How Do I Look: In Which I Think a lot More about Caitlyn Jenner

Caitlyn Jenner, that beacon of femininity and gorgeous lips, apologized just now (that is, I am seeing it for the first time this morning) for saying some things that offended various elements of the transgender community. I won’t lie. I have a small, close knit online community myself (not that those are the same thing) and we very much enjoyed the idea that the hardest part of being a woman is figuring out what to wear. If you’ve decided to be a woman, and why wouldn’t you want to, figuring out what to look like is right there at the top of the list. And, if you find yourself already a woman, by the accident of your birth, laboring on, trying to sort out what to wear is a problem that is going to follow you always.

Ms. Jenner (I guess I’m just going to go with it) doesn’t want to look like a man in a dress, but also doesn’t want women who look like men in dresses and like it that way, or men who look like women in dresses but only because they can’t afford not to, to feel less than, or, beneath her in any way. They are all brothers and sisters. Although I’m pretty sure she just means sisters. They need to support one another and that’s what’s most important. And so you can see that the very most basic element of being a woman–cattily cutting other women down to size–is alive and well for Ms. Jenner and the trans community.

I have very mixed feelings about this whole dust up. First of all, l say, live and let live. If Ms. Jenner wants to be a woman rather than a man, good luck to her. She must take it up with God. I can only point out that God created, in the very beginning, male and female. The two genders are made in his image but they don’t, in isolation, reflect his glory. It is their relationship to one another, in marriage, that shows forth something particular about God. A single, unmarried person reflects the glory of God by reflecting Christ and his desperate and perfect sacrifice. Similarly, two people who come together under the bonds of marriage articulate something about the trinitarian nature of God. When you try to re-gender, or remarry, or in any way mess with the picture, you are saying something profound about what you think about God, and so he will have something serious to say to you. Still, my duty is to pray, and wonder about it all from a far distance.

Second, I do think, and I say this as a woman whose body has been fairly broken by the carrying of six infants, by laboring to bring them forth into the world, by sustaining them for a long while after they are born, and now by wandering around picking up after them and managing the physical nature of their lives, that figuring out what to wear is kind of a beast. The fashions of the age don’t want me to look matronly and feminine. They want me to look like a prepubescent boy. If I walk into the Gap and look for a pair of jeans, (and isn’t it shocking, my tyrannical husband allows me to wear trousers) whatever I’m going to find is going to cut in at the ankle so that my ample middle (which will never be flat because of, as I said before, all the children) is always well in view. I’ve been liberated more recently by following some high powered executive’s advice to wear a uniform. Her uniform is gorgeous. She wears it every day. My uniform is gray. I live in Binghamton. Every day, a gray sweater, gray trousers, boots, hoop earrings. So I don’t think about it any more. Except when I can’t wear my uniform, and then, just like Caitlyn Jenner, I take everything out of my closet and fling it down and weep and then call in my crack team of fashion specialists to tell me what they think. “You look fine, mom” they say, “gray totally goes with whatever that purple thing is.”

Third, what a person looks like, in a single moment, both does matter and does not matter at all. I know this because what I struggle with about my appearance is lived out more obviously in what I feel about my house. And this, incidentally, is why Ms. Jenner is wrong. The hardest part about being a woman is not figuring out what to wear, it’s trying to keep your wretched house clean. Sure, you can give birth and be sad about what happens to your lithe, young body, and then you can even sorrow over what to put on every morning. But after you stuff yourself into your clothes, you won’t have a lot of time think about yourself all day. What you’ll be doing is going around sweeping the floor four or five hundred times, picking up spoiled drawings of Darth Maul, removing puppy waste from every corner of your gracious living room, getting luncheon onto the table and then negotiating the horror of who is going to clean it up, and in every way trying to beat back the chaos of stuff that threatens to overwhelm your entire existence. Whether you are wearing a ball grown or a pair of overalls doesn’t really change the essential nature of the work you face every day. Even if you are very rich and can afford a maid, the sign of your gender is whether and how much you clean before that person gets there.

Solomon spent a really long time building the temple. And it was full of gold and cedar and beauty. And it was dedicated and the Spirit of God descended in power and great glory and it was full of his presence. God made his dwelling there and the people could come into that gracious court, that perfection of beauty, and be with him. But very soon, right away in fact, the people fell into sin. Solomon himself wandered away into the imaginations of his own heart, into idolatry and the worshiping of all his wives’ gods. And slowly the beauty of the temple was pilfered away. The gold was scraped off. Dust covered over piles of junk in back rooms. The book of the law was shoved somewhere and not bothered about for several hundred years. Like a body that ages, and decays, and is broken by wrong choices, bad living, sin, the temple reflected what necessarily happens to the human body. But God doesn’t get old, and ugly, and broken. Why would he let his temple, his dwelling place, fall into ruin?

Well, first to reflect what would happen to his Son. The Son is the place where we perfectly meet God. He comes here to be with us and we come into his gracious presence to know him. And his body was subject to the brutality and horror of death. But, and this is where all the threads tie up together, I think the temple falling into ruin, but it still being a place you could go to meet God, was a foretaste of the Christian experience of the body. God makes his home in you through the Holy Spirit. The glory and the beauty of his presence lives in your mind and your soul, and, remarkably, your body. But look at you. You’re a wreck to look at. You wake up out of bed and you’re older every moment. And you creak when you stand up. And your lips have not been shoved full of collegian. And your hair, oh ye gods, your hair. You should have repainted your nails three weeks ago and just when you managed to put something on, someone carefully applied jam to you. Your body is every moment going down to death, by degrees. Even if you try to change your gender, or your earrings, or your very sense of yourself, there’s nothing you can do to forestall the inevitable. And yet, if you are a Christian, God himself lives in you. And he is not changing or dying. But look at the wreck of your mind that he has to constantly be cleaning up. Look at all the rubble in your heart that he is constantly mending. As soon as you learn something or get something sorted out, immediately there is something just as bad in another corner.

In this way, it doesn’t really matter what you look like. It’s your inside that matters. But also, it really matters what you look like, because God made you. The healing balm for anyone who struggles with the brokenness of the flesh, of not being what you see in your mind’s eye, is to have God himself move in and make himself comfortable. The man, the woman, the confused, the ruined, can be a place where he lives. And when he lives in you, the purpose of your body is restored. Other people can shake your hand, or look in your eyes, or listen to you chatter, and can see glimpses, through the brokenness, of God himself. The relating of one person to another, through the body itself, can be mediated by God who is right there, reflecting his glory into the world. So just put on something. It’ll be fine. You look great.