"Beyond the Binary Code: Gender in America" Rev. Susan Karlson, February 12, 2012

I believe in synchronicity—what some call meaningful coincidences. Synchronicity happens all of the time if we are open to it and moments of synchronicity can utterly transform us.

Back in 2003 I heard a National Public Radio interview with transgender people talking about the problems they confront constantly. They interviewed a heterosexual woman who had fallen in love with her friend, a transgender male. She fell in love with the person, not because of an identified sex. The interview broke through my defenses by revealing stories about real people struggling with their love and the complicated circumstances of their lives.

A ministerial colleague who was transgender female to male openly talked about the struggles he had gaining acceptance as a religious leader. Another colleague talked about the limitations of binary language—how complex it was for this minister who finds the pronouns “he” or “she” ineffective and limiting. I felt our relationship grow exponentially as my colleagues shared perceptions about body and gender.

As John said, Allison Woolbert shared her own experience before her surgical procedure two years ago at this church. I feel honored by the trust of all these people, that they could reveal things that had been invisible to me. I think how the Girl Scouts accepted a 9 year old transgender child and how people across the nation are now encouraging people to buy more Girl Scout cookies in solidarity with the Girl Scouts standing on the side of love in opposition to the youth promoting a boycott of the famed cookies.

Synchronicity happens when we remove the blinders that keep things invisible to us. In this case gender labels obscure the richness of relationships that go on with all their joy, pain and confusion even if they don’t fit in the standard binary model.

Nick Krieger wrote an autobiography in Nina Here Nor There. These are my final words by Nick because they reveal what is at the very heart of this Valentine’s Day Service: “Words are tools for communication like gender is a system for organization. And even as I play into the system by choosing a bathroom, a pronoun, a box on a form, I see it as a framework built upon faults, an institution that oppresses us all with some victims suffering more than others, a juggernaut. Some people see it as a binary, a spectrum, a continuum, or a rainbow. But when I envision my own gender, it is with my eye to the lens of a kaleidoscope that I spin and spin and spin.”