Hairy

I've got a real love-hate relationship with shaving.

When I was a preteen, I saw my Dad shaving with his electric shaver, and thought it would be neat to have enough peach fuzz to need my own (I was one of those boys that want to be "just like Dad"; whatever gender confusion I may have had was buried pretty deeply at that point). Then I got hit by the "body hair fairy", and I quickly discovered how much of a hassle it can all be.

For starters, I've got a LOT of hair. Arms, legs, chest, back, and of course on my face. Way more hair than any genetic female would ever have, and enough that people notice when I shave it. For my face & legs, that's fine... guys can do that, especially if they're cyclists (I am). But everything else? Arms, chest, back, shoulders, armpits...? When that hair goes missing, people tend to ask questions I'd rather avoid.

So, I shave what I can safely shave in our culture without raising eyebrows. Not the best, but I can live with it for now.

Unfortunately, even for the places I feel free to shave, I have issues. I've always had super sensitive skin, which makes using a blade of any kind tricky — I tend to cut myself, a LOT. Plus, my face gets pretty irritated if I shave on anything approaching a regular basis (like daily). And as if that isn't enough, my hair grows in at a weird angle, so that even the closest, smoothest electric shaver leaves me with a Homer Simpson-style 5 o' clock shadow. Sad face! :(

It's taken me years to figure out how to deal with this. For a while I tried growing a goatee, because it seemed like it would be less of a daily hassle. I was also in a phase of my life when I was trying to deny my feminine side, and I thought having a beard would make my GID feelings weaker, or at the very least easier to ignore. I quickly found that I was wrong in both cases: it took even more effort to keep a goatee neatly trimmed, and after a few days the prickliness would really start to bug me (and my wife, for that matter), so I'd end up shaving it all off, and the feelings would come roaring back.

More often than not, then, I end up being lazy and looking like a less-masculine George Michael, with a day or two's worth of shadow. Yuck.

Honestly, if electrolysis / laser hair removal weren't so expensive and time-consuming, I'd have probably done my face and legs already. Le sigh.

Ah, yes, my legs. I've been shaving them on and off for years. Once, early on in our marriage, my wife commented on how sexy my legs would look if they were shaved. So that night I took the opportunity to shave them... slowly, and with several painful nicks, but I rather liked the results (my girlish feelings were just reawakening after being dormant for most of my college years). I loved their smooth silkiness, and the way my pants fabric felt slipping over them when I walked was absolutely delicious. My sweetheart was surprised when she saw what I'd done the next morning — I think her original comment was just playful and not really serious — but if I remember right, she liked them. (I was riding my bike back and forth a lot to college classes at the time, so my calves were pretty toned). But shaving my legs was so time consuming, not to mention hard for me to explain, so I'd go months or even years without doing anything about them.

Fast-forward to last year. I've spent the last few years exercising on my lunch break at work a couple of times a week, usually just power-walking or some light weight training in the gym in my building. Then I had the brilliant idea to bring my bike to work and leave it in a corner, so I could RIDE on my lunch breaks instead. It's easier on my bad knees, and I can go further and burn more calories in the same amount of time... win-win! Plus, as a serious cyclist, I finally had a justifiable reason to shave my legs on a regular basis... make that win-win-WIN! I've got my own Venus shaver for the job so I don't mess up my wife's blades, and she's come to accept my doing it.

I've kept my legs clean-shaven pretty much constantly since then. Doing maintenance shaves maybe once or twice a week is enough to keep them soft, smooth, and comfy. I still wish there was a better way besides shaving to get my face and legs to where I want them, and wish I could follow suit with the rest of my body, but for right now, this feels like a good compromise between sasquatch and naked mole rat, and makes me feel just a little bit more like myself.

Is Gender Binary?

This morning Christian Taylor published a new post on her blog that got me thinking about how my views on transgenderism are changing. I commented there, but I feel like those comments could be fleshed out a little more, so here goes.

I've been reading and studying more on the subject lately than I have in the past (again, I'm finally approaching my transgenderism as something to be learned from, not something to be ashamed of), and have had some very interesting insights. In a nutshell, the more I learn, the harder time I have seeing gender as a strictly binary thing, either 100% male or 100% female, and not as a complex continuum of thoughts, feelings, desires, and attitudes that shape our perceptions of the world and inform our approach to it. I'm still trying to reconcile that with the LDS church's Proclamation on the Family, which I believe to be inspired of God, and which includes this passage:

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

I'm trying to exercise some spiritual insight here, and I think maybe terminology is getting in the way a little. Mirriam-Webster defines gender as "the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex". So in the common usage, gender is, indeed, binary, and the Proclamation's usage is consistent with that definition: all God's children are sons or daughters, and this gender is part of their eternal identity.

Now contrast that with a common feminist perspective on gender:

...according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons.
...
This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice”

So in this characterization, sex is binary, but gender is most decidedly not! I recently read a really great article about this on the Exponent, an LDS women's magazine. Seriously, go read it, it's fascinating. Here's a snippet:

Furthermore, the behaviors, traits, roles, and expectations of gender are culturally relative. I witnessed this first hand during my dissertation fieldwork in Ghana where men unabashedly hold hands with each other, wear pink, sing soprano, and like hello kitty without any reflection on their masculinity, “machismo,” and/or sexuality. It is also a land where women “provide.” They farm, they own small businesses, they occupy the most prestigious and wealthy positions in the largest outdoor market in the world. The variations continue from culture to culture in what fundamental behaviors are “male” or “female.”
...
The obvious socially, culturally, and politically constructed continuum of gender behavior gives me serious doubts about the concept of the “eternal nature of gender” argued in the Proclamation to the Family and subsequent talks. It is implausible and carries the remnants of Americancentrism and 1950′s idealism inapplicable to much of the global membership. Thus, is the theology merely a remnant of our church leaders’ generational and national upbringing? Is it the one and only true gender construction? Or am I missing something?

I think we in the transgender community do a disservice to each other by trying to "categorize" different types of transgenderism (i.e. crossdresser, transsexual, genderqueer, etc). To my mind, it seems like we're accepting the scientific premise that gender is a continuum, and yet we're not quite able to let go of the emotional need for tidy little boxes or labels for people. I think of myself as a transgendered man, and crossdressing is part of the way I express that, but it's not an end unto itself — that's just more like a means of connecting with my feminine side. I've been praying and pondering a lot about this lately, and I'm feeling pretty strongly that my essential sex identity, the sex of my spirit if you will, is male (I know it seems weird to impute a sex to spirits, but work with me here). That said, my gender is a very different matter, and not so easily categorized. My physical and linguistic mannerisms, the way I approach any number of subjects from politics, to my profession, to friendships, to church doctrine, to my marriage and parenthood — I fall all over the male/female spectrum, and I don't think I'm alone in that respect. There are a ton of ways people may express their discomfort or lack of fit with their society-proscribed gender role, and I don't think this necessarily tracks with any incongruences in the genders of our bodies, minds, and spirits.

Please note that I'm not attempting to criticize anyone for understanding these things differently. We all see the world imperfectly, as Paul anciently told the Corinthians:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
— 1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV

I'd like to think the day is coming (Paul's "then") when we all will know one another the way our Heavenly Father knows us, and the fractal beauty of our infinite gender variations will take our breath away.

Buongiorno!

 

Thought I'd be a little original with the title of my "hello world" post. ;)

Lately I've been trying to reconcile my life-long testimony of the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ with my longstanding feelings of gender... well, "muddiness" for lack of a better word. Let me explain.

So for nearly as long as I can remember, I've been dealing with thoughts and feelings that aren't a perfect fit with my birth gender. It wasn't that I felt like I was a girl born in a boy's body -- I'm pretty sure my spirit is male, if it has to come down to a binary choice. But we're learning that gender is a continuum, not just black and white, and there are certain aspects of the role assigned to me by society and biology that just don't fit who I am:

• I'm not at all aggressive or assertive, even though I like comic book superheroes and played with Transformers as a kid.
• I'm extremely nonconfrontational, unless I feel like someone is being bossed around / treated unfairly.
• I'd rather build things up than tear them down. Even as a teenager, random destruction and pyromania have never appealed to me (except for anthills. For some reason I loved kicking over the anthills in the Rocky Mountain high desert where my grandparents lived).
• I hate watching sports, unless I know someone on one of the teams (like in little league). Actually, I'm not even very fond of playing most sports... unless it's as a bonding activity with friends I care about.
• When faced with a choice between "hanging out with the guys" and tucking my kids in at night, the kids win every time.
• (thinking about it, I don't even really have any guy friends outside of work and the Internet, although I get along okay with the guys in my neighborhood and at church)
• I try to be handy with cars like my Dad and Grandpa before me, but more often than not I just don't have the hands or the head for it, and we just leave it to the mechanic.
• On Tuesday nights, when I take my kids to church youth activities, I'd rather sit in the foyer and talk with the other kids' moms than go in the gym and play basketball with their dads.
• I'm the designated doer of dishes in the house, and if I weren't out all day "bringing home the bacon," I'd be home "frying it up in the pan," doing a good chunk of the cooking too.

Anyway, you get the idea. In a lot of ways, I'm not a very "manly man." And yet...

• I feel like bringing home the bacon is my responsibility, and I take it very seriously.
• Physically, I'm very obviously male: I'm broad-shouldered, relatively tall (5'11"), have kind of big feet, and my entire body is covered in hair (even my 5-o'clock shadow has a 5-o'clock shadow!)
• I like some masculine things: sports cars and power tools.
• I'm humbled to hold the Priesthood of God, and seek to use it to serve and bless the lives of others.
• I love my wife, and have never had any interest in a romantic relationship with a man.

Anyway. I've spent most of my 14 years of married life on the binge/purge crossdressing merry-go-round, always feeling like it was something of a compulsion, but then subsequently feeling shame and guilt that I wasn't conforming to the role God had ordained for me. Sometimes, sadly, that shame would be compounded by an indulgence in online entertainment that, well, let's just say it's not virtuous, lovely or of good report, and it made me even more sure that my gender confusion was somehow wrong or sinful.

Almost always, these guilty/shameful feelings have been accompanied by fears of what would happen if my wife were to find out, and guilt that I've gotten so adept at hiding this from her. She walked in on me wearing her clothes a few times early on in our marriage and was very emotionally hurt by it, so I've always been afraid to really open up to her about why I feel the need to do it. I really need to, though.

These two worlds I live in often feel hopelessly irreconcilable. My wife and kids are upstairs in bed, and here I sit on the couch in a skirt, trying to figure out why. Finally, one night about a week ago, instead of searching for fulfillment by reading from the lion's share of online transgendered sites, many of which don't share my values, I Googled "transgender mormon," and was thunderstruck by what I learned: there are other LDS men who feel the same way as I do, and instead of denying these powerful urges (which never fully works -- they always come back more powerful than ever) or leaving their families and the Church to pursue gender transition, are trying to find a middle ground: embracing their feminine sides in a way that is in harmony with the Gospel!

Can such a thing be possible?

Thanks to Sweetisthepeace, Inter Alia, and Christian Taylor, I'm encouraged to try and find out.