Spirituality and Being Transgender

The week after the Gender Odyssey meeting in Seattle, I decided to go see an old friend in the Islands off Vancouver. She was gracious enough to let me stay at her house and tag along with her for a few days. She and her spouse have a mountain permaculture farm and she has a unique high-tech clothing factory in the middle of a rural area. Her spouse happens to be transitioning in the opposite direction but that is a story for another post.

Our main activity was to sit and talk about transgender issues and our pasts. She is an author and poetess, me as a scientist-soldier who felt she had to save the world by being masculine for a time. She calls me “Princess Knight” after the manga character who also was forced to be a man for a while. At one point we started to talk about spirituality. She said that she became transgender and eventually transsexual because of her spiritual experiences. She said that she was inspired by thinking and dreaming about “the Goddess,” a universal feminine spirit. She committed herself to get closer to this Goddess by being transgender. Eventually, she wanted all traces of masculinity removed and became transsexual. I am sure that she would capture her experience in words differently from me. She is, after all, a poetess and I am a geeky scientist.

I cannot say that I have had the same spiritual experience, but I can believe that she and others have feminine (or masculine) spiritual experiences, whether becoming transgender or not. Reports of gendered spirituality are too numerous to ignore.

I believe that I became transgender out of my experiences with gender behavior at an early age, not from spirituality. I felt that I “fit” better into the feminine gender and still do. It wasn’t so much that I rejected the masculine gender but the pull of being feminine was much stronger.

Her description of feminine spirituality reminded me of the descriptions I have read by anthropologists about the multiple gender behavior categories (3 or 4) of Native American cultures and, of course, the original Two-Spirits. The Native Americans reported to anthropologists that assignment to gender behavior categories was supposedly based not just on birth sex but also on the reports of children about their spiritual experiences. For example, if a male child reported a feminine spiritual experience, they might be assigned to a gender behavior category for males that involved such behaviors as homemaking, childcare, weaving and pottery making. If a female child reported a masculine spiritual experience, they might be assigned to a gender behavior category involving hunting and war making. Some children reported both masculine and feminine spiritual experiences and might be encouraged to participate in two gender behavior categories, changing their dress and presentations as they changed back and forth. Such children were called “Two-Spirits.” Many Two-Spirits grew up to be tribal leaders and shamans. (Today the definition of Two-Sprits can be somewhat broader, sometimes encompassing gay and genderqueer Native Americans.)

This idyllic anthropological story of spirituality being a determining factor in assignment to gender behavior categories probably has some truth in it. But it may also be a figure of speech for an assignment based, in part, on the observations of parents and others of children’s behavior. To what tribal jobs and activities were the Native American children attracted? Were they strong enough to become warriors? Did they have talent for art or making things? How did they react to people practicing the various gender behavior categories? What did the children have to say about the assignments?

The evidence for assignment to gender behavior categories may well have included both spirituality and behavior tendencies. Of course, spirituality experiences and behavior could be linked. One often dreams or thinks about behaviors that one has done or will do or feelings about situations.

My girlfriend and I may well just have different conscious interpretations of subconscious mechanisms that make us transgender. As scientists are aware, our subconscious mechanisms do most of the heavy lifting while our conscious mind sits back and observes. We make decisions long before we are consciously aware of them and we can watch all the subconscious processes form our decisions. Unfortunately, there are many scientists whom I call “cortical bigots” who assume that our cortex, the outer layer of our brain, is most important. That’s because initially we could not look at activity beneath the cortex with such tools as the electroencephalogram, which measures cortical electrical activity from the surface of the scalp. Someone once described it as trying to understand a single phone call by listening to the outside wall of a telephone exchange building. After all, she is a poetess, I am a behavioral scientist.

There are lots of subconscious, subcortical mechanisms in the brain and nervous system over which the cortex and consciousness have no control. For example we have no control over the center that controls motion sickness. We sure would like to turn that off when we feel air or seasick! There are subconscious mechanisms that work in parallel with cortical systems. For example, there are certain people who have sustained damage to their visual cortices in the back of the head. Some of these unfortunate people surprisingly can move around quite normally without conscious, cortical vision. This phenomenon is known as “blind sight”. That is because there is a parallel processing mechanism in the lower brain for vision. If you compare the brains of humans with animals, you see that this lower level vision center is all that birds and lower animals have and they move around quite well. Indeed, the vision of most birds far surpasses that of humans. The evolutionary reason that we do not consciously control all these subconscious mechanisms is that the brain would have to be much, much larger to accommodate all those connections. And we normally can function just fine without all those connections that satisfy the evolutionary condition for fitness.

There is one subconscious mechanism that we need to be particularly concerned with. I call this mechanism our gender behavior predisposition. We have all sorts of predispositions including the tendency to use one hand more than the other, or musical or other talents. This is a subconscious biological mechanism we are born with that helps us make decisions about preference for culturally constructed gender behavior categories. For some people, this biological predisposition is compatible with their assigned birth gender category and votes to continue to present in that category. For transgender people, their predisposition votes to behave and present in a non-assigned category.

For my poetess friend, this biological predisposition may have been expressed through her spirituality experiences. For me, it was expressed in feelings of which category “fit me” better. Since our consciousness has no direct connection to this mechanism, it is “out of our control.” The message it sent to my poetess friend and I may have been the same but it took a different brain route for each of us.

Tags: brain, featured, spirituality, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul