Grace... Eventually?

“Grace is having a commitment to—or acceptance
of—being ineffective and foolish.”
- ANNE LAMOTT  
Ugh, I swore up and down that I was not going to write about this.

As I was winding down last night, I caught wind that a favorite author of mine had apparently used her Twitter account to express fatigue with the very public gender transition of an individual once known for athletic prowess but now in the common consciousness principally through association with a media accident I refer to, collectively, as “the K Hole”. You may gather from this moniker what you will any insight about my attitude towards same.

This was problematic for me, not because of her disdain for the media circus which has ensued, but because — by not respecting that individual’s choice to adopt a change of pronoun through the omission of one letter — my author suggested an uncharacteristic callousness toward the gender identity issue as a whole that shines a new, somewhat distressed lens on her writings about grace and compassion.

I don’t know what drove that; it may have been the fact that this individual has overshared TMI about plans to Keep It and assure us (did I seem worried?) that there would be no accompanying change in sexual orientation. Or maybe it was the plasticine Photo Spread, or possibly the unwavering support for people and institutions which do their best to keep others on that same road of transition, who do not share the same safety net of money and prestige, in places of poverty and violence. 

Or maybe my author was just plain tired.  Anybody who reads her stuff knows she makes no claim to be perfect. She has been candid about some pretty self-destructive choices along the way, and the ongoing struggle to surrender control, be present, and generally see past others’ warts (and her own) to the God-loved person inside who really is trying hir hardest. She wasn’t issued a manual on how to respond to a seemingly camera-hungry public figure who has suddenly stood our perceptions on their collective ear. 

Similarly, no such manual exists for undergoing profound identity change, post middle-age, while bearing media scrutiny and a lifetime’s assumptions about gender and sexuality on your back, many of them obtained in the oh-so-forward-leaning world of athletics.  

That said, having this experience does not magically make one above reproach. Narcissism is still narcissism, and publicly voting against one’s own interests (or those of the people who share your gender identity but don’t share your privilege) is still going to earn you criticism. On the flip, if you set yourself up as a coach for others to find kindness and mercy, and then say something completely tone-deaf, you can expect to be called out on it. Possibly by your own kid.

What I know… what we fought for… is that this individual has the right to explore these things, maybe mess up, shape-shift, and sort out how to be seen and known. We can wish it didn’t have to unfold in lurid detail in the tabloids, and we don’t have to attach any bravery or heroics that aren’t warranted (try this as a poor, inner-city person of color and get back to me!).  But how we respond to who one person becomes should be based on hir choices alone, and not reflect our understanding, or path to one, of what it means to have or change a gender identity.

The next Tweet in my feed, offering a completely unrelated story about Afghanistan, began with a quote:

“Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world”

THE REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

So that’s where we are: bitter and beautiful, trying to live with each other, getting it horribly wrong sometimes. Everyone we encounter has something to teach us; it’s harder with some than others to know what that is, but — in those cases — it seems to be something we need to know about ourselves.

Sorry Seems to Be the Easiest Word

I live under a pop-culture rock, and it is only because of his inner-orbit position on the Six Degrees of Channing Tatum that I even know Jonah Hill’s name. But his recent run-in with a paparazzo, culminating in his angrily calling the man a derogatory term for a gay man and commanding him to perform a particular sex act, to me is less about who he is than what he said, the public’s response, and his later reaction to his own behavior.

Hill appeared both on The Howard Stern Show and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to apologize for his outburst. Calling himself a lifelong supporter of LGBT people, he first claimed that he “didn’t mean it in a homophobic way” but then refused to give himself that pass, saying “I think that doesn’t matter how you mean things... Words have weight and meaning, and the word I chose was grotesque and no one deserves to say or hear words like that.”

The first part is old hat. We have all heard “that’s so gay” as a synonym for “stupid” or “lame” … it gets thrown around quite casually, and -- when challenged -- the default response is “that isn’t how I meant it,” in a tone that suggests that this should just be okay with you.

More extreme epithets like the one Hill used are tossed around by alpha-males like a football in their understanding of good humor, but emerge for others only at moments of anger or stress. He attempted to explain to Fallon’s audience that his behavior was triggered by a prolonged bout of harassment by the cameraman, who was hurling insults at him and his family. He seemed almost shocked, however, by his own choice of words, as if he didn’t know he was capable of saying such things. Either he’s a better actor than 22 Jump Street gives him room to demonstrate, or he genuinely regrets that we all know this about him and was somewhat stunned to learn it about himself.

What I think bears reflection, however, is why is this where (generally male, but not always) people’s brains go in that moment. Hill told Fallon “I wanted to hurt (him) back, I wanted… the most hurtful word I could think of at that moment.” Hill assumed his antagonist was heterosexual, and thus the go-to insult would be to not only imply otherwise, but to immediately then direct him to a passive role, asserting Hill’s superiority over him.

The day after this all happened, The OASIS, the LGBT ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, marked 25 years since it became the first such outreach authorized by a Christian bishop. The project, established at All Saints Church in Hoboken, N.J. in 1989 by the Right Rev. John Shelby Spong, provided a “safe space” for gay men and lesbians (bisexual and transgender folks were added to the equation later) to worship with their whole selves at a time when this was largely impossible even in a comparatively progressive church.

In his sermon at the event , the Rev. Harry Knox invited the participants to unpack a very similar theme, which is that endemic misogyny is at the root of homophobia and transphobia. If one starts out with the premise that it’s just a little bit better to be male than female, then logically one will look with disdain on a man who seems to reject this privilege by assuming a role and mannerisms you associate with women. And a woman who dares to assert herself and claim authority reserved in one’s psyche for men will be perceived as a threat. Even the gay male community has bought into it, with personal ads peppered with “masc. only” or even “straight-acting” as a selling point.

We can claim to have evolved as a society, and in fact on paper we have. New laws giving LGBT people various rights and protections are passing at a rate which has triggered resignation and even backlash from those who feel threatened by the loss of privilege the status quo might have given them. In many social settings, it is no longer okay to make racist, sexist, or homo- or trans-phobic comments and one can be expect to be challenged for it. There is noise from some quarters that this has gone so far that our collective sense of humor has been lost as a result. I think it is healthy to be able to laugh at ourselves and a little irreverence does help keep things in perspective.

That is different, however, from using words as weapons. Hill claims he regrets his actions, and many of the on-line commenters seem willing to forgive him. I have no reason to doubt his sincerity, but this accomplishes little unless he does the extra homework to examine why, as a self-proclaimed friend of our community, he immediately defaulted back to asserting his hetero-male privilege when the chips were down. If I call someone the name that he did and acknowledge I did so as an act of aggression, that means I have -- somewhere in my psyche -- bought into the idea that this is a bad thing to be, and less than me. And -- unlike what I might say during a carefully-scripted talk show interview -- what I say in the heat of a stressful encounter is raw and pure, closer to the heart.  If I were Mr. Hill, I’d be spending some time with that.

As Luke’s Gospel tells us, “Therefore whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops.” What we say impulsively lends more insight to what’s really going on inside us than the lines we get time to rehearse.

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Adaptions of this post were published by:

• "'Sorry' Seems To Be The Easiest Word"
  published on believeoutloud.com on June 9th, 2014
• "Sorry Seems to Be the Easiest Word"
  published in the July 2014 edition of the Episcopal Journal (page 12)