Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From How God Became King (2012)

  But the coming of the kingdom is conspicuously absent not only from the great creeds, but also from “the gospel” as envisaged in the churches of the Reformation. If we want to stick to the great tradition, we should be prepared to take the gospels more seriously. One might even state it as an axiom: when the church leaves out bits of its core teaching, heretics will pick them up, turn them into something new, and use them to spread doubt and unbelief. But the proper reaction to this, whether it’s in the second century or the twenty-first, ought never to be simply to dismiss the heretical teaching outright and continue as before. The proper reaction is to look carefully to see which flank has been left unguarded, which bit of core teaching has been left out, where the canonical balance has not been maintained. Only then might one set about reincorporating that within a fresh statement of full-blown Christian faith. After all, another axiom might well go like this: when the church leaves out bits of its core teaching, it will inevitably overinflate other bits of its core teaching to fill the gap. (In other words, leave out the kingdom, and you may end up saying more than is really necessary in your “Christology” about Jesus’s divine/human nature.) That doesn’t mean that the overinflated core teaching is wrong. In the strange providence of God, this might even be seen as a means whereby people have been led to concentrate more intensely on vital areas. But it can only ever be a temporary move. By all means park the New Testament in a safe spot and go for a walk to pick the flowers nearby. But make sure you return to the New Testament when you want to continue your journey. The Hidden Underlying Challenge: Theocracy When we examine the wider movements of thought and culture in the eighteenth century, we find something of enormous significance for understanding why the gospels were being read in the way they were. At the heart of “the Enlightenment” was a resolute determination that “God”—whoever “God” might be—should no longer be allowed to interfere, either directly or through those who claimed to be his spokesmen, in the affairs of this world. Once “man had come of age,” there was no room for theocracy. It was as simple as that. God was pushed upstairs, like the doddering old boss who used to run the company, but has now been superseded. He has, no doubt, a notional place of “honor,” a cozy office where he can sit and imagine he’s still in charge. But nobody is fooled. The new generation is running the business now.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Slowly, I drum my fingers against the iron table and eye his glass, trying to calculate how many sips it will take for it to be emptied. If he takes one sip a minute and there are 25 sips left, I’m looking at half an hour. When he has finally drained his glass, he insists on walking me home. At the corner outside my building, I point and say, “OK, this is me” and he steps forward, puts a hand on my waist, and kisses me more passionately than I ever could have expected from our vanilla conversation. I glance around, mortified to be kissed like this in the middle of the day in a spot where I know so many people, and also perplexed because where did that come from? I’m disappointed in myself as I go inside, having already failed at nailing this new “in and out” policy I came up with a few hours ago. I need to abandon some of my perpetual politeness if I am to continue to speed date. In other words, I need to actually adhere to the speed part and stop being solicitous and attentive when I know I will not see these men again. CHAPTER 23Strut of SuccessI silence the voice that questions why Scott wasn’t honest about his address on his Tinder profile and why he seemed egregiously angry at the woman whose dog approached me during our walk, convincing myself that it will be good to go on a date outside of the city since I’m paranoid about being seen by people I know. Also, he’s a firefighter – a volunteer firefighter with his local fire department – but still, close enough. It is early evening when I pull my car up to a quiet suburban street of boxy low-rise apartment buildings, all of which look identical. Several times I drive to the top of the cul-de-sac and then U-turn before giving up and texting Scott that I am outside but can find neither his building nor a parking space. A few minutes later, I spot him walking on a path, sporty and robust in a T-shirt and gym shorts, making me feel conspicuously overdressed in a short, ruffly navy blue dress belted at the waist and a pair of high-wedge sandals. He comes right to the driver’s side and opens my door, asking if I want him to drive to find a parking spot. I slide out of the car and run around to the other side. He seems put out at having to rescue me. Inside, his apartment is simple and tidy but devoid of character. A jumbo flat screen television is the highlight of the living room, with a few framed photos of him and his daughter scattered around. There are two small bedrooms flanking the main room, and the one that belongs to his daughter is homey and sweet, with stuffed animals on the pink comforter and posters on the wall.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  In addition to apologists, arguing that Jesus really did walk on water and cure the sick, thus demonstrating that he really was divine, the eighteenth century saw great movements of revival, particularly through the Methodist movement led by John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. Their theology and their understanding of the gospels are quite different topics upon which I am not qualified to speak. But I suspect that the Wesleyan emphasis on Christian experience, both the “spiritual” experience of knowing the love of God in one’s own heart and life and the “practical” experience of living a holy life for oneself and of working for God’s justice in the world, might well be cited as evidence of a movement in which parts of the church did actually integrate several elements in the gospels, a synthesis that the majority of Western Christians have allowed to fall apart. Even within Methodism itself, however, I do not sense that the fine instincts of the early leaders have led to an enriched, integrated long-term understanding of the church’s central texts, the gospels themselves. What I miss, right across the Western tradition, at least the way it has come through to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is the devastating and challenging message I find in the four gospels: God really has become king—in and through Jesus! A new state of affairs has been brought into existence. A door has been opened that nobody can shut. Jesus is now the world’s rightful Lord, and all other lords are to fall at his feet. This is an eschatological message, not in the trivial sense that it heralds the “end of the world” (whatever that might mean), but in the sense that it is about something that was supposed to happen when Israel’s hopes were fulfilled; and Israel’s hopes were not for the demise of the space-time universe, but for the earth to be full of God’s glory. It is, however, an inaugurated eschatological message, claiming that this “something” has indeed happened in and through Jesus and does not yet look like what people might have imagined. That is the story the gospels are telling. But if this is so—if God has become king of the world, through Jesus—then nobody can stay indifferent. This is the point that the four gospels are making, but that the creeds appear completely to ignore and that the Reformers and subsequent “evangelical” movements have likewise normally ignored in their eagerness for “the gospel” of personal salvation. The church has gone on reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but without any clue from those great creedal and Reformed traditions as to what they are actually saying.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The second thing that Christians have done is to say, with the neo-Anabaptists, that the church must simply put its own house in order, keep its own nose clean, and live as a beacon of light, but without actually engaging with the world. It must construct a parallel society in which the kingdom values of Jesus are lived out for all to see. Now I’m all for the church cleaning up its act and shining like a light in the world. But the strong sectarian separatism that all this implies seems to pay no attention to the great statements of Jesus’s cosmic lordship in the New Testament, not least to the claim of Matthew 28 that Jesus already possesses all authority on earth as well as in heaven. It is always in danger of dualism, of cutting off the creational branch on which all Christian thinking ought to be sitting. The third and fourth reactions among Christians, which are all too powerful today (particularly in the United States), have simply baptized the right-wing and left-wing politics of a deeply divided society and claimed this or that one as Christian, to be implemented and if possible exported. Listening to the sub-Christian language on display among those exultant at the killing of Osama bin Laden in the early summer of 2011 was an example of the right-wing tendency; anything that advances the worldview of Fox News is assumed to be basically Christian, wise, and automatically justified. But listening to many on the left, I have a similar problem. The left claims the high Christian and moral ground of a concern for the poor and the marginalized, but again this regularly parrots the elements of liberal modernism, not least its new sexual ethic, without any attempt to scale the true heights of the gospel vision in the New Testament. Meanwhile we in the United Kingdom, hearing all this going on from our cousins across the ocean, tend to be grumpy pragmatists. We don’t much care for theory, and we don’t, for the most part, want anything too drastic to disturb our uneasy peace. (It has often been pointed out that, in response to the communist chant, “What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it? Now!” the classic English protest movement might be imagined chanting, “What do we want? Gradual change! When do we want it? In due course!”) No, we English mostly just want to get on with our lives, grumble about our politicians but still vote for them, watch some cricket, and go to Choral Evensong now and then when we feel like it.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  There is no “transgender social contagion.” What we are witnessing is simply an across-the-board increase in all LGBTQ+ identities because the stigma targeting us is gradually diminishing. As I argued in a 2017 essay, these dynamics are strikingly similar to the rise in left-handedness (from roughly 2 to 13 percent of the population) in Western countries over the course of the twentieth century as the stigma associated with left-handedness receded and the practice of coercing children into being right-handed abated. 23 If “social contagion” (or “80 percent desistance,” or trans identities being a mere “trend,” or any of the other alternative hypotheses promoted on these anti-trans parent websites since 2015) were indeed true, then we would expect that by now there would have been a large exodus of teenagers and young adults renouncing their trans identities. But that hasn’t happened. The most recent research studies continue to show that gender-affirming care remains highly efficacious and the rates of regret or detransition remain very low. 24 In other words, there is no credible evidence that kids today are adopting trans identities spontaneously, capriciously, or frivolously. “Just Asking Questions” and the “Cisgender People Turned Transgender” Trope Most people have never heard of the anti-trans parent websites that I described in the last section. The fact that many of their talking points have nevertheless seeped into the public discourse is the result of mainstream media outlets presenting them as though they are reasonable concerns. Since there is no smoking gun—no actual proof of a conspiracy to recklessly “rush kids into hormones and surgeries,” and no tangible evidence that trans youth are rejecting those identities en masse upon reaching their late teens or adulthood—these mainstream efforts tend to rely on a “just asking questions” style of reporting that sows doubts in audiences’ minds without ever explicitly taking a side. In addition to rendering the subject as inherently “questionable,” this approach often utilizes outliers and anecdotes to make it seem as though scientifically unfounded positions (e.g., “there’s no evidence for anthropogenic climate change”; “vaccines may cause autism”; or in this case, “gender-affirming care is still experimental” and “these kids will likely grow out of being trans”) are on equal footing with scientifically supported ones. Several 2022 New York Times articles relied heavily on this approach. “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” was ostensibly about the latest World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH; formerly the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association) Standards of Care publication, which, while imperfect, supports and provides an extensive literature review for gender-affirming approaches. 25 Yet the article instead emphasized disagreements between researchers, gave disproportionate attention to trans health practitioners who reject the gender affirmative model, and is filled with unqualified comments from “concerned parents” (some of whom are clearly active in online anti-trans parent forums) discounting their children’s trans identities and gender-affirming practices.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  I believe that it has to do with the fact that many of the women who have most strongly gravitated toward feminism are those who have found traditional feminine gender roles constraining or unnatural. In many cases, this is due to their own inclinations toward exceptional forms of gender expression. Because their personal experiences with femininity felt uncomfortable and contrived in comparison with their experiences with androgyny, masculinity, or other gender expressions (which they found more liberating and empowering), they mistakenly projected their own experience and perspective onto all other women. While not necessarily done maliciously, this extrapolation was nevertheless an act of gender entitlement, one that denied that any diversity in gender expression might exist among women arising out of their very different class, cultural, or biological backgrounds and predispositions. By arrogantly assuming that no woman could be legitimately drawn toward feminine expression, these feminists permanently relegated femininity to the status of “false consciousness.” The feminist assumption that “femininity is artificial” is narcissistic, as it invariably casts nonfeminine women as having “superior knowledge” while dismissing feminine women as either “dupes” (who are too ignorant to recognize they have been conned) or “fakes” (who purposely engage in “unnatural” behaviors in order to uphold sexist societal norms). This tendency to dismiss feminine women is eerily similar to the behavior of some lesbian-feminists in the 1970s who arrogantly claimed that they were more righteous feminists than heterosexual women because the latter group was “fucking with the oppressor.” 17 It is an extraordinarily convenient tactic to artificialize, and even demean, an inclination (such as femininity or heterosexuality) when you personally are not inclined toward it. Indeed, this is exactly what straight bigots do when they dismiss queer forms of gender and sexual expression as “unnatural.” When we feminists stoop to the level of policing gender and start inventing etiologies to explain why some women adopt “unnatural” feminine forms of expression, there’s little to distinguish us from the sexist forces we claim to be fighting against in the first place. While femininity is in many ways influenced, shaped, and enforced by society, to say that it is entirely “artificial” or merely a “performance” is patronizing toward those for whom femininity simply feels right. Indeed, one would have to have a rather grim view of the female population to believe that a majority of us could so easily be “brainwashed” or “coerced” into enthusiastically adopting an entirely contrived or wholly artificial set of gender expressions.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, it’s just the last thing I want to do after an exhausting week of work is hang out with a couple of eight-year-old girls.” “You’re not making it better,” I say quietly. “You’ve basically repeated the exact thing that offended me to begin with, just taking out the bit about making slime.” “You’re right, I’m sorry. You caught me off guard when you asked me and I had a million things distracting me at work. That’s a classic example of a moment when I should have hit the pause button and asked you if I could think about it and get back to you,” he says. “Fair enough, but the part that’s bothering me is not that you didn’t think about it but that you seemed so genuinely horrified by the suggestion of it. It was hard for me to work up the courage to ask you and being shot down like that really hurt and frankly confused me.” “Laura, at this point in my life I don’t want to play daddy to other people’s kids. I don’t see myself standing on the sidelines of Georgia’s soccer games, cheering her on.” “She doesn’t play soccer and I didn’t suggest that you play daddy. Georgia already has a father. I was just asking you to join us for dinner, not play a role in my family. But OK, you’ve made your feelings clear and now I understand that,” I say. “It’s not about you, Laura, or your kids. I’m at a difficult place with my own kids right now, so it’s impossible for me to imagine having relationships with someone else’s kids. You’re so in love with your children, you can’t possibly understand,” he says, still staring at the ceiling. “I suspect this will be the last time I look up at that crack on the ceiling.” He points to a spidery crack over the bed with a sad smile. “Quite possibly,” I say with an equally sad smile. Yet, we manage to forge ahead, spending our weekends together when I don’t have the kids, and talking on the phone every day when he calls me from work and again before he goes to sleep. There is a rhythm and an easiness to being with him, and we have sex that is thrilling and nourishing and continues to keep me intrigued. At the same time, I question myself: what does this mean, what are we to each other, shouldn’t I still be having sex with lots of different men? Isn’t it too soon for me to feel I’m settling down with only one man, especially when that man doesn’t really want to be part of my life beyond my private relationship with him? CHAPTER 38Laura’s Liberation TourI’ve maintained traditional views of monogamy and relationships throughout my life, firmly believing one relationship at a time takes tremendous effort and concentration and that part of loving someone is loving only that someone.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Luke has structured his opening so that we hear in the background the great stories of Samuel and David, all pointing forward to the arrival of the true king. The great poems we call the Magnificat and the Benedictus, the songs of Mary and of Zechariah (1:46–55; 1:68–79) speak powerfully of the fulfillment of God’s ancient purposes and promises in the forthcoming births of John the Baptist and Jesus himself. This theme runs right through the gospel and is emphasized in such passages as 22:37, where Jesus declares, at table with his friends, that everything about him in the scriptures “must reach its goal.” Even Jesus’s closest followers, however, cannot begin to see in the strange events of his arrest, trial, and death any kind of fulfillment. They had been living in the currently prevailing version of the Jewish story, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to end with the violent death of God’s anointed. “We were hoping,” say the two on the road to Emmaus, “that he was going to redeem Israel!” (24:21). But he obviously hadn’t. The answer, highlighted in Luke’s matchless telling both of the Emmaus story and of the larger story of Jesus as a whole, is clear: “You are so senseless!” he said to them. “So slow in your hearts to believe all the things the prophets said to you! Don’t you see? This is what had to happen: the Messiah had to suffer, and then come into his glory!” So he began with Moses, and with all the prophets, and explained to them the things about himself throughout the whole Bible. (24:25–27) In other words—as the disciples excitedly discover in going over the scene immediately afterwards—there was a new “opening of the Bible” as Jesus expounded to them the large story, which, when seen in this light, was bound to lead to the crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah as the complex event through which, indeed, Israel and the world would be redeemed. But, in parallel with this, there was an “opening of their minds” that had to happen as well (24:45). Luke is clear that the events involving Jesus are the events in which all of Israel’s previous history has been summed up and brought to its divinely appointed goal. But this is not something that casual readers can see at a glance. It is not something that Caiaphas or the Pharisees would instantly recognize when Jesus’s followers began to announce that he had been raised from the dead.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But he is much, much more. And it is that “much more” that the church has found so hard to grasp and express. Jesus the Moral Exemplar A third standard line people sometimes advance when wondering why the gospels tell their readers about what Jesus did in his public career is to suggest that he was offering an example of how to live. His utter, generous love and his fearless rebuke of wickedness and oppression make a formidable combination, especially when you add in his apparent fondness for parties, on the one hand, and prayer, on the other, and his remarkably shrewd ability to sum up situations, people, and problems in a pithy phrase or to tease out fresh meaning with a neat, telling story. What a man, we say to ourselves. Unlike many moralists then and now, his own life strikingly matched his own stringent teaching. People have sometimes accused Jesus of betraying his own standards (in cursing the fig tree, for example), but most people have accepted the gospels’ portrait of him as embodying that mixture of wisdom, love, holiness, and truth that he was urging as the proper standard for human life. The idea of Jesus as “teacher” is therefore sometimes elaborated further, and Jesus is seen as “moral exemplar.” Jesus came, many have said, to “show us the way,” to “show us how it’s done.” But that’s part of the problem—with this as a theory at all, and with this as a theory about why the gospels are what they are. As I have written elsewhere (in After You Believe ), * it isn’t actually much of an encouragement to me to read the stories about Jesus. I might as well take encouragement from watching a great athlete run a four-minute mile. Sure, it’s a fine sight, but at my age and with my weight I would be lucky to do a mile in ten minutes, let alone four. I can watch a ballet dancer on stage with great delight, not because I think I can copy him, but precisely because I know I can’t. Have you ever tried to copy Jesus, not just in his amazing generosity and kindness, but in his sharp, brightly colored little stories? Very few people throughout history have been able to tell short stories like that, so brief yet so complete. The obvious answer to this proposal, then, is that just because I see someone, even Jesus, behaving in a particular way, that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier for me to do so. Only today I was reading a testimony from a leading theological teacher who lamented the fact that her own life hadn’t matched up to the ideals she had assumed were the Christian norm. If Jesus came either to teach or to model a perfect way of life, hoping that people would then obey him and copy him, we would have to conclude that he was a striking failure. And that’s not the only point.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “My mother doesn’t accept my pit bulls. Or, she accepts them, but she doesn’t like them. Which is exactly the way she was about me as a child. She just tolerated me. But she didn’t think I was special. Also, now that I’m living at home I obviously can’t start conscious-dating anytime soon.” “Your feelings are certainly understandable. But with regard to the conscious dating, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true,” said Dr. Jude. “Of course it’s true!” neighed Chickenhorse. “You don’t know my mother. She has no boundaries. She’ll want to know exactly what’s going on, who I’m with, what family he is from, and then she’ll find some way to involve herself. So, sorry, now that I’m homeless we will have to put off dating again.” Brianne’s dating life was going no better. “Things have gone a little south with the man from OkCupid,” she murmured, adjusting one knee sock. “He sent me an email the other day letting me know that he couldn’t return to the States yet, because he was waiting for a business deal to close and temporarily was out of funds. Then he asked if I could loan him some funds.” The group gasped in unison. “I’m not sure what to do. One of the items I put on my vision board is that I want a man who is financially stable. I don’t want to compromise my vision board. I’m supposed to be manifesting. My life is simply too abundant to take on someone who is living a life of lack. But at the same time, because of that abundance, I can’t help but think that it might be the kind thing to help him out—especially if it will allow us to go on our date.” “Mmmmmm,” said Dr. Jude. “I would strongly suggest setting a boundary with him.” “Do not send the money,” said Chickenhorse. “He’s probably a catfish!” “A what?” asked Brianne. “A catfish. Like, a scammer. Someone who pretends to be someone he isn’t.” “Oh no, he’s not a scammer. I know that he is who he says he is. We’re very close.” “How long have you known him again?” I asked. “About six days,” said Brianne. We all looked at her. “It’s been a rich and rewarding six days.” Sara looked at her quizzically over the pomegranate she was peeling. But she was in no position to judge. Having almost reached her ninety days of no contact with Stan, she had had a slip. A big one. Now not only were they in contact again but they’d been seeing each other. Stan had reached out with an apologetic one-thousand-word email declaring his love. He also sent her a bouquet of carnations. Of course, Sara was allergic to them and gave them to a neighbor, but that wasn’t the point.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  The first thing I noticed upon taking progesterone is that my sex drive, particularly in response to visual input, sharply increased. In fact, the visual effects of progesterone very much reminded me of how I responded to visual stimuli when I was hormonally male. Upon hearing my experience, I am sure that some people—particularly those who favor social, rather than biological, explanations of gender difference —will be somewhat disappointed at the predictable nature of my transformation. Some may even assume that I am buying into female stereotypes when I describe myself becoming a more weepy, touchy-feely, flower-adoring, less sexually aggressive person. Not only are similar experiences regularly described by other trans women, but trans men typically give reciprocal accounts: They almost universally describe an increase in their sex drives (which become more responsive to visual inputs), male-type orgasms (more centralized, quicker to achieve), a decrease in their sense of smell, and more difficulty crying and discerning their emotions. 1 On the other hand, those who are eager to have popular presumptions about hormones confirmed will probably be just as disappointed to hear what has not noticeably changed during my hormonal transition: my sexual orientation; the “types” of women I am attracted to; my tastes in music, movies, or hobbies; my politics; my sense of humor; my levels of aggression, competitiveness, nurturing, creativity, intelligence; and my ability to read maps or do math. While it would be irresponsible for me to say that these human traits are entirely hormone-independent (as it is possible that fetal hormones potentially play some role in predisposing us to such traits), they clearly are not controlled by adult hormone levels to the extent that many people argue or assume. While transsexual accounts of hormones are largely in agreement with one another, I also find it illuminating to examine the more subtle differences between our individual experiences. For example, I have heard several trans men describe how they started to consume porn voraciously upon taking testosterone. While my sexuality was definitely more visual when I was hormonally male, and I certainly enjoyed looking at porn on occasion, I still always preferred erotic stories and fantasies to pictures of naked bodies. Similarly, I have heard some trans men say that they almost never cry since taking testosterone, whereas I used to cry somewhat often (although not nearly as often as I do now) when I was hormonally male. Some trans men have also described becoming more aggressive or competitive since taking testosterone (although many others describe themselves as becoming more calm).

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Focusing primarily on those trans people who undergo the most procedures during their transitions not only shows a more dramatic change—one that reinforces the idea that sex reassignment is “artificial”—but also fosters the audience’s assumption that trans people are merely mimicking or impersonating the other sex rather than expressing their natural gender identity or subconscious sex. Perhaps no element in these sex reassignment and plastic surgery shows helps confirm the audience’s assumptions about gender and attractiveness more than the before-and-after photos. These pictures are designed to overemphasize stereotypes. In the programs that feature plastic surgery and gastric bypass surgery, the subject is almost always wearing frumpy clothes and frowning in the “before” picture, and dressed smart and smiling in the “after” picture, adding to the perception that they have become more attractive. In the transsexual documentaries, “before” photos of trans women almost always depict them in the most masculine of ways: playing sports as a young boy, with facial hair and wearing a wedding tuxedo or military uniform as a young man. Similarly, “before” shots of trans men often include pictures of them wearing birthday dresses as a child, or high school yearbook photos of them with long hair. The purpose for choosing these more stereotypically female and male images over other potential “before” pictures (for instance, ones where the subject looks more gender-variant or gender-neutral) is to emphasize the “naturalness” of the trans person’s assigned sex, thereby exaggerating the “artificiality” of their identified sex. In real life, before-and-after photos don’t always depict such clear-cut gender differences. One time, a friend who has only known me as a woman visited our apartment and saw wedding photos of me and my wife, Dani, for the first time. Despite the fact that I am physically male and wearing a tuxedo in the pictures (as we were married before I physically transitioned), I do not look very masculine; instead, I look like the small, long-haired, androgynous boy that I used to be. My friend seemed a little let down by the photos. She muttered, “It’s weird, because it looks just like you in the pictures, except that you’re a guy.”

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Indeed, unlike our predecessors in the groups Queer Nation (who held public “kiss-ins” in suburban malls) and Transsexual Menace (who staged protests in small Midwestern towns where trans people were murdered), many in the queer/trans community these days often seem more content celebrating our fabulous queer selves or enjoying the safety of our own organizations and events. 6 While there is nothing inherently wrong with creating our own queer/trans spaces and culture, what troubles me is that we are clearly sacrificing diversity in the process. For example, in queer/trans spaces, one rarely sees MTF crossdressers (despite the fact that they make up a large portion of the transgender population) and there are very few trans women. Some might suggest that these groups are choosing not to attend of their own accord, but that only leads to the next question: Why are they choosing not to come? Often when trans women ask me when I’m performing next, and I tell them that it’s a queer/trans event, they will tell me that they’d rather not go because they do not feel comfortable or safe in those spaces, that they have been dismissed or belittled at such events before. Even trans women who are dyke- or bisexual-identified often don’t feel welcome or relevant in queer/trans spaces. And whenever a trans woman or ally points out aspects about the queer/ trans community that contribute to these feelings of irrelevancy and disrespect—such as the way our community coddles those who support trans-woman-exclusionist events or who make trans-misogynistic comments—we are described as being “divisive.” This use of the word “divisive” is particularly telling, as it implies that “queer/trans” represents a uniform movement or community—a “oneness”—rather than an alliance where all voices are respected. Perhaps the only thing more ironic than the fact that the transgender movement’s “shatter the gender binary” slogan is now being used to enforce a new subversive/conservative gender binary is the fact that the queer/trans community’s growing sense of “oneness” evolved out of a well-meaning attempt to prevent exclusivity. From the outset, many early transgender activists feared that one particular transgender subgroup might come to dominate the transgender community, that they would begin to police the movement’s borders and enforce their own sense of “oneness.” Because the exclusivity of cultural feminism and the mainstream “gay rights” movement seemed to center on disputes over identity—who counts as a “woman” or who is legitimately “gay”—many activists advocated the idea that the transgender coalition should be borderless, one where there was no set criteria for an individual to join. Many also worked to play down or blur the distinctiveness of individual transgender subgroups in order to prevent any kind of hierarchy from developing.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  In all of these cases, public confusion stems from the implicit assumption that we transition in order to become the objects of heterosexual male desire. If people were to assume instead that we transition primarily for ourselves (as is indeed the case), then it would become easy to understand why some trans women might not want to put on makeup, dresses, and heels every day, or why they would choose not to undergo an expensive form of genital surgery that could potentially result in a loss of sensation or other medical complications. The popular assumption that trans women deliberately transform ourselves into sexual objects also explains why we are so frequently depicted in the media as sex workers. 3 The fact that trans female sex workers have reached the status of “stock characters” is of particular interest, as such depictions are at complete odds with other cissexual presumptions about transsexuality. Media representations of trans people that do not involve sex work typically go out of their way to stress the fact that transsexuality is an extraordinarily rare phenomenon, and to promote the idea that transsexuals are sexually undesirable. So it is unclear why, being as rare and undesirable as we supposedly are, we seem to make up such a significant percentage of sex workers on TV and in the movies. This inconsistency implicitly suggests that trans women must somehow specifically seek out jobs as sex workers, presumably because we so desperately wish to be sexually objectified by men. In fact, many trans women are sex workers, but generally not because they wish to be sexual objects. Like their cissexual counterparts, many trans women turn to such work because few other viable economic options are available to them. For example, in San Francisco, perhaps the most trans-friendly city in the nation, approximately 75 percent of transgender people cannot find full-time work, 57 percent have experienced employment discrimination on the job, and 96 percent live below the city’s median income. 4 In other words, any realistic portrayal of transgender sex workers would necessarily have to address the issue of poverty that comes at the hands of anti-trans prejudice. This, of course, rarely happens on TV or in movies, where depictions of trans female sex workers are almost always brief and superfluous.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  MacKenzie, who together host the radio program GenderTalk, described two similar incidents on one of their programs. In both cases, while they were being filmed, the media producers wanted to get footage of the two of them putting on makeup together (requests that Nangeroni and MacKenzie denied). 4 I myself had a similar experience back in 2001, just before I began taking hormones. A friend arranged for me to meet with someone who was doing a film about the transgender movement. The filmmaker was noticeably disappointed when I showed up looking like a somewhat normal guy, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. She eventually asked me if I would mind putting on lipstick while she filmed me. I told her that wearing lipstick had nothing to do with the fact that I was transgender or that I identified as female. She shot a small amount of footage anyway (sans lipstick) and said she would get in touch with me if she decided to use any of it. I never heard back from her. When audiences watch scenes of trans women putting on skirts and makeup, they are not necessarily seeing a reflection of the values of those trans women; they are witnessing TV, film, and news producers’ obsessions with all objects commonly associated with female sexuality. In other words, the media’s and audience’s fascination with the feminization of trans women is a by-product of their sexualization of all women. The Media’s Transgender Gap There is most certainly a connection between the differing values given to women and men in our culture and the media’s fascination with depicting trans women rather than trans men, who were born female but identify as male. Although the number of people transitioning in each direction is relatively equal these days, media coverage would have us believe there is a huge disparity in the populations of trans men and women. 5 Jamison Green, a trans man who authored a 1994 report that led to the city of San Francisco’s decision to extend its civil rights protections to include gender identity, once said this about the media coverage of that event: “Several times at the courthouse, when the press was doing interviews, I stood by and listened as reporters inquired who wrote the report, and when I was pointed out to them as the author I could see them looking right through me, looking past me to find the man in a dress who must have written the report and whom they would want to interview. More than once a reporter asked me incredulously, ‘You wrote the report?’ They assumed that because of my ‘normal’ appearance that I wouldn’t be newsworthy.”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Each had now been scrubbed multiple times. Then I looked in the mirror. I really did look cute. The light in there was dim and I took a few pictures of myself: hand on hip, ass out, from the back and side. Garrett texted to say that he was waiting in the lobby. I decided I would make him wait a few minutes, not text back, but just appear. When I came out to the lobby he was checking his phone. “Hey,” I said. “Oh hey,” he said. He rose and looked me in the eyes. My body felt all needle-y. “Do you want to get a drink first?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. I wondered why we couldn’t just get drinks in the room. I had a vision involving Champagne. Also, my ass was starting to sweat again. We went to the bar and sat around drinking cocktails. It was dark and tropical in there, with black palm-tree wallpaper like the Beverly Hills Hotel on opium. This time we really didn’t have anything to say to each other. I guess he didn’t feel like talking about graphic design anymore and I wasn’t going to bring up fonts. He still didn’t ask me anything about me. It wasn’t awkward, though. The silence was thick with knowing that I would be kissing him soon, and other things. I imagined his tongue in my pussy. If only he would look me in the eye again. “All right,” he said as I took the last sip of my vodka and pineapple juice. “This is how I think we should do it. I’m going to go in first. You should wait here. Then in about five minutes or so you come back and knock on all four of them. I will let you into the one I am in.” “All four of what?” I asked. “The bathroom doors,” he said. “Wait,” I said. “I don’t understand. Why are we going to the bathroom?” “To fuck.” He laughed but he looked a little concerned. “I’ve always wanted to fuck in the bathrooms here.” “Oh,” I said. “I thought we were, like, getting a room or something.” “Oh shit, sorry. No. The fantasy was that we would fuck in the bathroom. Sorry. Did I not make that clear?” “Not exactly.” “Are you cool with that?” he asked. I tried not to look disappointed. But I was. What the hell? Was I not good enough for him to get a room? Did I look like I wanted to fuck in a bathroom? Maybe this was sexier. Maybe this was like an honor, that he thought I would be wild enough. Anybody could fuck in a hotel room. Not everyone could fuck in the lobby bathroom. “Okay,” I said. “I’m game.” “You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll love it. The bathrooms here are super lush. They’re like their own little worlds. It will be fucking hot.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  At the center of it all, we find once more the themes of kingdom and cross. Jesus announces the kingdom and summons his followers to share in the work of announcing and inaugurating it. Yet the kingdom confounds their expectations; they don’t understand what’s going on, and they fail to pick up the significance of his strange stories and his powerful deeds. The story of the “foundation of the church” in the gospels does not show Jesus’s first followers latching right on to his message and his meaning and being sensibly and easily “trained” to follow Jesus in putting the kingdom into effect. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus were still shocked and sad because, despite the rumors of the resurrection, as far as they were concerned the crucifixion of their friend and master meant the dashing of all their hopes. “We were hoping that he was going to redeem Israel!” (Luke 24:21). Part of the meaning of the kingdom, in the four gospels, is precisely the fact that it bursts upon Jesus’s first followers as something so shocking as to be incomprehensible. That is why Jesus told so many parables. His kingdom vision was so unlike that of his contemporaries that this was the only way to get through, to launch his followers upon the strange new vocation that would continue, energized by another dramatic and life-changing event (Pentecost), after his death, resurrection, and ascension. And part of the meaning of the kingdom, seen as the launching of God’s renewed people, is particularly that the launching itself involved the death of Jesus, something again for which his first followers were completely unprepared and that, indeed, they refused at first to countenance: From then on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he would have to go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and be raised on the third day. Peter took him and began to tell him off. “That’s the last thing God would want, Master!” he said. “That’s never, ever going to happen to you!” Jesus turned on Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You’re trying to trip me up! You’re not looking at things like God does! You’re looking at things like a mere mortal!” (Matt. 16:21–23) The gospel story of Jesus seen as the launching of the renewed people of God includes, as a central element, the incomprehension, failure, and rebellion of that people, until they are stunned into new faith by the resurrection and energized into new obedience by the Spirit. The themes of kingdom and cross are not simply theological themes that the disciples have to learn, abstract ideas on their way to constituting a creedal “orthodoxy.” They are the pattern of their life, both as they follow Jesus around Galilee, despite not understanding what he’s up to, and as they then follow him, in the power of the Spirit, to the ends of the earth.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  He made me feel like a special little pea. Through his work in the desert with the university, he had received a grant from the American Geological Fund to make documentaries on the national parks. He always directed and edited the docs himself, and the grant gave him the power to travel, be free, and always be producing. Even though the documentaries aired at two a.m. on limited cable channels, he could never be accused of failing. “I’m more with the scientists than the artists,” he said. But he had the allure of an artist. In our earlier years together I traveled to see him on location often. I spent my holiday breaks in an Airstream at Acadia National Park, Glacier, Yosemite. He would go on shoots all day and I would go out exploring, bringing back little souvenirs. He loved hearing what I had seen, correcting my landscape terminology. My favorites were the lakes and oceans, the rivers and waterfalls, like nothing we had in the desert. The rushing water, and traveling in general, made me feel like my life was moving forward, in spite of my flagging thesis. I identified myself with his work. It felt adventurous. But later on, he began covering more desert locations: Death Valley, Arches. I would stay in the Airstream all day and wait for him to return. Why did I need to explore another desert when I had a desert right at home? And why had I come to see this man who was the same here as he was at home? Same face, same dick. Same ennui of a long relationship but with no desire to commit. I told him I was staying in the Airstream to work on the thesis. But when people asked me what I did for a living, I glossed over my Sappho and the library, and quickly brought up Jamie’s work. I pretended it was still exciting. But the only real excitement left was the challenge of roping him into our imaginary future. On the day of our breakup, I had blown a tire on Camelback Road and called him for help. When he arrived he looked in my trunk and said, “But you don’t have a spare.” “No,” I said. It was late in the evening on a Sunday and the auto-body shops in town would be closed, so we called AAA. While we waited I felt hot and fussy and angry. I wasn’t sure exactly why. He looked silly to me, dough-bellied and chinless. Everything had rounded out. He was making little sucking noises with his front teeth, alternating with small whistling noises. It was one of those moments when you look at the person you have loved for a long time and everything is wrong with them.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Or vice versa. Only when the story the gospels are telling is fully integrated with the dogmas the creeds are teaching can we be sure we are on track. Displacement Activities The result of all this has been, I believe, that though the gospels are so rich in material of all sorts, their underlying emphasis has been quietly but thoroughly overlooked. All those parables, moral teachings, remarkable deeds, and so on—one can easily make all kinds of perfectly good theological and practical points out of them. But one may be so busy with that exercise that the main point goes unnoticed. This is what, I believe, has actually happened. The result has been a series of displacement activities. The church has said, in effect: (a) we know the gospels are important, because they are the inspired apostolic witness to Jesus; and (b) we know what is important in Christian theology, namely, the divinity of Jesus and his saving death or, as it may be, his moral teaching and example; so (c) we assume that that is the primary message of the gospels. In fact, to sum up the proposal toward which I have been working, the four gospels are trying to say that this is how God became king . We have, partly deliberately and partly accidentally, forgotten this massive claim almost entirely. Since we cannot stop reading the gospels without ceasing to be proper Christians, we have developed all kinds of strategies for making alternative sense of the gospels and so screening out the dangerous and challenging picture they are actually sketching. That is at the heart of the problem I have been trying to identify. It has been a salutary exercise, I believe, to review in this way the different things that people have said as they face the question of why the gospels included all that material between Jesus’s birth and his death. All these proposals have been advanced quite seriously, and I have tried to take them in the same serious spirit. But it is clear to me that none of them have actually taken the gospels seriously as they stand. They have gone to them with the wrong questions and have found answers, of a sort, to those questions. The challenge now is to accept that we have all misunderstood the gospels and to set about finding ways in which we can put this right. It is time for a fresh look at our central texts. 4 The Story of Israel I MAGINE, IF YOU WILL , that you have set up a new sound system in your living room. You have installed a quadraphonic set of speakers, one in each corner.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  AUGUSTAN PEACE. It was supposed to have been completed in time for Rome’s Jubilee 2000 celebrations. But you are there two years later, on a hot and muggy mid-afternoon in July, and it’s still hidden within a canvas and metal cocoon. Jackhammers pound and cranes rotate around a scaffold-clad cube inside the construction zone. Outside it, elegantly dressed Italian women turn the Via di Ripetta into a stylish fashion show while young Italian men weave their Vespas in and out of traffic, up and over curbs, racing toward the Ponte Cavour to cross the Tiber. There are only a few other tourists in sight and, oblivious to the normal near accidents all around them, they stagger through the city’s summer heat, looking at clumsily folded maps with hats on and heads down. It’s not Rome’s most visited area, surrounded as it is by drab concrete buildings from Italy’s Fascist 1930s. East of the construction zone is the park around the cypress-crowned ruins of Augustus’s Mausoleum, which, long ago stripped of its marble, has become a refuge for homeless people and a place for walking dogs. Still, the new construction hopes to change that decline, and a huge billboard put up by the Commune di Roma announces the restoration’s chosen architect, political patrons, and corporate sponsors. There is also an illustration of the new museum for the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, the magnificent cube of ancient history now hidden behind that protective screen. That modern billboard does not explain how controversy surrounding the museum’s construction and the altar’s renovation caused the long delay. The commissioned architect was the American Richard Meier, whose postmodern works have already appeared around the world and include the new J. Paul Getty Museum in Southern California. But many Romans were outraged when he unveiled a plan calling for a long glass and steel museum to encase the Ara Pacis Augustae, with a fountained plaza at one end and an auditorium at the other, an elongated jewel box along the bank of the Tiber. Some critics ridiculed it as “Los Angelizing” their city, and the flamboyant Italian deputy of culture, Vittorio Sgarbi, derided the piece as an affront to Rome’s cultural legacy. According to its detractors, Meier’s design lacked adequate continuity with classical Roman styles and thus eroded the city’s distinct heritage with a kind of architectural globalism. Many Romans preferred a Roman museum for a Roman monument, but the altar of ancient Roman peace had become an altar of modern Roman strife.