Hi, Catholic here—the only part of the holy trinity with a human body is the Son (Jesus) so yes, but also God the Father doesn’t have a human body so no, but the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all the same being as well so yes, but all humans including women are created in the image of God so hypothetically He has everything else too. Hope this helps.
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Something is bothering me about the application of "no true Scotsman" to saying something isn't Christian. This is true only up to a point. Because at a certain point, there is a boundary where someone isn't a Scotsman. I'm not a Scotsman, for instance. I could say that I'm Scottish, because I have ancestors who come from Scotland. But you can't compel Scottish people to accept me as Scottish.
Similarly, there is a boundary around what's actually Christian. The definition of Christian isn't actually "everyone who says they are." And it's not everyone who reveres or venerates Christ. Muslims and Manichaeans revere Jesus but aren't Christian. Not everyone accepts non-Nicene Christianity as Christianity. And movements can be destroyed by allowing in everyone who says "I'm a _____" without pushing back. Look at the watering down of feminism. "It's feminist to conform to the status quo, actually," was a devastating boundary shift.
So here we come to a charge that I must accept everyone who says they are a Christian as part of my faith. And it's difficult to create a satisfying response because we have two things that are true:
1. People bearing the name "Christian" are causing significant, real harm in our name and it doesn't do any good and it doesn't repair any harm to tell our neighbors "well, ACTUALLY that was a FAKE Christian and I'm different and better 😌"
2. Some of these beliefs aren't Christian. These are beliefs that cut you off from the body of Christ. White nationalism ISN'T Christian. Jesus crossed boundaries of nation and ethnicity all the time. And this is beyond being a church of wheat and tares. There is a swath of Christianity right now that has set up an idol in the form of a man they call Jesus, but they are not in any way worshipping the God revealed in scripture. I can't accept that as Christianity. Christian nationalism is idol worship.
I think it mainly comes down to we have a secular facing responsibility and a church facing responsibility. It's the difference between I wouldn't tell anyone recounting how they suffered at Christian misbehavior "that wasn't a real Christian™️" but I would tell (and have told) other Christians "that belief is not Christian, it's not scriptural, repent and return to the true faith."
We're not talking about "no TRUE Christian would say cuss word/take the Lord's name in vain." Yes, TRUE Christians would do and have done and will do horrible things and we can't absolve ourselves through distance. But we are also talking about a deep theological sickness in our body. We have the right to fight off that sickness. We have the obligation to fight it off before it kills us.
Mainline Protestants for a really long time have tried the strategy of "just BE a better Christian" while these conservative churches actively prey on our membership and guess what, it's not working. We need to SPEAK BACK to these people. And "this isn't Christian" is not a tool I'm ready to dump from my toolbox.
the peace of the Lord steals over me after great turmoil. I am His and shall always be in His hand, and where He leads me I shall go. Always my Savior prepares the way for me, and since He is my courage and my strength, my light and my salvation, I cannot help but follow.
I am being cryptic because I don't have all the answers yet to be able to speak about what is happening. let me reassure you all that my family is safe and hale and whole. I am safe and hale and whole. there is only a change in my future plans, but such a tremendous one that I have truly struggled with it -- but if God is for me, who can be against me? and I will do my utmost to take every day as it comes, with love and joyful hope.
Have you not seen the UK news lately, there were Anglican run mother and baby homes, forced adoptions and the whole Home Children thing. It wasn’t just the Catholic Church.
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I hear there's been a trial liturgy floated for MAID in Canada. while admittedly the concept is not my favorite (I've talked about this before) I agree with the person on Anglicord who said that you kinda gotta show up for believers who choose it, even if you don't agree.
the liturgy acknowledges right up front that the Anglican Church of Canada is divided on this practice, and that the ethics of the practice aren't what ACoC set out to tackle. there just needed to be a resource for those who are called to minister to those who choose it. I remember that God did not ask us to judge. God merely asks that believers love one another as Christ loved us. and no, I don't think you're going to Hell if you choose MAID, that's definitely not my problem with it. this liturgy even says, and I quote:
"pastoral presence also needs to be deeply attentive to signs of coercion or abuse of power in and amongst any of the relationships of the person at the centre of care."
I can be comfortable with having a liturgy knowing that ACoC is aware of the possibility of abuse. that it's even pastoral duty to look out for that. because someone has to care, right? someone has to know that euthanasia has been offered by eugenicists as a tool to unburden society of its "useless eaters" in the past, in multiple places. someone has to carry the history and the awareness and be on the lookout for the abuses that speak to those attitudes.
it's not for me to validate or invalidate the liturgy's contents. it is very much for me to applaud the thoughtful guidance ACoC has provided, and the history and the now and the inequities that may lead to MAID being abused. that's what I would want if I were a Canadian Anglican. I would want a pastoral presence that was aware and, hopefully, has been participating in the dying person's journey. (if you are called into a MAID situation on an emergency basis, you are probably facing a person who is in the kind of agony that Jesus Himself suffered on the Cross. the morality looks very different.)
so overall, contrary to my initial "what the aitch?", I think I'm pleased knowing ACoC chose to do this. I hope the liturgy gets [handwave] ratified for permanent use or whatever.
I came to this way later than I should have as a supposedly engaged Friend, but holy shit Britain Yearly Meeting's response to the transphobes is fucking incredible.
this is the most profound "fuck you and your shitass underhanded tactics" i have ever seen from an official Quaker source. do you know how badly you have to fuck up for the clerks to outline five different ways you're out of right ordering?
and they have, as one would expect of Quaker bureaucracy, brought the goddamn receipts.
nyah nyah yah boo sucks
like i am just. I'm not surprised but it's still always good to see it acknowledged that Quakers are disproportionately trans and non-binary (literally four times higher percentage of us in Britain Yearly Meeting than in Britain as a whole) and also as a disabled Somewhat Trans the original message leaning so heavily on "but think of the poor disabled people!" pissed me off so fucking much. so. another W here.
yes i know this is just the stuff trans activists have been saying the whole time but this is the stuff we've been saying the whole time and it's laid out just. so fucking succinctly and obviously that it just feels like a sick burn, you know?
HOOTIN AND A-HOLLERIN again, i know this, but having it in official terms as A Fact Of The Situation is just like. ugh. my heart is healing.
it is a very quaker "shut the fuck up" move to repeat "discerned" twice in one paragraph just so you know for damn sure it was done under the quaker process and is divinely/spiritually/bureaucratically solid, and i know because i have done this exact thing while clerking
fellas is it possible to do a pacifist murder
SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP again like. if you are not used to quaker spaces i need you to know that it is SUPER uncommon for modern quakers to straight-up say "this is offensive and wrong" to each other. like. it is frankly one of the real problems in the Society, our tendency to be conflict-avoidant and try to find a middle road and be polite.
so i need you to know that being this unequivocal on a contentious issue, in a published communication from BYM, is a fucking nuke in Quaker terms. this is gloves-off bare-knuckle quaker convincement. fucking get 'em.
and finishing out on one final "no YOU'RE out of order!" which, again. as someone who clerks on an area meeting level and has wanted to say this kind of thing to people a lot, this is additionally satisfying in ways that aren't even about the trans rights of it all.
although also
including pronouns in the sign-off is also, i think, standard practice for the Clerks now, but god it's satisfying in this context
the minute from Meeting for Sufferings is also worth reading (it's in the full letter at the link), it's not nearly as savage and is a lot more "let's try to find a way to explore common ground" but it's still pretty unequivocal.
the person who pointed me to this (who is ironically neither Quaker nor British) also pointed out the inherent comedy in claiming that the trans agenda is going to end Quakerism now when like
i think that would have happened two hundred years ago if it was gonna, at least in the States?
#this is truly excellent#and also so rare like there is no way to stress enough#that this is a last resort move for BYM
like yeah that's an important point. for better and worse, this is not, like... the first step BYM or BYM trustees have taken here. Sex Matters has been stirring shit with Yearly Meeting, Meeting for Sufferings, and other Quaker bodies for at least a couple of years now afaik (my mum was on Sufferings until the end of 2023 and they were definitely being a pain in the arse then as well)
it has taken a lot for the clerks to reach a point where they're this blunt and targeted, and as the letter suggests, part of that is that the Sex Matters convener not only reached out inappropriately and outside the proper channels, but also shared it with a whole bunch of people. I saw the Sex Matters letter weeks ago (it was attached along with the Sufferings report in July) which, in hindsight: yeah that was weird actually
side note but the Sex Matters letter is so bad. like. not just in the ethical regard. it contains a massive """""equality impact assessment"""" to support them on how totally unsafe mixed-gender bathrooms are. they have marked every equality group as severely negatively affected, including on the basis of gender reassignment. (their argument for this was, i believe, essentially "this might upset detransitioners" with no further evidence or explanation). none of the "risks" are evidenced. many of them are just questions of "could this affect...?". i think i found maybe 5 risks that were actually founded and all of them had been considered in BYM's own EqIA. as someone who has done a lot of equalities paperwork in professional contexts and takes it seriously i was personally offended by the lameness of the paperwork but also they were directly accusing BYM of not fulfilling their legal requirements to assess impact under the Equalities Act, and they then circulated that through BCC and socials. this was a clear attempt at intimidation. it's also hilarious because like. this is the Bureaucracy Religion. if you come at bym staff on the basis of paperwork you had better be so fucking sure.
the point being that this is kind of the nuclear option for BYM, and it's been earned. Sex Matters have already been heard in Meetings, and it has not changed the feeling of the Meeting; they have already been spoken to privately by elders and pastoral care in at least some cases; the existence of their viewpoints has already been noted in minutes on the subject.
One of the reasons that this sort of thing doesn't happen often internally (this kind of bluntness is usually reserved for external statements, like the statement on the Westminster police raid a few months ago) is that usually it doesn't have to. On a national level, Quakers usually don't go further than saying "Friend, you have been heard" and either discouraging or ignoring things that are outside of the main business processes (Meeting for Sufferings, Yearly Meeting sessions, Area Meetings, etc.) until they go away. is this ideal? probably not. but it is why you rarely see this kind of thing.
Back in the day (like, up until the 19th century, when Quakerism was a much more insular and controlled group), irreconcilable dissent might have got people (including the Public Universal Friend, actually) kicked out of the Society. we... don't really do that any more. I'm not sure we could do that any more, the approach to membership has got a lot more relaxed and people really only leave membership when they choose to resign it.
So in a lot of ways, this is the most BYM can possibly do - be blunt, be categorical in their condemnation, and make it publicly available to Friends to make up their own minds.
(That publicity is also very unusual. Typically, we would only see these things addressed through minutes, epistles, or other notes addressed to the record rather than to an individual. We would also usually expect them to come from a Meeting rather than individuals - I'm not entirely clear whether this letter is from Trustees as a whole, or from the Clerks individually, but it looks like it's from the Clerks. I imagine there must have been a lot of discussion before they decided to publish this to the website.)
this is not a casual thing for BYM Clerks to do. they have committed here. I've been involved in Quakers since I was a small child, and I don't remember anything like this happening before, not even following the (quite polarising) decision on gay marriage BYM took in 2010. The severity here really speaks both to how hard Sex Matters have been prepared to push their agenda (and how little they have been prepared to accept Quaker discipline*) and to just how little patience BYM Clerks have left. This isn't just a sternly-worded letter: this is more or less the harshest BYM can get without themselves stretching the bounds of Quaker discipline*.
I don't think Sex Matters will back off. If there's one thing about transphobes: they are fucking tenacious. So while I am hype as hell about this letter, I'm also kind of watching with bated breath to see what comes next, because if Sex Matters continue to fuck around, I actually don't know what they'll find out.
The Big Quaker Idea is that ordinary people don't need the mediation of priests to understand God and can instead understand God through spending time with one another in silence. Sometimes people in these silent meetings are "moved to speak" and "give ministry". This is both how we worship and how we make decisions, sitting in silence waiting for people to speak with divine inspiration with the aim of "discerning" a way forward on whatever issue we have to make a decision about. Invoking "discernment" in this context means that Quakers believe there is some amount of divine inspiration behind a decision because it was made in this way.
Basically "Thanks for your email, we already asked the Holy Spirit what to do about the toilets, They said they should be gender neutral"
The Quaker reformation of the mid-eighteenth century reinforced the denomination’s challenge to mainstream gender norms and provided a more immediate example of female empowerment to the Friend and his disciples. Quaker reformers worked to reverse a growing separation of religious and social issues perceived as female concerns from a more masculine realm of politics and economic life. This ran counter to the feminization of religious life taking place in other Protestant denominations in the late eighteenth century. Many Protestant churches faced a reality in which women dominated membership and, as a result, they found their authority frequently limited to a set of issues—spiritual life, family, children, and charity—that society increasingly defined as female. In turn, they were losing their purchase on areas of daily life—commerce and politics—gendered as masculine. The advocates of the Quaker reformation countered this, contending that the values of love, humility, and philanthropy transcended sex and that religion was inseparable from politics and economics. This helped to stave off any effort to marginalize women in the Society of Friends. It also enabled Quaker men and women to construct gendered identities that were increasingly at odds with mainstream society. The Society of Universal Friends was in harmony with these developments. They, like the Quaker reformers, sought to erase any line between spiritual concerns and everyday life and deemphasized the difference between masculine and feminine—especially in the realm of religion.
The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America by Paul B. Moyer (emphasis mine)
don't mind me, just fangirling a historical person who DID have Something To Say about the gender this person was (so much so that the only appropriate way to refer to the Friend is in fact as "the Friend". pronouns? we don't know 'em).
my mother and I are both big fans of the Friend. THAT is how you do historical trans rep.
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as modern interpreters of historical narratives, we need to be careful that we don't project our desires onto a story that isn't what we want it to be.
today's saint is Marina the Monk, and I will refer to her throughout with she/her pronouns because the gender dynamics of today are not the gender dynamics of the 5th century AD. people point to the fact that Marina took up a male name and garb and lived as a man and say, "this was a trans man". but I would argue that Marina cared more for her soul than for her perceived gender, and wanted not to be a man per se, but to be sanctified. whatever she had to do to be holy, she would do it, dying to the very self she had been raised as in order to seek a life that honoured God. there may also have been an element of not wanting to be separated from the only family she had left (her story begins properly after her mother dies and her father's planning to marry her off and become a monk himself). there may have been an element of not wanting to be married, there may have been an element of not wanting to be cloistered with women -- we don't know. we can't know. we don't know enough.
rather than ascribe to her a queerness that may not have been true, I plan to stick to the bones of her story: that, rather than dishonor the girl who plotted against her and pinned a baby on her, she took the shame on herself, and all responsibility. because we are all sinners. and like Daniel in the apocrypha, we can want no part in the downfall of someone Christ called us to love even as Christ loved us. Marina's story is primarily of Christlike love. let's not make gender identity -- a modern idol -- the takeaway instead.
I think about this sometimes. I think about this, and the stupid things I did that have derailed, it feels, my entire romantic life. how as a girl I had no guidance that wasn't either it's your choice!!1!! or your hormones are making you a sinful harlot, repent.
(frank talk about sexuality below the cut, by the way.)
-- neither approach is wise, because when you call her a harlot -- or as good as call her that, in all but name -- you drive her into the arms of the people who think it should all be choice. and when the choicers get a hold of her, sex stops being something sacred that you share in love and starts being what you do to scratch an itch. bored? fuck about it. drunk? fuck until you're sober. lonely? fucking will earn you a night's respite.
I know God was with me for a little while. God showed me that the tenderest thing was to sleep nestled next to a man, and only sleep. to be curled up in arms not mine, for a night or for a bonfire. I have to think it was God who thwarted all of my hormone-driven attempts to lose my virginity, and God did a great job at that until I turned 21 and the thing was done. and from there I guess it was well, she has to choose for herself.
or maybe it was the blatant disdain I had for the Christian tradition. how I strove to bend Creation to my will. the one love spell that ever took... brought me Stuart. who, yes, ignited my mind at first, but who ignited my body in short order and dragged me deeper and deeper into his mire, and I tried to give him everything I had but it was never enough. he took. and then. and then the hormones died, worse luck, so that I wanted less and less to try to give, and he would take more often regardless.
by the time I gave him up, I was dead inside.
I stayed dead to romance for nine more years. then the first man I kissed in nine years, and my body reacted with violent diarrhoea and cramping. I dated because I wanted my person. unfortunately I broke a perfectly good heart in the process -- not mine. and I'll owe her until the day I die, for her loyalty and kindness when I didn't deserve it. but I made it clear to her, by dating, that what we were wasn't enough. instead of being mature about it and talking through what we were to each other. it says a lot that the only relationship I've ever been in that felt good was this one QPR I treated less-than-respectfully. Julia is the only person I don't regret. and the only thing I'm sorry about is that her home will never be mine, because I am bound to this city and she is bound to hers.
if you're reading this, Julia, profoundest apologies for not knowing jack about shit. turns out I'm acespec, too. and finding my person with that on my back is going to be tough going. pray for me, if you can.
I tried. God kept saying no. the guy who loved to read and was cultured? he turned out to have a hoarding problem stemming from unresolved grief for his parents, and no hope of gainful employment. the "nice" Indian man? he wanted a friend with benefits and didn't bother to tell me until I flat-out asked. (I let him have a part of me that I want back, but I can't say I said no, even if I didn't say an enthusiastic yes. I was tired and scared of everything.)
the man who said I would either be the best thing that happened to him or the worst? still married to wife #2, and so prone to overthinking and so scared of going from one trap to another that he chose to hurt me rather than reassure me when he acted cagey. he ended it with me three whirlwind weeks in, this one man who didn't want me to be his whore. that was a bad Thanksgiving. we lovebombed each other but I meant it. I was ready to do what it took to be a good person to him. he wasn't. that was the last straw.
I cut my hair and kept cutting. I let myself be edged out of my own gender. changed my name, changed my pronouns. realised how not-me it actually was, changed again. it was time for a better name. I'd taken my original nickname from a book about a courtesan. really not the fate I wanted to write for myself. then I was one undignified, gender-neutral syllable. plucky, but not the stuff of anyone's romantic dreams.
you can imagine Miette as the heroine of a love story, if you can ignore her memetic origins.
I don't leave the house without something tied over my head because my hair is so short that I feel intense dysphoria looking at it. when I say I kept cutting, I mean "I let my hairdresser give me a trim in January, she bushwhacked me, and I spiralled". I have a new hairdresser, and I encouraged her to take me really short, and that was a mistake. I'll never be more than a chin-length shag kinda woman, but it'll be a long time until I'm a chin-length shag kinda woman again. so I cover my hair in an attempt to look at least remotely feminine and romantic.
I don't have any good pictures of myself. so I don't have a dating profile.
I hate how I look in pictures.
it's too bad the only way people date anymore is via elaborate and expensive personal ad.
in short, I am a pile of hopeless romantic. emphasis on the hopeless. and so I come to God with all of this. Lord, I keep asking, find me the alloromantic asexual of my dreams, who's good for sweet kisses and kind snuggles and nights keeping each other safe, and love so epic people wish they were us, but... the rest is just an itch I'd rather scratch by myself.
in the spring and summer, the loneliness is acute. but I'm resolved: no more sacrifices. I've given enough of my body and with it, my soul. I am parted out like an old police cruiser. if the price of entry is the last of what makes me a person, forget it. this cannot be God's plan for me. if God intends me to give away even more of what I consider sacred to my husband-to-be, then I'll sooner be damned. better to burn.
giving that away isn't sacrificial love... except if the sacrifice is to Satan.
