![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raven_cromwellSo, I'm still feverish enough there's no way I can do this justice. With that disclaimer on the table: Chris Hayes is a generally center-left American news host. Not ultra-progressive, but good enough on most issues that his "Why Is This Happening" podcast has been on my radar for a while. Especially since the hour-long podcast interview format gives him a lot more room to shine on one particular subject than does a news broadcast, where he's necessarily skipping from topic to topic. He was, at least in this first episode, an excellent longform interviewer. Asked insightful questions but only to steer the conversation, and listened far more than he spoke. Also was just very aware as a cis dude that he'd never handled these topics personally, freely admitted his own blindspots, and so deferred very well to Daniel without any fuss if he overstepped.
Being on day two of a raging fever that made sleep impossible, last night seemed an excellent time to listen. (in retrospect, I'm surprised I could understand more than one word in ten, but on the scale of fever-induced oddities it def could've been worse.) The first episode that came up was an interview with Daniel M. Lavery. I had no idea who this Daniel person was, but did remember Amal El Mohtar retweeting a Grace Lavery, who had some insanely insightful comments about being on the gender nonconforming spectrum, and muzzily wondered if they were related. They are, as it happens, in that they're married, and Daniel recently took her last name, for reasons both deeply loving and viscerally difficult that get explained in-show.
As it transpired, Daniel had recently released a memoir, called something like: Something that May Shock and Discredit You, which I intend to try and read soonish. And much of the focus of the show was growing up queer in the evangelical church, and fuck it was a funhouse mirror in which I recognized more of my own life than I think I ever have from a queer writer. With the fever, it was enough of both catharsis and gut-punch I was weepy.
Everything from:
The whole interview is so worth a listen. (had a very hard time finding a screen-reader friendly version, but if Google Podcasts doesn't work in your part of the world, it's available on all the usual suspects from spotify to apple.) But there's one bit that felt deeply revolutionary for me: it was a quote by Daniel's friend that he passed along. God made trans people for the same reason he made wheat and grapes, but not bread and wine. So we, too, could be part of his marvelous creative process, just as we are when we change grapes into wine and wheat into bread; so we can prove that we don't just inhabit our bodies but can sculpt them.
My feelings on faith are more agnostic than anything these days, but my God, if I'd had someone to say that to me as a struggling Christian kid, it might've changed the entire course of my life, and made it so much less complicated, and I'm so grateful there're people making a path for queer folk within religion.
Being on day two of a raging fever that made sleep impossible, last night seemed an excellent time to listen. (in retrospect, I'm surprised I could understand more than one word in ten, but on the scale of fever-induced oddities it def could've been worse.) The first episode that came up was an interview with Daniel M. Lavery. I had no idea who this Daniel person was, but did remember Amal El Mohtar retweeting a Grace Lavery, who had some insanely insightful comments about being on the gender nonconforming spectrum, and muzzily wondered if they were related. They are, as it happens, in that they're married, and Daniel recently took her last name, for reasons both deeply loving and viscerally difficult that get explained in-show.
As it transpired, Daniel had recently released a memoir, called something like: Something that May Shock and Discredit You, which I intend to try and read soonish. And much of the focus of the show was growing up queer in the evangelical church, and fuck it was a funhouse mirror in which I recognized more of my own life than I think I ever have from a queer writer. With the fever, it was enough of both catharsis and gut-punch I was weepy.
Everything from:
- the getting saved to please your parents! because there was this sorta inevitability, even if you couldn't articulate it, that well. this is what's gonna happen and everyone expects it to happen. it's supposed to bring so much joy and relief and I want that, and it'll make them so happy
- the church not wanting to seem outright homophobic so just being deeply deeply sad about queerness and saying that we should be kind to gay people, the way we should be piteously kind to anyone with an affliction
- the slow evolution of queerness. from realizing you were lesbian to realizing it went slightly sideways from that onto the gender-nonconforming spectrum
- the fear that doing anything about those feelings will only result in regret, and the terror because no one has any easy answers for you; you just gotta walk the path (I'm still really struggling with this, and hearing it articulated, seeing Daniel's joy after resolving those fears, gave me such peace. No answers--and answers won't really come till I'm a little further away from the familial nest and pursestrings, but such peace that I can just. take small steps and see how they feel. that there's a way to gently ease into possible transition.
- And the immense difficulty of familial relationships when it's not so much rage but devastation. As though your queerness has blighted their crops. My interactions aren't as hard as Daniel's, but they're still. really fucking hard. And we hear a lot about families who rage at their queer children, but not so much families where it's just. immense disappointment and vast devastation.
The whole interview is so worth a listen. (had a very hard time finding a screen-reader friendly version, but if Google Podcasts doesn't work in your part of the world, it's available on all the usual suspects from spotify to apple.) But there's one bit that felt deeply revolutionary for me: it was a quote by Daniel's friend that he passed along. God made trans people for the same reason he made wheat and grapes, but not bread and wine. So we, too, could be part of his marvelous creative process, just as we are when we change grapes into wine and wheat into bread; so we can prove that we don't just inhabit our bodies but can sculpt them.
My feelings on faith are more agnostic than anything these days, but my God, if I'd had someone to say that to me as a struggling Christian kid, it might've changed the entire course of my life, and made it so much less complicated, and I'm so grateful there're people making a path for queer folk within religion.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-22 12:32 am (UTC)Also, I really hope you're getting some rest and mending.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-22 12:49 am (UTC)Also: virtual hug gladly accepted. :) And I'm mending, slowly but surely, I think. Going in for tests next week, cause three times of being completely flattened by illness in less than three months is a little...concerning, but hoping the fix'll be relatively minor and I can maybe spend the next few months not feeling like I've been flattened by a train.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-22 01:39 am (UTC)If your groaning to-read list has room for another point on the spectrum, I was actually just thinking about you as I read Ivan Coyote's second most recent book, Tomboy Survival Guide. I don't have a sense of how well-known Coyote is in the U.S., so I hope you'll forgive me if they're a household name and I'm overexplaining, but up here they've been publishing books and performing live for twenty-odd years about their experiences being genderqueer and more recently identifying as trans. Along with S. Bear Bergman, they've been my gender heroes (or maybe lifelines?) for years, but especially given that Coyote is from a blue collar Yukon family, there are things about their family relationships and experiences thereafter navigating more middle-class Canadian spaces that hit a little closer to home for me than Bergman's.
Anyway, I'm a book post behind, but I should be getting to this one soon - and! I just now saw that Coyote's newest-newest book is called Rebent Sinner. How is that for topical?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-22 04:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-22 07:41 pm (UTC)