Tag: authenticity

Posted in Identity

Testosterone, Week 7: Still Here, Still Genderqueer

Posted on by Alex Kapitan

My decision to start taking testosterone seven weeks ago wasn’t one I came to easily. For months, if not years, I wrestled with an enormous, tangled ball of yarn and rubber bands made up of conflicting emotions and a thousand stories running through my head about what such a decision would mean.whac a mole colored

One story that kept popping its head up out of my unconscious mind, like a whac-a-mole game, was that I would somehow be giving up on being genderqueer if I started testosterone. A small vicious voice seemed to whisper in my ear that taking T would mean I was retiring my charade of being neither man nor woman and finally picking a side, finally transitioning.

Whack.

I’m here to deliver the death knell to that whac-a-mole gremlin. Giving up on being genderqueer, on being myself? Nothing could be further from the truth. Taking testosterone is an act of rededication to my full, fabulous self; an act of love; a gift I am giving myself—not a resignation. Continue reading “Testosterone, Week 7: Still Here, Still Genderqueer” →

Posted in Identity

A World with No Closets

Posted on by Alex Kapitan

“When did you come out?”

It’s a question that I get asked often, and it never ceases to make me smile wryly due to the impossibility of answering it in the straightforward and simple way that is invariably expected.

“When did you come out” presumes that the act of naming one’s truth and self-identity is a one-time, all-encompassing event, a clear and unmistakable milestone on the linear timeline of one’s life. It also presumes that there is only one facet of self-identity that is deserving of such a declaration. Continue reading “A World with No Closets” →

Posted in Identity

Testosterone, Day 0: Claiming My Truth

Posted on by Alex Kapitan

My entire life, I have forged a path for my sense of self without clear road markers.

I wish I could say that this lack of reflection of myself out in the world meant that I learned to trust only myself and my own truth, but if I said that I’d be lying. Instead, somewhere along the way I internalized a sense of not trusting my own truth, I accepted the invalidation of my experience, I felt inherently wrong, misfit, untrue.

I am only at the beginning of the journey to reclaim myself as worthy and my truth about myself as true. Continue reading “Testosterone, Day 0: Claiming My Truth” →

Posted in Faith, Identity

Dear Liberal Religious White People: Stop Using #AllLivesMatter

Posted on by Alex Kapitan

I have seen and heard a lot of white liberal religious people saying All Lives Matter as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement, and it causes my heart and my soul pain.

From a spiritual place, All Lives Matter says that we need to emphasize our same-ness instead of our difference. In the context of a political moment that seeks to call attention to and rectify state violence against black people, All Lives Matter is a colorblind approach and stance. Among other things, All Lives Matter says that deep down we are all the same, so differences shouldn’t matter. It says that calling attention to difference is wrong. This is a problem. Continue reading “Dear Liberal Religious White People: Stop Using #AllLivesMatter” →

Posted in Identity

Queering Family

Posted on by Teo Drake

Teo

Whenever I am asked if my boifriend and I are married, especially in LGBTQ space, I feel unwelcome pressure to define my relationship so that the asker of the question can translate my answer into dominant culture’s terms.

This is the same pressure I have felt around gender. All of the questions about anatomy and my experience can feel like an assessment of which pre-existing “knowable” box to put me in. This is especially true for my boifriend and our relationship to one another. His genderqueer prancy femme boi self cannot be neatly summed up in dominant culture’s language without being dulled in the translation.

What we are to each other does not play by the binary rules the language of marriage requires. How we love and live cannot neatly fit into the “degree of commitment hierarchy” that the State’s definition of marriage requires. Continue reading “Queering Family” →

Posted in Compassion, Faith, Identity

What Being Sober for Exactly Half My Life has Taught Me

Posted on by Teo Drake

Teo

On Thursday January 2nd I passed the milestone of being in recovery for half my life: 23 of my 46 years. I have now been sober three times longer than I drank. Along the way I have learned a great many things (often the hard way). Here is what is coming forward at the moment, but is by no means a complete list.

Nothing is linear: not healing, not harm, nothing. Shedding damage from trauma, including addiction, has not been a process of going from point A to point B. It has been an ever-meandering route that seems to invariably circle back upon itself (often accompanied by my sentiments of “Fuck, I thought I dealt with this already!”). In early recovery everything was new and often magical; hard, but it still felt like I was getting somewhere… Then it seemed like growth came more slowly or not at all. Over the years I have found that to be the way healing unfolds. I honestly don’t know if there is a destination. What I know is that I am at home in my skin more than I thought would ever be possible. I’m wary of seeing myself as a “work in progress.” I distrust the self-help gurus who push “self-improvement.” Healing for me has come from being curious about who is actually here rather than focusing on “what I could become.” Continue reading “What Being Sober for Exactly Half My Life has Taught Me” →

Posted in Faith, Identity

From a Friend of Bat

Posted on by Alex Kapitan

Alex

The UUWorld’s Family Pages section is always a delightful and beautifully crafted magazine insert that offers stories and resources appropriate for children and people of all ages along a common theme. I’ve always enjoyed reading it, except on one memorable occasion. The Fall 2012 Family Pages section offered a story based on an Aesop’s Fable, entitled “Why Bat Has No Friends.”

In the story, Bat kept switching sides in a war between mammals and birds, and his lack of allegiance resulted in the other animals banishing him to the night, telling him: “Because you could not choose your friends during war, you will not have them during peace. From this day forward, you will only fly at night when everyone else sleeps. You will have no friends among the mammals or the birds.”

I’m here as a friend of Bat to set the record right. Continue reading “From a Friend of Bat” →

Posted in Identity

Shapeshifter

Posted on by Alex Kapitan

Alex

I am a shapeshifter without ever changing form. I am straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender. I am wife, son, boyfriend, best friend, partner.

Look at me and in your eyes I become whatever life has taught you to associate with a being that looks, moves, sounds like me. I become a reflection of your culture, your comfort zone. Register the things about me that fit the labels you’ve applied to me and don’t notice the rest. Fill in the blanks of my story and my self with facts from the card catalog of your experience, all neatly sorted and logically applied.

Look at me. Who am I at an airport, on a dance floor, in a church choir, on a sports field, in my parents’ house? I am a shapeshifter without ever changing form—all that changes is the gaze that considers me, as I blend into the world as you know it.

Until I don’t.

Until I’m a dyke whose boyfriend just arrived. Until I’m a teenager who just handed you an ID that is not the slightest bit fake. Until I’m a woman who you just saw go into the men’s room. Until I’m a trans not-quite-man who just brought an intention to become pregnant someday into the conversation. Until I’m the son who just produced a wallet to buy the shirt dad helped pick out.

Until I shift my shape right in front of your eyes. I become a shapeshifter without even changing gazes, as your mind works to re-figure me. Who am I then? Something else you recognize, or someone uncategorizable?

Look at me. I am not the story your mind creates about me. Your gaze does not define me. I am self-made, self-defined, and divinely inspired. And neither of us is limited by your imagination or mine. We are bigger than that, part of a shapeshifting universal spirit.

So look at me. And then let’s welcome the surprises we find in each other’s true selves and histories. We are both shapeshifters.

Posted in Activism, Faith, Identity

Religion is Not a Dirty Word

Posted on by Teo Drake

This post is the second of a two-part response to the assertion among some yogis that yoga is not a religion. Read Honoring Yoga’s Sacred Religious Roots for part one.

Teo

The second part of my struggle with the declaration that yoga is not a religion is the underlying concession of the domain of religion to the Religious Right. I am simply not willing to concede that territory.

As a philosophy professor one of the hardest things to explain to the folks I was teaching was that for us to have an actual philosophical argument, we have to agree to the terms. We have to both agree to common definitions or at least acknowledge that we don’t have a common definition. We have to have that discussion first before we can have an argument, because if we are not using common definitions, if we don’t have an understanding that by you saying this you mean this but when I say this I don’t mean that, if we don’t have that understanding, then we can’t have an argument, or a debate, or whatever language you want to use. We can have a fight, we can have a shouting match, we can have a confrontation, but we cannot have an argument. We cannot have a debate. We certainly cannot have a reasoned debate.

And in this regard I will not concede the use of the word religion to the Religious Right. I will not allow them to have sole ownership of that word. I will not release and walk away. This is not a game of tug of war where I’m willing to let go of the rope. I’m not interested in taking the rope from them. I’m not interested in claiming sole ownership of the word religion but I’m also not willing to concede sole ownership of the word religion to the Religious Right. Continue reading “Religion is Not a Dirty Word” →