So, it's been a month since I've published anything here. Sorry for kinda dropping off the planet; it's been a pretty crazy month.
My family and I are currently on vacation, visiting our extended family in Utah, and tonight in family scripture study, we read Alma's great sermon on the atonement, in Alma chapter 42. As we neared the end, we read verse 24, and something clicked over in my head:
24 For behold, justice exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her own; and thus, none but the truly penitent are saved.
(emphasis added)
Look at the pronouns Alma uses: why is justice male ("his demands"), but mercy is female ("her own")? When I was on my mission, I remember my mission president using this passage as the theme for a zone conference, and though it's now fuzzy and I may be misremembering his interpretation somewhat, I think it was something along the lines of the importance of having both justice and mercy, both male and female approaches to life, in order to have a well-balanced whole. Two sides of the same coin... the yin and the yang.
I've said before on this blog that I feel gender is not strictly binary in nature, and that I personally feel that I have both masculine and feminine traits, but a single "me" (unlike some, who feel they have separate male and female selves). How does that square with what my mission president (and maybe Alma) is saying?
A fellow member of the TGIMormons Yahoo group I belong to recently made an observation I kinda like: perhaps, instead of a rigid gender binary (i.e. just 0 or 1) or a single male<->female continuum (e.g. 0, 0.1, 0.2, ... 0.9, 1.0), maybe gender is more like a graph with two dimensions, one X and one Y (hmm, interesting that those are the common math terms and also the common gender shorthand), and every individual's gender identity lies somewhere on the graph. Most people would cluster around the axes, the majority of men having a high Y value and low X value, and most women the opposite. People like my friend Sam that have a sense of neutral gender would lie near the origin of the graph, near (0,0), and people that have two distinct gender expressions like BiGender.net founder Brin would land up in the top-right of the graph, near (1,1). It's not a perfect metaphor, but I like that it points to maleness and femaleness as separate-but-closely-linked traits, just as justice and mercy are separate, but closely linked concepts in Alma's cosmology, and you can't have one without the other.
I'm interested to hear people's opinions on both my reading of Alma 42 and my friend's 2-axis conception of gender. Sound off in the comments below, and let me know what y'all think.
