Six Lessons

Had me a real good conversation with some queer peeps recently. And I don’t mean “peeps” as in the Easter marshmallow snack – but then again, I do not want to assume anyone’s peep identity. Me and two others, a man and a woman, according to the Old Solar definition of the sexes, both from the Left Coast, sitting opposite from me both at the table and in every other meaning of the word.

Gather ’round children, and I will tell the tale.

The Sit-down

Instead of recounting the entire conversation, I am going to mention a few highlights of what transpired, then attach a lesson learned to each. At the end, you may have six new ideas, or at least two or one, which is a good return on investment for a ten minute read.

Beer was drunk (dranken? drinkled?). Not a lot, just enough to set the mood and oil up the jaw hinges. Some say mixing opinions with alcohol is ill advised. Personally, I find it hard to get agitated while sipping on an icey bottle of suds. And what better way to show you got no better place to be than the foam of an oatmeal stout on the mustache?

We have learned through a decade of Pavlovian conditioning to approach conversations with LGBTQ+ peeps with the obsequiousness of a peasant entering the court of a Shang Dynasty emperor: stand still, avoid any sudden movements, don’t look them in the eye and never turn your back. After all, you don’t know the particular tumbler combination of pronouns to use or what kind of invented micro aggression you may step on with your big, clumsy, white feet.

Some want to hold others emotionally hostage with their pain by collecting all the wounds they can and suing them as an excuse to demand all their point of personal preference to be catered to. In self-defense, those who don’t particularly like the feeling of a gun to their heads have tried to understand these individuals through broad sweeping cultural critiques, and then apply what they learned to individuals. This can get messy, which leads me to my first lesson of the conversation, don’t hit the pedestrians.

Lesson #1 Don’t Hit Pedestrians

I believe in driving 75 mph on I-25, but not in the suburbs. Both involve driving but the context and purpose are very different. Often when we “do our research” on all this gender and sexual funkiness, we are approaching it from a four lane highway, ideological viewpoint – the generalities, assumptions, and stereotypes that summarize and see the breadth of the landscape. This is not wrong; understanding generalities is how we begin learning anything new. And this generalized view is very useful if you are having a conversation about ideologies, say in a debate with an audience or helping someone step out of their individual experience to see trends, or writing a think piece for a wicked popular blog.

However, when we are talking to a person, an actual human with a face with and a history, they do not often fit into the crisp lines of ideology. Using gross categories can be uncouth, mischaracterizing, cause unnecessary conflict, and just can be plain ole’ unkind. We drive fast on the highway because there are no pedestrians and we need to get somewhere quickly. In the suburbs priorities change. People live there. There are many side streets to explore running in different directions. Here, you have to be on the lookout for pedestrians so you do not smear them into the pavement and bring undue injury.

People are hit all the time because this miscalculation. In one breathe a man can juggernaut his way through history from Marx to drag queen story hour, connecting all the links in one chain of unbroken pristine logic, and conclude the man wearing eyeliner sitting across from him intends to trans the school boards, queer the kindergarteners, and permit a person to legally wed their sex robot. Meanwhile the other person is left in a mangled contortion of roadkill with a tire mark up their spine.

This doesn’t mean avoid speaking truth, it just means there is a human person with unique history and experiences, often very painful and traumatic ones, which need to be accounted for and probably do not run completely in the same direction as the highway.

So that is the first lesson: know your audience. Are you talking to a group? An individual? Does there need to be some highway driving to get to the suburbs? Drivers beware.

Lesson #2 Listen, but not like that.

I was remarking to these two, one of whom identifies as a particular flavor of queer (femme) and dresses drag as the occasion arises, the other who identifies as masc (masculine female), that there seem to be a preponderance of drag queens in the news, on streaming services, and reading Frog and Toad to toddlers at the at local libraries. So what’s the sudden cultural fascination with drag about?

He said the idea is that gender is a playground. Since gender is a social construct, and this construct is based on stereotypes perpetuated by power, then what we know as ‘male’ and ‘female’ are roles protected by the hegemony that we are taught to perform when we are young, and continue to plod along in those cultural grooves as adults. Drag paints (literally) with gaudy mockery this absurd performance of the male and female roles we act out on the stage of life every day. It is a dramatized caricature that goes to eleven. While every man and woman in America is aping the prescribed look and roles of fixed gender, drag is busy subverting this by the farcical imitation of gender stereotypes. The silliness of performativity is manifested by the silliness of the performance. Or as RuPaul quipped “We’re born naked and the rest is drag.”

(This is idea of performativity – that gender is a stylized repetition of acts – is a key concept in gender studies and is extremely confusing, almost as if it intends to be so. Look it up if you want. I took a sip. You don’t have to drink the whole bottle of vinegar to know its sour. Perhaps one day I will take a deep dive into performativity and tell you what I find, but right now I do not have enough Adderall).

Okay, I get it. Makes sense. I don’t agree with any of it, but I understand. Sometimes the best you can do is figure out where exactly you differ with someone. I have known this particular man for a while. Having abandoned his Christian roots, he is coming from a perspective that doesn’t believe in God and is very angry at this God he doesn’t believe in, and this forms the kitty sand on which he builds his worldview.

In conversations like this, I like to take the role of an interviewer. This is particularly true where your reputation may precede you, so to speak, as a raging bigot, and rapport must be established. Good questions are reconnaissance and can be useful in understanding the topography of their foundational principles they are standing on and why that particular foundation was needful or attractive to them.

In addition, you may get a glimpse of the compensatory mechanisms a person has put in place to deal with trauma. The type of injury someone sustained can be understood sometimes by the way they have compensated to shore up for it; solutions take the shape of the whole they filled up. In the end, you know someone way better when you can both say, “here is my line in the sand; this is what I am about” which is much prefered to feeling like you are constantly tiptoeing through a minefield.

So I don’t mean ‘listen’ as in “sit down, you straight white man, and take your talking to.” I mean asking good questions to help uncover assumed truths, how they arrived where they are. The complex lattice of a snowflake has at its center a dust particle the crystals form around. Ask questions to get at the dust particle and listen to the answers.

**Bonus thought…As an interesting point of fact, after talking with many trans men and women through the years, I have found a trend that transwomen (biological men) are much more open to question and willing to share than transmen (biological women). In my experience this second group is more reticent, shut off, and distrustful. If this is extrapolated and is true on a broader scale, why do you think that is?**

Lesson #3 Nope

Here I had finished the oatmeal stout, and moved seamlessly on to a sparkling belgian quad.

The next phase of the conversation was me poking this phrase “gender is a social construct” with a sharp stick labeled “Nope, it’s not.” Four eyes met in a shared snicker; if silence can laugh, it would have sounded thus. As a Christian man, white even, I am the representative of the chief architects who manufactured the gender categories which are currently oppressing people like themselves. To them, it was hilarious that I thought my opinion actually mattered anymore.

Two things must be understood concerning the progressive mind: power is everything and power is oppressive. Not some things, or a few things, or those things that have directly to do with politics – every assumed truth, establishment, standard, system, body of knowledge, cultural structure, or even meanings of words are all backed by the drive for power. And power is always used for selfish group promotion. So as a white, Christian, straight male, my claim that gender is not a social construct is the oppressive power structure exerting its dominance.

Corollary to the evils of power is the righteousness of oppression. In a strange and cancerous offchute of Christianity, those who are deemed oppressed automatically have moral authority by definition. This translates to traditional gender norms being wrought through oppressive power and therefore evil and queer being a de facto positive good. Allowing me to speak as if my thoughts were on equal par is like a baptist minister allowing a wiccan to take the pulpit and poison the ears of the congregation. It cannot be allowed.

What is happening here is that one side is allowed to plop down their axioms and the other is not. Axioms are those things we assume to be true without the need to prove. One side of the table held the axiom that gender is a social construct. The other did not. I recently wrote about this carpet turd of an idea, that gender is a social construct. But the lesson I want to focus on here is the permission to lay out your axioms with the same calm presentment that others are offering theirs.

If there is a potluck of ideas in our culture, the Christian has been disinvited from bringing a dish. He may eat what others bring -will even be forced to take a “no thank-you portion” of everyone’s offering- but his casserole is left to congeal untouched. We get to sit at the kids table in the corner, with our knees up by our chest in the tiny chairs. Since we Christians are very nice we thank them for allowing us to be a part of their dinner, and take our plate heaped with slop and sit at the kids table with the other mild-mannered Christians.

Nope. If people are bringing ideas to the table, and the invitations said it was going to be an open, inclusive, safe and diverse potluck, then grease up your 9×13 pyrex because you have just as much right to be there as anyone else. Make some elbow room for yourself. God also has some truth claims which ought to be brought to the table in a sincere and loving statement-of-fact, just like everyone else at the table is doing. So the takeaway here is not to be afraid to plop God’s truth down in these conversations, unapologetically, with a big smile, and enjoy the delicious silence that follows.

Lesson #4 Non-binaries Look Suspiciously Like Binaries

They went on to describe why gender is fluid. Here is the summary of their thoughts.

Thanks to the hegemonic patriarchy, culture erroneously propagates diametrical opposites of gender, male and female each having character traits assigned to them by culture (strong, beautiful, gentle, brave, boisterous, aggressive, demure, breadwinner, breadmaker, etc). Boys traits are blue and girls are pink. In the pink box are the pink character traits with the expectation all females will fit into this pink box. Same with the males: blue box, blue traits.

But what if a male has some pink traits? Or a female, some blues? The woman said she had many masculine character traits – a lot of blues mixed in with the pinks – and the queer man said he had more ‘pinks’ than a flock of flamingos at a breast cancer awareness gala. With each character trait assigned a binary color by society, if a biological male has a buttload of pinks then maybe these boundaries culture has erected are wrong? There is so much overlap of gender traits when people are left to unbuckle their belts and are not rigidly kept in two camps.

Not all girls are all pink; some girls have blue. Since this is clearly true, can we really still keep these fixed gender boxes of blue boys and pink girls? A female would have to excise her blue traits, denying a very real part of herself, or else spend a life in a closet; a man would live a long, demoralizing life of constantly bailing out the pink waters flooding his masculine hull. Since we all have a mixture of blues and pinks, can’t we conclude we all are at least to some extent, gender fluid?

That was the gist of it.

Interestingly, for such a non-binary, gender fluid world they, it was remarkably binary. Character traits and dispositions are either pink or blue and we need to either give way to this gender fluidity or else sift through the traits and toss out the ones that don’t match.

But the mistake here is that they are assuming gender is derivative of biology, disposition or societal constraints. Christianity, conversely, says gender comes first, is a gift, and is chosen for us before the foundation of the earth to manifest the glory of His image in the person. Gender does not morph and undulate with traits or dispositions. It is quite the opposite: gender creates; it shapes traits and proclivities and molds the way desires are expressed. Gender is a teacher.

In this way, Christianity is much more “fluid”, if you like, even as it maintains strict gender categories. This is because the trait or disposition can be both “pink” or “blue”, each having a representation as it is illuminated though the God given gender of the individual. Gentleness is not pink and therefore female, but is a characteristic of God’s nature and takes on a masculine hue in men, and a very different, very splendid feminine application in women. There is beauty in the masculine physique as there is in the feminine, though beauty of a very different kind. When viewed in this light, the male with some “pink” trait need not worry he is part chick, he only needs to allow gender to teach him to manifest the trait to the masculine form.

This gender confusion is a very natural consequence of other psychic and philosophical forces at work. Modern science has told us we are the remarkable result a string of unbelievably favorable poker hands -lucky accidents. This poison has spilled the bounds of science and leached into our drinking water. If everything we see is an accident, from which anything at all can result through chance, why not gender? But this is not true. Our physical form is not an accident. It is infused with purpose and meaning and will be a teacher and guide if we submit to it.

This is very good news to those who are on the brink of being lost to the hinterlands of genderlessness. A young man who is drawn to the artistic, say painting or dancing, may not fit the typical masculine physique. But having the firm and fixed boundary of masculine gender can both nourish and give direction for how to express his masculinity through his gifting, guiding him in what to prune from his life and what to bulk up. He will be masculine in his painting while keeping the paint off his nails; he will bring a strong and calming stage presence for the ballerina’s grace, without donning the tutu.

Lesson #5 A Faulty Assumption and a Fatherly Spirit

After about an hour the conversation ended with the femme man tearing up with anger and saying he could not continue the conversation. He was sick of having to explain himself to “people like me.” Apparently I should have learned about him and his thoughts from someone else. This seemed strange to me, like introducing to a test pilot a prototype aircraft that is the size and shape of a bulldozer, then getting angry when he asks you to justify the physics. But herein lies the fifth and final lesson. I made an assumption.

As we all know, when you make an assumption you will be an ass and the ump will shun you. I assumed, which seemed to me very natural, that this person could act as a representative of the queer community so that by understanding him I may understand queerness as a whole better. Clearly, this is not a novel approach. If you want to learn about the Chinese, talking to a Chinese person is a great way to start. But I learned what looked like a unified group of individuals around certain shared ideas was more like a bunch of ping pong balls floating in a bathtub.

The idea of questioning a part as representative of the whole is not that controversial. Being a Christian, I frequently have my kidneys tenderized by people throwing haymakers at my worldview. Because Christianity is a solid thing – you can push against it, test it, interrogate it. When others level questions at Christianity, I feel an apt representative to speak on its behalf. In general, if you find any Christian who can defend the faith in any orthodox way, they will be defending the same ramparts as the guy next to him.

But this is not the case in the LGBTQ “community”. Notice I used quotes just then around community, which is because they tend to share, at least from what we see on the public relations wing, a unified front, solidarity of goals and shared desires. But it is much less a unified and solid front, and more of a cloud of particulates packed so tightly it only appears so. Because at the core of the ideology, to the extent there can be said to be a core, is the solipsistic seed of one’s own personal truth, lived experience, history of exodus from oppression.

And so my assumption that I could talk to one as representative of the whole was shot down based on one of the few fundamental and incontrovertible truths of LGBTQ+ identity, which is there are no overarching truths to identity – each person must pinch that loaf out on their own. Queerness itself is identified as an essence without an identity and queer theorist tip toe around any solid definition. Because, in a way, to define queerness is to normalize it, and normalization is antithetical to queer.

Apparently this was troubling to the young man, which was certainly not my intention. In retrospect, I would have approached the conversation less like a journalist and more like a father. That can sound pretentious, but because a spirit of fatherlessness presides over our nation, I think Christian men need to adopt a spirit of fatherhood when in situations like this – the calm, insistent, authoritative voice and unflappable disposition.

Sometimes people need to spew out all the anger, pain, abandonment and confusion in their hearts before the dregs of truth are laid bare at the bottom of the heart. A good father can take it, can take the licking even if they bear no personal responsibility for it being there. Under the strong wing of fatherhood is a safe place for others to dismantle, and then, with patience, for a tender word to be spoken to the wound now laid bare.

Lesson #6: Differences All The Way Down

This last lesson is the most important of all, and that is we need to understand our differences often go all the way down to the bottom. That first and most important bifurcation is is there a God and is he silent? All other arguments, political prescriptions and ideological differences have this at the root. One would not be wrong to stop haggling over the flavor of the fruit and take an axe to the root.

Conclusion

So there are my six lessons. These kinds of conversations must happen and we must proceed with a heart that is respectful, attentive and curious, while not mincing words about the truth and glory of gender and the Christians place at the table of ideas.

Most important is to remember no one’s mind is changed in these matters because some guy bested them with facts and logic. Repentance does not come from a history lesson uncovering the roots of queer theories in the mind of Marx, nor marching out the inevitable consequences of their ideologies to pederasty. It is only seeing the light of the glory of God through Jesus. All eyes are shut tight in willful insurrection until the Holy Spirit cracks them.

In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servant for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

2 Corinthians 4:4-6, ESV