Tabernacles of Clay

I found out something about myself last week that made me feel more comfortable in my own skin.

The insight came from a book written by a friend and delivered into my life by God.

The book is called Tabernacles of Clay. It's by Dr. Taylor Petrey, who I attended church with for a few months fifteen years ago. In his book, he collects what the leaders of my church have said about gender and sexuality. Then he carefully and compassionately does his very best to figure out something. He tries to figure out what those leaders really believed about what it means to be a boy or to be a girl, and to be in love.

The part that hit home for me was that, in my church and my culture, being a boy is a task. And it’s a task at which, in many ways, I have failed.

I kind of missed this, in part because the attributes of an ideal boy are often implied instead of plainly listed. What I am surprised I missed, though, is the message that being a boy is something I can fail at.

Now that I see it, it's obvious. Time after time I have heard my leaders say that the differences between men and women are eroding, and that this is contrary to God’s plan. I have constantly been told that the world is becoming less gendered, that this is a bad thing, and that it is going to take great effort on my part to stop it from happening. But somehow it still didn't occur to me that the thing I was supposed to do was try harder to be more of a boy.

One reason it was easy for me to miss the call to be more masculine was the actual behavior of the leaders I knew and looked up to. Most of the ones I admired were sensitive, kind, emotional men. The classically masculine men - aggressive, abrasive, emotionally stunted - never seemed like role models to me. Despite the messaging, it was clear to me that masculinity did not correlate with morality. In fact, it kind of seemed like the opposite was true.

But what I realized in reading Taylor’s book is that even though I don’t think it is morally better to be more of a boy, how much of a boy I actually am is something I do have to take responsibility for and make decisions about. 

Intellectually I am aware that gender is socially constructed, and that it has to be performed. But it was hard to see that because of another idea about gender that I had internalized in its place.

The idea was that gender is fixed and binary, and it got talked about a lot at church. One oft-quoted statement was that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual … identity and purpose.” The way I naively interpreted it, being a boy was something that was assigned to me by biology, and so it wasn’t something I had to do anything about. Nothing I did could possibly make me anything other than a boy, so how “boyish” I was seemed irrelevant. If I wear pink, and I’m a boy, then by definition wearing pink is a thing that boys do. It’s just as “boyish” as fixing cars and having trouble talking about feelings. I didn’t dislike my body, so I had to find a way to be at peace with my gender.

But Taylor’s book made me realize that this isn’t really what was meant by that “gender is … essential” phrase. Now that I see it in the context of everything else church leaders say about gender, I can see that it’s not descriptive, it’s aspirational. Gender should be something that’s essential to my identity and purpose. But I have to work at it. I have to preside, protect, and provide. I have to live up to some standard of gendered behavior that the rest of the world is abandoning. I have to choose how much of a boy I’m going to be.

And when I realized that even my conservative church leaders believe that gender is something we choose to perform, or not to perform, it suddenly gave me permission to believe it too. And when I started to believe it, something shifted inside my chest. Some new space opened up in my lungs, and I took a breath that was deeper than any of the ones I’d taken before.

I like my body, and I like being attracted to women. But being a boy has often made me really uncomfortable. It made me feel trapped in a club with a lot of people that I didn’t identify with. It made me feel like all my complexity and humanity were constrained by my biology. It took away choice. It made me feel limited.

Whenever I wanted to develop one of my feminine traits, I felt like I had to petition the world to expand the definition of what makes a boy. Just like feminists called on the definition of womanhood to be expanded to include ambition, aggression, and pleasure, I wanted the definition of manhood to be expanded to include nurturing, surrender, and intuition. I thought that I was stuck being either a boy or a girl. Since I didn't want to become a girl, I had to ask for feminine traits to be made accessible to me.

I have a clear biological sex, and I feel comfortable with that biology. It feels like me. But I now realize that has only a secondary relationship to my actual gender. I don't have to ask for feminine traits to be part of boyhood. Sometimes, I can just be a girl. It's a move that takes away the need for me to fight cultural battles in order to be my authentic self.

Before, I would argue that "true" masculinity includes changing diapers. What I meant by that is that I wanted the stereotype to change, so that the masculine trait would trade places with the feminine trait, or just disappear altogether. And I still think that's a righteous cause. If people step up and change diapers, independent of their gender, someday soon that stereotype will evaporate. And that will be a cause for celebration.

But in the meantime, I can just be more of a girl when it comes to changing diapers. Being a girl is a more moral choice for me, because the way boys deal with diapers feels sub-human.

I can't change what society expects of a girl or a boy. But I can choose which gender I perform in any given part of my life. That's a human right that can't be taken away from me.

I am not constrained to be only a boy. And I am also not constrained to be only a girl. The whole array of feminine and masculine traits are laid out for me to take up. I can choose to develop feminine traits, I can choose to develop masculine traits, or I can choose to develop both. And if I develop both masculine and feminine traits, I will be less of a boy than I could be. I will fail at what my culture expects me to accomplish in terms of my gender.

And that is a wonderful thought.

Now that I acknowledge that gender is a set of choices, I reject the idea that my moral task is to push myself towards the masculine. I think my moral task is to discover the gender identities that allow me to be the most authentic version of myself. And choosing to act as a more authentic me is the way I feel touched by the divine.

So that’s what I meant when I said that this book was delivered to me by God. It came into my life with a timing that was cosmically perfect, and it tapped me on the soul and invited me to open up. It made me feel like a more complete human being at a time when I desperately needed to feel that way.

I recommend the book, and I also recommend embracing your god-given ability to perform your own gender.

Love to all.

PS: I use “Taylor” instead of “Dr. Petrey” when I talk about the author of Tabernacles of Clay. I mean no disrespect by this. In fact, my intention is quite the opposite. I admire the hard work and effort that it takes for someone to get a PhD, but I have even greater admiration for someone who used their graduate training to develop relevant skills that make them able to help out the world in a unique way. The power of Taylor’s work doesn’t come from the institution that granted him a doctorate - it comes from his brilliant mind and his generous soul. And that’s what I wanted to emphasize with the (lack of) honorifics.