Growing into my identity
As an empathic perfectionist, conflicts stung me. I used to perceive any conflict as a reflection of my flawed character. It took years of inner wrestling to understand that conflicts were opportunities to grow, not threatening, but nurturing in their tumult.
All too often, humans keep to their comfortable spaces, unwilling to engage in a conflict with those who differ. I do not have that luxury, nor do I want it. I open myself up to you today to push the conversation of sexual identity and religion, not as a destabilizing conflict, but rather a nurturing discussion that extends a welcome to all beliefs and identities.
I felt alienated in religious settings where my questions about the Bible and its origins were dismissed as irrelevant or spiritually weak, and as I learned more in school about the uses of the Bible to validate atrocities throughout history, I lost trust in my religious communities because the Bible wasn’t considered in its historical context or its imperfect translations. Specifically, I remember staying up one night at Christian camp reading Genesis 3, and as I read verse 16 in its NIV translation, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” I cried without really knowing why.
Until, that is, I read Wilda Gafney’s womanist interpretation. In “Womanist Midrash,” the pain of that passage healed as she explored how the Spirit of God uses she/her pronouns in the Biblical Hebrew; how it describes an androgynous being, not Adam but rather the adam, referring to humankind that is then split in two; how “over” translated to “in” and “with” more often, reading instead “he shall rule with you.”
When I stopped living in fear and started letting go and opening myself up to conversations around religion, I found space to wrestle with my identity, my God, and their Scripture, leading me to where I stand today as a bisexual, Christian, cisgender woman.
I may have known my identity for awhile now, but only until recently have I found a sense of representation and visibility through my studies of queer and feminist biblical scholarship. With help from the class “Gender, Sex, and Religion,” I was exposed to multiple approaches to the Bible beyond just traditional biblical studies.
“I think [including more perspectives] just makes for more accurate, more representative, more interesting scholarship,” Mika Ahuvia, an assistant professor at the Jackson School of International Studies, said.] “The more [people] are looking at a text, the more nuances they notice.”
It turns out that biblical authors had no language for sexual orientation and gender identity, but rather viewed sex and gender within patriarchal constructs motivated over the years by different political, religous, and socioeconomic influences.
When the topic of “homosexuality” did arise in the religious circles at youth groups or summer camp, I was told that the Holiness Code of Leviticus in Scripture not only addresses it, but condemns it. Never, however, was I told during these conversations of its historical context, where it fails to mention how these laws merely condemned sodomy — non-procreational sexual acts — not homesexuality itself, nor did anyone explain the cultural beliefs that influenced these laws.
In biblical Israel, there was a cultural necessity to understand the religious and social significance of their bodies and so, procreation was viewed synonymously to achieving immortality and wasting semen was thought to be impure and harmful because it was believed to hold the most crucial role in reproduction.
By exposing myself in a variety of knowledgeable, heavily researched interpretations, queer and feminist biblical scholarship specifically equipped me with a platform and the language to heal. Whether it’s the deconstruction of gender and patriarchy through reinterpreted creation stories in Genesis or the contextualized and researched approach to the Holiness Code of Leviticus, biblical scholarship redefined my relationship with the Bible and deepened my understanding of its authors and how interpretations changed with time, and how they were shaped by and influenced societal constructs of gender and sex.
Regardless, the search for community as a queer Christian continues. Whether it was my faith in secular communities or my sexuality in religious ones, I still don’t know where I belong, a feeling all too familiar in my experience between straight and LGBTQIA+ communities.
While we may be the “B” in LGBTQIA+, the bisexual community still faces health disparities and stereotypes from straight and queer communities for a variety of reasons.
“Our research has found that bisexual people do experience many health disparities, both in Washington state as well as nationally,” Karen Fredriksen Goldsen, a professor in the School of Social Work, said. “For example, we found that bisexual women compared to lesbians have higher rates of disability and are more likely to experience disability at earlier ages
Fredriksen Goldsen especially noted the community’s lack of visibility, where an “increase in visibility could create opportunities to further build and expand communities” as well as reduce stigmas.
“As we recognize bisexual lives, we can begin to understand their distinct experiences,” Fredriksen Goldsen said. “Our research has documented many disparities as well as strengths in this community, as bi people are resilient.”
At the intersection of religious, secular, straight, and LGBTQIA+ communities, if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the majority of these communities and the unique individuals within them don’t know how to interact with each other. As someone on the receiving end, the lack of dialogue between these diverse communities lends its hand to miseducation, stigmatization, and polarization.
When Ahuvia started teaching “Gender, Sex, and Religion,” she noted that the biggest gap she felt like she had to overcome was between the secular and religious students. Now, four years later, it’s shifted.
Silence and invisibility serve no one, so I will never refuse the challenge to uproot what I hold true, wrestle with it, learn, and grow.
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