My Leadership Conference

Recently I was selected by my Unitarian Universalist church to attend a week-long leadership conference. "Leadership?" I thought. "What does that have to do with me?" But I was, of course, flattered and I decided to go and see what it was like.

They sent us an online questionnaire to fill out: what church I belong to, am I a vegetarian, etc. They also asked me my gender. This was a bit of a problem. I suspected that they would be assigning people roommates of the same gender. And the thing is: I identify as a trans man. If I put "male" as my gender they would expect me to share a room with some guy I've never met, and that made me nervous. If I put "female" . . . well, that wasn't happening.

Fortunately, the conference organizers had set up a blank field where I could fill in my gender. I wasn't being forced to choose "male" or "female." So I wrote in "transgender." And I thought to myself, "that might cause some confusion."

A week later I got a call from one of the conference organizers. I understood her to say that no one else who had ever attended this conference had ever specified a gender that was something other than "male" or "female." She was not sure where to put me. She was very polite and kept repeating that they just wanted to do whatever it would take to make me feel comfortable. But the sad truth is that she was making me feel very uncomfortable.

I want to make it absolutely clear that I don't blame her. It's not her fault that she had never had to deal with this issue before. It's not her fault that there was no policy in place. It's not her fault, because none of us really know what gender non-conformity means or how to handle it. I blame society. Nonetheless, it was an unpleasant experience for me. To use the terminology we were taught at this leadership conference: she was feeling anxiety because of a disruption in homeostasis, and her anxiety infected me.

She was very polite and I was polite too. I said "I want to thank you and the other conference organizers for setting up the questionnaire so that people could fill in their own gender." I am sincerely grateful for that, because if I'd been forced to select "male" or "female" things would have been even worse. She told me they had set it up that way on purpose because they wanted to be mindful and considerate of non-gender-conforming people. However,  it did occur to me after I'd gotten off the phone with her that, although they had set the form up that way, they obviously hadn't made any plan for what to do if someone actually took advantage of the opportunity they'd been given to list a non-standard gender. They had decided it was a good idea in theory. But in practice . . . they hadn't really come to terms with it.

She and I discussed the various options. In the interests of brevity I won't list them all - you can probably figure out what they were. We ended the conversation with her promising to find a solution. I closed my phone and then started freaking out. She had said that she didn't know where to put me. She had sounded kind of unsure about the whole situation. I had no idea what was going to happen.

The days went by and the time for the conference approached. I didn't hear back from her and I was scared to call her. In the most fearful part of my mind I fully expected to show up at the conference and be told, "Sorry, we don't have accommodations for you, you can't stay here. And I don't know how you're going to get back to the airport." You may think that sounds crazy. But discrimination and prejudice against trans people are still rampant in our society, even in Unitarian Universalist churches. And it wouldn't even take outright prejudice. Discomfort and fear of change cause many well-intentioned people to fail in their attempts to be inclusive. (Of course, my own insecurities about whether I was "qualified" to attend this Leadership Conference also came into play.)

The conference started on Sunday. On Saturday the thought occurred to me: "If they assign two men or two women to a room, then that assumes they have an even number of men and women. But sometimes they must have a person left over." That made me feel better. I was the person left over. I felt like I had a right to bring my transgender self to the conference after all. Although I didn't know if the person assigning bedrooms had thought of this.

Red Lentil Pasta Sauce

Savory cinnamon dishes are delightful, especially in winter. I got this recipe from a cookbook my grandmother gave me, Complete Vegetarian Cuisine by Rose Elliot.

Ingredients

• 1 large onion -- chopped
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 garlic cloves -- minced
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano or basil (optional)
• 8 ounces red lentils -- washed
• 15 ounces canned tomatoes
• 2 cups water -- or use up to 1/2 cup red wine and the rest water
• salt and pepper
• 8 ounces pasta. The original recipe calls for tagliatelle verde (spinach pasta.) I prefer linguine myself, when I can't find tagliatelle verde.

Directions

1. Heat the oil in a saucepan. Add the onion, cinnamon, and optional herbs and cook for 10 minutes. Then add the garlic and cook for about 5 minutes.
2. If you're using wine, add it to the pan at this time, stir, and let it come to a simmer. Then add the lentils, tomatoes, and water and bring to the boil. Let the mixture simmer gently for 20 minutes, until the lentils are tender. Taste and season with salt and pepper.
3. I recommend pureeing the sauce at this point, especially if you have a stick blender which makes pureeing so convenient. The truth is that although this recipe calls for 1/2 pound of pasta I usually go ahead and cook a whole pound. Pureeing the sauce makes it go further.
4. Around the end of step 2, bring a large pan of water to the boil and cook the pasta.

How to Make Happy Pasta

I was recently watching an Italian cooking show, and the woman said that the reason Italians cook their pasta al dente is that they add the pasta to the sauce and let it cook for another minute or so, absorbing the flavor. This is a good idea. Another good idea which I heard on another cooking show is to take a small amount of the pasta cooking water (after the pasta has been cooked) and add it to the sauce. The pasta cooking water has starch in it which helps to thicken the sauce. It's especially nice in a recipe like this one, because lentils are good at absorbing extra water.

I hope you enjoy this recipe. Happy New Year!

The Fear of Coming Out

So there's this guy who blogs about being the single father of an adopted child. I read something by him once, probably a post titled "I'm Christian, Unless You're Gay," but I don't really follow him. Then I saw that he had come out as bisexual and I decided to read his coming-out post.

You see, I’ve never wanted to be anything other than straight. Since I was eleven years old, I’ve been desperate to only be attracted to those of the opposite sex. I’ve masked and obscured any feeling I’ve ever felt that threatened my place within the realm of what I’ve been coached is both normal and acceptable.

Much of what he says resonates with me. For example, he started his blog, which is fairly popular, after his second wife left him because she thought he was gay:

I started this blog as a way to save myself from myself. As a way to force myself to laugh again. As a way to maintain some sort of normalcy. And yes, even as a way to protect me from ever having to be anything other than straight.

I started my first blog shortly after coming out to myself as trans. At that time I had no intention of ever telling anyone else. I wasn't scared exactly, but looking back now I think it's significant that I started writing again around that time. It was a time for new beginnings. (I didn't start writing my trans blog until three years later.)

When Dan Pearce wrote his "I'm Christian, Unless You're Gay" post, he said in it that he was not gay.

I certainly wasn’t lying to you. To lie, a person has to both know and believe a truth and then present it contrarily. I didn’t know and believe the truth. Not yet. In 32 years, I hadn’t even once been able to allow myself a truly open and honest thought about it all.

Now he's afraid that people will treat him differently. That his sister will no longer let him be alone with her children. That his parents will reject him. He knows his life will never be the same. I want to tell him that after the first shock, he'll discover that he's the same person he always was. That anything is better than living a lie - and he knows that, otherwise he wouldn't have come out. I can't tell him that everything will be all right. But it will be better.