Deconversion - check; Deconstruction - in progress

I have been detoxing from my scrupulous religiosity for a good many months now.  

The first thing that happened is I gave myself permission to miss Sunday Mass.  This was big bc I had an almost compulsion to work around that weekly ritual.  Now, having missed a few Sundays, I am able to still attend without it feeling like a must.  My husband and son really still like going, and since it's been a family tradition for us all these years, and we haven't found a replacement yet, I still go.  My son in particular enjoys serving at the altar, and since we have a move coming up where he won't be able to continue serving at the new location, I want to give him the opportunity while we still can.  

The shift in thinking from "Sunday obligation" to "family tradition" has allowed me to still get some spiritual benefit from the liturgy.  I'm not sitting there angry at having to be there, or at having to listen to preaching I disagree with.  Technically I'm not sitting much anyway since we attend an Eastern Rite Catholic church ;) .  Rather, I focus on what I find enjoyable - the beautiful interior, the ability to sing/chant 90 % of the liturgy, watch my son doing something he takes great pride in, and this lets me turn a blind eye to any message that might come across as problematic for my deconverted sense of truth and justice.

Perhaps tied for first place was also my prayer life.  I stopped praying.  It wasn't that difficult.  At the height of my most recent religiosity, I recited the Modeh Ani (Jewish morning prayer) in Hebrew and English upon opening my eyes in the morning.  I recited prescribed prayers in front of our prayer corner, with icon veneration and metanoias (venerations).  For a time, I covered my head with a scarf as well.  Slowly, the practice dwindled to an evening family prayer where we just cuddled together in the dark and prayed.  This is the practice that needed tweaking once I made the conscious decision that I have deconverted.  I had to stop dragging my family through my spiritual quest, as I had been doing and they had graciously come along for the ride.  Besides, gathering together right before bed was a good practice.  It's just that what was said and done during it had to get tweaked.  

We kept a couple of rote prayers we cycle through as a way of continuity, and we sing a favorite hymn or just the Our Father together.  But the focus of this time together has shifted to non-spiritual things.  We go through and say what we are grateful for (which may or may not be seen as spiritual).  Then we say something we like about each other, including ourselves.  This started as a way of strengthening sibling bonds between my oft quarreling kiddos.  We then mention something we're working on ourselves that may need some accountability and/or what we need from each other in the coming days, as a way of encouraging open communication and humility.  

But otherwise, my so-called prayer-life has been getting replaced by a meditation practice.  In the past week or two, I've crossed into prayer during one of them - I do miss having a personal God to talk to, Whom I believe to have my back no matter what.  I hope to eventually land there, but for now, it's still marred by a very religiously dogmatic lens that I don't want to reintroduce into my spiritual life.

Probably the most freeing change as a result of my deconversion has been the process of revisiting my worldview as a whole, and reassessing my politics and ethics without reference to "what the church says".  I have returned to a more liberal political viewpoint, and I had to face head-on the single issue that always prevented me from truly and fully embracing leftist ideology: abortion.  Roe v Wade was just recently overturned, while I was very much still religious and unapologetically Pro-Life.  It was that day that I told my children about abortion.  I had been dreading the topic, but I felt elated when it was overturned.  I wanted to explain to them why I supported some candidates and not others, when the only reason was really their stance on abortion.  But now that I was revisiting the issue, I realized that it's way more complicated than I was led to believe, way more nuanced, and there really isn't a single clear solution to the problem, aside from universal voluntary abstinence which apparently is a no-go for a lot of people who are much more vested in their sexuality than I am.

I remember giving a talk at a women's retreat where I shared that feminism had become a type of religion for me.... Or was it environmentalism?  Either way, I was criticizing myself back then for letting something "other than God" replace my sense of direction in life.  My lifestyle and actions were seen as worshipping ideals other than God, but really, this was only true if "God" were defined as the war-lord of the Hebrew Bible and not the Universal Source and Destiny of Taoism.  To worship the God of Nature - the only God that it makes sense to worship - means to do many of the environmental actions encouraged by "the left".  Starting with not being wasteful.  Valuing natural resources and the contributions of all species to life on our planet.  Dismissing materialistic and convenience-based practices in favor of ones that build life up.  Really, I was becoming more "pro-life" by expanding my acceptance of ALL life, all lives, not just those from a narrow set of issues supported or opposed by the church (abortion, embryonic stem cell research, artificial reproductive technology, capital punishment, euthenasia...).  There were issues of life that never got touched with a ten-foot pole by adamant pro-lifers - the exceedingly high suicide rates among trans and gay youth, the plight of children neglected and abused by religious extremists, sexual harassment and abuse and rape of young women.  Immigration was an issue that was embraced by the Catholic church, but not by Evangelicals, who have warped into the American Nationalist Christianity of MAGA Trumpism.  

At any rate, I realized that if there ever was a disconnect between my religion and my conscience, the problem was not my conscience!  Even though that is precisely what is taught in catechism - that we have to "form" our conscience.  That we don't know what's right or wrong unless we are taught it from an authority wearing vestments at the altar.  Talk about gaslighting!  I am so done with being gaslit from my codependent upbringing in a family of an undifferentiated mass!  I'm supposed to doubt the still, small voice inside of me (in spite of what the Bible says (1 Kings 19:11-13) in favor of trusting external authority?  Based on what evidence?  Their lived experiences were somehow more trustworthy than my own?  Ahh, and there's that pesky word - evidence. 

I realized that I was becoming more scientifically minded.  I wanted to study formal logic and critical thinking.  I wanted to use reason.  And while I do recognize that reason is not actually a perfect guiding light, it beats brainwashing every day of the week.  I kept coming back to this word: nuance.  

Neither religions - any of them - nor the strictly secular, atheistic resources I started to dabble in were actually correct.  Everything in life and in the world is nuanced.  Nothing is actually black or white.  Imagine the blow that had on my autistic brain!

So my deconversion is now complete, but my deconstruction is ongoing.  I no longer believe in the literal dogmas of Christianity - none of their variety, nor the competing monotheistic options of Islam or Judaism.  Now begins the exciting part of figuring out what I DO believe then, and what that means for my spiritual practices, how I share these things with my children, how I make moral choices in life, and the inner dialogue that I carry with me.  See, I was once diagnosed with mild OCD, which may or may not be a valid diagnosis, but it points to the scrupulosity with which I tried my best for decades to "be a good person".  I measured myself using artificial metrics that no one could live up to (Virgin Mother, anyone?).  Was there any wonder that I constantly second-guessed myself?  That I deferred to others even against my better judgment?  That I had a hard time establishing healthy boundaries with my mom?  Religion not only didn't help with my mental health, it made it worse.  Now that I'm free of it, I can start to rebuild my life on what is truly good, beautiful, and well, true.  

 

The New "Mrs. Man's Name" is Genderlessness

We have entered the Fourth Turning - the inevitable Crisis of our society has arrived.  Social mores are being reimagined with a vengeance.  It's easy for those of us who have never lived through this before (most of us) to be in a bit of a panic about it, as if this has never happened before, or not to the same degree, or not in the same way... But really, each Crisis has the same effect on those generations who are middle aged and older when it hits.  

For us, it means racism is being reimagined and redefined.  It means that gender is being eliminated from the public sphere.  It means that the economic and political status quo is being uprooted with vocal neo-hippies who want to start from scratch no matter the cost.

And it's easy for us look at the seemingly sudden uproar and freak out.  But really, any honest student of history did see it coming, as William Strauss and Neil Howe's "The Fourth Turning" illustrates.  And therefore, there is no sense in trying to force the genie back in the bottle.  

The Crisis is at hand.  We can fight it and exhaust ourselves, or we can accept it and reimagine our new role in relation to the new world order (and I don't mean this necessarily politically, but just in general).  

In particular, I'm thinking here of gender ideology.  It makes very little sense to me to take a mental disorder and normalize it to the point of gaslighting the rest of us into thinking we have been fooling ourselves all these millennia thinking species come in two sexes.  But that's the first problem - semantics.  

Sex and gender, as I learned back in my undergrad days, are not interchangeable terms.  Therefore, as long as we think they are, we will be talking past each other.

Sex is the biological fact of our physical bodies, including our chromosomal makeup (XY or XX, or some abnormality thereof), our genital makeup (egg-production or sperm-production, or some abnormality thereof), and our secondary sex characteristics (musculature, body hair, voice).  This last section is where the overlap with gender begins. 

While it is true that males tend to be more muscular, more hairy, and have deeper voices, while females tend to be less muscular, less hairy, and have higher voices, this is not universally so and varies by ethnicity.  What's more, it is often exaggerated by socio-cultural efforts to highlight stereotyped beliefs and expectations about the sexes.

Gender is the set of those stereotypes that are associate with a given sex in a specific culture and historical period.  Clothing is a starting point.  Only modern times have allowed the rather extreme differences in acceptable dress for females and males.  Historically speaking, most people wore some variation of a tunic that more or less draped male and female bodies in very comparable ways.  In those times, we generally see women demarcate themselves with an additional head covering, though often males also wore these for practical reasons.  

Outside of clothing, hair has historically been used to accentuate a person's sex/gender, especially when clothing didn't always do the job.  Males often sported facial hair, while females wore their head hair long.  Although with certain cultures, hair was traditionally long universally.

So really: hair, clothing, as well as various adornments like makeup and jewelry are completely arbitrary gender markers, meaning they are socio-cultural ways of signaling the sex of the individual, but they are not what makes the individual the sex that they are.  As such, those things can and do change from culture to culture and between time periods.

With that said, it is important to note that what gives those markers any meaning at all is that society agrees on those meanings.  Once society starts to question the association of facial hair with masculinity or makeup with femininity, we enter chaos, because people no longer know what to expect.  This is where we find ourselves today with gender bender ideology.

Twenty years ago, I was on the bandwagon of gender neutrality to a point, before I had realized the logical conclusion of such a world-view.  I was outspoken against sexist language, I refused sex-based social titles ("Mrs") and names (husband's surname), and I entered motherhood insisting on what I thought was a gender-neutral babyhood for my children.  

By today's standards, I was mild.  For me, being gender-neutral just meant wearing neutrally-colored and decorated onsies and outfits that looked equally cute on a little girl or a little boy.  I never once thought to undermine the idea that underneath it all, there actually WAS a little girl OR a little boy.   I also didn't push stereotypical toys onto my children, instead focusing on things I deemed educational and useful for a human child, regardless of sex.  So I got cars for my daughter and dolls for my son.  I thought I was a rebel.

Today, parents are no longer allowing society to even try to force their gendered stereotypes onto their children by... simply not revealing to anyone which sex their child is.  They choose gender-neutral names and use the third person plural pronoun to refer to the child, so that people simply cannot stereotype them according to sex. In my generation, we did what we could, but there were still people who, knowing we had a daughter or a son, would nonetheless come at us with color-coded gifts and assumptions about their temperament or future careers.  Technically, we were still at the mercy of well-meaning, or not-so-well-meaning others.

Today's gender-neutral parents have found a way to take that risk completely out of the equation.  I can't say that I blame them.  I get so up in arms about nonsense I hear about my daughter's physically attractiveness but my son's temperament, as if they don't both have both qualities.  

Yet I'm not exactly on board with the new gender bender world-view.  I believe the sexes ought to have equal opportunities and be treated with equal respect, but I do not believe they should become indistinguishable from each other.  I believe it is something beautiful to be feminine as a female, and to be masculine as a male.  God made us male and female and said it was very good, and I for one have no reason to argue.  There are things about being female that are wonderful precisely because they are not universal to all humans.  Part of what makes us human, in fact, is actually our sex and the associated life experiences that differentiate us from the opposite sex.  

I do honor each individual's right to identify how they want to identify - on one hand.  On the other hand, what bothers me is the lack of understanding why such a seismic shift in worldview is being thrust upon us oldtimers with such fury and so little comprehension for why it may take us time - a lot of time - to wrap our minds around it.  Accusing us of being bigotted hardly opens up the lines of communication.  

When I call a biological female "she", it's not to be disrespectful, but it's because that is what four decades of living on this planet has taught me.  Expecting an overnight change is simply unrealistic, and yes, we're going to push back against being forced to change.

But there's more.  We also learned how to be respectful, and interestingly, respect is not expressed in universal ways.  I remember people thinking they were being "respectful" when they referred to me as "Mrs. Husband's First Name".  It absolutely infuriated me!  I come from a culture where thank God this type of "etiquette" never took root, and so I did not find it respectful in the least to have my own name erased from the public square simply because I was married.  I never stopped to consider that the people offending me were not doing so intentionally.  They were operating according to the rules they had been taught.  Their world view had not had a chance to upgrade.

And so here we are again, this time with me being the inadvertent disrespector when I "misgender" someone.  Back when, I sighed with annoyance when someone assumed I went by "Mrs. Man" but I absolutely went berserk when someone called me that even after I let them know that was not how I wanted to be addressed.  

Today, people are having the exact same reaction to us calling them "she" or "he" based on our cultural programming, which tells us that 1) we can make gender assumptions based on people's external markers such as physical features or name, and that 2) sex and gender are essentially the same thing.  I'm trying to be respectful, because the idea of calling someone "it" - that is, ungendered, is downright dehumanizing.  And yet that is what people thought they were doing if they didn't acknowledge my affiliation with my husband - as if my existence as a human being was somehow diminished because I was married yet not being acknowledged as such.  Married status was seen as more important for a woman than a man.

Today's youth are doing away with gender as a concept altogether, and while I grew up with gender as a fact of life, if I want to maintain integrity in respecting the wishes of individuals even when I do not understand said wishes, I will need to readjust how I think about people without the lens of gender.

My gut reaction is that to take away gender is to take away the humanity of a person.  But for the youth of today, who are simply not "married" to their sex the way I was not "married" to my... well, being married, one of us is going to need to adjust our world-view.  I, being of an older generation, claim to have more wisdom, which includes the ability to compare current situations with previous ones and to draw similarities between them.  I cannot expect the same from the youth.  They are making their demands not to be difficult, althought their demands are indeed very difficult for us old-timers.  They are making their demands in the same spirit as I made my demands 20 years ago.  I simply wanted the right to define myself by my own standards.  I did not want to be told who I was.  Once I was allowed to do so, with time and experience, I came around to the idea of being called "Mrs.".  Albeit, I still will not go by my husband's given name.  But I would happily respond if someone simply called my by his surname.  That is the compromise that could have only come through time.

And so I can hope for as much to get worked out with this new demand of genderlessness.  God willing, with enough time and life experience, the pendulum will swing again in the direction of balance, and as people stop pushing gender on others, those others will stop insisting on avoiding gender, and eventually we will arrive in a place of compromise where we can all agree that life makes sense again.  

But this won't happen any time soon.  And so, I embark on a new phase in my life - acknowledging that I am now part of the middle-aged generation, and that our ideas are no longer the new thing.  I have to make way for the even newer ideas, and practice patience, humility, and understanding.

I trust that this new attitude will be much more healthy and useful than digging my heels in and rolling my eyes at each new mention of gender.  I don't have to understand it or even embrace it for myself to respect that it matters to other people.  If I am to see others the way God sees them, that starts with making an effort to try to see them the way they see themselves.