1. Introduction
Marjorie Pearson asked me if I’d be willing to talk here today. I’ve had lots of interesting discussions with Marjorie over the years, and really appreciate how open she has been to my issues about my gender identity.
She was interested in why I recently decided to add “they/them” as my preferred pronoun; before this I didn’t specify a pronoun at all.
My “coming out” has so far consisted of adding this information about my pronoun preferences to my email signatures on my personal and work email accounts, and to my Zoom label.
I’ve never really talked about my gender identity publicly before, and hardly ever privately.
2. Gender and Spirituality
Where to start?
I can remember being uncomfortable with male gender roles when I was a kid.
For a long time I was afraid to grow up, because I feared I would become a callous, hard man. Over the years, my experiences of deeply understanding my many female clients only confirmed my fears, and as a therapist I have often felt ashamed to be a man.
In fact, the most important spiritual figures in my life were women: my mother, my grandmother, my childhood mentor Margaret.
I experienced my father as generally a kind, wise person who was not forceful, avoided conflict and was a bit distant. Also, his wisdom was more worldly. Although his insights were valuable and interesting, they didn’t strike me as spiritual or particularly inspiring. In the end, for me he was more of a fellow traveller on the same or a similar road.
On the other hand, it was my mother, grandmother and my friend Margaret who were strong, inspiring, powerful. I do have to say that in the case of my mother and grandmother they were also rather controlling.
However, these three people deeply inspired me to do more and to be more; I went to church with all of them; they provided a strong moral compass for me; and they helped me get closer to God.
This was important, because from a pretty young age, I had real trouble getting my head around male images of God. For me, God has always been female. Nevertheless, to try to find a less extreme position, my compromise has been to adopt a gender-balanced trinity: Jesus/son = male; Holy Spirit = female & Father replaced by a gender neutral Parent.
In church, I’ve always been more comfortable when there was a female priest (I’m pretty much a life-long Episcopalian), although gay men will do if needed (and have done for most of the past 25 years).
3. Growing up Female-Identified
From a young age, I was pretty much always more interested in girls and women than boys and men.
I can remember imagining having long hair. In the 1950’s and early 1960’s it was always cut short, as was the custom for boys then, but I don’t think I was ever really comfortable with that. Then around 1970 I started growing it out into a gender neutral Afro. When that stopped working for me around 2000, I started growing what hair I had left out into a pony tail; at that point, my dad was doing the same thing with his hair, as were my two sons. It felt good to finally be able to do that.
So I guess you could say that I’m “female identified”: Certainly, my main role model has been my grandmother, who was public figure (radio and TV personality) in Chicago, then retired to become a professional writer. From a young age I aspired to be like her. Also, as I was the oldest of her grandchildren, she encouraged me.
It’s hard to know, but I think I might have preferred to have been born as a female. In addition to having long hair, I think I would have liked to have been able to have children, scary and difficult as that can be. I feel somehow incomplete as a human being for not having had that experience, and even guilty for having evaded the process. Although I love my two boys and do not for a second regret who they are, I certainly would have been happy for us to have had girls, and to have helped to raise them as strong women.
4. Finding a Balance Professionally & Personally
I have certainly found it fulfilling to have been a therapist for many women, who have certainly given me plenty of vicarious experiences of what complete jerks men can be. As I noted earlier, as a therapist I have often felt ashamed to be a man, even as I worked to support my female clients in developing their own sense of personal power, helping them maintain a balance between their need to be themselves and their need for connection with the important people in their lives. In recent years, as I’ve come to work with more people from East Asian, I have come to pride myself in being a kind of wise “auntie” to many of them, occupying the role that might have been provided by an experienced older female figure in many traditional cultures.
But of course I live in the body of a man. I don’t necessarily reject that, but as I’ve been saying I identify more with women and strongly value the more traditionally “feminine” parts of me: empathy, emotionality, sensitivity, poetry, and an interest in the arts and music, as well as literature. I’m not interested in dominating or “winning”. So in general I tend to feel like I have more in common with women than men, and would rather hang out with them. I’ve always tended to have more female than male friends, and have in my career really benefitted from a succession of female mentors and therapists.
5. Psychological Androgyny and the “They/them/their”
In the 1980’s, psychological androgyny was a big thing in academic psychology, and that always made a lot of sense to me. Psychological androgyny is the idea that we are all mixtures of traditionally male and female characteristics, and that maybe the ideal might be a flexible balance of characteristics traditionally associated with men and women. Thus, for me personally, the pronouns “she/her/hers” and “he/him/his” can seem too limiting; for this reason, “they/them/their” are my current preferred pronouns.
Nowadays, of course, I think a lot of people feel like psychological androgyny is too limiting: Why should certain characteristics be associated with women and others with men? Why can’t women (and men) have whatever characteristics are true and work for them? That makes sense to me, but perhaps because I was brought up with traditional gender role stereotypes, I still like the idea of psychological androgyny, even with its somewhat outdated dialectic of traditional gender roles. But here I am.
Lastly, like my grandmother, I have ended up a writer, although not of novels like her but of professional and scientific books and articles about psychotherapy and psychotherapy research. And that is where I discovered the appeal of “they/them/their” to refer to generic people whose gender wasn’t known, or whose gender wasn’t relevant. This is actually an old usage in English, going back centuries, so in spite of what most of us were taught in school, I happily abandoned the use of generic masculine pronouns and now find myself preferring gender neutral pronouns. Long live “they/them/their”! I’ll take them, and happily embrace myself as a slightly queer, nonbinary person.
