How would you have me live my life?

CassandraToday3 Comments

I have a question for the authors / scholars / feminist leaders who oppose male-to-female (man-to-woman) transition for people who say they are transgender or transsexual.

How would you have me live my life?

Not what is your theory of gender, not why is transition morally wrong, not what’s wrong with the transgender movement(s), not what are your qualifications, not even what are your feelings about people who say they’re trans.

Just: How would you have me live my life?

I was born with unambigously male anatomy. For as long as I can remember — back to age 4 — I have had a deeply felt sense that I am female on the inside; that my male body notwithstanding, my heart and soul are female; that I was meant to be, or should have been, born a girl — all of these, yet not exactly any of these. I was deeply unhappy, not so much with my circumstances, as with who I was, who I understood myself to be. When I transitioned in 2005-2006, I felt a weight lift from my spirit. I still feel that lightness today. I feel right in a fundamental way.

But how would you have me live my life?

And now that I have transitioned, how should I move through the binary gendered world that is the USA in the early 21st century? Whether we think it should be this way or not, circumstances for women and men are different. There are different restrooms and locker rooms for men and women; there are different clothes; there are different social opportunities; there are different social expectations; there are different job possibilities; there are different safety concerns; there are different options for dating, love, and sex. How should I move through all this, now, 10 years since I changed my name and grew breasts and became known to many people as a woman?

How would you have me live my life?

Not what should I have done; not how should society change; not what should trans people in general do; not what do leading authorities say I should do.

How would you, personally, have me, personally, live my life?

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Bring Me Home

CassandraToday2 Comments

Heart is cold
affect flat
veil is closed
spirit lost

No more why
only what
next today
then the next

God afar
watches waits
does no more
cannot do

Pain or not
love or not
life or not
our own choice

Farther shore
see it soon
closer now
bring me home

A Talk About Our Relationship

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Another short reflection paper I wrote for my New Testament survey class in seminary, in the Fall of ’09.
This one is about Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

Romans and I have a wonderful relationship. It hasn’t always been easy – we’ve had our share of differences. To be honest, we still do sometimes. But it’s truly a long-term, loving relationship. I’d like to talk a little bit about what makes it work, or at least, what makes it work for me. If you want to know how he feels, you’ll have to ask him, although good luck with that – he’s not always comfortable with touchy-feely language.

Any good relationship has to be based on honesty. If you’re holding something back from each other, trust breaks down, and you lose faith in each other. Whenever I’m with Romans, I try to be present with a completely open heart. He’s the same way. He tells me what he thinks, what he believes, what he thinks is and isn’t important, and so on. I never have to play “guess what I’m thinking” with him. Sometimes he tells me more than I need to know at the moment, but that’s OK, better to say too much than too little.

Another really important thing is always showing how much you care about each other – not just caring, but showing it too. Part of that is making sure that you spend quality time together. It’s not enough just to be in the same room, you have to engage each other, have real conversations. I know I always feel better when I’ve been spending time with him regularly.

Of course, sometimes those conversations are easier than others. I don’t mean in a bad way… for instance, I’m a pretty emotional person, and he can be kind of intellectual and analytical sometimes. But if you care about each other, you make the effort. I try to listen really carefully, and he’s really patient about having to explain things more than once.

I don’t want to make it sound like he’s the one with all the answers. See, he hasn’t changed much over the years, and it seems like I’m starting something new all the time. So I can bring that to our time together, and help him understand and adapt to the way the world is now. He appreciates that, because a lot of people bring their questions to him, and he wants to be able to answer them in language they understand.

And speaking of being with someone else – that’s another thing that makes our relationship work – it goes back to that trust that I mentioned a few minutes ago. We’re completely loyal to each other. If somebody else needs him, I’m OK with that, because I know he’ll be there for me when I need him. And if I spend some time with Jude or Mark or even old Isaiah, he trusts me to come back to him. And I always do.

There’s something comforting about him, even though he can be so mental at times. Like even though he has a very clear sense of right and wrong, he’s still very accepting. He doesn’t judge people by surface things, like whether they’re male or female, or workers or bosses. He’s funny – he always says that he doesn’t even care if someone’s Jewish or Greek or whatever! It makes me feel safe around him, because I know he’s accepting of me too.

Another thing – he’s not one of those who are afraid to talk about love. When he says, “Owe no one anything, except to love,” or “Love is the fulfilling of the law”, I get all mushy inside – I never get tired of hearing things like that.

I guess that’s the bottom line – he’s all about love and faithfulness, and so am I. That’s really what’s at the heart of our wonderful relationship. And that’s what will keep us together for the rest of our lives.

Christmas

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A friend asked today what Christmas means to me spiritually. While it’s possible to write a book-length answer to that, I limited myself to these three short paragraphs.

Christmas is that moment when God moved (moves) from transcendent, “out there somewhere”, to immanent, right here next to us and among us — and yet, without losing the power and beauty of that transcendence.

And more: That baby, Son of God and Son of Man, teaches us — shows us — the reality that the Divine and the human can co-exist in the same being. God is not just with me; God is in me. And not just as some abstract essence — everything that makes God God is in me: God’s love, and God’s power, and God’s creativity, grace, and hope. More, this God-in-my-heart is my connection to transcendence and eternity.

Christmas is that moment — not just a temporal moment, a spiritual moment — when all of that is revealed to me in an awe-filled flash.

(Un-)Forgiveness: Mark, Hebrews, and the Go-Go’s

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I wrote this shortly after I had completed a major research project on the Gospel of Mark; and between my reading of the Letter to the Hebrews and our group discussion of it. Also, I listen to rock’n’roll when I’m staying up late writing and reading. Now you know how Mark, Hebrews, and the Go-Go’s ended up in the same essay.

 
 

You’re unforgiven

so go on living

knowing that I’ve unforgiven you

and my thanksgiving

came the day

I saw it was OK

to unforgive you

– The Go-Go’s

 

Maybe I’m oversensitive, having just spent 36 straight hours with the shadowy Gospel, Mark the Dark. But there’s something that really bothers me about Hebrews. It’s something that also used to bother me about Mark until yesterday, when I finally came up with a satisfactory understanding of it. It’s the same ambivalent feeling that I have about that song “Unforgiven” from the Go-Go’s 2004 CD God Bless the Go-Go’s (snippet above). It’s hard-driving rock’n’roll, and with lyrics like that, it’s a great break-up song if you’re the one who’s been dumped.

But now that I’m over my latest break-up (pretty much), I’m not as comfortable with the song. It’s clever, making “unforgive” a transitive verb, and part of going on after love lost is reclaiming your ego. But the sentiment seems so… un-Christian. Forgiving is good, not forgiving is not so good, but unforgiving someone? It seems too cold-hearted and permanent.

The troublesome Mark passage that I’m referring to is 3.29, when Jesus says, “…whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” Same problem – it seems so cold-hearted and permanent, very un-Christ-like. I rescued this passage for myself in the context of the surrounding story. The religious authorities have just accused Jesus of knowing how to cast out demons because he is a demon himself, in league with the Devil; this passage is part of his response. He knows that really, he is God, so he is warning the priests and scribes that it’s dangerous to say God and the Devil are the same thing, because then you cut yourself off from access to salvation. It all comes from a misunderstanding of Jesus’ identity.

That rationalization doesn’t work with some of the Epistle to the Hebrews, though, like 6.4-6: “…It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance.” (NIV) What?!? After I’ve repented and been baptized and forgiven, I’m still at risk of losing it? To be sure, “fall away” here means more than missing Sunday service – it carries the connotation of treachery or betrayal. But if a Christian converts to Judaism or Islam for a time – faiths that deny the truth of the Christian gospel – before realizing the error of their ways, is Hebrews saying they can’t ever come back?

Everything I understand about our Christian view of God says that God loves us so much that God acts with grace when faced with human sin. But this and similar passages in Hebrews seem to be saying that even grace has its limits. I’m not one to cherry-pick the parts of the Bible that I like, and pretend that the rest don’t exist. But I don’t know how to reconcile this passage with the Gospels or Paul. I suppose it’s a project that I’ll have to take on later. I’ll add it to my Biblical theology to-do list.

My Heart Bleeds for SurveyMonkey… Not

CassandraToday3 Comments

SurveyMonkey*, a popular free site for creating online surveys, is playing fast and loose with the truth about their exposure to the Heartbleed vulnerability.

As far as I can put the pieces together, they were indeed running the broken version of OpenSSL before this week’s public disclosure of Heartbleed, and they quickly patched their computers with the fixed version. They also sent e-mail to their user base, advising everyone to change passwords, which, while not an admission, is certainly a strong hint that users’ passwords may have been exposed.

What they won’t admit is that, for who-knows-how-long, their data was also at risk of exposure. By “their” data, I mean your and my and all their other users’ surveys and survey results. Probably not a big deal to many users, but certainly something you would expect a service provider to be honest about.

I tried to get a straight answer from them, but they refused to give one. Posted below is the e-mail conversation I had with them yesterday. While I don’t have a final answer from them yet, it appears unlikely I will get one. The support person, Ian, offers at the end to take my question to the technical team on Monday. But no technical person will be able (permitted) to answer my question any more clearly than Ian.  The decision to fudge their answer came from Marketing/Communications, and the decision to stop fudging will have to come from there too.

I can’t tell you what you should do, dear reader, but you deserve at least to have accurate information when you’re deciding whether to trust a web site with your data.

_______________

* SurveyMonkey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/

Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 17:33:00 -0700
To: (me and all the other SurveyMonkey users)
From: “SurveyMonkey” <surveymonkey@go.surveymonkey.com>
Subject: SurveyMonkey Heartbleed Security Update

Dear SurveyMonkey Customer,

On April 7, 2014, researchers disclosed a vulnerability in a technology called OpenSSL that powers encryption across much of the internet. The vulnerability is commonly known as the “OpenSSL Heartbleed Flaw.”

Our team took immediate action to secure SurveyMonkey’s infrastructure against this flaw. We closed any exposure that might have existed and wanted to let you know that SurveyMonkey is not vulnerable to the Heartbleed flaw.

Although we have no reason to believe that any part of our service has been improperly accessed due to this vulnerability, as a matter of best practice we would like to recommend that all our customers reset their passwords. To reset your password, visit My Account and change your password in the Login Details section of your Account Page.

Thank you for being a great customer. Happy surveying!
The SurveyMonkey Team

 

From: (me)
Sent: 4/11/2014 8:30 PM
To: support@surveymonkey.com
Subject: OpenSSL Heartbleed vuln

Your e-mail to users doesn’t actually say whether you were vulnerable to the Heartbleed exploit in the past — it only says you took immediate action and are not vulnerable now. Were you at any time running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL (1.0.1 through 1.0.1f) on any of your public-facing servers? Please give me a straight answer — I admin servers for a living, and I don’t suffer FUD gladly. Thanks,

 

From: support@surveymonkey.com
Date: 4/12/2014 12:06 AM
To: (me)
Subject: Re: OpenSSL Heartbleed vuln [ ref:_00D301HuKJ._50030Tmot8:ref ]

Hi ,

We promptly did a thorough assessment of our site to resolve any exposure that might have existed and are happy to let you know that SurveyMonkey is no longer at risk to the Heartbleed flaw. We have no reason to believe that any part of our service was improperly accessed due to any exposure that may have existed.

Due to our security policy, we are not able to disclose any specifics on our production infrastructure.  Your confidence is of the highest importance to us and we have taken pains to ensure that customer and survey data remain secure.

You can confirm this via an independent Heartbleed vulnerability test site, such as http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#surveymonkey.com:443

If you have any additional questions about the SSL encrpytion used on our site, you can learn more about it in the following FAQ:http://help.surveymonkey.com/articles/en_US/kb/What-is-the-enhanced-security-option-SSL-encryption

You can also review our security policy here:https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/policy/security/

All the best,

Ian
Product Support Specialist

From: (me)
To: support@surveymonkey.com
Date: 4/12/2014 12:37 AM
Subject: Re: OpenSSL Heartbleed vuln [ ref:_00D301HuKJ._50030Tmot8:ref ]

Really, Ian? Really? I understand that you can’t tell me any more than the marketing suits will allow you to tell me. But I think I can read between the lines of “SurveyMonkey is no longer at risk to the Heartbleed flaw.” Yeah, “…no longer…”

In other words, at some point SurveyMonkey was running the vulnerable version of OpenSSL on public facing servers.

I know you’re just doing your job, but would you please pass this up the line: that this customer, who is a 30-year veteran system administrator, thinks it’s absolutely slimy that SurveyMonkey won’t disclose such a major vulnerability to its users. At Georgia Tech, where I’m on a team that admins about 1000 Linux servers, if our department tried to hide something like this from the departments that are our customers, there would be hell to pay. And rightly so.

I’ll post your non-reply, along with this message, on Facebook, so that at least my friends know what kind of company SurveyMonkey is.

I’m sorry, Ian, that you personally are forced to be caught in the middle of this farce.

Kind regards to you, Ian

From: support@surveymonkey.com
To: (me)
Date: 4/12/2014  12:57 AM
Subject: Re: OpenSSL Heartbleed vuln [ ref:_00D301HuKJ._50030Tmot8:ref ]

Hi ,

I can certainly understand that you’re concerned and I will definitely send this over to my technical team for further review. However, since it is late on a Friday, you can most likely expect a response on Monday.

Thanks for your patience on this matter. Have a good rest of your weekend.

Warm regards,

Ian
Product Support Specialist

Pope Francis and Teh Gay: So What?

CassandraToday1 Comment

In the name of all rational, clear, critical thinking, WHY are so many of my liberal friends all ga-ga over the Pope’s recent comments about gay people?*

The Catholic Church, including this Pope, still holds that homosexual acts are always serious sins. “Hate the sin, love the sinner” infuriates us when it comes from the evangelical side; why does the Roman church get a pass?

Moreover, Catholic doctrine still holds that a homosexual orientation, while not a sin, is “disordered.” This from the 1986 official statement of doctrine:**

“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”

Some say that, even though Pope Francis’ comments are in line with decades of church teaching, at least they represent progress compared to his predecessor. But to say that Francis is not as bad as Benedict is to damn him with faint praise indeed.

Add to all this the fact that the Catholic church has given no indication that they plan to stop fighting against marriage equality in the civil sphere, and you are left with a nice man fronting a well-executed PR campaign on behalf of an institution that continues its centuries long tradition of preaching the good news of love, while practicing the the ancient evil of hate.

————————————————————————————

*  For example: http://believe-out-loud.tumblr.com/post/56787003555/as-reported-by-huffington-post-pope-francis

** http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19861001_homosexual-persons_en.html

Two Nights

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This is a reflection paper that I wrote in the fall of 2009 for my New Testament survey class in seminary. I’m posting it now because it came up in a conversation.

Luke is the only canonical Gospel that includes the birth narrative. What are we to make of that?

Psalm 23 declares, “Thou art with me.” An individual woman or man is speaking directly to God about God’s presence with her or him personally. It is, as far as I know, unique in all of Scripture in stating this truth in this way. What are we to make of that?

My own contemplative prayer practice has evolved while I’ve been at seminary. Adapting Thich Nhat Hanh’s breath prayer, I found that I could center myself for worship by repeating silently, “Breathing in, Your spirit enters and fills me. Breathing out, I love.” I began to use it in other settings. When I was walking the labyrinth this summer, it helped me to focus on the spiritual, as it soothed and quieted the mental. Seeking to detach from the physical as well, I switched to something even simpler, with no reference to breath. As I walked, I repeated, and contemplated, a pair of four-word selections from Scripture: “Thou art with me. Thy will be done.”

“Lovely,” I hear the reader ask, “but what has this to do with Luke’s birth narrative?”

The birth narrative in Chapter 2 is one of only two scenes in Luke that takes place at night. The other is Jesus’ last night in this life, on the Mount of Olives, in the Garden of Gethsemane.

These two night scenes frame Jesus’ life. Their literary function is that they help to unify a long, meandering story: reading about the last night reminds us of, and carries us back to, the first night. But what is their gospel function?

Let’s return for a moment to my contemplative prayer. Its two parts together summarize, for me, the essentials of my faith. The deceptive simplicity of “Thou art with me” actually encompasses complex wisdom about the nature of God and the nature of my relationship with God. Ours is a personal God, addressed directly, and addressed with familiar, rather than formal, pronouns. While this God may be in Heaven, as many gods are said to be, our God is also as immanent as can be – right here with me. Similarly, “Thy will be done” is a nugget whose small size belies the magnitude of its meaning. It is not only an acknowledgement that our God indeed has a will for us, inviting us to learn what it might be; it is also our promise of commitment to serving that will.

Moreover, the two parts of the prayer are interrelated.  To apprehend God’s will can be terrifying – awe-full. Sureness of God’s presence with me is the only thing that can comfort me enough to feel safe in the face of this awe. Going through the prayer in the other direction, it says that, while God’s presence with me may be comforting, it is not enough to give the relationship its full meaning. The second half is the necessary further development – my reciprocation of God’s presence is my acceptance of God’s will and its implications for how I am to live.

The two nighttime scenes in Luke teach lessons similar to those of the prayer. The Nativity, especially with the intimate detail of Luke’s story, is a narrative way of expressing “Thou art with me,” God’s presence is now here, in our human world. On the Mount of Olives, the very last prayer we hear from Jesus’ lips, even as he is fully cognizant of the gravity of the moment, is “Thy will be done.” Ultimately, a relationship with God calls us to whatever is necessary to fulfill God’s intention for humanity.

Just as most of the rest of Luke’s Gospel narrative tells the story that links those two scenes, the rest of his Gospel message explores the implications of the two principles that the scenes represent. It fills in the spaces to help us understand the connections between love and service, between comfort and call, between birth and death, between “with me” and “Thy will.”

Choice and Queerness

CassandraToday10 Comments

A friend of mine wrote a thought-provoking blog post about the issue of whether being gay is a choice, and whether it matters if it’s a choice or not. Part of what makes her essay so good is that it’s intentionally not from a theoretical viewpoint; it’s based on her own personal experience. When I told her it connected with some thoughts I’d been having recently, she encouraged (urged? demanded?) that I write my own post on the topic. I can’t improve on what she said in her essay, but I can bring my own story to it, a story that’s both similar to and different from hers.

I’m queer. I’m not a lesbian, but rather a bisexual transsexual (which is fun to say out loud, if nothing else). Both my gender transition and my sexual orientation have raised questions of choice for me.

This post will look at my gender transition, which took place during the period mid-’05 to mid-’06. It was in the time preceding that transition that questions of choice came to the fore. One obvious question: did I have a choice about my inner feeling of femaleness? To that I would say no. In the course of counseling, I went back all the way to age 4 in my memories, and that feeling of femaleness, along with the desire to act on it, had been there all along. I won’t hold any 4-year-old accountable for making bad life choices, myself included. So it wasn’t a choice then. As I grew up, and on into adulthood, I tried to make the feelings go away by force of will; that is, I tried to choose not to feel female inside. When I had still not succeeded by the age of 53, I had to admit that it looked a lot more like part of who I was, than a feeling I chose to have; and if that’s what it looked like over the course of half a century, it very likely really was what it looked like.

That was lesson one about choice: sometimes you just are who you are, and you don’t have a choice.

Certainly that realization of powerlessness over something so big contributed to the unprecedented wave of depression that then enveloped me at that time. As sort of a Plan B, since I couldn’t make the feeling just go away, I did my best to research what could cause something that was so resistant to will power. Fortunately, I was working at the University of Michigan at the time, where the graduate library has excellent collections on gender, both from the feminist and from the transgender points of view; there’s also a medical library for the university’s med school. Surely, in all that, I should be able to find an answer to this problem of having no choice about feeling like the wrong sex – maybe a hormonal imbalance, or childhood abuse, or a traumatic brain injury in my past.

Six months, dozens of books, and hundreds of articles later, I surrendered. The answer was simply this: some people just feel like the opposite sex inside, in their hearts, minds, and spirits. Nobody knows why. And when the feeling is strong and persistent, the only relief is found in transitioning to the sex that a person feels like inside.

Having now accepted that I had no choice about feeling this way, I saw that I did have a choice about what to do about it. Neither alternative appealed to me, though: continue to struggle for the rest of my life as I had for the preceding 50 years; or turn my life completely upside down and live the rest of my life as a woman. Choosing gender transition carried the risk of losing relationships with family and friends, and possibly losing my job as well. Choosing not to transition carried the risk of never escaping the clutches of deep depression, and the certainty of never escaping the feeling of being a different sex inside myself than I was on the outside.

Lesson two: having a choice doesn’t necessarily mean that any of the options looks really desirable.

I couldn’t decide. I went for long walks. I got drunk a lot. I prayed. I cursed God. I considered suicide. I joined a gender group, then switched to another. I talked endlessly with my counselor, my wife, my gender groups, and anyone else who would listen. None of those things made the choice for me. At the time, I thought I was deferring making the choice, but I see now that to defer was itself to choose – to make a choice for the status quo.

Let’s call that lesson three: having a choice can free you from one of the alternatives. But it does not free you from having to choose; in fact, it obligates you to choose.

As I said at the beginning, I did end up choosing transition. I felt that I could no longer stand feeling as bleak and as sad as I had for the preceding year. If transition could relieve that depression, I just didn’t have the will to fight it any longer. I took my chances on the consequences of that choice. As it turned out, I lost my marriage and with it, the ability to live in the same house with my then-5-year-old daughter as I watched her grow up. There were also some collateral material losses. By and large, though, none of the other feared consequences came to pass.

But it still didn’t feel like a choice really, not a free choice. You may say that I could’ve chosen to wait one more day; since I’d waited so many days already, what difference would one more make? And the same argument would apply the next day, and the next. Why should I ever have to choose transition? The analogy I’ll use here is holding your breath. If you can hold your breath for 10 seconds, surely you can choose to hold it for 11 seconds; what’s one more second? And if you do hold it for 11, then we know you can choose to wait one more second, so it’s your choice whether to hold your breath for 12 seconds. And on and on. But of course, eventually you have to breathe again; at some point, you can’t choose even that one more second. And as I continued to choose not to transition — by deferring making the choice — that one more day and one more day finally reached a point where I could not defer it one more day.

So I guess lesson four is something like this: sometimes logic tries to tell you that you have a choice, while nature is saying that you don’t have a choice. When that happens, nature eventually beats logic, every time.

In wrapping up, I want to touch on one more thing: this is my story, about my struggle with choice and queerness. It doesn’t prove or disprove anything about anyone else’s story. And nobody else’s story can prove or disprove mine. And that brings us to

Lesson five: Your mileage may vary.