[Magdalen] I'm confused

[Grace Cangialosi]

Thanks very much for this, Susan! I didn't know about the video; I'll look it up.
Yes, I share your ambivalence about using "they" as a singular pronoun, but we've been doing it for years to avoid having to say "him/her"  or "he/she" all the time. 

On June 1, 2016, at 10:16 PM, Suzie Buchanan <buchanan.suzie at gmail.com> wrote:

Some good resources:
http://www.glaad.org/transgender/allies
and I hope you haven't missed the "Voices of Witness: Out of the Box" which
is a wonderful half-hour video released in 2012, made by Episcopalians.  It
does some of the vocab work, but the real beauty of it is in the personal
stories.  It can be found on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzCANWGsEdc

I am grateful that the queer community that has discovered my parish as
safe space trust me enough to continue to teach me.  This past Sunday we
had our "Mass on the Grass" where people are sitting on blankets and lawn
chairs, and there is no aisle or real sense of "this side" and "that side"
to read the psalm antiphonally by full verse.  So we chose to do it: "women
read the odd verses, men the even verses."  At the picnic following, as I
worked my way around the yard where people were enjoying fried chicken and
other picnic delights, a group of my queer contingent gently invited me to
look at them, and then "hear" the invitation to the psalm again.  These are
parishioners who don't identify themselves in the binary gender ways I was
trained to think in.  They didn't feel welcomed in to read any part of the
Psalm.  They weren't angry - just wanted me to hear from their ears.  And
love me enough to teach me.

This Sunday we are having "Youth Sunday" and the young person who is the
preacher is someone whose preferred pronoun is "they".  I think that is the
hardest transition for me to make - it is still such a plural thing that I
have a hard time saying: " I asked Grace to preach, and they said yes."
But Grace did say yes, and they will preach.  I'm looking forward to what
they have to share. (OK linguists, in this case "they" is singular, so is
it "what they has to share"?)

susan



On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 7:55 PM, Grace Cangialosi <gracecan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I need a little help here, and I feel foolish for having to ask, but I do.
> It relates to the terminology for transgender people. I've been wondering
> about it for awhile, and then this morning I met the trans neighbor of a
> 92-year-old parishioner who had just passed away and found myself feeling
> totally confused. Mind you, I didn't express that, but it's been on my mind
> all day. And she will be coming to the funeral on Saturday, so I will be
> meeting her again, as will all those in attendance. And knowing this
> congregation, I anticipate that there will be comments and questions put to
> me after the funeral is over, probably on Sunday.
>
> What I don't know is which way the term "trans" is applied.  If a person
> was born biologically male and is now living as a female, with or without
> surgery, is she considered a trans woman or a trans man? Same question for
> the reverse situation. This woman introduced herself with a woman's name,
> and I took that at face value, but I experienced some cognitive dissonance
> because of her appearance, which was decidedly masculine, as was her voice.
> And she had shaved. But she had breasts...  Obviously this isn't important
> in deciding how I'm going to relate to her, but my discomfort about whether
> I might do or say the wrong thing  let me know that I need to get a handle
> on this. I'm sure that, just as gays and lesbians have come out and taken
> their places in society in a way that causes scarcely a second look, the
> same will be true for trans men and women.  But that isn't the case yet, at
> least not for me.
>
> Finding myself in this confusion is a bit ironic, because the last patient
> I had as a volunteer Hospice chaplain at least 20 years ago was a woman
> with AIDS, and she was transgender, though I didn't realize it for a long
> time. She had had the reassignment surgery in the 70s and had worked as a
> platform model in New York. In addition to AIDS, she had scleroderma from
> the breast implants and was part of the class action suit against Dow
> Chemical. I never had the slightest bit of discomfort with her and grew
> very fond of her as our visits continued.
>
> As I visited her weekly, I learned her whole story, and as she became
> sicker, I met her parents who lived in West Virginia. The tragedy in the
> situation was that they were very strict Pentecostals and had no idea how
> to deal with the fact that their child, born Jimmy, was now a grown woman
> named Christine. Her mother asked me point-blank if she was going to go to
> Hell. I assured her that I did not believe she would.
> When she died, I did her funeral and burial as she had requested, and then
> the family requested that I have no further contact with them.
>
> So anyway, back to the original question of which way the term "trans" is
> applied.
> Thanks,
> Grace