You know what we also have?  We have questions.  We have questions about sex and sexuality and all that stuff, especially when we’re younger and especially because “that stuff” often isn’t covered by mainstream sex education.  It’s not covered by most but the most liberal and extensive of sex education.

Scarleteen is a comprehensive sexuality education site; we have a messageboard, a text service, articles, polls, blog posts, and expert advice columns.  We support over FIVE MILLION young people every year on a really modest budget; under 60K to support all of that.

And when I say “we” I do mean “we” because I work with Scarleteen.  I am a Scarleteen volunteer because I know how important sexuality education is, and I know how important it is to be able to ask absolutely any question and receive a factual, nonjudgmental answer from somebody.  This is especially important to me, as a trans person, because there’s just not a ton of information out there about sexuality education for folks outside the gender binary.

Sexuality education goes way, way beyond “how not to get pregnant” or “don’t get a sexually transmitted infection.”  Sexuality education is about healthy relationships AND healthy bodies.  We truly focus on both at Scarleteen.  And we do it with an almost-entirely volunteer staff, and any extra education we need comes entirely from the wonderful (and overworked) Heather Corinna.  We’re a really small group, all with lives outside Scarleteen, providing a lot of services to a lot of people and we do it because we love and respect healthy sexuality.  But we can’t do it for free.

Please consider a generous donation to Scarleteen.  If all you can spare is a few dollars that’s great.  But if you truly care about sexuality education and you CAN afford to give more please consider doing so.  Sexuality education is so important.

Donate here.

Let’s invite the best and the most passionate of the “up and coming” folks in our denomination to come and preach.  Let’s make sure we arrange for folks to be able to carpool and let’s bring tents.  We all own tents now, after OccupyEverywhereInTheFreakingUS.  So let’s break out those tents again and let’s camp.  Let’s be alive in our faith without worrying that we look silly or ridiculous or too passionate.

Let’s hold a revival.

I’m thinking August 2013.

Who’s in?

You know, like church?  Our churches.  Our Unitarian Universalist faith communities that we are so, rightfully, proud of.  The churches where so many of us have “gender identity and expression” in our mission statements and have supported transgender rights legislation from city-wide right up to the national level, and where we stress over and over that all are welcome.  We ask you to come as you are and then, if you’re somewhere outside the gender binary, you’re ignored.

Transgender identities can be complicated and confusing and often they get oversimplified in an effort to give a quick explanation to somebody.  Phrases like “born in the wrong body” and “really a boy/girl” are used to sum up all that is the trans experience.  Those phrases do work for a lot of people who identify as trans; there are some people who truly have known since they were very small children that they are definitely the “other” gender than the one they were assigned.  There are also quite a lot of folks out there for whom there is no “other” gender.  They know they aren’t male but they aren’t totally female, either.  I talked about this life in the middle-ground of gender before.

When an assembled body of people is referred to as “ladies and gentleman,” or “men and women” or anything along those lines there is a group of people you’re ignoring.  When you sing “brothers and sisters” or “oh, fathers/mothers let’s go down,” or do a reading that calls on “men” to do one thing while “women” do another you are ignoring all of the “me’s” out there.  You’re ignoring my existence.  I don’t think it’s intentional but I do think it’s something that needs to change.

Today this came up during a service that was supposed to pay homage to the Iowa Sisterhood and the Bread and Roses strike.  That’s great!  There are women out there who have made amazing contributions to our world; women who have banded together and created real, valuable change.  It is necessary that we recognize their perseverance to succeed in a world that did not want to include them.  It is necessary to see their successes as one step in a more gender-inclusive world.  But, when we celebrate these successes, can we please not do it in a way that makes those of us who are neither men nor women invisible?  We need to take the spirit of their message, or the essence of what they were seeking, and expand that beyond the binary we’ve been taught.  These women were fighting against a world that tried, and often succeeded, in making them invisible.  Trans people are doing the same thing, but with smaller numbers and a less united “what we’re fighting for” message in many cases.

In the UU world trans people are accepted on paper and, often, if they fit in enough with one of two genders they are welcomed in practice (for the most part).  There are a lot of trans people I know who would be perfectly fine standing and claiming their identity as female or male, and that’s great, and I’m thrilled those people are supported by their communities.

I am not male.  I am not female.  I use the pronouns he/him/his because they force people to recognize me as not-a-female.  If there was a more readily accepted and useable gender neutral example I’d happily adopt it.  But there’s not, so I don’t.  But just because those are the pronouns I use does not mean I’m your “brother” or a “man” or one of the “guys.”  There is no side for me to pick in these songs, or these readings, or rituals.  There’s no “middle” or “other” so I’m left out entirely.

So what do I think you should you do?  Just recognize our experience.

How?  Oh I’m SO glad you asked!

1. Look at a reading and see if you feel comfortable adapting it to make it more inclusive.  If you can’t change the words then make an   acknowledgement that it’s not entirely inclusive.  “Though the author refers to “women and men” we take this reading in the spirit of affirming all genders.”
2. Look for hymns that affirm all people, and adapt if necessary.  One of my favorite replacements for the phrase “brothers and sisters” is “siblings in spirit.”  This, too, is a quick fix.  “In the chorus of ‘We’ll Build a Land’ we will sing “siblings in spirit” rather than “brothers and sisters” to better welcome all into our worship.”
3. Remember trans folks on Mother’s/Father’s Day.  Many trans people have interesting and complicated relationships with parenting, whether or not they are parents themselves.  Again, you don’t have to do away with services, just an affirmation is fine.  You don’t get something pre-scripted here; I’d prefer you wrote it yourself, from your heart.
4. It’s okay to mess up; it’s not okay to pretend you didn’t mess up.  Acknowledge and learn from criticism, complaints, hurt feelings, and difficult feedback.
5. Don’t ask men to sing one part and women to sing another.  I don’t care if it messes with your choir director’s mind.  Find another way to classify voices.  “Higher voices, sing __, lower voices, sing __.”
6. Lastly, stop referring to the kids as “boys and girls.”  There are miniature versions of me, too.  We get just as annoyed and we’re often less articulate when we’re smaller.  Call them children, call them kids, call them young people.

Email me if you want to hash something out privately.  Andy.Leigh.Coate-at-gmail-dot-com.

We’ll build a land where siblings in spirit united by God may then create peace… see, totally works.

Totally.

Thanks to Rev. Sean Dennison and others for help in sussing this out in my mind.

Thankfully most of the response I have seen from my friends has been “let’s buy extra cookies this year to support the Girl Scouts and their policy of inclusivity.” That’s great! That is positive activism, that is change through love. There have been the few comments I’ve seen on Facebook calling this girl stupid, calling her a bitch, calling her things that NO parent would want to see their kid called. Names I don’t want to see any kid called, either.

She is a kid. She’s 14 I think, and it’s clear this movie wasn’t totally her idea. The editing is a little too sophisticated, her reading a little too stilted, everything just a little “too” to be completely written, planned, filmed, edited, and posted without adult intervention somewhere in the process. None of that is to say it might not have been her idea, or something that she mentioned at dinner that a parent latched on to. But more than likely she’s a girl who was put up to something by her conservative parents who were upset about the possible inclusion of transgender or gender varient girls in Girl Scouts. That kind of thing CAN sound scary if presented in the wrong way to a young girl (or, frankly, to anybody) and I have no doubt that she does believe what she’s saying.

It’s scary when something is presented to you in a way that makes it sound like something you know and love is changing. If a young teen is told “we’re going to let boys into your Girl Scout troop!” I can see how that could freak a kid out. The problem, of course, being that boys aren’t being allowed into Girl Scout troops. There’s a good chance that this girl has no way of knowing that; if she’s been fed the typical right-wing rhetoric about what transgender means then… yeah, she has it wrong and it probably does sound scary. That rhetoric usually goes something like “unstable men who like to dress up like women so they can use the girl’s bathrooms and possibly hurt girls.”

I have no doubt that this girl was raised in a conservative Christian household; every sign is there. She wears a cross, the video was immediately up on a very Christian-centric website, and even the script she was reading from was very “family values”-centric. Read the terminology they use… all those words are carefully chosen and come from the same place as Focus on the Family, the American Family Association and other innocuous-sounding-but-hateful groups.

I feel bad for this girl. I feel bad that it’s clearly going to be awhile before she has any actual chance to explore the world a little and meet people not in her religious, social, and political demographic. I feel bad that she’s probably getting a lot of hate directed at her right now from liberal folks and that that is just going to enforce the points she has been fed. I feel bad that she was used in this way to push an agenda that she clearly doesn’t know much about. I just feel bad for her.

Let’s keep this boycott-of-the-boycott positive. Let’s buy a ton of cookies and let’s send letters of support to Girl Scouts, thanking them for being inclusive and forward-moving. Let’s not demonize a 14 year old girl for something I have no doubt she’ll regret at some point. She really is just a kid.

A. Maze. Ing.

I launched my fundraiser just a couple days ago.  Already I have my application fees covered.  That’s… amazing.

(also, terrifying – post forthcoming, have no fear!)

Any future donations will go toward any other education/ministry-preparedness fees that come up.  What are those?

Assuming I get in… tuition, books, housing, career assessment, clinical pastoral education… you get the point.  The financial need isn’t going away.

And if I don’t get in?  Then I freak out for awhile and apply again next year.

The original post!

———————————-

I guess I’m going for it.

I’m applying to seminary with the hope of entering ministry in the Unitarian Universalist denomination.  There are a million things I need to do before I see that day, and a lot of those things involve… money.

Ick!  Who wants to talk about MONEY?

Except I have to.  Even the very first steps here, just the application process to seminary, is far from cheap.  I’ve narrowed it down as much as I can to cost as little AS it can, but in the end there’s money I need to pay that I just don’t have.

There’s an awful lot of good out there in this world and I’ve discerned that this is the vehicle through which I want to help some of that potential good be realized THROUGH ministry.  If you want to see my ministry move forward, or if you have found this a useful or helpful blog and want to see more both online AND in real life, I hope you’ll consider contributing.

If you, or people you know, are at all able to help me out please do.  You can donate to me directly through Paypal.

And I’m not actually going to use the money to buy coffee.  Any money left when application and transcript and GRE fees are over and done with will be saved for the next monetary hurdle!

Donate here!

This one was made by Jenn Lindsay, and PhD student at Boston University:

(if you’re creepily just looking for my part, I speak at 8:15/10:55 and am giggly for some reason.  If you’re looking for the UU parts they start around 23:30)

The other, Holy Mess, was part of a class that one of the other Protest Chaplains was taking last semester.  Laura Evonne Steinman, another UU who was very active in the tent city aspect of Occupy Boston, gives a great interview.

Ok, so it’s not QUITE that drastic (at least not all the time).

I applied to be the Young Adult Worship Chaplain at General Assembly this year. The position would have involved creating and leading worship services for the Young Adult caucus, helping plan the Synergy worship, and working with the Young Adult Caucus folks in general to make GA a worshipful as well as active and justice-focused time for Young Adults.

As you can probably tell from the awesome past tense of the previous paragraph… I didn’t get the position.

I got the call as I was playing a magi during the Occupy Boston nativity play (not sure which magi I was… which one carried the gift of housing, again?), so I didn’t answer. I listened to the message (a generic, “I’m calling about this position, please give me a call back”), called back with anticipation, and was told I didn’t get the position (a generic, “you were one of our top candidates but we went with somebody else, we hope to work with you in the future”).

I am proud to say that I didn’t cry until I was off the phone. How’s THAT for discipline?

“Clearly” I thought to myself, “it’s because I suck. It’s because they don’t see potential for ministry in me. I don’t even know why I applied. It was stupid to apply. I’m never applying for crap like that again.” Logically I suppose none of that is true.

One of my good friends serves on the group that picked the chaplain and I know they don’t feel those things about me. But it hurt because I wanted it so, so badly. I wanted it because I love worship and I see how much room there is to expand that and because we are going to be doing AMAZING stuff in Phoenix and I wanted to be a part of that.

I know that just being in Phoenix will make me a part of General Assembly, but I wanted to be a part of the inner workings, the “what makes it go,” and I wanted to be a part of what made it a worshipful experience as well as one where we got to live out our faith through social justice.

I love worship. I love the arts and actions and beauty of worship done well and I’m excited that I’m getting to the point where I have some of those skills and I’m even more excited to continue honing them. I love that I’m at the place where I can get up and offer a service with only days of angst, rather than weeks.

But I also love conferences. I’ve been doing conferences for years and years and years and I know what works and I know what DOESN’T. Conferences hold a special place in my heart, but I have been through so many conferences on so many topics that simply going as a participant is sometimes its own special form of angst-producing. I don’t “sit by” very well, especially when it’s something I care so deeply about.

I don’t even know if I’ll get to go to General Assembly this year since I’m unlikely to get the funding I did last year (and even attending last year still had me spending more upfront money than was really financially feasible for me). But if I do go it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be hard to not be a participant in making GA work, but rather somebody who GA happens to. I want there to be room for me, too, to do things. To engage and help and BE. I’m at a time in my life where I’m relatively unencumbered and I wanted so badly to throw myself into this. And I can’t. There just doesn’t seem to be that space for me to do that. And I’m still a little broken up about that.

DONATE HERE

We are still hosting Occupy Ogden on our lawn. It has been roughly a month and a half. There have been a fair amount of changes – we are down to 3 full time campers from a max of about 21. There were issues with drugs and alcohol and the local occupy group got tired of feeding them, and so most of them were asked to leave. (not by the church but by a GA decision) The remaining 3 campers are homeless, but very dedicated to the movement. They come to worship and actually to every activity we have. One played the recorder during a service. They also help out the church with raking leaves and now with shoveling the snow. The snow is the issue now, however, and we worry about the campers when the temperature drops. They say they are fine, and that they don’t want or need to go to a shelter. I am not sure we have either the resources or the will to invite them indoors on the coldest nights. Some of our members want to do that and some just want to tell them to leave “for their own good.” We are struggling with issues of caring vs care taking, and some are getting frustrated with what was to be temporary. There is stress about the budget even though our end of year appeal went well. Occupy is taking a tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources, and with only 100 church members it is getting to be more and more of a stretch to support the camp even at the level we have been. We have a donation page on our website, but as far as I can tell, no one but our membership has used it. (I will post it again below if any of you are feeling generous!) It just feels like we are out here all alone in the wilds of Utah doing something very few other churches are doing. We are in a small city, and the movement isn’t large here – less than 100 actives, about a third of whom are church members. Maybe we are crazy, maybe we should just give up, but Occupy might be the movement that saves us all, and maybe places like Ogden are where it will survive and grow. This really is religious work and in sync with every last one of our UU principles, so how can we turn them away? I hope we don’t have to do that, but I also don’t want someone freezing to death on our front lawn.

PLEASE donate now to help out the Occupy Movement in general, the AMAZING and SUSTAINING WORK that Occupy Ogden is doing, and the BEAUTIFUL EXPRESSION OF OUR FAITH that Rev. Novak andthe Unitarian Universalist Church of Ogden is participating in.

Please spread the word, share the message, and donate NOW!

How to be a protest chaplain, rule #1

1. Religious symbols are still amazingly powerful. If you’re clergy, wearing your gear and showing up is basically all you need to do. Some folks might think it’s a “costume.” This is both hilarious and sad: one guy told us in New York that we were the first Christians he’d ever seen at a protest – at least, on his side. Then be prepared to listen.

How to be a protest chaplain, rule #6

DO NOT PROSELYTIZE. That’s not OK. That’s not what chaplains do. The Occupy movement is about working together despite the fact we all have our single issues and existing organizational work etc. Not only is proselytizing obnoxious, it’s detrimental to the movement. (And we won’t claim ya.)

This post is fairly Christian-centric. Suck it up. It’s good for you. It’ll make you grow up big and strong and possibly more tolerant.

We had a LOT of clergy stop by Occupy Boston. Both clergy we invited, clergy that asked to come, clergy that simply showed up, clergy that led services, clergy that came to services, clergy that brought their entire congregations, clergy that brought apple pie. A lot of clergy, from a lot of different denominations. If they talked to us first, asked what we needed, we usually had one answer. “Just come. Be a visible presence. Wear a collar if you are able.”

Wear a collar. We didn’t say “bring a sign from your congregation” or “bring literature on your denomination and what it has to say about social justice” or anything like that. We didn’t say “make sure we can tell what faith tradition you come from.” We asked them to wear a collar, if they were able. The collar is a known, recognizable symbol that a person has been ordained.

Every protest chaplain, when asked, would identify what religious tradition we came from. Sometimes we each did denominationally specific work at the site. I helped lead the UU Vespers services, others helped with the Ecumenical Communion Services, the Occupy Mass, and the Occupy Judaism services. But when we were out there doing the chaplain stuff we wore our badges that said “Protest Chaplain” and when asked what that meant we had an answer.

The Protest Chaplains are people of faith here to support the spiritual and religious aspect of the occupation and the occupiers.

I would have been dismayed if “my” clergy, the UU ministers I love and respect and hope to join as a colleague someday, had shown up in this:

I know that the point of those shirts may be to wear them en masse AS UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST MINISTERS STANDING ON THE SIDE OF LOVE IN SUPPORT OF ___.  That’s in capital letters because those are capital letter shirts.

“BUT,” you may be saying, “but we aren’t protest chaplains.  We ARE UU clergy.  We want people to know we are UUs!”

The point of those shirts, or so I am hearing, is public witness. Public witness is what we, the protest chaplains, did. It’s what we are still doing. We took the super intensive crash course in public witness. This is the course that involves sleeping outside with your classmates in a tent and marching in sometimes multiple parades per week. We learned, through real-time feedback, what worked and, oh my gosh, what did NOT work.

The clergy that came? They wore solid color shirts and collars. That’s pretty much it. They showed up and the collars were enough to get people to talk to them. When UU clergy came THEY wore black or solid color shirts and collars. Because they were clergy FIRST.

When UU minister Jason Lydon was running back and forth as we were getting arrested at 2 in the morning in early October he was wearing a black shirt and collar. He was NOT identifiably Unitarian Universalist, he was identifiably clergy who was there for us, in support of us, in solidarity with us.

What is the point of these clergy shirts? Is it to be different, or edgy, or to stand out? Is that what clergy “should” be doing in acts of public witness? Is it necessary to be a UU FIRST in circumstances when we are witnessing publicly for a non-UU-specific issue? We aren’t the only people of faith fighting for immigration rights, for same sex marriage, for clean air and water, for an end to slavery, for LGBTQ rights. We aren’t the only ones by a long shot. These clergy shirts only serve to separate us from “other” clergy. It’s not what I want to see “my” ministers do and it’s not what I want to do, either now or in the future.

(also, they are freakin’ ugly)

Obviously, as this is my personal blog, this is my personal opinion.

Our physical occupation has ended, the next phase of our movement begins.

But it is so hard.

It’s been an amazing, hard, beautiful, hard, awe-inspiring, hard, flat out gorgeous experience. It’s an experience that I wish so fervently I never had to participate in but… damn. Damn.

I went to the jail where the women were being held this morning. We hugged and sang as people were released. We moved on. We marched to the jail where the men were being held. We hugged more, we sang more, and we waited. I stood by the exit, handing out food to each released protester and letting them know where to get something to drink, people with a charged phone, and a spot to be away from the media.

It wasn’t warm today in Boston, and even though I’m now starting my fifth winter in New England I wasn’t dressed appropriately. I left the house in that marginally frantic “I have somewhere so much more important to be” mode. I also forgot to eat for a good portion of today and I didn’t drink any water from the time I left the house until I got home.

(Self-care is on my to-do list, I promise.)

I was one of the point people for organizing a multireligious solidarity service prior to our first post-raid General Assembly. We wanted to call folks together, let them air some of their pain, let them be heard prior to entering a very procedural meeting. We wanted to continue the faithful, religious, spiritual voice that had been part of the Occupy Boston movement since before Dewey Square was even occupied. We weren’t leaving now.

I can only hope the service provided something of that space. I was so cold, so tired, so dead on my feet by that point that I don’t remember almost anything of what I said. I know we sang a lot. Snippets stand out; taking a minute to breathe while one of our wonderful and involved priests took the service in her way-more-capable hands for a few minutes, encouraging people to keep singing as somebody was screaming behind us, and making eye contact with friends who I didn’t know were coming and feeling reassured.

But it still felt so final.

The movement meant so much to so many people, but to me it meant that I’m in the right place in my life. I’m doing what I need to be doing. I feel good about who I am, where I am, what I am doing and where I am going. I’m proud of the decisions I’m making and I’m thrilled to be with the people I spend my time with.

I’m not always happy with the decisions that Occupy Boston folks made, autonomous action or not, but I’m thrilled with the role that I, and the Protest Chaplains, have played. I’m thrilled with what we’ve done with what we’ve had. I can’t wait to see what we do next.

After, of course, we sleep.