Gender Essentialism As Dysphoric Heresy
During Easter worship one of our staff leaned over middle of service and said, “Days like today cause a lot of dysphoria for my friends.”
It took me just a minute to snap out of the mild hymn induced reverie I was in to kind of get it and also remain curious. “Let’s talk more about this.”
Later they discussed how many demands there are on holidays in general, and perhaps especially at gendered holidays like Easter, to present strongly as a gender. Just think of the hats and bonnets and pastels and ribbons and more.
Additionally, non-binary people who are not out to their biological family go home for the holidays and play a role.
This sent me back to a memory I had last fall, it was the first high school football game I had attended in a few years. My daughter was a guest with her junior high band for the night on the field with the high schoolers.
Having just hosted Queer Camp earlier that summer, and so been with dozens of youth who do not conform to cis gender norms, I kept thinking through the evening, “This is the most heteronormative of events.”
Now I’m not saying it’s bad. Football games are fun. But one part of them raised in me the closest I’ve ever come to a feeling of dysphoria. There was so much demand to play a gender role there, on the field, in the stands, anywhere. It was cloying.
Now, to be clear, I am not non-binary. I identify strongly as male and always have. I’m comfortable and happy as a man. And I’m quite comfortable hanging with people who identity as male or female.
What I’ve learned however is the difference between hetero identity as one identity among many, vs hetero identity as the demanded identity.
I guess it’s not surprising that dominant Christianity, uncomfortable as it is with the rise of secularity (ala Charles Taylor, defined as an era where being religious or not religious are equally tenable) would also be even more uncomfortable with the secular Ozark on of gender (where being cisgender or non-binary or trans are all equally tenable).
But what is surprising is this version of Christianity’s willingness to raise gender to the level of creed. Whereas it was historically more of a heresy to split the church than to have differences of opinion on social issues, now the conservatives split off and form their own denominations simply so same-gender couples can’t serve as pastors.
And it’s not unusual to walk into one of these churches come Sunday morning and catch a sermon on male headship and complimentarianism. As if play submissive wife or centering the male were core Christian doctrines (they’re not).
What is actually happening now is a status quo backlash against cultural changes occurring that are genuinely Christian in spirit.
I mean the last word in Scripture on gender is that eschatological insight in Galatians: There is no longer male or female, but all are one in Christ Jesus. And when the Sadducee’s try to trip Jesus up in the gospels with a question about marriage in heaven, he says it’s not like that, and more like being angels (whatever an angel is…)
And if you want to go all Revelation we learn that the church is the bride of Christ, which complicate gender presentation in all sorts of ways.
I’m not making this stuff up. It’s all right there in Scripture. And you can see how whether you read it one way or another and then reify it as doctrine has tons of implications for whether you simply assert cultural norms (which are heteronormative) or you open space for gender bending in identity and presentation, which has the wonderful side effect of potentially lessening dysphoria.
And anytime you relieve dysphoria you are acting like a Good Samaritan. 100%.
There’s likely a strongly overlapping Venmo diagram of bromeotherapy, incels and complimentarianism that puts evangelical Christianity and Tucker Carlson right in the center.
But really that’s just a tired (if troubling) trope, and just about as authentically Christian as the images of some guy getting light therapy on his testicles.
As cruciform as those images were, they are really a sacrilegious cooptation of the cross of Christ all laying themselves down at the altar of testosterone.
Muscular Christianity has been under the illusion that God’s testosterone levels have needed buffing.
Christianity in the way of Jesus remembers it was the women who remained closest, and acknowledges Jesus was of woman born and the Spirit, which leaves his own gender potentially outside the range of binary.
All of which brings us back to dysphoria and Easter. I wonder if simply acknowledging Jesus as non-binary goes some way toward healing and challenging the hyper-genderization of that holy day.
Certainly Jesus’ own body was transformed in the resurrection, still his own self and yet also part of and fully God. That’s a form of gender presentation way beyond gender binaries.
Like that recent sci-fi short story, we could even say Jesus’ gender identifies as bread and wine?