I am fascinated with anything remotely associated with the apocalypse, the end of days, armageddon, and all other manner of prophetic wonder. I love the idea of drastic change that makes the entire world shift perspective, start over, and do everything better, or at the very least, differently. I have repeatedly revolutionized my own life by initiating migrations on a two year cycle. I am reborn over and over again, discovering clear phases demarcated by the act of packing and unpacking and settling in again into a whole new reality.

You should also know this: I never listen to, nor do I ever read the news. I have surrounded myself with a transparent shield off which all manner of information simply bounces. Those times when I have let my guard down, even for a minute, just to find out what’s going on “out there”, I have been attacked by piercing, depressing, traumatizing, and hopeless voices. As soon as I find myself shriveling into permanent angst, I close myself off again, protecting my mind and my spirit from an endless stream of bad news.

Until now.

How can I not pay attention, now that we’re seemingly at the brink of something else, a new time of great unknowns? Just as I have spent much of my life dreaming of new cities and places to call home, I am now imagining a brave new world. Chaos and crisis are upon us. How will we rise above our past mistakes and our fear to meet our highest potential? I am a witness to three historic shifts, all in one year, and I’ve been so excited about them that I have let the media have free and easy access to my brain. I can’t turn it off, for fear that I’ll miss that subtle moment when everyone is thinking differently about life and about eachother and about our future.

1. The financial meltdown. As more of our friends and families lose their homes and their jobs, we are in the position to find great compassion and understanding in our hearts. Just in the last week, I have seen ordinary folks reach out extraordinarily to those who are suffering in poverty. I believe that this time of recession or depression will be difficult, but I also believe that we will come together like never before to support and care for eachother, and I’m thrilled to be part of this change.
2. Barrack Obama. It’s true that Barrack is a politician, and against gay marriage, and so he loses some appeal for me and some other people I know. However, I have been waiting a long, long time for a leader to stand up in this country and inspire us to care about what’s going on around us. The fact that Obama will be the next president of the United States makes me feel like maybe we’re all good, open, trusting people, and that we’re ready for a new future.
3. Gay marriage. Closest to my heart is the issue that is on fire this election season. When I was a kid, I remember hearing about the possibility of maybe having gay marriage being heard in the courts in Hawaii. Years went by and nothing changed. Just this year, California, a true leader in this country, has made gay marriage legal, and I am overjoyed. It is now only a matter of time before all states and then the federal government follow suit and perhaps even in my lifetime, I will witness the true equality between all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender.

   Unfortunately, it’s not over yet. A proposition sits on the California ballot this November that would amend the constitution to disallow the right to marry. Tragically, this is a close and tough fight. Please, if you can, donate a little (or a lot) to the NO on 8 campaign. Anything helps. I thank you and so do future generations.

We are at a turning point, a new beginning. Financially, emotionally, politically, spiritually, a million different axes of identity and reality are shifting beneath us. We are strong and courageous people, and I look forward to the shedding of our illusions and to rare glimpses of everyday miracles.

Update: LISTEN TO “As We Are: Transgender”

Imagine my surprise this morning, getting dressed in the locker room after a serious workout, when I turned on the radio and heard people talking about being transgendered. A daily show called Think Out Loud on OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting), is discussing gender and the challenges of living as transgendered. They are also taking calls and the discussion is awesome. You can also check out the topic blog page for more information and to make comments.

You can stream the show for 15 more minutes (until 10am PST). I don’t know if they save archives to the site, but I’ll post a link later if they do.

Leo has got me thinking about the idea that my soul might have a gender.

As a result, I’ve thought a lot about assigning a gender to my soul and I feel tugged in two directions equally.

I was raised in a spiritual environment. I attended parochial schools most of my life, surrounded by images and lectures and anything else imaginable that spoke of God the Father. I learned of many mythological and legendary religious heroes, usually men, who came closer to God than anyone else and deserved great praise and consideration. I was a good, trusting kid who was open to these ideas and so these ideas became my own.

My mom presented a feminine side to spirituality that could not possibly compete with the nature of my experience, but instead began to work its way in. I found myself drawn to the few but present representations of women. We were Catholic by then, and luckily so, since in most religions there is no female presence at all.

Spirituality is many things to many people, but to me, it is the line that connects all the dots together. Spirituality is my connection to the earth and to the universe and to other people and to life in general. Through spirituality I seek to feel grounded, peaceful, and one with everything. Spirituality helps me to explore my relationships and to understand the energy of the universe and to witness my attraction to this energy in all its forms.

When I was a child, I was taught to look toward a divine entity for comfort, protection, understanding, and punishment. I was taught to gender this role as male. (Is gender a verb? It is now.) As I grew older, I began to feel resentment where before I had known absolute trust. I realized that this archetype did not apply, or at least I didn’t want it to apply, and so I left all that religious stuff behind. (Okay, there were a lot of other reasons, but this was the first.) I could certainly relate to the desire for an ultimate mother figure, so left the image of Mary at the back of my mind, but shunned the God as Father idea and moved on.

Although I know this isn’t true, my mom convinced me at a young age that women have a stronger connection to God. I believed that the woman’s experience, in all of its suffering, made women the older souls, the more deeply wise. I have spent a lifetime trying and failing and trying again to unravel these patterns of thought from my brain, but just as surely as the God the Father image holds regardless of my rejection, I am caught up by these ideas.

Even the notion that I would claim a genderless soul feels like I am breaking these bindings that have caught me since childhood. Viewing my gender from a spiritual perspective makes me wonder how much of my long-held personal concepts of maintaining a woman centric gender are caused by these clouds that block my vision. Sometimes I feel like I have a man and a woman inside of me, and they are fighting it out, allowing my identity to shift by who is better rather than by who I am. I am defined so much by “what feels right” to me and yet this value judgment of “right” is ingrained through outside forces, especially during my early childhood development. I just want to be free, ya know? I want to be free from all these forces that are beyond my control that superimpose themselves on me and make me something I don’t recognize or understand.

From Just Out:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “that’s so gay” or “that’s gay” in my lifetime, especially in my lifetime as an adult. It’s shocking but true: many of my queer friends over the years have made saying “that’s gay” a habit in their everyday speech. When asked to explain why, as a queer person, they would emulate the derogatory and hurtful statements of children, there is never an answer that satisfies me.

I’ve decided in my old age that when a queer person says “that’s gay” when that person really means “that’s dumb in a twisted way”, they are accepting a cruel slur as part of who they are in an attempt to buffer the slight they feel when someone else says it. I must be honest, when someone I know who is not queer says “that’s gay” when they mean “that’s stupid”, my feelings are hurt. I realize that this person has no idea who I am and that I want to never hear another word come out of their mouth. If that someone is queer, the hurt is twice as much, because the person knows what it is to be gay and they still associate gay with stupid. It’s infuriating.

And what kind of example are we setting for children by acting this way? Oh no, we say, it’s not okay to say “that’s gay”, and then we walk around saying it. I don’t think so.

I may have scared away anyone who might answer this question, but I would love to know from the people who have “that’s gay” in their vocabulary, exactly what makes them feel okay about saying it. Any takers?

There are certainly two sides to my gender story. There is the gender that others see, the way that I dress and talk and act and the identity that other people place on me as a result. The cleaning lady in the bathroom sees me as a freak, my co-workers accept me as one of the guys, my friends see a complicated queer person who emanates masculinity. My own expression is drawn toward short hair and button ups and jeans and all those appearances that have typically been associated with men. I cannot control how other people classify me, but I can present myself in a way that is in line with how I see and feel comfortable with myself. When I look in the mirror, I feel the most attractive with a tight fade and hip-hiding Levi’s.

On the other side of the story is how I understand and experience my own gender. Sometimes I experience my gender when something that I am doing or feeling reminds me of the ideas I have around one gender or another. I don’t really have any desire to constantly lift myself out of the binary gender system, but instead I enjoy allowing myself to dabble in all of the options. It sure is nice to have options.

I think it’s important for me to be able to say “I am experiencing this part of myself or this part of my world as a woman, or as a man, or as something else.” I spend so much of my time not feeling like I belong to any genderedness at all that I appreciate these moments when I can identify my perspective as that of a woman or a man. I enjoy being neither, but I also enjoy being both.

Sometimes it’s hard to express ideas around gender because gender associations with behavior, ideas, and feelings are widely seen as pre-feminist rhetoric. I want to identify and appreciate those things about me that I find are connected to my experience as a woman or as a man, but my immediate reaction is to suppress these ideas because in the attempt to make all things equal between man and woman, we have decided that there are no differences and so my insistence of these differences would mean that I am upholding an archaic stereotype.

Okay, there’s a third side, too, and that’s the experience of my gender in relationship to another person. It’s not just about how Agent sees me, but how I see myself through my interactions and experiences adjacent to Agent and her gender. When Agent and I started dating almost seven years ago, I had some intense initial feelings of desire to expand and solidify my gender as something else, something more manly. In a relationship with someone who was not by the queer community’s standard definition of “femme” for the very first time in my life, the part of me that feels masculine swelled and caused my closest attempt to start testosterone.

Thanks for the comments you made that has had me thinking about this stuff the last couple of days. I’m no gender theorist, but I wonder about this stuff a lot. I’d love to hear more about how other queer people experience their gender and how they deal with the moments when labels beg to be used but are seemingly inappropriate for one reason or another. How do you define your gender?