Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach,
by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (Pilgrim Press, 2001)
Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach, by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (Pilgrim Press, 2001) |
Leave it to The Witness' own Virginia Ramey Mollenkott to push the theological envelope one more time in her marvelous new book, Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach. Just as she did with Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? co-authored in 1978 with Letha Scanzoni, before Virginia admitted publicly that she was the neighbor in question, she has written what is known in the publishing business as "a big book." In my view, this book ends one period in the epoch struggle of Christianity with homosexuality and opens another.
Virginia received a Lifetime Achievement award from SAGE, Senior Action in a Gay Environment, a direct-service and advocacy group for seniors in New York City in 1999. It was my privilege to make the presentation on an evening when the Broadway crowd was out in full feather to honor composer Jerry Herman, artist Paul Cadmus and entertainer Storme DeLarverie. I wondered what they would think of a feminist religious writer getting the award as well.
I began my remarks by suggesting that Virginia's impact on Christianity is enough to make the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence look like altar girls. The audience roared. We were home, with our people, people who have paid a price to sing, "I am what I am," and mean it. I realized that oppressed people know the role religions can play to liberate or oppress. Here they were face-to-face with a Christian woman who has insisted that her community live up to its Word. I claimed that Dr. Mollenkott's contributions have resulted in some of the remarkable inroads that lesbian/gay/bisexual and transgender people have made into Christian institutions. I noted that she points helpfully toward a lot of work that still needs to be done. This book only reinforces my words.
For the past 30 years, lesbian/gay/bisexual and transgender people and our supporters have labored in the often unwelcoming vineyard of Christian churches as if people were female and male, gay and straight, here or in the country. What was once a gay-male movement for social and ecclesial justice, slowly and still to a limited degree, became a gay/lesbian movement with some sense that lesbian women's experiences were different from gay men's.
The relatively recent but welcome arrival of bisexual people on their own terms only reinforced the binaries, albeit by embracing them. However, the entrance of trans people in their many forms -- intersexual or hermaphrodite persons, transsexuals, transvestites or cross-dressers, drag kings and queens or performance artists, transgenderists or bigenderists and androgynes, to name only some of the newly emerging categories -- effectively changes the panorama forever. No longer can we tell players with or without a scorecard. No longer can we assume anything about anyone, or so it seems, with gender categories as fluid as warm honey and sexual orientations multiplying like dot-coms in the Silicon Valley. The point is that all must be made welcome, just as they are, in communities that call themselves Christian.
Gender is a complicated concept. I predict that the Human Genome Project and its descendents will settle most of the biological questions about sexual orientation. But I doubt that science will ever find the gene that causes discrimination, that triggers hatred and that sets up excluding hierarchies. Thus, Virginia's focus on the religious components is well-placed because it is there, where values are grounded, that the promise of justice lives.
Virginia is never one to ignore the elephant in the living room. In this book she goes about the systematic deconstruction of gender givens, relying on the latest social and biological scientific information. She spares neither progressives nor conservatives, arguing -- and I agree -- that we all need to shift our static categories because they simply do not work anymore.
Life is not split conveniently down the middle. There is much greater diversity than any of us dreamed. There is no purpose served in denying the obvious, even though it is convenient to do so. I can imagine that some LGBT activists may secretly wish she had left well enough alone. God knows we have enough problems on our hands with the old anthropology. We have not been very successful in changing religious institutions on gay/lesbian and bi terms. What makes us think we will do any better with trans and queer? But knowledge grows and with it our analysis. What remains static for Christians in this whirlwind is a commitment to love and justice. The rest, as the rabbis say, is commentary.
Almost everything changes if Virginia's analysis is correct. Texts like "neither male nor female" can mean just that when gender is in flux. Arguments against women's ordination need wholesale revamping since we do not know for sure now what a woman is. Even our own hard-wrought sexual identities are up for grabs when we take seriously the data from the sciences and listen to the stories of people who have lived painful lives because they could not check a box, use a rest room or get married, because they did not fit the mold. Virginia's honest Christian response is that the only thing we can throw out is the mold. She does so with courage, compassion and skill.
Virginia has done her homework in the trans community. She knows the people, reads the literature, attends the events, loves with her generous heart and thinks with her scholarly head. She has found the people and the arguments persuasive, fascinating and compelling. We are the richer for it. How little we know about what makes any of us tick, much less what makes us love and feel sexually attracted. How dare we judge from our ignorance?
She models how to work as a Christian scholar and activist without apology and with attention to an increasingly pluralistic world. Virginia grew up as a fundamentalist's fundamentalist in the Plymouth Brethren Assemblies, a Christian group so parochial that she did not know Catholics were Christians. Nonetheless, she brings a welcome interreligious perspective to bear, making good on her subtitle. Not only is she looking at trans matters on the sexual front, but also in the religious realm. This attention to Hindu, Buddhist and other faith traditions signals that she has gone well beyond her evangelical roots, though she never leaves them entirely. They nurture her own generous spirit and ground her commitment to inclusivity.
Every summer she provides leadership for a weekend at Pennsylvania's Kirkridge conference center entitled "Gay, Lesbian and Christian." She has helped thousands of people over the decades make sense of that ecclesio-genic conundrum. I imagine that the group will slowly take on trans concerns and include more trans people because of her prophetic stance. It will not be a quick adding of the word "trans" to the title, but a thoughtful, perhaps painful grappling with how taking trans concerns seriously upsets all of our apple carts. The difference is Virginia will be there to pick up the fruit.
She continues to push the Evangelical Women's Caucus to greater inclusivity. Imagine their surprise when she came out as a lesbian. Now, through her tireless advocacy for trans folks she is inviting every group to push its parameters. The Caucus will feel it, too, as trans people move toward membership and any trans people who are in it come out. The movement for LGBT inclusion cannot simply add "t" and stir, but must confront the changes that taking new people seriously on their own terms demands. No cheap grace here.
The first time I met Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, she was preaching from the pulpit of a church in Washington, D.C. She began, "Grace -- is a lesbian." My mouth dropped. Now, I suspect, she might begin something like this: "Grace -- is a transgender person who loves women and men." The Holy Spirit may be surprised to hear her identity revealed and her message articulated with such brilliance.
We, luckily, have the book.
Witness contributing editor Mary Hunt is co-founder of WATER, the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, in Silver Spring, Md.