Nothing made me prouder to be an American than Attorney General Loretta Lynch's impassioned defense this week of the civil rights of transgender people to use public bathrooms that correspond to their gender rather than their biological sex. To see other people as made in God's image is the fundamental teaching of all three Abrahamic faiths. This means, I think, to see God Himself/Herself as transgender, as participating in the endless flux and flow of creative and sexual energy, from which all of us derive our very being.
By comparing North Carolina's controlling bathroom access on the basis of sex to her own experience growing up in the segregated South where white bathrooms were off limits to black people, Lynch convincingly made transgender rights into a case of rights for all, as much as those with a more conventionally religious worldview may resist the idea that people are free to alter their own gender and that our society must accommodate these changes.
But as much as I agree with her position on this issue, the news that the Obama Administration is sending out a letter today directing every school district in the country to allow children who are transgender to use bathrooms and changing rooms that correspond to their chosen gender rather than biological sex gives me pause.
On the face of it, it seems to be the same issue as the public bathroom one in North Carolina. But bathrooms and locker rooms seem very different to me, as they do to many others who have participated in this very acrimonious public debate. Bathrooms have stalls; locker rooms typically do not. Do I want my daughters to be around naked boys and for naked boys to be around them? Is a teenage boy who is transitioning to being a girl unlikely to get an erection around naked girls? Is a teenage girl who is transitioning to being a boy not likely to attract unwanted male attention?
The many parents and children across the country who are opposing these new regulations may have a point; while it may end up costing schools significant money, there need to be ways--which the Obama Administration is giving some suggestions and guidelines for--for children to dress and undress in private. I'm less concerned with the specter of rape, which seems highly unlikely in most public places, than I am with the simple need for modesty and dignity, which is also arguably an important religious value.
My own religion, which is Judaism, has traditionally insisted on maintaining very strict separation between the sexes (including prohibiting cross-dressing) and frowns on homosexuality. It is, to some extent, a rebellion against this worldview that characterizes Jill Soloway's Amazon show, Transparent. The show, which revolves around a Jewish family whose patriarch is becoming a woman, reminds us how complicated human sexuality is; characters move in and out of homosexual and heterosexual liaisons, question their sexual identities, become involved with partners who are themselves in the process of transition.
In the "Jewish Masculinities" course that I taught this past semester, we ended the year by watching an especially provocative episode of "Transparent" that suggested that a man could have a vagina and a woman could have a penis. (My students really struggled with this, beyond the fact that they had a difficult time knowing whether to refer to the main character as "he" or "she.") Similarly, Jill Sobule's new musical production of Yentl plays up the transgender elements of the story in a way that radically reshifts the roles of men and women in Orthodox Jewish culture.
Perhaps we are less in a transgender age than a postgender one, in which the very categories of gender are being not just reshuffled but perhaps demolished. And it seems inevitable that the rise of transgender identities is moving our society toward a less Puritanical attitude toward sex in general.
On balance, this seems like a good thing; it may motivate all of us, transgender or not, toward greater sexual freedom and pleasure. But it does need to be balanced with a very real need that people have for privacy. Adolescents, in particular, are discombobulated enough by the whole realm of sexuality. We need to find ways of being especially sensitive to their needs, even as we salute and embrace transgender youth and adults as they take enormously brave and risky steps toward the expression of their own most authentic selves. Wouldn't a loving transgender God expect no less?