My lovely daughter Annie became engaged last week to her beloved Edward. Wait, Annie? The daughter who came out and started our journey to be allies and advocates? Yep, Annie. And yes, Edward is a guy.
So yeah, there’s a story to that! Annie is the one who came out to us five years ago – now as what she chooses to call herself: queer. Bi was her second-choice word, and she says she was always attracted to both men and women. But she prefers queer because it is outside the gender binary (male/female, with no gradation). She and so many in her generation stand outside the gender binary saying it does not represent them. They are feminine and also masculine. Sometimes both and sometimes neither. And what defines masculine and feminine? And how helpful are those distinctions compared to the harm they have caused by boxing people into a description that does not fit them?
As for Annie, she dated women, and she dated men. And Edward turned out to be the one to spend the rest of her life with. Hooray! We love Edward, we think he and Annie are a great match, and we look forward to a long and happy life for the two of them together. Nothing could make me happier.
But it is not the “relief” I would have expected it to be when this began for us five years ago.
When she first came out to me, I was afraid for her, afraid of what being with a woman would mean for her life (i.e. bullying, being judged and being excluded). For her to meet the man of her dreams would have been my “dream-come-true.” Her being engaged now to a man was the most I could have asked for.
But it is not that. God used this path Annie has been on to bring Rob and me to where we are today. Thank God! We have discovered an entire community that the church has marginalized and hurt and whom we love and staunchly defend. This whole work that is FreedHearts may never have happened if Annie had not courageously opened the door to this journey way back when.
When our straight middle daughter got a trans* f2m housemate, it was not a big thing. We embraced him as much as anyone else in our kids’ lives. Maybe more so, because of the tenderness of his heart, having been through so much pain. Of course, Hannah, our youngest, is grateful because Annie’s coming out made it way easier for Hannah to come out later.
Here is an interesting thing you need to know: Annie is not someone who was queer and who is now straight and marrying a man.
She did not “come to her senses.” The freedom for Annie is that she does not have to sacrifice her queerness to be with Edward. He loves her for exactly who she is. Her queerness allows them to step outside the gender binary, the “here’s how heteros behave.” They do not consider themselves a “cisgender, hetero couple”—they are just them, in a non-definable relationship. They resist heteronormative descriptors, and I love that about them.
Annie’s journey, and so our journey, has torn down artificial barriers that should not have been there in the first place. We have discovered even more the fractures of those traditional heteronormative roles. What do I mean by traditional heteronormative roles? Here’s an example. Several years before all this, my friend was in her Bible study where the leader talked about marital roles—meaning traditional roles where the woman runs the household in support of her husband who does his job well to support the family. Very traditional, very conservative.
My friend said to me over coffee, “That role does not describe me at all.” Though this woman is conservative, in the mainstream of the church’s congregation, she is also a professional whose kids are nearly grown, who works every bit as hard as her husband at a career. Those roles of running the home and of bringing in the income are no longer the way they were in the 1950s. To try to fit a modern marriage into that grid is to cripple both women and men into artificial roles that no longer fit them.
Believe it or not, to vary from this description was once considered by the church sinful and outside of God’s plan.
It’s analogous to the situation when interracial marriage was new, with a lot of fear about blending of the races. What would happen to the children of these marriages? Would they be black or white? Would they be outcasts? Now, having gone through several generations, the blended race is no longer an issue. Not that we don’t have many race issues to heal and fix, but mixed race is not off the grid as it was several decades back.
Again, this was also once considered by the church as sinful and outside of God’s plan.
Sound familiar?
Gender issues that look unknown and scary right now – and are considered by the non-affirming church as sinful and outside of God’s plan – will not longer be that way in coming decades.
It’s a strange new world out there, as roles morph and even genders are not as cut-and-dried as they were once thought to be. For many of us, such a thing is unthinkable. But for our kids’ generation, it’s the new normal.
So, I am glad God is a big God! And I am thrilled to help plan a queerly wonderful, beautiful, perfect wedding. 🙂
I will keep you posted!
* If you want to understand the gender binary and queer identity, you might want to call your local PFLAG, or you might look at one of these great videos: HERE and HERE
You can learn a lot. And you don’t need to fear the unknown. The world is big enough for all of us!
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