Transitioning, 1

Weeks during which I meet a lot of new people always make me pause and question things. Why do I do what I do? What does it mean to be Transgender, gendered, sexed? Are we these things or do we do these things?

Every time I meet someone new there is the process of explanation and decision. Do I correct their pronoun usage to the one I prefer? Do I allow ‘she’ to slide and not correct someone? Do I choose ‘he’, even though it does not encompass what I mean either? Do I go through the process of explaining gender-neutral pronouns?

When I meet someone in Divinity school, as many of the people I meet are, or someone who works in a religion related field, I also have to wonder what it means to be/do who I am in light of deep and devoted faith. What would G…d say if G…d were to comment on what I am doing to my body and my gender?

Opinions vary wildly, from “Amen, Brother! Fight the Gender Paradigm” to “Adonai will lead you back to your rightful place”. I’m not sure that I know what either of these mean. These people, the religious ones, ask me how I could deny the order of the world that G…d ordained. They ask me how I can not feel like one or the other – doesn't everyone feels like one or the other?

The question I get the most though is “Are you going to transition?”

People, when they ask if I am going to transition, mean a specific thing. They mean, “Are you going to start taking testosterone? Are you going to have your breasts removed? “ They mean but don’t say “How much are you going to change and how will I recognize you in the end? How will I deal with you once you are not the person I know you to be now?”

I never know how to answer these spoken and unspoken questions.

The world is in a constant state of flux and transition. We all change with every breath we take, with every step towards a class, with every word we read. None of us are the same from one second to the next. How much am I going to change is the point of transitioning. If I knew now who I would end up being, would life be any fun? Where would the challenge be?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience”. The experience is the change, the evolution, the transition from one thing to another. This is what it means to be human, it is what it means for our spiritual beings to be exploring an earthly existence.

Transition is a gift from G…d, one that we all were given and all go through daily. It means something different to each of us, but it is there. If you put your fingers to a pulse point, hold your wrist lightly, you will feel it. In every heartbeat, in every person, is a moment of transition that resonates through all we do.

People always want to know, when you start a blog, what it is going to be about – what will it mean, what will you talk about.

That moment when I feel my pulse beat and know that I am a different person than I was a beat ago; that moment when I pray and it means something deeper and more true than it meant the time before – that it what this blog is about: the glory and the pain of the constant transitions of life and faith; the questions that spur these transitions and the questions that are the inevitable results.

I will leave you with this, said more beautifully than I could ever hope to say it, and pray that it inspires you to look at the transitions in your own life, in all of their wonder and beauty and heartbreak and pain.

We are not to know why

this and that masters us.

Real life makes no reply,

only that it enraptures us…

makes us familiar with it.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke