Inventing one''s self.

[joannatsf]

"A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creators role, according to one way of seeing things; he's unnatural, a blasphemer, an abominations of abominations.  From another angle you could see pathos in him, heroism in his struggle, in his willingness to risk:  not all mutants survive.  Or, consider him sociologically:  most migrants learn and become disguises.  Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invinted about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.

A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him, to prove he's managed it.  Playing God again, you could say.  Or you could come down a few notches and think of Tinkerbell;  Fairies don't exist if children don't clap their hands.  Or you might simply say: it's just like a man." The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

I read this passage this morning and it seemed to address so many different parts of the transgender experience: the hatred of the religeous right, creating a new identity and the need to pass.  It's left me with food for thought and I'm wondering if anyone sees things in it I missed.

[pennyjane]

i don't know much about islam and it's abominations and such.  but the premise of this is most certainly foreign to christian thought.  the very idea of christian life requires one to "remake" themselves.  we are told explicitly that the old self is no longer valid and a new self must emerge:  a self not of the natural order but of the divine.

it isn't us who reinvent ourselves but God.  i think the case could be made that whenever we reinvent ourselves it's God at the wheel.  paul, in his letter to the colossians stated catagorically,  "strip off the old personality with it's practices.  and clothe yourselves with the new <personality> which through accurate knowledge is being made new according to the one who created it."  i think the case can be made that resisiting such change is in fact placing one above God and His will for us.

my transition was formulated much by this principle.  i felt that the life i was living...that of lying and deceit...was not pleasing my God.  don't laugh, i'm strongly christian and believe in such things as pleasing and displeasing God.  sometimes in life we are presented with dilemnas that just will not work themselves out so we have to make conscience choices based on incomplete and unproven data...for christians, that's where the Holy Spirit comes into play.  we must trust that if deep down inside we really believe that it's God who is remaking us, the we must submit, without reserve, in faith and trust.

this is just from the perspective of one christain person.  i do not represent the christian faith or any of the many leaders.  i do not have any ill or malicious thoughts concerning any other religion or point of view.  no offense is intended towards any person or faith.

[Sarah Louise]

I never thought of transitioning as "making myself up" or "playing God".  When I transitioned, I was only being who I always was and disgarding the fake person I had portrayed for so many years.

I always considered this a birth defect that needed correcting.

I am a Christian and would never consider thinking I was a god.  I do not believe transitioning is a sin, but if it was, God forgives sin.

Sarah L.

[joannatsf]

I didn't really see this as a theological topic.  Rushdie is nominally Muslim but he must not be a very good one since writing the book quoted earned him a "fatwa", sentence of death for blasphemy by the Ayatollah Khomeni.  He had a $50,000 reward on his head and was forced to hide for about ten years.

I'm not Christian myself though I was at one time a rather involved Anglican (Catholic Lite).  I don't recall a rebirth as something my priests spoke about or taught.  Could it be endemic to some Protestant denominations that speak of being "born again"?  Not all Christian denominations subscribe to that idea.  I believe faiths that offer confession as redemption for sin don't really offer a rebirth as part of the program.

Going back to the quote I subscribe to the pathos theory.  Even before I came out to myself I believed TG people were incredibly brave.  To transition is to risk everything and consider myself lucky to have lost little in the journey.  Some people are not so lucky, Gwen Araujo for example.

"Most migrants learn and become disguises".  I'll stick by that observation.  While I may have been female at my core it took work for me to become accepted as a woman.  Most of us are very concerned with passing.  My own disguise was to become a chameleon and blend in with my surroundings, other women.  Passing is all about making other people believe.  Here's hoping the children clap.

FYI The quote is about an Indian man who strives to erase his ethnicity and become English.

[Alyssa M.]

I love the notion Rushdie expresses of needing people to believe in you. Most if not all of my struggle with gender stems from my relations with other people. What is gender without society?

I've also found that culture shock and the struggle to assimilate into a culture is eerily similar to gender dysphoria. There's something of the same terror in trying to go to a shop and speak French to the clerk as there is in trying to go to a shop and present as female; and there's also something of the same crushing dehumanization caused by feeling cut off from community, unable to fully express your humanity.

--

For what it's worth, I've never heard of a Christian denomination that doesn't talk about being "born again." It's just that many mainstream denominations (especially Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican) take it to mean baptism. The phrase (and it's relevance to baptism) comes from Jesus' encounter with Nicodemus in John 3. (Which is in the Revised Common Lectionary -- Second Sunday of Lent in Year A of the three year cycle, i.e., this year. )

~Alyssa

[NicholeW.]

I agree with you, Claire. *child clapping* You made excellent points and Alyssa followed them home.

This, the idea of Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invinted about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves. isn't about sin and religion, it's about belief and blending, taking cover, so to speak. To be successful, someone has to change her ways in regard to how she may have been "taught" to live. That requires study and practice, not so much prayer and statements.

You pass into a new country where you are an immigant. Like an immigrant you must become a citizen of the new land and for that not only must you believe, but you must build the belief of those with whom you live.

Nichole

[tekla]

"Most migrants learn and become disguises".

Oh, I think we all do, we learn many of them in our lives.  It may seem clearer in the Immigrant space, that feeling of Huxley's "Oh Brave New Word!" where all at once everything is sort of similar, and yet everything is profoundly different. 

I spent years where I would get up in the morning, walk down a big nightclub street and see the aftermath, have a cup of coffee at a little old Italian cafe, then walk across the street into SF's Chinatown and feel like I left the planet.  You're different and you know it.  You can't hide - even at five-nine you stand out in that crowd.  You don't speak the same language.  Hell, they are not even speaking the same language with two very different kinds of Chinese going down, but you understand neither.  And those live animals going into the food stores?  Yikes.  In Safeway world we're pretty protected from seeing our dinner killed, but in other places, you betcha, that's what I call fresh! I saw a women kill a chicken getting on to a bus one day.  And the smells are different, the BokChoy, the 1000 year old eggs, fish for miles.

But you have other mornings where you see that the kids are all playing kid type stuff, and that's no different.  Even if you can't understand the words, you know when people are mad at each other, or happy to be talking to each other, and you pick up on that.  And even if the products are somewhat different, shopping for food is a commercial deal, and that's pretty consistent around the world.  Deliveries are just deliveries, and some of that strange food is pretty darn tasty?  Who knew that a culture thousands and thousands and thousands of unbroken (no dark ages in China) years old might invent some pretty good eats?  Hell, I even got uses to the BokChoy.

And, little by little you become a part of it rather than being apart from it.  I'd be reminded once in a while, when I would be going thought there with someone who was not used to it.  Trying to remember how it was when I first saw it.  And trying to understand how I was thinking about it now.  How it had become a part of me. 

You slowly merge with all of it, it changes you and you change with it. 

I think its like that with most things.

[joannatsf]

I think you could fairly call China's years under Mao Tse-dung as a dark age.  Millions starved to death in the 50s during the Great Leap Forward.  In the 60s more were slaughterd during the Cultural Revolution.  Europe's Dark Ages can largely be attributed to climatic events that lasted about 150 years and their slaughter were a small compared to China's in the middle of the 20th Century.