"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.”

Reflections John Adrian

When I became active in the Gay Rights movement, about 15 years ago, I didn’t know any transgender people, but I soon found myself working with some.

At first I viewed these people as sincere, even passionate, oddities whom I didn’t understand.

They were more than gay men, or lesbians, who liked to play “dress-up”, but how much more I didn’t appreciate. None-the-less, everyone seemed to accept them as they were, and I did, too.

Thinking in the double-binary of male & female, and gay & straight, I couldn’t fit them to any classification I was accustomed to using for people.

As I got to know them, I learned these were people who were sincere in the work we were all doing, who had the additional burden of being born into a body which didn’t, and would never, fit who they were. It was like me feeling that I was really supposed to be tall and slender, only more so.

Last year at a Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office meeting that Susan and I attended I saw one of them for the first time almost a decade. Privily I commented to her that the years had been kind to her and that she, while looking essentially the same as she had the last time I saw her, had turned into a rather lovely woman. Her reaction was to allow that it was only artifice, and “tons of carefully applied make-up”. I said to her: “No. You have matured into the woman you were always meant to be.”

I realized almost immediately that the change, which I believe was visually imperceptible, was two-fold:

On her part a maturation, physically and psychologically, into a womanhood she’s comfortable inhabiting.

On my part a change in perception that “this isn’t a man dressing and acting as a woman, it is a woman.”

When I first met Allison Woolbert, who spoke here about a year-and-a-half ago, I was impressed by a person of courage and conviction. As I came to know Allison somewhat, here, in Princeton, where she lives, and in Minneapolis where we were both delegates to General Assembly I found myself thinking, “This is one sharp woman.”

Again, “this isn’t a sharp man dressing and acting as a woman, it is a sharp woman.”

The Settled Minister Search Committee, which brought Susan Karlson to this congregation, early in its proceedings, circulated a questionnaire to the congregation to find-out what kind of minister the congregation wanted. Among the questions asked were several about gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity. (In the then over 150 years of its existence this congregation had only called white, heterosexual, men to minister.)

Like good Unitarian Universalists no one who responded had any problem with the idea of calling a woman as settled minister.

No one had a problem with calling a gay man as settled minister. After-all, we had been well served for a year by an out, gay, interim minister.

No one had a real problem with calling a lesbian to be settled minister.

However, several respondents had a problem with calling a transgender minister. Universally, they felt they would feel “uncomfortable” around him or her.

I believe being a Unitarian Universalist requires me to be “uncomfortable” with accepting the “status quo” if that existing condition, or state-of-affairs, treats anyone as “less than” me simply because ze is different from me.

Almost all of you are different from me in one way or another.