| Steph Turner�s Opening Statement |
| An Introduction to �Transspirituality�
What exactly does the �trans� in transgender mean to you? Is transgenderism for you about �transgressing� gender norms and barriers when expressing your authentic self? Or is it mare about �transcending� gender norms and barriers when expressing your true identity? A little history, please It was in the pages of Tapestry that I first came across this question. That had me thinking how it�s not in my nature to transgress anything of importance to anyone. As far back as I can remember I have felt a spiritual connection to all life, even in my loneliest moments. In my experience, transgressing social constructs of gender is merely the perceptual effect of transcending them for some greater good on a mystical level. Transgressing what I perceived important to others, even gender norms, was a source of guilt for me. It took the urgency of my identity needs to break free from such guilt. An article in Tapestry about FTM transbears had me thinking about my self-image as a high flying eagle who �transcended� the conventional divisions depended upon by others below. This appealed to how I experienced my gender identity, as I transcended gender norms. It also appealed to my emerging identity as a Native American, with this personification of animal spirits. I pictured myself as a �transeagle� who flew over these categorical barriers. As a clearer expression of my deep spiritual core, the roots of my lifelong spirituality began to unfold. The whole experience of being arrested, convicted and incarcerated has a way of focusing one�s attention on spiritual matters. Losing the support of my new TG friends in 1993 left me with few places to turn for help. When I was told by the local �support� group leader how she couldn�t believe I was innocent, I became disillusioned with the TG community�s culture. If identifying as merely �transgendered� meant I couldn�t count on the kind of spiritual supports I had previously known from my evangelical background, then maybe I really wasn�t �transgendered� at all. Abandonment to the relative conventions of the impersonal judicial system made little sense to me. But it did to them? Maybe I was something more than mere TG, or something less. Maybe I was a misfit among misfits. All my life I have been a misfit, the social outcast, and wondered what was wrong with me? It�s not just that my experience of gender was at odds with my childhood peers; even my religious and political views were contrary to theirs. Now that I�m much older and wiser I realize it�s not about what was wrong with me for not fitting into an imperfect world, but what was actually right in my spirit. What was so terribly wrong was a world at sharp odds with my transconventional spirituality. Transcending culturally relative conventions Life is full of social conventions that have evolved over time to help us organize and manage our understanding of reality. Almost every social convention began around a universal experience, like categorizing your perceptions into what is familiar and what is unfamiliar; then categorizing what is unfamiliar as either threatening, benign, or welcoming. Universal principles like love, peace, and empathy served as a foundation for conventional ways to develop the best of what humanity has to offer in the face of all other conventional relations. Over time in each social community, these social conventions evolved with cultural values that were relative to their specific felt needs. These proved useful for interpreting what is familiar and unfamiliar, and for interpreting what is threatening, benign or welcoming. Moral conventions evolved for interpreting how a culture is to best express such principles as love, peace and empathy. But this increases the relativity of each culturally defined social convention, making it irrelevant to those of a vastly different culture. This creates social tensions at odds with my very being. . For some reason I was intuitively drawn at a very early age to place more personal value on these universal principles. I found them more dependable for developing our human potential. I could see how others were more attached to culturally relative social conventions that solidified their society. This in turn provided them the stepping stone for their gradual development. That was okay for them, but much too convoluted for me. Relating peacefully to both Democrats and Republicans mattered more to me than sinking into the ways of either one. Empathizing with Christians and nonchristians alike meant more to me than championing one over the other. Loving both my feminine and my masculine energies is more fulfilling than simply latching onto one or the other. Who needs these conventions anyway? Before identifying as transgendered I felt very insecure about being so terribly different. To pacify my felt need for security I gravitated towards the conventions of conservatism. After identifying with other transgenders I gravitated towards the conventions of liberalism to express my felt need for personal liberty, to counter the pressure I felt from my conservative Christian friends. Each social convention proved useful for a phase in my life as a stepping stone to where I needed to go to develop my full human potential. They would have become stumbling blocks to my spiritual growth if I had stayed in either one too long. Being apolitical or transpolitical remained an illusive ideal until recently. Likewise, my gender expression followed the only social convention made available to me at the time. Masculinity in public, femininity in private. For years, my femininity�s need for expression cried out for whatever social legitimacy it could find. The transgender community provided me with my first umbrella of conventions for legitimizing my feminine expression. The broad category of transgender served me well as a stepping stone to the more specific convention of androgyny and gender fluidity. The backlash to the gender binarism within the TG community helped me to affirm my transcendence of the category of gender itself. Not to abolish gender as a working convention, but to see it from above as a much more fluid dynamic of existence that can be superseded to bring out my spiritual potential. In our collective human experience, we all need some kind of social conventions. We need them to serve as reference points for relating to one another, and to ourselves. Life would be confusing without them. But as a �transspirit� I find I am far less dependent upon them for my spiritual existence. In fact, I find myself independent of the most culturally relative social conventions. I exist better without them. It is who I am. Rising above the fray My existence is best summed up by something I once read in a book: �While many think of themselves as human beings having a spiritual experience, I think of myself as a spiritual being having a human experience.� Abraham Maslow, the humanist psychologist, recognized this potential for �being� in those who were becoming self-actualized �persons who have transcended to a kind of superconsciousness are said by him to be capable of B(eing)-cognition. It involves a person in rising to ecstatic peak experiences of cosmic wholeness, where one can stoically contemplate and stand in awe of the colorful peculiarity �below.� That level of cognition is universal, unified wholeness personified. It exists above and beyond the lower dichotomies, such as those of good and evil.� And, if I may add, guilt and innocence, liberal and conservative, masculine and feminine. (Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology and Counseling, 2nd Ed, p. 589.) My Native American background provides me with the valuable myth of the �two-spirit.� Claimed by many gay Indians, the idea of a midgender Indian had less to do with sexual orientation and more to do with an innate spirituality to see two worlds as one: not only the masculine world with the feminine world, but perhaps mare so the conventional world with its many dichotomies below and the transconventional world from above. If the American Indian tradition of the berdache is at the core of my transconventional experience, then I take comfort in knowing how my transspirituality has been around for many millennia. I suspect many transgenders are transspirits. Their intuitive connection to all of what life has to offer compels them to blend and balance their masculine energies with their feminine energies in ways not even contemplated by nontransspirits. Efforts to conform to culturally relative social norms feels something like trying to hold a beach ball under water; after a while their transconventional energies forces them back up to float above the minutia of this world. Transspirits have the potential for serving a conciliatory role in this troubled world. In fact, they already possess what many spiritually seek. If only dominant culture wasn�t so resistant to their transcultural ways, these transgenders could cultivate their transconsciousness for the greater good of collective human potential development. First, of course, they need to allow themselves to grow, despite the outward appearance of transgressing religious conventions about self-indulgence and self-discipline. The transspirit moves beyond these conventions when realizing how the indulgence of universal needs IS a matter of shaping and disciplining one�s core self. Transreligious It has been my transconventional observation that those who cling too tightly to culturally relative ways are the very one�s who suffer the most from religious tensions. When I think of �transreligious� I mean transcending differences between diverse faiths to cultivate what each has to offer for human potential development, especially its universal principles. As a transspirit, I acknowledge the Ultimate Reality at the core of all existence. All reality is relative to this unifying core; pathology stems from a subjective reality becoming removed from this unifying reality that transcends this tangible world. There is a transreligious quality in the way Abram left his Mesopotamia homeland to become Abraham and transcend his cultural roots towards a new way of looking at spirituality. I see a lot of trans spiritual qualities in Jesus, and in the Apostle Paul. There is even a transspiritual quality in how the Prophet Mohammed brought the message of Islam to the Arab peoples. There could be many who are transspiritually transreligious without being necessarily transgendered. These, like Jesus, are not strictly bound by culturally relative dictates of gender norms. Apart from social pressures to go along with gender stereotypes, they are open to the possibilities of masculine and feminine energies coexisting in the same person. Though they may never have crossdressed, per se, the idea is not so repugnant to them. One more point about this transreligious spirituality. The transspirit is gracious to the more conventional spirituality of others, assuming this conventional spirituality isn�t infringing on the needs of others. Not everyone is meant to be transspiritual. And transspirits do not all transcend culture in the same way. The transspirit may naturally challenge the culturally relative aspects of another�s faith (especially if own developmental needs are being squelched in the name of religion), but spiritually inhibited from hindering the spiritual development of others. It respects how each has learned to address one�s own spiritual needs. Transspirituality recognizes how the transgression of another�s spirituality is no spirituality at all. What about you? Some aspects, I realize, are specifically relative to my life experience. For example, my nonviolence ethic may be more of a feature in my transspirituality than others. The way it inhibits me from harming what I sense I am connected to in the universe of life speaks to the specific needs I have developed in my own unique life. Others may express their transspirituality quite differently, according to their am unique set of developmental needs, in many colorful flavors. Transspirituality can be defined as a spirituality that transcends the more relative conventions of culture, especially those outmoded because of changing developmental needs, to expediently reach more absolute elements for developing untapped human potential. Transspirituality is in effect a categorical reference for those whose lives are struggling to break free from the stifling effects of other categorical references. Especially the more culturally relative social conventions. The culturally defined gender binarism is only one of them. Does any of this ring a chord with you? I welcome your feedback. I have only scratched the surface of this transspirituality and invite you to dig deeper with me, and perhaps with our synergy discover so much more. Then maybe, just maybe, we will demonstrate our integrity and even blessing for being transcultural misfits. You can write to me directly since Michigan permits inmate-to-inmate correspondence. If you do, please let me know your state�s policy, if I will need to reply through Amanda. Thank you, and live true! |
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