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Photo: Courtesy of Chloe Aftel.

KIM



Many people in my life don’t initially understand gender that is beyond the binary. We really like boxes and labels. So when I would try to tell people in Seminary that I identified as genderqueer, most of the time they were initially confused. I suppose I am lucky that they generally wanted to be supportive, but they just didn’t “get it.” How can I not be one or the other?! So, ironically I used the tool of religious language, a language that sadly has been used to harm queer people to explain gender to them. I would ask them, “Is God a man?” and like good Emory University students, they would say, “No, of course not. I use inclusive language for God.” After all, in our scriptures there are in fact masculine images of God like “Father,” but there are also many feminine images like maternal images for the divine. So I’d ask them, “Well is God a woman?” and they would usually say something like, “No, God is beyond gender.”



So I’d just tell them, "There you go, I’m more like God than you are." And they usually would smile, and it would just click. They got it. There are things in life that are beyond definitions or labels. For me as a spiritual person I believe that the Divine (what some call God) is beyond our labels or language or anthropomorphic descriptions. As a queer person, I feel it’s a gift to live out, within my understanding of gender, something that is deeply spiritual and expansive.