the androgyny of heaven

I wish I could say I came up with the title of this post myself, but it was MNJ. We were having an email discussion and he dropped that phrase and I loved it. I'm not really sure where this post is going to go. I just thought I'd take some of the things we were mulling over in our email exchange and think out loud and bring the conversation to the readers of my blog and see what you all think.

Something I tend to think about the nature of gender and attraction and sexuality. Sometimes at church (ok, most of the time at church and of course in other places as well) people boil these ideas down to very basic binary elements. There are men and there are women. Men have a penis and women have a vagina. Men have a certain role to play and so do women. Men are attracted to women and women to men. Everything fits into a neat little package.

Except that everything really doesn't fit into neat little packages. There are men attracted to men and women attracted to women and some attracted to both. Anything that falls outside of the neat package is labeled as unnatural. There are babies born with the genitalia of both a woman and a man and the parents have to decide what gender to assign the child. What happens if it becomes obvious as the child ages that the gender assigned doesn’t fit what the child begins to self identify as?

What even determines gender? Is it purely physical traits, or are there a spiritual components to it as well? If we believe gender is eternal, then there must be a spiritual component. If someone has the physical characteristics of a man, but feels very deeply that he is supposed to be a woman, is that the gender of his eternal soul? Is it right to demand that he live out his physical gender based on our current cultural constructs of what a man is? Maybe our current cultural constructs are broken.

Then we could get into attraction and how we express our attraction to others. There are unspoken rules about what kind of expression of affection is appropriate between two men or two women, and there’s a difference between what is generally accepted as appropriate for two women versus what is generally accepted as appropriate for two men. What’s an appropriate expression of affection for someone who is married, to someone who is not his or her spouse? I think some people get so wound up in that question that they are unable to have a normal relationship with anyone but their spouse.

I suppose my point is that I believe that our cultural constructs of gender and attraction are broken. I’m not necessarily saying I know how to make it not broken. I think we accept current constructs just because that’s what we’ve always known them to be. What if there’s a higher understanding and way to experience and express our gender and our attractions? Maybe gender is important but not necessarily so that we can split people up into masculine and feminine and give them roles to play. Maybe it’s so that we can cultivate both the masculine and the feminine within ourselves to become more whole and well. Maybe there’s some beautiful eternal truths embedded in all of these questions that we aren’t seeing because we limit ourselves to neat little packages.

I heard a friend once say that he thought one of the reasons gay marriage feels is so threatening to some is that it turns gender roles upside down. If two people of the same sex are able to have a happy, healthy relationship and raise well adjusted children that may actually do better than children of a mother and father (as this study suggests), then it kind of challenges how gender and its role in relationship are understood.

This was a whole lot of thought vomit. Feel free to vomit your own thoughts below. What do you think the role of gender is? What’s the role of attraction, other than to populate the earth? Are there ways we can experience and express them better than we currently do?

Oh, and remember this guy?  Oh man.