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Welcome to my humble abode. Feel free to sit down a while and warm yourself by my fire. I write here mainly to inspire, encourage, perhaps confront, to empower, and to change. If you leave with a lighter step, an answer to a question, really questioning long held ideas that may not be taking you where you need to go, or with a lot of new things to consider, I will have done my job. Please enjoy your stay. With love, ~Mother Star

Saturday, June 29, 2019

"The world is watching us make a colossal difference between homosexual and heterosexual sin and claim that we do so because there is no difference!"

If I wrote an ethnography on my country and its attitudes toward homosexuality, I would not say there are people who have a construct of homosexuality being inborn and part of a person, and also people who disagree. I would say we have people who have said construct and deeply value it, and people who have the same construct but maintain a very ambivalent relationship with it, denying that they have it at all.


You can't behave like homosexual attraction or behavior makes one "other" and still say that you don't perceive it that way. It seems most church people do that though. There are numerous people I have met at work in my life who are church going people and cohabited out of wedlock or were having blatant affairs people at work all knew about. Wearing Christian shirts and leading church projects and talking to everyone about Jesus and their church and trying to witness to people while living in open sin. If they were homosexual they might have been kicked out of church, or just not been allowed to lead anything. More likely the former at the time. If homosexuality is grounds for dismissal from work, exclusion from certain occupations and military service because it is a sin, then why are adulterers and promiscuous people allowed to do these things? "It is a sin" does not justify exclusion from certain things unless it excludes everyone, except if this particular sin makes the individual a whole different kind of creature and different kind of case. If I said, "this is a different case than these other sins because it is a sin," I would sound crazy right?

Besides that, where does a Christian's responsibility begin and end? If a cashier gets fired for refusing to sell condoms to a gay couple on grounds she is "standing up for her faith" (I remember hearing about this happening sometime, I think...), did she ring up the product for other couples that may not be married or that clearly are not? If she is responsible before her maker for what the customer does with what they intend to buy, it would definitely be better not to be a cashier anywhere... You have to decide where the boundaries of your responsibility before your Maker lie and be consistent with them. If you "stand against" something on grounds of your responsibility before your maker and you do not have responsibility for it anyway, the person you are "standing up" to does, this is not "living out your faith" it is attempting to control someone else. It is a boundary violation. Jesus gave us all free will and with it comes individual responsibility. Now, if you attempt to force people to comply with the will of the Lord when no violence is occurring if you do not, this is not living your faith, it is violating the boundaries set down by the Master between you and that other person. You can't use responsibility before Jesus to get bullheaded about things you are not even responsible Him for, but people often do that.

I agree that a minister cannot stand and pronounce the blessing of Jesus Christ on a same-sex marriage, but I also see that if a person is leaving a spouse for a new one, the minister cannot pronounce blessing on that either for the same reason; it is not part of the biblical plan for marriage. Why are so many minister's performing blasphemous weddings? Kim Davis was on her 4th husband. There is this guy that plays bass in a local band around here who is on his 5th wife; he left every previous wife for whichever one was next. Most weddings are performed by allegedly Christian ministers, right? Who is doing all these blasphemous weddings WITHOUT ANY
CONTROVERSY? And why is that without controversy while we have churches splitting over homosexual marriage? It's all fornication right? These unions are wrong for the same reason homosexual marriage is wrong, it is against Jesus' plan for marriage, as He clearly stated in Matthew 19. Why do the heterosexual sinner's emotions matter so much that we have to ignore the word's of Jesus Himself to accommodate them and watch family after family be destroyed, and do not defrock the minister's who participate? Families torn apart and who knows what the fallout will be like for all those broken homes, but allegedly doesn't pose as much threat as a same sex marriage? People come up with all sorts of reasons, some of them absurd, why same sex marriage will destroy society, and watch their society destroyed by fornication in another form with comparative docility. If the word "fornication," or the term "sexual immorality" depending on your biblical translation, means sexual sin period, then we need to start acting like it. In the meantime we truly do manifest hate and discrimination, and cannot use the bible to justify our rage, because we are not really following it in any case.

"3 Then the Pharisees came to him, testing him and saying to him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for any reason at all? 4 He answered and said to them, Have you not read how it was that he who made man at the beginning made them man and woman, 5 and said, For this thing shall a man leave father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and the two shall be one flesh? 6 So then, now they are not two, but one flesh. Let not man therefore put apart that which God has joined together.
7 Then they said to him, Why did Moses direct to give a testimonial of divorce and to put her away? 8 He said to them, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your wives. But from the beginning it was not so. 9 I say therefore to you, whoever puts away his wife (unless it be for fornication) and marries another, breaks wedlock. And whoever marries her who is divorced, commits adultery.
10 Then Jesus’ disciples said to him, If this is the case between man and wife, then it is not good to marry. 11 He said to them, Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 Some are chaste who were so born from their mother’s womb. And others are chaste who were made so by men. And others are chaste who have made themselves chaste for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He who can receive it, let him receive it."

I think it is obvious that "whoever can receive this..." in Matthew 19 doesn't mean "Whoever wants to." Sometimes people leave you and you do not have a choice in the matter. They sinned, you didn't. Most marriages in the world are arranged (according to my anthropolgy professor, sometimes marriages are arranged by parents for impure reasons like greed or selfish ambition. I don't know that it happens all the time, but it happens. My church will not even recognize a forced marriage as valid, actually, and priests are required to make sure people are not joined in a previous union before they agree to do the wedding. If people are forced into a marriage against their will and can prove it or can prove some other legitimate thing nullifies the vows they took, the priest can still do the wedding. The priests are accountable for what they stand representing Christ to bless and bind, and take it very seriously. Therefore I think they have credibility in saying they cannot do same-sex weddings because it isn't in accordance with the divine plan. They are consistent in upholding said plan. But people who have blessed numerous adulterous unions without a thought, or blessed a union they did not expect to last for some reason, "What God has joined together let no man separate," violating the divine plan have no credibility in fighting gay marriage because they care so much about the divine plan. That just looks stupid. To say, "Well, I just don't receive it," for any cause whatsoever does not work, and you can't say anything about upholding biblical standards for marriage if you do not honor them yourself.

If you do not believe people are naturally and physically wired to be bouncing from one bed or one union to another, and sit talking about brain chemicals like oxytocin to state that we are wired to mate for life, but treat sins of promiscuity and adultery different from homosexuality, you have no credibility when you say you oppose "lgbt agenda" on grounds of it being a sin. The language "lgbt agenda" indicates an attitude of otherness too... We can't watch that show because it has homosexuality in it, but we watch unmarried sex every day and in every film, and we won't listen to songs about homosexuality that do not tempt us, but listen to songs about promiscuity and adultery, some of which very possibly might tempt us. We do this stating that we are walking out our convictions that homosexuality is "a sin just like other sexual sins and not anything different". We say fornication refers to sexual immorality period (it does), then we get entertained by what we call "fornication" and do not mind, but will not watch or listen to homosexuality "because it's a sin". We say we believe something but behave another way. Fornication is fornication, so either start acting like it is or stop talking.

Repentance is needed here. Jesus is the SAME yesterday today and forever, is no respecter of persons and doesn't make a difference for what kind of sins you are doing, as if some are actually ok (how would sin be ok?) and some not. If the church intends to be a living witness to the unconditional love, justice and mercy of our creator, then a lot more needs to be addressed than same-sex anything. Consistency is key. We are NOT being the same all the time and do not treat every sexual sin the same, especially if it is homosexuality. Ask yourself what you think is wrong to listen to or watch if it doesn't stir temptation in you, and be consistent about it. Where does your responsibility and your preacher's responsibility begin and end, exactly? Be consistent. Is it ok to watch shows and listen to songs about heterosexual unmarried sex? If so, you do not have a valid argument for the immorality of watching gay shows or listening to gay songs either, let alone to demand to have it taken off the air. You might not enjoy watching it (you might want to ask yourself why you do enjoy watching the other in that case...) but there would not be moral grounds. I'm NOT saying what you should watch or not, I'm saying, sexual sin is sexual sin, period. Do you really treat it that way? If not, think about what you need to change to make your behavior and your professed beliefs line up.


The world is watching us make a colossal difference between homosexual and heterosexual sin and claim that we do so because there is no difference!
It needs to stop.

Godspeed.

~Mother Star

Sunday, March 10, 2019

How Gender Variants Reinforce and Preserve Man-Woman Gender Norms

There is a great deal of noise lately about people who self identify as transgendered.
there is even noise about how this will help justify an unjust gender system.
I strongly believe this is not so. To choose to be classified as the opposite gender or a third gender on grounds that you do not dress or behave according to social norms assigned to your physical sex in a gender binary does not get rid of the oppressive norms of the gender binary, it preserves them.

Put it this way. G = Gender. S = Sex. And . . .

 S+G = Your worldview of who you are and how you fit/the role you play in the world around you

If there is a conflict between who you are inside, or your needs, or etc., and the gender norms for your physical sex, and you respond by doing this:

S+G
- S       What you will end up with is still G.

Some real life examples:
Native American tribes with more than 2 genders have classified people who performed occupations, or did other behaviors, socially assigned to the opposite sex separate, additional genders; this is often called a "gender variant" by anthropologists. Notice, please, that in order to have gender variants, they all have to have this . . . "baseline" I'll call it, of lifestyle norms associated with male and female bodies. Gender variants who were/are socially sanctioned and recognized as such adopt to one extent or another the lifestyle associated with their opposite sex. This did not lead to big changes in the baseline gender roles for men and women at all; the roles and expectations for most of the men and women of these tribes remained unchallenged and unchanged by the acceptance of gender variant lifestyles. Having people in their community running around breaking the rules of the gender system most certainly would have altered the basic set of rules for men and women sooner or later, but this was addressed by creating gender variants. These groups did not apparently have gender systems that were causing problems for most of their population though. Westerners do have serious problems with our gender ideology and are in need of real change. Another gender variant example, the Hajiras in India, are religious ascetics associated with a deity in the Hindu pantheon that is associated with the Hindu gender system --  a gender system where women are very severely oppressed. One of the Hajiras' roles is to officially call a baby a man-child or woman-child and bless their future fertility and their entry into this world, which seems nice, but other ways they appear to serve the deity of their gender system is by validating very powerfully the gender norms by how they express their third-gender identity. Hajiras, always physically male, have been demonstrating that they are not men by not working (along with some other more benign lifestyle choices, like wearing traditionally feminine clothes) for ages. They do not have jobs or homes of their own, which is seen as taking female attributes. This powerfully reinforces very oppressive gender ideology, and the effect is probably intensified further by the fact that these are clergyman of the gender-deity. Often, Hajiras themselves end up as prostitutes or beggars because of this. On the other hand, they use coarse language, which apparently Indian women cannot do, and are clergy. Clergy is a male-only role in Hindu belief, this along with the coarse language is seen as manly behavior. This gender variant obviously reinforces the gender norms that make it so hard to be a woman in Indian society. They have been doing this for ages, and it has not helped Hindu women a bit. I am skeptical and actually applaed when men take hormones to grow breasts and wear pancake make-up and fancy clothes, and get their picture taken and retouched and carry on about how beautiful they are and how great they are and are like, "See how womanly I am!" This does NOT help with the Western over-emphasis on women's physical beauty. constructing one's sex out of the equation when a conflict arises between who you are or what you need and the norms laid out for you doesn't fix a broken gender system. It can't.

If you say instead:

S+G
- G       You have taken the G out of the picture. you have defied and subverted the gender norms.

Some real life examples.


When the American suffragists fought for the female vote, they were called "unsexed" just to be mean, i.e. they were being told that they were not acting as women and thus should not be counted as such. People also said that voting would "unsex" American women. The suffragists did not accept any of this, but insisted that they were indeed women and would still do what they were doing and fight for the woman's right to vote. I have been voting since I was 18 years old as a result -- mainly in elections that they got the strongest resistance to having women vote in. At times, these ladies also cut their hair short and changed their clothing, which immediately identified them to any who saw them as "ultras", extremely radical feminists who wanted women to vote in all elections, including Presidential elections. If they had been reclassified as gender variants of some sort because of that behavior, maybe they would have been given the ballot buty most women would still not have it. At the time there were women who opposed women's suffrage because they believed all the lies in the gender ideology of the day, and said they didn't want to vote! If suffragists or women who wanted to vote were reclassified as gender variants and granted the ballot because they were not seen as women, most of us still wouldn't be voting and would still believe all the awful lies about ourselves that were so normal to believe back then. Gender variants do not subvert male-female gender ideology, they protect it from being subverted. Instead, American suffragists (and probably all the other country's suffragists too) violated their culture's gender norms, which led to changing those gender norms.

 Susan B. Anthony, the most famous and accomplished American suffragist, with her hair cut short in protest.

In the 1960s and before that, young men in America were often forced against their will to go to war. They were rounded up at their high schools to be tested and, according to an elderly friend of mine who was subjected to this multiple times, they were stripped naked and forced to stand before the cold, examining eyes of the recruitment officers as if they were cattle being scrutinized at a meat market.

Forced recruitment scene in "Hair" the movie, which my elderly friend said was quite accurate. I covered up his backside...
My friend and many others publicly burned the "draft cards" that were sent to them, ordering them to report to military bases for training. They grew their hair out, and rejected being classified as homosexual or effeminate because they did so. Today, it is illegal for our government to force anyone into the military. In that generation, people were spared the degree of media bombardment and brainwashing that we have today. If they had allowed the system to reclassify them, or maybe if the system had thought of reclassifying people who defied gender norms into non-binary gender types or gender variants, we would still have forced military service in our nation now. 

 
Another scene from "Hair" the movie, which my friend said was correct. People accused them of being homosexual or androgynous, but they rejected that classification just as much as they rejected the draft cards. If they hadn't, we would still have a draft, even if they did not have to participate.
In order to conquer an oppressive gender system, you must defy its rules. Defying its rules does not mean rejecting the body you are in, it means rejecting the system that makes your body feel like a prison.

In order to operate as a gender variant and claim to be one, you must first take the norms of the gender system as being in some way real and valid. To defy and destroy them, you must ignore or defy them and count them as invalid. Since gender is constructed by people, people's belief in it is the only thing that makes it valid or real. Sex, however, is concrete and real. You wouldn't need medical intervention into a healthy body if hormones were gender norms instead of sex traits, you could handle it all by yourself. You must believe in a gender ideology very strongly to arrive at the conclusion you are "transgendered" rather than saying you are a  man or woman and will still do things current gender ideology forbids because you want, or need, to. To call yourself in language according to the gender norms associated with the opposite sex (yes, gender is constructed but it is people's constructed ideas about sex), you further validate the gender system.

Besides that, sex hormones are not a gender norm, they are a sex trait. To believe you need to take hormones to be who you really are based on the gender system demonstrates excessive belief in the constructs one claims to realize are merely human constructs. To say, "Gender is socially constructed, sex is fixed biological reality. Therefore, who I really, truly and irrevocably am inside is a male despite my female body, and I need to take sex hormones to make my biology fit the that gender I am" is insane. "A is fixed, and B is infinitely changeable, therefore my true irrevocable and predestined self must be B and so I need to do something about my A," or "A is fixed and B is infinitely variable and changeable. Therefore, since B is infinitely changeable that means I can change my A however I want! :)" is a reasoning atrocity. If you tell me something like that, I know you are saying the words "gender is a social construct and sex is a biological phenomenon" without knowing at all what it means. Westerners are notorious for not being able to distinguish between the two. Yes, gender is socially constructed, but it is social constructs about biological sex. If you experience a conflict between how your gifts and interests are classified in your gender system and the body you have, then the gender system is what needs to change, not your body.

I used to feel like my body was a prison, a cage I couldn't get out of except by death. Not only was I female, but very small framed, very petite, and somewhat voluptuous. I didn't feel like I could do anything I wanted to do or be anything I wanted to be at all. I seriously considered suicide. I thought about hormones or surgery. I thought men were spoiled with their Y chromosome and their physical strength. I was raised a Christian and wondered how a loving creator could play such a seemingly cruel joke on me, giving me the desire to be and to do so many things and a body that made it either impossible or maybe even a sin to do them. The stupid beliefs I had about the meaning of my body in this life and world changed a little at a time. At work now, where I am the only female in this facility maintenance subcontractor crew, women who work for the company we subcontract to have said to me that they are so happy to see a woman doing what I do. The fact that I am small, and female, and somewhat voluptuous in figure and I operate the overhead cranes that I use and the other equipment that I operate makes them feel better. The women who have said this to me all run equipment that is much more complicated and their jobs are at least as dangerous and so on, yet some have actually told me "I could never, but I'm so glad to see a woman do this." They still believe they can't! They haven't woken up yet, but seeing me do  it makes some women feel a little bit better and to believe in themselves just a little bit more. Now I know why Creator put me in this body and gave me the desires and the talents that I have - to breakdown the lies this gender system has put in people's heads, little by little every day of my life. If I accepted a gender variant identity, that effect would be destroyed, and probably reversed. My life would not send a message to them, "Oh yes, you can!" It would say perhaps even more strongly, "No, you can't. Women don't run this kind of equipment here." Eventually, I realized that the difference between sex and gender is, sex is Creators blessing, it's the vehicle I drive through life, and it's beautiful, it's part of me, its how I have life in this world in the first place. It gives me real power in this world, it does not take it away. It can only limit me or cause me problems if I somehow fail to see the value in it. I really shouldn't hate it, ever. I've come to realize that, basically, gender norms are other people's will, my sex is the Creator's will, and the two ought not to be called the same.

This current gender system is still basically rooted in the same stuff that caused women not to be able to vote and young men to be forced to fight in wars that had nothing to do with them or their country. It still makes people think that motherhood is by nature an impediment to economic independence or a career, and thus leads to massive bloodshed in the name of emancipating women without actually bothering to emancipate anybody. It causes people to keep kids away from impoverished fathers because men are still seen as meal tickets not really as human beings. It has to go.

In conclusion, here are some pictures of people who identify as male, but do not accept the rules for how a man should look. They are not androgynous or gender variant in any way, they are not rejecting their maleness or even a binary gender system in their behaviour. they are rejecting rules other people made up. They are not rejecting the Will of their creator. Enjoy.

Godspeed.

~Mother Star

 Hippies of the 1960s
 Gothic Male model in a "manskirt"
 Christian rock band Petra receiving a Dove award, the Christian music version of a Grammy
 80s rock band Ratt
80s Christian metal band White Cross