Promises

Sometimes when we touch, the hypocrisy’s too much.

Ahem.

It’s hard to know where to start, so let’s start with The Promise Keepers. When this group was formed, it certainly wasn’t my cup of tea and it was deeply problematic in many ways. It was a group of ostensibly heterosexual, cisgendered men who self-identified as Christian, not necessarily evangelical. Their goal was to support each other in their roles as fathers and husbands, across racial and denominational lines.

Alas, at a recent rally in Oklahoma, they showed their very new, very political, very hateful and, to be honest, deeply fragile leanings. Among other imaginary specters, they have decided that “trans identities” and the concept of preferred pronouns are a particular threat.

Let’s lift up the corner of this rug a little.

When the gender identity of another person is a threat to you, that’s about you. If you know who you are and can stand in that when the wind blows, you’re deeply happy for anyone else who can do the same or who is even trying to do the same. When who you are is based on arbitrary rules of power over others and fear of human complexity, every other thing and every other person is a threat. That does sound lonely. Who wouldn’t want to start a club to stave off the oppressive sadness of that limiting story?

These men, and so many others, refuse to be with nuance, to make mistakes, to try again. The fuel for this kind of hate and intolerance is nothing more than a preference for erasure, injury or murder of anything unfamiliar over developing the skills to be with the ugliness inside oneself—the ugliness that is inside all of us and that stays inside of us if we pretend it’s not there. Who knows? Maybe if you can get enough of your friends to agree that it’s not there, maybe the bear doesn’t shit next to the tree that fell in the woods when nobody was looking…or something like that.

There’s a good bit of research suggesting that masculinity is among the most fragile of identities. The news, HR departments, and our own homes are filled with examples of minor threats pushing otherwise-reasonable men to lie, shout, yell, harass, cheat and even commit assault to demonstrate their manliness.

Fellas. Seriously? You’re better than that. Like, really and truly, you’re made of the most beautiful stuff that the rest of us only want to mirror back to you.

A recent Pew study found that 46 percent of people under 30, and 29 percent of people between the ages of 30 and 49 know someone who uses gender neutral pronouns. And 41% of the people surveyed felt comfortable with the reality that a person’s gender is not dictated by their sex at birth. That’s a hell of a lot of people who have figured out how go about their lives without the need to erase others’ truth or pretend that “the science” says they shouldn’t have to be uncomfortable.

Freedom will never lie in the places where you only feel what you’re conditioned to feel, where you always feel like you’re in the right place or doing the right thing.  I understand the allure of always wanting to “know” if the person in front of you should be asked to chop wood or bake a pie, but it’s not 1680, my loves. Real liberation is having the skills and the heart to be with change, including the change that wants to happen inside you, the change that could heal your pain.

C’mon, boys. I never met Jesus, but I’m pretty sure he’d ask you to stop acting the fool. There’s no way he’d support the idea that it’s better to hate and kill each other than to make mistakes as you learn to see your fellow humans--all of them-- for what and who we really and truly are and were created to be. We don’t want you to be transgender. But when you quit being dicks to people who are, I guarantee you’ll have much more room in your heart for that freedom you keep saying you want.