Strands of the Interconnected Web

A Reflection by Jim DeLaHunt
May 2001
Palo Alto, CA

I’d like to share with you some thoughts on why affirming Erinn as a transgendered person is important to me, and I’d argue to all of us. It’s not just because Erinn is a nice person, though she is. It’s not just because it’s the self-satisfyingly liberal thing to do, though it is. It’s because my affirming her is interconnected with my freedom to affirm myself. Let me try to explain.

My Mom (and here comes my Mother’s day tie-in) was a classic housewife and mother of the 60’s and 70’s. She lived the cultural norm that your sex and your role had to correlate. Being a woman, her role was to be wife and mother to five not very grateful males, and two girls. But in the 70’s, she and her fellow housewives began reading feminist ideas. She started rejecting that correlation, that limited role. She began figuring out what her identity as a person was, what other roles she was called to fill. It led to graduate school in architecture and design.

I read some of those same feminist ideas, and so I grew up with the idea that this correlation was not absolute. I could and I should understand who I really was, and go for the roles that I was called to. I grew up liking to cook. I grew up wanting to be a stay-at-home mom. Rejecting this correlation let me become myself.

Fast forward to the 80’s, when I was in college. One of my friends came out as a gay man, the first gay person I had known personally. At the same time, the combination of the gay pride movement and the fight against AIDS raised the profile of gay people in my hitherto straight world. In that world, the sex of your sweetheart was supposed to correlate — inversely — with your sex. Men fall in love with just women and women with just men. This correlation was false, just like the correlation of gender and role. A person could and should understand their true nature, and not try to fit it into a false correlation.

Now, I’ve been using the terms “male” and “female” as if they are clearly delineated categories, but guess what, they are not. According to Dr. Fausto-Sterling in the American Journal of Human Biology, about 1% of babies are born with bodies that differ in some respect from the standard male or female. Maybe they have different chromosomes, like XXY instead of XX or XY. Maybe they have a large clitoris, or a small penis. It turns out that a baby’s sex is determined by physicians wielding rulers. If a newborn baby has penis that is 1” or longer, the baby is male. A clitoris that is 3/8” or smaller means the baby is female. Anything in between is treated as a pathological condition, a problem to be cured with surgery. The medical profession, together with anxious parents, changes the sex organs of the baby to fix a problem.

And perhaps 1 in every 500 elite athletes has been diagnosed as intersexed, that is has turn out to have some kind of non-standard body configuration, according to the same author. This apparently causes real surprises to Olympic athletes, who may find out their condition for the first time at the Olympic medical tests.

So here is another reason to reject the strict correlation of sex and sexuality, of gender and role. The terms aren’t well-defined. The reality of nature is that these terms “male” and “female” have blurry boundaries.

So let me take this journey on to transgendered people. There is this concept of “gender identity”. It is the gender you recognise when you look inside yourself. It is who you really are. Our culture has a yet another correlation — that all people who look male, who have male bodies, also have a male gender identity; and the same for females. What transgendered people represent is the exception to that correlation. Their body doesn’t fit their gender identity. And the solution they choose, against great resistance and hardship, is to change their gender presentation, and even their body, to fit their true identity. They step outside the narrow trenches of correlation between body appearance and gender identity.

Now I say to you that I believe these stories are all linked. Our culture has a message of correlation, of two narrow trenches that line up into “male” and “female” a whole collection of different characteristics: gender roles, sexual orientation, physical sex, and gender identity. The lesson from all these stories is that none of these characteristics falls into narrow trenches, they all are spectrums. And they do not correlate neatly, they vary independently of each other in different people. I believe that the same morality that calls us to recognise that gender roles shouldn’t be confined to two narrow trenches correlated with gender, calls us to recognise that gender identity isn’t confined two two narrow trenches correlated with these other characteristics. These issues are strands of the same interconnected web. We should affirm transgendered people and bisexual people and CEO women and stay-at-home fathers, as different aspects of one reality.

[Note: This talk was delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto on 5/13/2001. “Erinn” is a minister at this church, and the focus of the service was Erinn talking about her experience and insights as a transgendered person.]