Each week we celebrate that this community is an intergenerational one. We celebrate that no matter how old or young we are, we all have something to learn and grow in together.
When I was the age that some of you are, my parents had this book called “It’s So Amazing1.” It talked about peoples’ relationships with each other and how they make families together. And at one point it talked about how some men like men, and we call them gay, and some women like women, and we call them lesbians. As an eleven-year-old, this was the first time I had a word for how I felt about myself and other people, and reading about it so lovingly and gently meant a lot to me.
We’ll spend a lot of time in this service talking about the words we use to describe how we feel about ourselves and other people. You may hear words like “lesbian,” or “bisexual”; “gay” or “transgender”; and some of these words may be new to you. Or some of them may not. You may very well know people who are lesbian, or transgender, or bisexual.
And the more people you meet, and the more people you listen to, you may find that not everyone agrees on what these words mean. You that some bisexual people say they love men and women; and other bisexual people say they love people no matter what gender they are. You may meet some transgender people who say they’ve never been the gender people thought they were when they were babies; and you may meet some transgender people who say they used to be one gender, but they’re not any more.
And this can be confusing! It can be really confusing when you hear people disagree about what these words mean, and who can use them to describe their experiences. So here are two things I want you to think about if this seems confusing:
That’s what’s important. What is important is how we’re connected to each other, no matter how alike or not alike we are to one another. It can be easy to pay attention to how we’re different, or how people don’t fit in with each other. But what matters more, what will help solve some of your confusion, is looking for how people are alike, and how they’re connected to one another. What are the things they love? What are the things that make them happy, or safe? No matter what words we use to describe ourselves, you might find that we share more of these things in common than you thought.
In 2019, I served as celebrant in a service our senior minister offered about gender identity, where in place of a sermon they and I did a Q-&-A with the congregation. Amy and I fielded questions about our own experiences with gender, questions about trans experiences more broadly, and about other topics circling around queer experience. The questions were often thoughtful, sometimes challenging, and fitting the intent of the service, there were many questions about the words we use. Why do we call ourselves bisexual, or pansexual, or queer? Who gets to use what words to describe themselves, and why?
I remember one such question in particular. Someone in the congregation said that for a long time they identified as bisexual, but later their partner came out as nonbinary. They didn’t know if it was accurate for them to say they were bisexual anymore, and wanted to know our thoughts as nonbinary people. Speaking for myself, I answered that I identify as bisexual as a nonbinary person because it fits, in large part because of other trans and cis people I have known who describe their bisexuality as attraction to other people beyond the particularities of gender. Some people might find this definition more expansive than they’re used to, but as we heard in our first reading, bisexuals have described themselves in many and varied ways for decades – and yet still found connection in a single word. This history has played an important role in shaping the words I use to describe myself, and why. Over the years I’ve found that I use words to describe myself not only because of who I am, but because of who I’m connected to. This value of connection to other people is important to any community built around identity or shared experience – whether you’re queer, trans, or even Unitarian Universalists. While identity-labels can clarify our experiences or set us apart from other people, they can also help us realize the deeper connections we have with one another.
As you might imagine, the 20 or so minutes we had in that forum weren’t enough to dig into these complex questions. However, if you are an LGBTQ person, or spend much time listening to LGBTQ people, these questions and debates about terminology may sound familiar to you. We all belong on a spectrum both for sexual orientation and gender identity, as Isabella Gonzalez wrote in our opening words2. We all want to belong. We want to connect with people who experience the world like we do, when that world often alienates us. Finding words and labels can help us clarify our experiences and understand them in a broader context. In a 2018 article for Slate, Alex Myers wrote that:
Many coming out stories begin with internal clarity (I felt this way my whole life) mixed with external confusion (I didn’t know how to explain it), resolving when the person meets either an “out” person who acts as a life-model or encounters a term that explains what they have been feeling in language…They help individuals articulate what has previously been an undefined internal state3.
Whether a word, a person, or a community, encounters like these help people understand that their feelings, attitudes, and behaviors don’t exist in isolation. Reading that book on my parents’ shelf as a kid, I felt both a sense of clarity about myself, and a comfort in knowing there were other people in the world with feelings and experiences like mine. The words we use to describe ourselves can help us connect to people with similar experiences across time and space, and can feel like a refuge.
But perhaps in a perverse way, these labels and their assumed meanings can be used to establish and enforce rigid boundaries, separating out who belongs in a group, who doesn’t, and why. Later in her article4, Isabella Gonzalez alludes to the experiences of alienation from gays and lesbians that trans, bisexual, and asexual people can feel at times. Sometimes it’s for not being seen as “gay enough”, or as interlopers in “gay community” . Some gays and lesbians can perceive these other identities as weakening their political or cultural movements, such as the movements for marriage equality or freedom to serve in the military. Or even that, in Myers’ words, “by advertising an increasing array of identities, the community will appear too on the fringe and become an easy target for mockery5” from cisgender and heterosexual establishments.
When I look for this in my own life, I think to the time as a college sophomore when I heard an alumnus speak about being told by another organizer that he shouldn’t talk about his experiences as a trans man, because it would detract from a message pushing for marriage equality. I think to all of the times I’ve heard bisexual and asexual colleagues talk about feeling and experiencing alienation from gay and lesbian spaces for being “not gay enough” or having the assumed ability to “pass as straight”. Even more narrowly, I’ve known pansexuals who assume bisexuals are trans-exclusionary, because they assume bisexuality can only mean attraction to men and women assumed as such since birth. I’ve also heard bisexuals accuse pansexuals of recreating the wheel of being attracted to multiple genders. So, we’re faced with this irony: the tools we look to for our own liberation can just as easily be used to separate us out based on the perceived threats of technicalities, ignoring the common experiences, interests, and oppressions we face as LGBTQ people.
I think this boxing out is facilitated in part by an individualistic attitude to identity-markers and expression. Many of the narratives I’ve encountered around identity and labeling prioritize individual interest and experience. I hear this in the sentence Myers uses to close his article: “Everyone deserves a name6.” While this is accurate, I also find it cuts the scope of the issue down to personal choice. It ends the sentence before considering the community and connection that exist beyond individuals’ needs and experiences. And it’s not a narrative I can easily fit over my life’s experiences.
That book on my parents’ shelf, It’s So Amazing7, set me down a path to learn more about myself and other queer people, the names we call ourselves and each other. While it was true that I did like boys at that age, I had also had soft feelings for girls, and as a young teen I understood myself as bisexual. As I grew into young adulthood, I felt that interest in women was more limited, and I found it easier to tell other people I was gay when I first came out. In college I came to know people with many different genders and sexual orientations, and I felt I could be more nuanced in how I described myself. I remember calling myself a “panromantic gay,” which at the time felt like a way I could express the possibility of having romantic feelings for people of any gender (“panromantic”), but at the end of it being a guy most seriously interested in other guys. I later came to know myself as nonbinary and transgender, and not really a guy at all. I clarified then that I was pansexual, and later fell away from feeling represented by that word.
On one level I felt disconnected from how I heard other pansexuals I knew describe their experience of being interested in personalities rather than genders, and finding that’s never really been true for me. But I really came back home to calling myself bisexual because of the other bisexuals I’ve known. I think of my friend April, a nonbinary person who talked often about their experiences in bi activist groups in Minneapolis. Our first reading8 has also been incredibly important to me. I take a lot of comfort and guidance knowing that even thirty years ago bisexuals were pushing back against preconceived notions of who we are and how we feel. Even then we were making room for the wide variety of personal experiences we can have, still choosing to call ourselves by the same name, still recognizing that the similarities connecting us are stronger bonds than the differences that set us apart. This is why I say I’m bisexual – not just because of who I am and how I feel, but in recognition of who I’m connected to, across time and space.
All of this is to say that I may deserve to have a name, but which one? I’ve called myself by so many names, and eventually come back around to the first word I used to understand myself. I can’t make sense of this journey as someone making the decisions of an isolated individual.
I’ve had a similar experience as a Unitarian Universalist – and maybe some of you have as well. My own practices and worldviews have been shaped by Paganism, Catholicism, and Buddhism. I participate in Unitarian Universalist community, where I can cherish and uplift all of those influences, without feeling pressure to sideline or suppress any of them. I am a Unitarian Universalist because I value being connected in community to people with a broad range of spiritual and ethical traditions. The richness that comes from that connection is why I’m here. We are not Unitarian Universalists because of one thing we believe or one way that we practice or one source that we honor. We are Unitarian Universalists because of the common vision we have for our lives and the world, and for the connections we have with one another. We recognize that the similarities connecting us are stronger bonds than the differences that set us apart.
So in closing, I ask you to consider not just who you are, but who you’re connected to. Whose space, and values, and experiences do you share, even in spite of your differences? How are your lives richer because of these connections? While words can get in between us, the visions and values we share in common can see us through.
1. Robie Harris and Michael Emberley, It’s So Amazing! A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families (Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 1999).
2. Isabella Gonzalez, “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity: To Label or Not to Label,” Sex, Etc., June 27, 2018, https://sexetc.org/info-center/post/to-label-or-not-to-label/
3. Alex Myers, “Why We Need More Queer Identity Labels, Not Fewer,” Slate Magazine, January 16, 2018, https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/01/lgbtq-people-need-more-labels-not-fewer.html
4. Gonzalez
5. Myers
6. Ibid.
7. Harris & Emberley
8. Bay Area Bisexual Network, Anything that Moves, Winter 1991, retrieved from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xR2FbB2jJwAPKzkDxtfGDqmIcsfnvcHX/view