This commentary is by Michael Caldwell of North Wolcott, a member of the international ecumenical Iona Community and author of The Radical Center, a syndicated monthly column transcending current fractures in culture and religion.
Both my dead brothers were cross-dressers. They died (aged 54 and 61) addicted to alcohol and tobacco and God knows what else. They lived lives of contrast and confusion.
We were close growing up, distant all our adult lives. We loved each other as kids in the suburbs of the city of brotherly love (Philadelphia), and derisively dismissed each other as adults.
They were tough guys — hard-drinking chain-smokers who laughed, mostly, at the world when they weren’t railing at it. There wasn’t much in between their rants and laughs. It was one or the other — humor or rage, whether at work at-blue collar jobs, or at play in drag at a bar.
Addiction, we knew, had devastated previous generations, had scared me enough that my life was mostly nondependent of substances, except for tobacco, which dogged me for decades before my final relapse and final smoke at age 62. Alcohol had scared me more — enough to figure out in decades of therapy how to separate out the compulsion from the substance.
For them? I wonder. I imagine that painkillers of many kinds enhanced their ability to live the lie that tough, toxic masculinity was their lot in life. They seemed to need their tough guy exterior and at the same time “need” a break from it when they dressed in women’s clothing.
I imagine it might have been a way they appreciated their feminine side, a side all men have, according to Carl Jung and Jungian psychology, a side, he said, which we ignore to our peril (just as women have a masculine aspect which, if neglected, can have consequences).
I embraced my feminine side in adolescence — in dreamwork and poetry. Giving it voice meant, to me, knowing clearly that I was heterosexual, not that I wasn’t fascinated by women’s garments, but in other ways than my brothers.
The complicated grief of losing loved ones to addiction prompted a question: If my brothers had embraced more comprehensively their inclinations, could they have healed their toxic, chauvinist sides? What dogs me is a sneaking suspicion that their addictions arose from not dealing with what I’ve learned could’ve been a “cross-gendered” orientation, if not a full-on transgendered identity. Why two brothers in one family? Baffling. Skews statistics I’ve read.
The ambiguities make me endlessly curious. What if parents today talked with their children — boys and girls — about both genders, that both are in all of us (as Jung says) and that we need to give voice and vote to both sides of ourselves?
Could parents speak of the benefits and blessings of both genders beyond poisonous patriarchal stereotypes? My brothers and I didn’t get that. How many kids get that? Where are the models?
Why isn’t there more attention to deconstructing cultural stereotypes (“wives, be submissive to your husbands”), constructing “partnership” structures for identities, especially in adolescence, that can comprehend both genders, from both birth bodies? What if kids, from an early age, could see the blessing of celebrating both sides of themselves, no matter what body they were born with?
Riane Eisler and David Loye wrote the book on the partnership ethic which transcends patriarchy: The Partnership Way: Healing Our Families, Our Communities, Our World. It’s not that a culture’s gender roles need to be exactly the same. But why can’t each manifestation be seen to be equivalent, have equal value, with equitable power?
Men, for example, could then relax into a wholeness and generativity when they fully see women as equals. The benefit for women and the world would be wondrous.
I’m thinking there could be a radical center between the militant heterosexuality of rigid right-wing theology and the unexamined extreme of complete nonbinary gender fluidity. Biology is beautiful. Honor your other side as an intrinsic part of you. Live into the integration of both sides as a source of the personal integrity of a fully evolved human — in a lifelong process Jung called individuation.
There’s an unexplored role of the transcendent power of dreamwork for discovering and integrating all sides of ourselves. For some of us men, at least, a dream that shows us a woman within us who looks like us, a woman who nurtures by breast-feeding, for example, could lead us beyond addiction as well as potential surgery.
Can we respect trans folks and their decisions at the same time we look at comprehensive parenting that explores the beauty of both genders from an early age? I hope so. And may it be a source of understanding for those of us who can’t quite comprehend transitioning from one gender to another, especially beginning the process (now somewhat de rigueur in some circles) early in a child’s life.
