Ep. 7 - GENDER (Pt. 2)

Transcript:

Leo Wolters-Tejera.: We need to get away from this, just, so black and white, like, fixed, rigid, binary, penis and vagina and facial hair and makeup kind of narrative, to where we can have an open conversation. And frankly, I think some people rely on the binary to avoid having important and difficult conversations, but we can have them and the world will be better for it.

You're listening to The Talk: a podcast where we explore the possibility of creating a radical new communication environment between parents and children. An environment that's open, honest and candid, and where nothing is off limits.

L.W.T.: Is it great? No. Is there a lot of hatred? Yes. Do black and brown trans women still die by the hands of hateful people at an alarming rate? Absolutely. And that is a genocide. That's happening, right? But we're talking about it. So there is that conversation happening, and no change can happen without the precursory conversation.

Hi, everybody, it's Jeremy. You're listening to part two of our exploration of gender and parenting. And in this episode, we'll be talking about gender mostly through and around the lens of current culture, and also dipping into the ways that Western Christianity has brought us to where we are now as a culture when it comes to binary systems of thinking, and what that thinking could possibly look like in the future. Enjoy.

In 2010, Leo Wolters-Tejera started a project called Conversations. Leo has a lifelong history with church and religion and faith, and is deeply knowledgeable about theology and biblical history, with education and degrees to back it up. But Conversations isn't a church. I mean, there's no building to go into, there's no rigid leadership structure, and there don't seem to be any rules about who is welcome, or any discussion topics that seem to be off limits or even discouraged. So yeah, not a church. I suppose you could make the argument that the early Christian church looked something like what conversations is, or that it shares a lot of similar values with Latin American liberation theology, which centers around social concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed peoples? So what is Conversations? I decided to ask Leo directly.

L.W.T.: It kind of was an outcropping of my senior capstone project at Nyack when I was a pastoral ministry major. And it's like I what church would be if it wasn't so shitty. Like church without the bullshit, yeah. And so I do like a weekly conversation on Sunday night with someone interesting. And it's sort of just like a spiritually-minded conversation about life and belief, and really anything in between there. It's interfaith and intersectional. So, lots of different topics, lots of different guests. And then I have like the Facebook community that meets, a Discord channel that meets, we have a book group, I do like a weekly kind of more spiritual, almost like a sermon-esque, but it's a little more open-postured than just Christian. So kind of like a whole project going on there.

Jeremy: That's awesome. That sounds like a great community that you've kind of built around...

L.W.T.: Yeah, I'm definitely trying here. Basically, when I moved back from college, I was like, man, in college, there's just people who want to talk to you all the time. And now outside of college there's not that space for community. And I found that church was like a little limiting, especially after I came out. By limiting I mean just horrible and regressive. And so I kind of wanted to make something that was not that, but a place where I was being challenged to think intellectually and spiritually about bigger issues. And I'm a verbal processor, so I work best through conversation. And so it just kind of came up from there.

Jeremy: Yeah, I remember after college, like I got married. And through college I was really invested in church, faith, that kind of community. And after college I went through this really 180 phase, like through atheism, and became like this real kind of asshole evangelical atheist. And it took me a long time to sort of come back around to understanding the importance of the community functionally that church and religious communities can have.

L.W.T.: Exactly.

Jeremy: And so I really do appreciate that. I'm not part of a church or any kind of organized faith at this point. But I have come back around to really appreciating that that's important.

L.W.T.: Absolutely. I kind of ask people, like I posed the question: If you were a part of church, what do you miss? Or if you toy with the idea of church, but then ended up not being able to deal with the doctrine—what is it that you're wanting and seeking? And the number one answer is community. And so conversations actually started in 2010, and we did meet all in person. We met every week for like four or five years straight. We went on a couple humanitarian aid trips overseas. And we met in various places from like church basements, to coffee shops, to my living room. We had a critical mass of like, 40 people. It was pretty dope, but then I met my wife, and we have five kids. So there was like a whole period in there where I had kids from ages three to 14 in my house at all times. And that only changed recently, with a couple of them becoming adults. So I was like, okay, now's the time to like, reinvigorate it, especially because of COVID. It was a great relaunch.

Jeremy: It turns out that Leo and I have a connection that goes back to our childhoods. When I was a kid, my family attended the same evangelical church that Leo's grandparents attended, and I remember them pretty well. Leo's parents also attended that church later, but I don't think we overlapped. In the 1970s my grandparents were the directors of Delta Lake Bible Conference Center in upstate New York, where Leo and I both attended as campers during summers, and where Leo also worked as a teenager. With all this family and church overlap, it is possible we met as kids, but I don't think so. It turns out, though, that Leo and my sister did work together for a couple summers at camp.

L.W.T.: It's weird, because like I had some of the best memories of my life happen there. But then also, they completely disavowed me when I came out, so I haven't been back since I was there every summer from the time I was 10 till the time I was 20. I would spend every summer there with my grandparents, and then just all the sudden it was just boop, like done. And so I have so many great memories there, but then there's just this weird, like, cutting-off point, you know? But I guess I just think about the good stuff and have worked through rest and counseling, so to speak. You got to do what you've got to do right?

Jeremy: So would you tell me a little bit about your kids?

L.W.T.: Yeah, absolutely. So I have five kids. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people, like, ask my wife, "Which, which ones are yours?" And I just want to start off by saying, I have been peed on, and pooped on, and threw up on, and bit, and compared to Hitler, and disavowed by all of them. So I'm pretty sure they're all mine.

Jeremy: They are all yours.

L.W.T.: And that's one of the things that's like the most important to me, because there's this conversation that I think is—at least here where I live—it's a small town, right? So there's this weird conversation that I have to engage in with people to explain why my children are brown and black. And I'm like, holy crap, it's 2021. You know what I mean? So they're all equally my kids. And I think together, we just make up the most interesting family that I've ever seen. Because literally no two of us have the same skin tone, we have multiple different gender identities within our family, different orientations. And we're all very, very open about it at all points. My children: Currently, I have a daughter who is 21. She lives in Korea. She's in the military. She's in the army, which was like something that she told us one day when we were at work. She was like, "Hey, by the way, I joined the army." And we were like, "Wait, what? Come again?" You know what I mean? She's actually doing really well. And I think she needed this to grow up. So that's Eve, then we have a 20 year old, his name is Al. He is transgender, and actually just got his approval for top surgery.

Jeremy: Oh, congrats.

L.W.T.: Kind of cool, because he's going to the same surgeon that I went to.

Jeremy: Oh, beautiful.

L.W.T.: Yeah, that was pretty cool. He's super smart, super nerdy. Very, very cool and interesting kiddo. Then we have Isabella, she is 18. And she just graduated last year. She took a little bit of a gap year, mostly because of COVID, but a little bit because of like, adult phobia, you know what I mean? Like, "Oh, now I have to do something!" Then we got Kiki, who is 15, and she is some type of gender fluid. She's still kind of figuring it out. But to kind of compound or coexist with with that gender fluidity, she also is on the autism spectrum. So she would have been formerly referred to as a person who has Asperger's, but now it's all autism spectrum. So we've gone through a lot of interesting phases with Carissa. She would look me straight in the eyes and say, like, "You're not my dad, and I will never consider you to be my dad." But just about, like, two weeks ago she actually like apologized to me for that. So it's been like seven years that she's been biting me and cursing me out. And she apologized to me and I was like, "I'm glad you're in our lives, and I'm glad you came into our lives and then did leave, and I'm glad you love mom." And we got to have a really tough conversation but a good one because she said, "To be honest, I didn't think that you liked me." And so we got to have a good conversation about how I am her parent, but I'm also a human who has feelings. And after so long of being yelled at and spit at and treated abusively...it was uncontrollable when she was younger, because she didn't have the tools to express herself. But as she got to her preteen years, she chose to act that way towards me. And I told her as a human being, I can only take so much of that. So I had to shut down to not get hurt. You know what I mean?

Jeremy: What a beautiful conversation to eventually be able to have with her. That's remarkable.

L.W.T.: Oh, it was amazing. Yeah, and every one of the kids, we've had this conversation with— once they hit 15. But the years of 10 through 12 are just a giant shithole with the kids.

Jeremy: I'm looking forward to it.

L.W.T.: Right? And my youngest now is 12. When I met him, he was three. So I've been a parent for the majority of his life. But he's 12 now, so I'm not his dad anymore. The other day, I sent like a timehop memory in our group chat. And he literally wrote back in the family text message. "Don't send me any more pictures of me with Leo, I want no more memories with him. He's not my dad." That's verbatim, not that I took that to my counselor or anything. We're awaiting the redemptive phase with him. And right now currently, since he's 12, he's in his rebellious phase. So when your parents are Elle and I you can't go the whole emo route because we've been there done that may still actively live there. So instead of being emo, my son is currently a republican cowboy. And I shit you not a legitimate Stetson, a legitimate rodeo belt buckle, and the Garth Brooks box collection. He also likes to pose with his BB gun on a rock for his Instagram and post "Us Trump supporters got to defend our country", and just all sorts of crazy stuff. And at the beginning of the summer, he was making George Floyd protest signs. So a real 180 there. The thing for him is because he's 12, he's got that ordinary 12 year old factor going on, right? He also has the switching of households. And it's very, very different. And he's always identified with us moreso. Like, he's always been safer at our house, so he's always acted worse at our house, which is a double edged sword. But then also, now...his dad has three other children, and the mom of two of them is in and out of his dad's life. So Michael is trying to win his dad's affection, while also avoiding making his dad angry. And so the best thing that you know, anyone could do in that situation would be to assimilate with that person. But I'm pretty sure it's just his preteen hormones.

Jeremy: And what a situation for a child to be in. Like, I can't imagine what he must be going through emotionally and psychologically, you know?

L.W.T.: it's a it's a long road but Elle and I just keep telling each other like, this is the last one.

Jeremy: Wow, Leo. You know, I have two kids, and they're four and six. And I feel like any sort of complaining that I do about..."This is difficult, this is tough..." what you've just talked me through...you and Elle are doing an amazing thing, I think.

L.W.T.: Yeah, we're sure trying. And if anything, we're going to err on the side of being a messy, safe space as opposed to a tidy sterile space. So there's different challenges throughout the age brackets, but I guess the the redemptive notion of all of it is that eventually they become humans again, and you might get a year or two of that before they move on and leave you.

Jeremy: Are you seeing with your older ones—and I don't know if you went through this with your parents—but, that stage where you are you able to sort of transition from that parent-child relationship into more of a friend or peer relationship? Are you starting to see that?

L.W.T.: Very, very much so. Absolutely, yeah. I would say with everybody but Mikey now I'm kind of in that space with them. Karissa, she's still in high school, so it's a little bit different. But she's getting up there you know, two, three more years. But my other adult children, we have our own chats, like our own text message chats. We send each other like inappropriate Jeffrey Dahmer memes all the time. We watch shows together, I have matching tattoos with my oldest daughter and also Elle and I have matching tattoos with her too. I tattooed my son Al—gave him his first tattoo. So we all have those little special relationships. But I've definitely had that redemptive turn of the corner moment with all of my older kids.

Jeremy: That's wonderful to hear. That must be such a great feeling.

L.W.T.: It's literally euphoric. Probably like, one of the moments that is...it's so deeply meaningful because you're like, "Man, I was just trying to keep you alive at some point." and now I find myself like, "I wish we could just go get dinner together." You know?

Jeremy: I am curious when you were growing up—when you were a child—in your household, in your community, in school, if you have memories of first becoming aware of what the world thought about gender. About what boys and girls do and are, and should be, and act like and that kind of thing.

L.W.T.: I grew up in this very white, patriarchal, typical evangelical area and space. It wasn't one geographical area, because I moved a lot. But my dad was an evangelical pastor. So I spent my whole life steeped in that sort of environment growing up. And my whole social circle was in that sort of environment, particularly in the Christian and Missionary Alliance. So my understanding of the world was so binary and so gendered that I did not know it until much later in life. I was fed explicit gender constructs and ideas and roles, but I was fed them in such a way that I didn't know there were other points. Does that make sense? So I didn't that there was another way around the topic, basically. And so from the very earliest age, I was kind of, you know, girls wear dresses and boys play with Tonka trucks, and girls go to Girl Scouts and boys go to Boy Scouts. I was told these things, but I was kind of always a gender rebel, from the time I was young. And it almost makes me wonder—when I look back at my childhood—it almost makes me wonder if my parents had an idea that I was different on some level, because they were always kind of trying to just shape and create this prescriptive way to be, right? And I fought really hard against that. I literally remember one time for Christmas, I got a Talkgirl, instead of a Talkboy, like in the Home Alone movie, and I just cried. And I cried. And I was like, "It's not what I wanted!" It's the same thing, but pink with purple buttons, you know what I mean? But my grandma ended up taking it back and getting me the Talkboy. And at one point, like I remember getting Tonka trucks for Christmas. I just never did girl very well. I don't know if my parents knew that I was trans. Or if they just saw myself as like an aberration to the binary that they were taught, right? My parents didn't see themselves as a part of the binary because they weren't aware that it existed, right? They didn't know about the matrix. But I definitely grew up within that gendered binary system, and the Bible was kind of used to be the basis of that binary that I grew up in.

Jeremy: Yeah, I was gonna ask if you felt like your parents had a sense that there was something other than that binary construct, because I'm sure that came from their parents and came from their parents.

L.W.T.: Absolutely.

Jeremy: And so it's hard to blame parents for what they don't know, you know what I mean?

L.W.T.: Exactly.

Jeremy: And I'm sure you have turned that over, in your mind endlessly.

L.W.T.: A million times, because people have always told me like, why don't you just cut your family off? Or why don't you just take a step back from your family? And I'm like, you don't understand. So they did some not great things, but it came out of a system that they were taught. And to be fair, on a note of parenting: I wouldn't want to parent myself, that would be terrifying. I challenged everything my parents knew, you know what I mean? And I still do to this day, my brother does as well. So we always hold interesting roles at family reunions and stuff, but it would have been terrifying to parent me, and to have the worldview that they did—so deeply held for generations in our family.

Jeremy: Yeah. I relate to that so much, and the more people and the more parents that I talked to like that, that sentiment holds so true: We want to change the message, but our parents are only to blame to a certain degree.

L.W.T.: Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy: I love Ibram X. Kendi's umbrella analogy. I don't know if you know about it, but where he talks about the idea that it's possible to be a victimizer and a victim simultaneously. And if we approach victimizers with that mindset, then we can approach them in a way that is actually coming from compassion and understanding.

L.W.T.: Absolutely.

Jeremy: We all only know what we have been taught.

L.W.T.: Exactly.

Jeremy: And until something else comes into our frame. We have no way of adjusting that. Now, once that thing comes into our frame, we decide what to do with it, and then it's on us.

L.W.T.: Then you're fully accountable, right? Exactly. It's like the age of accountability in Christianity, right? Like, you know, once you hit that age you're suddenly magically responsible or like, I think it was Maya Angelou who said, "When you know better, you do better." So you're only responsible once you know. And then once you know, man, I'm not letting you off the hook. Like you gotta fix that.

Jeremy: In our culture now...I feel like there's so much that's happened in our culture in the past couple generations in terms of, like you said, that awareness and the ability for us to see and access other people and other types of people in the world. That we just didn't have the ability to share ourselves in the same way that we have over the past couple of generations, through social media and stuff. And so I'm curious what kinds of things you feel are really positive in terms of people's perspectives on gender, people's communication around gender? What are some things that are going really well?

L.W.T.: I think there's actually a lot of things going well in that realm, I believe. Especially in our current moment in history, right? I believe it was Time Magazine put out an article maybe two, maybe three years ago, with Laverne Cox on the cover. Laverne Cox is a black trans woman actress who  started off in Orange Is The New Black, but has kind of blossomed into this sort of all-over-the-place figure, and activist, and career woman. And she's also amazingly beautiful. So Time Magazine ran an article called "The Transgender Tipping Point". And I think that there was a cultural momentum building up to that point, and we really did hit that precipice and now we're kind of launching at a higher rate of speed into this conversation about gender and gender diverse people in our society. I wouldn't say it's mainstream now. But I would say we're starting to roll around to the place where people are recognizing that there is proper nomenclature to use. Even if you disagree, you can still refer to people correctly. There is some legislation that is coming around. In the past 4 years it's been rough. But I think culturally, that momentum didn't stop even when the White House was turned against us for a moment there. But I think that there are conversations happening within our society. And I don't think that you can have any change without having a precursory conversation. So to me, the fact that we're having this conversation in society is fantastic. I'm not black, and I don't want to appropriate someone's culture, right? But in the civil rights movement, back in the '60s, it was a lot of black people marching for black people. But if you look at the Black Lives Matter movement, from this summer, there were black people, there were white people, there were gay people, there were straight people, there were atheists, there were Christians, there were all sorts of people in the streets. And so what happened between the civil rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement is an integration of our society, because no longer is it just like the black people in this neighborhood are unhappy. All of the sudden, you have people in proximity to people that they wouldn't have been previously, because of, you know, just geographic movement, cultural exposure, and certainly social media. So people are in proximity to people who are different than them. And I think that's what changed the face of the Black Lives Matter movement to look different than the civil rights movement. And I think you see also that parallel when it comes to LGBTQ people, and particularly in relationship to gender diverse ideas, right? So there is that conversation happening, and no change can happen without the precursory conversation. Is it great? No. Is there a lot of hatred? Yes. Do black and brown trans women still die by the hands of hateful people at an alarming rate? Absolutely. And that is a genocide that's happening, right? But we're talking about it. It's not just hid on the back page anymore, or left out of the newspapers. It's there, and it's a cultural conversation. So we are not where we need to be, but we are definitely past that precipice where we've got some greater strides and momentum, in my opinion.

Jeremy: Yeah. And speaking of not being where we need to be, I'm curious about what you think where-we-need-to-be could and should and maybe will look like. Is there a place where gender diversity and knowledge about gender is just so fundamentally built into the way that kids are raised that it's just not a conversation anymore? Is it like "water is wet, this exists" is that a place that we should sort of strive to get toward? Is that possible?

L.W.T.: With Christ all things are possible. No, sorry, I had to do it. It just slipped out. But I was just having this conversation with two friends of mine today who are friends of both Ella and I. We're couple friends. And these two individuals are...one of them has been identifying as non binary for about six or seven years now. They were assigned female at birth, and they have since begun to transition medically with the use of testosterone and they have had top surgery, right? So they appear more masculine to the world, but they're firmly non binary, use they/them pronouns. And then my other friend is coming around to this understanding of some sort of gender variance. And she's playing with it still, and she's not sure what it is. She just knows she's not exclusively female. And so she's kind of beginning to talk about this. And so of course you've got me, you've got Elle, like, we're all LGBTQ. There's a very safe space. So we were just all talking today and I actually said...my friends are pregnant right now, and so I said to them, "How do you plan to raise your child like, do you plan to raise your child genderless?" Because I have seen that. Now that seems like some yuppie white BS, if we're being honest, like, "I have a genderless child named Antler!" you know what I mean? Like, that's some floppy-beanie-wearing, TOMS Shoes, kind of hipster stuff. But it's an idea that's out there, people will kind of raise their child in this genderless existence until their child is able to kind of express via words or actions what they kind of prefer. That's kind of a cool utopia. But my friends brought up a great point. They're not going to do that with their child, because our world is not at that point. And so while their child would experience a genderless existence at home, their child would be gendered in the outside world. And so they would be kind of more worried about the turmoil that that could cause. So they're going to talk to their child in a way which I think is really wise. And it's very similar to the way that Elle and I do, I just didn't get to start from birth. But they are going to start talking to their child using the pronouns that fit with the gender that they are assigned at birth because that's the thing that's assigned by a doctor, it's not like a biological mandate. But they're going to go with that but continually and consistently express the idea that the child is free to be how they need to be. And if at any point, they feel like they need to talk to my friends, they will be able to, so they are going to use gender in terms of pronouns and stuff. Gender in terms of color—that doesn't exist, so we're not even talking about that conversation, because that is so archaic. But they do plan to kind of use societally acceptable gender terms, until they can have a conversation with their kid that would show them otherwise. And if the conversation doesn't come, then their child will just, you know, be cisgendered, which is fine. So, I don't know, there's a utopian state where no one has to come out, and no one trans has to transition. But that would be centuries and centuries and centuries away from us. Because in particular, Western Christianity has really built this foundational...they've baked this idea of gender into the foundations of our modern world. And it was specifically Western Christianity, because there are a lot of Eastern religions and cultures and indigenous cultures that from the very beginning had more of an understanding of gender than just two binary genders. This idea of other gender ideas and presentations and expressions exists in all parts of history in indigenous populations. And they go back far enough to predate Christianity. So it was an interesting move by people who wanted to spread their religion and their culture to bring gender up.

Jeremy: Yeah, it's just another interesting example of how the desire for power is, so at the root of that religious spread.

L.W.T.: Absolutely.

Jeremy: Because splitting people into a binary system and insisting that they are intrinsically different from one another is such a wonderful way of creating an Other.

L.W.T.: Yes.

Jeremy: An in-group/out-group. Putting people in these spaces of defensive and offensive position. And it's such a...I don't think I had thought of it through that framework before. So thank you.

L.W.T.: Yeah, it's a manufactured sense of privilege and disadvantage, right? It's happened all across the world, all throughout history. But it definitely happened in the beginning of the United States. We manufactured the idea of race so that the white indentured servants would no longer feel solidarity with the black slaves, because the white indentured servants and the black slaves launched an insurrection. And so the American government, which was steeped in patriarchy, and Christendom, and binary thinking, said, "We've got to divide you", right? So we make race. So now you're not an ethnicity, you're white, and they're black. So boom. And then they manufacture discontent. And I think that that happens in so many ways, with so many power structures, and it definitely, definitely happens in terms of gender.

Jeremy: If you ever have grandkids, which, you know, could be anytime to be honest for you. But...

L.W.T.: Don't you say that!

Jeremy: But I guess I'm saying one or two or three generations down the road. How do you hope that parents will be generally talking to their kids about gender?

L.W.T.: I don't think that the idea of gender is evil, right? But I think the insistence that it's binary is problematic. Humans create categories because it's a way to help us understand the world around us. And that is not a problem. That is fine, until you allow those categories to manipulate people instead of people defining the categories, right? And so I think gender is a fine tool to discuss your interests and your experience of the world. But as someone who has had the insider privilege of seeing the world react to them in both genders, we need to do it differently. Because it's not a fixed concept. And it's not a moral mandate. Like, a transgender person is no less moral or valu[able] than a cisgender person. And so I would hope that two, three generations down the road, what we're seeing is a conversation where we play with gender, we talk about gender. We're like, "Oh, that's funny. They used to think that girls couldn't dot that dot", right? Or, "they used to think that boys only blah, blah, blah, because of testosterone." You know? I'm so sick of the false narrative of like testosterone rage. Like, when I transitioned, everybody was like, "Did you get angry?" And I was like, "No. Like no, dude." Like, I got pretty...I got a lot more mellow when I had testosterone in my body, because to be honest, my estrogen levels, like, they mellowed out a minute. So I didn't get ragey. And so I would like to see a world where we can talk about gender. And we can use these things as tools, but we can pick them up and put them down as we need, right? I think just like we have worked hard to develop cultural competency in terms of how we relate to people with different ethnicities. Even, you know, having a cultural conversation about the fact that different ethnicities exists, aside from skin tone, right? That's fantastic. We need to be able to have a cultural competency when it comes to talking about gender. And we need to not be so scared of people who are not either/or, you know? It's not scary! And ultimately, so many people's understanding of gender boils down to what my genitals are. I get asked so many times, "what are you" that I really would just like to point out to people that you're asking about my reproductive system, you know? And so we need to get away from this, just, so black and white, like fixed, rigid, binary, penis and vagina, and facial hair and makeup kind of narrative, to where we can have an open conversation. And frankly I think some people rely on the binary to avoid having important and difficult conversations, you know? It's a fact. Like people do, but we can have them and the world will be better for it.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think you're right.

That's Leo Wolters-Tejera or Leo WT. Leo is the creator of Conversations Official, an interfaith, intersectional, multi platform community group that facilitates spiritually-minded conversations about life, belief, and the intersection of the two. You can find Conversations in podcast form, blog form, Facebook form, Twitter form, Instagram form, Tik Tok form—all of the forms—and you can find them all by visiting conversationsofficial.com

L.W.T.: My favorite thing in the world to do is talk. Like, that's why I went to school to be a pastor. Shit time to come out, but you know, here we are. So I gotta channel it somehow.

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Goodbye.