Gender as a generational story

I’m about 100 paid subscribers away from my goal of 1,000 paid subscribers. If this space is meaningful to you, if you share the newsletter with people you love, if it’s every made you cry or laugh, if you like the idea of getting 5 delightful endorsements on a Sunday, and/or contributing to the donations we collectively send to nonprofit organizations of our guest experts’—join us as a paid subscriber!

---

Since we moved, we’ve been going to a Unitarian Universalist church right near our house. It’s a place with a rich history—many of the congregants have been coming for decades on end. It’s also a place of rich diversity—queer elders and new immigrants, disabled folks and brand new babies.

Me and Stella, my 8-year-old, particularly love it. It reminds us of the collective joy and sense of being witnessed week after week that we soaked up while living in cohousing for a decade. It has also been a profound gift to have a place to take my dad, who has advanced dementia, each week where he will be accepted with open arms regardless of the mood he is in. He loves the music and, though he can’t always stay through the whole service, it feels like he is soaking up some of our brilliant pastor’s wide-ranging, somatic, spiritual wisdom.

A few Sundays ago, going through the lunch line, Stella was misgendered by not one, but two, elders. This really bugged her. She is fine with she and they pronouns, but really doesn’t like being mistaken for a boy (both elders called her “son”). We talked about it and decided that we wanted to be part of a broader collective solution, rather than calling out these particular incidents. We didn’t want other new friends at church to have the same experience.

So we wrote to the pastors at the church wondering about some kind of communal problem solving, and lo and behold, they had been planning a whole month of services focused on gender! Stella’s uncle and I offered to do a little testimony of our own, articulating the ways in which gender can be stifling and freeing, and most importantly, that we see it as a generational story that is still unfolding in our own lives, and the life of this country at such a pivotal and perilous moment. I wanted to share it with you:

Courtney: We’re siblings and best friends.

Chris: I have two sons.

Courtney: And I have two daughters. So we think about gender and how it shapes who we are, who we have been, who we are becoming.

Chris: Gender can be a story of discipline. And it can be a story of freedom.

Our mom, Jere, was a “tomboy” growing up. She would escape to the Colorado fields from her rigid household, run by our grandmother who had a lot of very strict ideas about what girls should and shouldn’t do. Our mom found the sacred in nature, where she would ride horses bareback and commune with animals, and–at least for a little while–shed all of society’s ideas about what a girl was or was not.

In another generation, our mom would have had different tools to rebel against society’s rigid ideas about gender. As it was, she only felt most entirely, authentically herself when she escaped from society entirely for brief moments.

Courtney: The irony, of course, is that my mom created a household where I could express my gender identity flexibly as a girl, and all I wanted to do was play with Barbies and wear pink. I most definitely was not a “tomboy.”

It wasn’t until puberty that I began to experience the perils of gender as a discipline–being watched in the hallways of my middle school and learning that my body had become a site of power and danger. The “male gaze,” as they say.

Melissa Febos, in Girlhood, writes, “The self becomes a collaboration with other people, a series of fantasies that lead to ‘the armor of an alienating identity.’ Have you seen a suit of armor? There are so many pieces. Here is where a strange man named me. Here is where the girl stared. Here is the school report card. The plates clink and move together like one. The self underneath is invisible to others.”

Sometimes it began to feel like the self underneath was even invisible to me.

Chris: For me, gender also felt like a suit of armor by the time junior high hit.

As a child I resembled nothing more than a big blonde bee seeking pollen, barrelling and buzzing wherever desire took me. Being a boy in the 80’s, it was never a question where my frenetic energy would be directed: an endless parade of sports. And I found joy in them, especially basketball, but I also found myself deeply alienated by the locker room cultures where I was forced to endure endless pedagogies on cruelty and false power.

This alienation was compounded by my neurodivergence, which went undiagnosed until the end of high school but not undetected. I was hyperactive, but that was okay, as long as my energy was funneled into masculine endeavors. I was sensitive, which was only okay among my friends across the gender line, but would otherwise need to be buried under armor. My strange, burgeoning love of poetry? Kept in a notebook under my bed. I couldn’t wait to get to college and start living who I already was.

Courtney: So yes, gender can be a story of discipline. And it can be a story of freedom and creativity and connection.

Now we are in midlife, parenting four weird, brilliant kids who inspire us every day with how unarmored they are about their gender. Each of the four adheres to certain norms around the gender they were born into and sheds others. Stella wears a tuxedo one day and a dress fit for a queen the next. She’s not too preoccupied with pronouns, but doesn’t like being called a boy. She wants you all to know that you shouldn’t assume someone’s gender identity. As her big sister puts it, “Stella is her own gender.”

Stella is teaching me to be more playful around my own gender identity. I’ve learned that I feel most at home in masculine clothing (the “tomboy” after all!), but that also doesn’t mean I can’t wear a dress if that feels fun one day. As the male gaze becomes ever more irrelevant to me, as I learn from Stella, I am learning to invest in my own gaze. Screw the armor. What feels sacred and beautiful and transcendent to me?

Chris: I am also shedding the armor more and more as I move through midlife…

Early on in my experience as a parent, I started noticing, with joy, that my kids would often call me Momma before quickly correcting themselves. I never corrected them. And soon they just started calling me Momma-Daddy. I feel so honored by that conjunction and as I’ve thought more about gender I’ve realized I feel honored by all pronouns as well.

My friend JJJJJerome and I rename each other every time we meet. I greet them as Brother Sister Aster. They greet me as Sister Brother Sunflower. I leave them as Brother Sister Smilax. They leave me as Sister Brother Oxalis.

The more I live an openly neurodivergent life or as I like to say a tilted thinking life, the more armor I can strip off as I divest myself from enforced forms of masculinity, straightness, whiteness, and even human supremacy. I am a tilted thinking animal who sees my freest self echoed in the bounding of my children.

Courtney: Too often, in the headlines, this is all boiled down to its most surface-level symbols–pronouns and bathrooms. Gender identity is conflated with trans rights. And while we are both deeply committed to protecting our trans family, neighbors, and friends in any way we can, to prioritizing their sacred freedom at this scary time, we are also hungry to see all of us engage in a deeper, wider conversation. We all, every single person sitting in these pews, have a gender story–it is generational, full of the wounds of discipline and punishment, and also full of the possibility of creativity and freedom that our children are most expert at modeling for us now.

Chris: We are excited to continue to unbecome society’s ideas about gender, to shed our armor, and–instead–become creative and tender like our children. We think that’s a sacred, generational invitation that they are offering us, that this moment is offering us. How can we make the whole church, the whole community, like nature was for our mom when she was a little girl – a place of refuge and unconditional love and play and freedom? Let’s find out together.

You can watch the whole service here or our little part which starts at 32:10:

Follow my brother’s beautiful work and network of people over at

The Listening World

.

We have donated $250 to The Sylvia Rivera Law Project in honor of the Examined Family’s commitment to the idea that all people should be free to self-determine their gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination, or violence.

So now I’d love to hear from you: What are the stories of discipline and creativity that run through your gender story? What are the gender stories of your family—articulated and left unsaid? Where would you like to get more creative and free when it comes to your gender expression?