Copyright © 2000 Lisa Lees / Contact Lisa
[These are my notes, from which I often deviate in response to questions and the size and composition of the group to which I am speaking. This was scheduled to be a 60 minute session, but I didn't make it to the conference because of a winter storm!]
Un-Gendering Religion & Spirituality
a workshop presented by Lisa Lees
Good morning! I noticed while looking over the program that I am the only presenter listed with no title or affiliation. That's a good omen for this workshop, because our theme is asking what assumptions we bring to our practice of religion and our spirituality, specifically under the guise of gender.
I'm going to introduce myself, talk a little about gender, then we'll go through a small set of reflection questions as a group, process the result, and wrap things up.
My name is Lisa Lees. I'll give you a handout later that has my email and web addresses. I'm 47, a parent of two children, president of a large community theater company, and non-conventionally spiritual.
I am transexual, so I've spent my life observing gender in our culture. I've been actively speaking and writing on gender and sexuality for about five years. Until recently I worked at MSU, and was very involved in LBGT training and advocacy on that campus.
One of the major efforts I was involved with at MSU was helping to begin a formal dialog between students of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and LBGT students who do or did identify as Christian. That was a very intense, but I believe worthwhile experience for everyone involved.
I, as a young child, was raised part way in the Episcopal Church. As an adult I joined the Catholic Church for about ten years, was active in peace and justice concerns, and served on the Parish Pastoral Council of St. John Student Parish in East Lansing.
I no longer consider myself to be a member of any religious group, though I do consider myself to be spiritual and I will never stop searching for answers to those questions of ethics and purpose that cannot be answered by reason alone.
A very large part of why I do not belong to any religious group lies in the way that gender operates in all groups in our culture.
And that brings us to our topic for today...
Our lives are shaped by the instantiation of many beliefs, as can be attested to in the USA by anyone who is not Caucasian, Christian, right-handed, able-bodied, healthy, young, between five and six feet in height, heterosexual, and either a male masculine man or a female feminine woman.
One of our culture's most powerful beliefs is that each person is possessed of a simple binary property of being male or female, that this determines a wide range of behaviors we call gender, and that the two together entail one's social role as a woman or a man.
We believe so strongly in the male/man/masculine and the female/woman/feminine triads that most people use the terms interchangeably, conflating them into one poorly focused concept of gender.
What I want to do is a little work on unraveling the gender confusion with which we are saddled, and look at how our overloaded concept of gender affects our spirituality and our practice of religion.
There are differences between people. There are valid reasons to at times group people according to their actual differences.
In our culture, gender roles are used to group people by their prescribed differences. Aside from the violence this does to the actual differences between people, it also renders the concept of gender useless for other purposes.
What if we took as absolute truth the notion that "roses are red and violets are blue," using it to reorder not only our flower gardens but our use of color everywhere? We've done that with the human qualities we lump together as gender, but we only dimly see what a mish-mash that has made of our understanding of human ability and potential.
What I am trying to do is to free the concept of personality from where it is buried under our current concept of gender and give personality priority over reproductive biology. (Isn't it odd that we extend reproductive sex into public life and then forbid polite discussion of the topic?)
Not that there are no human differences tied to chromosomes, hormones, and genitals, but male and female humans are much more similar than our gender myths let us believe, as are human individuals much more different than their arbitrary grouping as men and women prescribes.
I question the effort that has gone into promoting feminism and masculinism, and ask why we do not instead concentrate on 'humanism'.
This sheet is for you to keep. We have only about 40 minutes to go through these questions today, so I'll have to keep things moving at a fast pace. But I hope you can find time later to give some more thought to the questions I raise.
Okay, we need to come to a stopping point now.
Are there any comments people would like to share about this session and what we have done? Any questions for me?
I hope what we have done this morning has helped you see that there is more thinking to be done about gender and its role in every facet of our lives.
Copyright © 2000 Lisa Lees /
Contact Lisa