Five years ago I began a quest to understand my cross-dressing. At that time all I wanted was to feel better about wearing a dress. I was only interested in satisfying my needs and didn't care about the gender community, gender family or anyone else. Fortunately others weren't so selfish.
Tapestry Journal introduced me to a number of incredibly supportive transvestites who freely gave of themselves to help me. Through their correspondence I found that I wasn't alone, that I wasn't a bad person and that there was hope for me. Their willingness to help made me feel guilty about my self-centered approach and caused me to include other transvestites in my view of the gender community.
As self-understanding and acceptance improved I recorded my observations and my book began to form. During one of the endless manuscript edits I recognized that the principle of integration applied to everyone in the gender community: female-to-male cross-dressers, pre-op and post-op transsexuals, anyone who was transgendered in any manner. Although I only understood the other groups in an intellectual sense it was enough to see that our common points were more important than our differences. My sense of inclusion was growing.
In time came the realization that homosexuals also needed to be added to my view of the gender family. [For a mind-expanding view of this issue read Dallas Denny's article "Heteropocrisy - The Myth of the Heterosexual Male Crossdresser".] Previously I saw great differences between the gender community and the homosexual community but one day I looked at us from the view point of society and realized that to them we are virtually indistinguishable from each other.
Why hadn't I seen our linkage before? Was it my prejudices? I thought that I had overcome most of my homophobic tendencies years ago, but my religious background kept raising possible Biblical implications. I found the two most commonly quoted verses on the issue -
"Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind:
it is abomination."
Leviticus, Chapter 18, Verse 22
"If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman,
both of them have committed an abomination:
they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be
upon them."
Leviticus, Chapter 20, Verse 13
By themselves these verses were horrifying but I remembered Doctor James M. Gray, author of Commentary on the Whole Bible. His advice was to avoid concentrating on small portions of the Bible to draw conclusions. Instead we should use multiple verses to obtain a comprehensive knowledge and place individual verses in their proper perspective. I followed his advice and read all the verses in-between. They are filled with prohibitions some of which seem rather odd today -
Don't harvest all the grain but leave the edges of the field as food for the poor
Don't cross-breed animals
Don't plant two types of seeds in a field
Don't wear clothes of two different kinds of material
Don't eat the fruit of trees until the fifth year after planting
Don't follow pagan practices of magic, cutting hair in certain ways or tattoos
I was uncertain how to interpret them and realized that I couldn't take everything literally. I also noticed that the two main verses referred to men not lying with other men. They neglected women lying with other women. Does that mean that being a lesbian was okay but being gay was not? Clearly, thoughtful study would be required to understand these passages as they were intended.
On the other hand there were many other prohibitions that were quite applicable for today that we often tend to ignore or treat as less serious:
Respect your mother and father
Don't steal or cheat or lie
Don't swear falsely using God's name
Don't take advantage of anyone
Be honest and just and show no favoritism in legal matters
Don't gossip, bear a grudge or take revenge
Show respect and honor for elderly people
Treat foreigners as well as you treat your countrymen
Don't cheat anyone with false weights or measures
I have failed to live up to many of those laws countless times and continue to fall short. How could I pick two of those 59 verses to judge or condemn someone else when the Bible says that God will only forgive us if we forgive others and that He will judge us as harshly as we judge others. It asks why we are so worried about the small indiscretions of our brothers when we ourselves have major problems. The message to me was to worry about how I am behaving and not to be concerned about how others are behaving.
So where does this discussion leave us? Well, there may be separate gender and homosexual communities, but we have much more in common than we have to separate us. It is foolish for us not to work together to achieve our common principle of integration.
A good question to ask is - How big is YOUR gender family?
"There can be hope only for a society
which acts as one big family,
and not as many separate ones."
Anwar al-Sadat
