Communicate Love
The nervous system uses tiny cells called neurons (NEW-ronz) to send messages back and forth from the brain, through the spinal cord, to the nerves throughout the body. Billions of neurons work together to create a communication network. Different neurons have different jobs. You have nerves throughout your entire body. Nerves send electrical signals that help you feel sensations and move your muscles. Nerves also control body functions like digesting food and maintaining your heart rate. Nerves are one of the foundational parts of your nervous system. Our body needs these nerves to conduct information so that our body needs to function.
Like our nervous system, what is communicated to help something function and grow is as important as the actual function itself. What is communicated is important, because words matter. Words can encourage and help the readers or hearers mental health. The same is true if the information shared is hate-filled. Words can indeed hurt.
Gender normativity are words that when used together for teaching, hurt.
Gender normativity means that there are fixed gender roles and that:
everybody is expected to fit ONLY inside the one that fits with the gender they were assigned at birth
everybody is judging not only themselves but everybody else whether they fit in said box
anyone not fitting in one neat box is ostracized.
Someone I love very much just proclaimed a need to teach youngsters of a gender normative. I understand the desire for parents to be responsible for teaching their children what they feel their children need to know to grow up to be loving responsible adults. Teaching youngsters that everyone must fit into a box of boy or girl and if they don’t, they need to be shunned from being a part of a civilized society is a poor and hurtful lessons. It hurt me as a queer man.
How can we teach a younger generation to love and accept people as they are? Do we teach the fore-mentioned normatively, because of an unite fear of children learning to be queer themselves? Perhaps, but I am convinced that some men and women are born that way - in no way is a queer life a choice the one could be persuaded into living. Is it fear? Is it past hurts?
I do my best to love others to love Jesus Christ. I don’t spend any time trying to “sell” people on being queer with me. But I am stuck with a question… Why do we ostracize some in our society for being different?
There is a beautiful story - A true story based on the New York Times best-selling book, “Same Kind of Different As Me,” the film is about homelessness, infidelity, and the transformative power of love, forgiveness, and healing. I’d a story about how to live out Christian values and accept people who are different from you for who they are - a creation made in the image of God. Why is this so impossible for other professing believers in Christ to live out when it comes to the queer community.
I recently watched Philadelphia again. It’s a story of a man, played by Tom Hanks, who contracted AIDS and how society around him did all they could to avoid him. The rain character of the story was fired from his job for heightened gay. He requested representation from nine different attorneys before finding an attorney, laid by Denzel Washington, who would represent him. As the relationship began, those in society questioned Washington inquiring if he himself was now gay and other awful rhetoric. Washington’s character was disgusted by the notion of others thinking he himself was a member of the LGBTQ community.
This is the society I grew up in and the society I hid from in a well-constructed closet for decades. I thought this hate-filled society had become more educated and had changed it’s tune. Apparently some i society have not changed, because it still has a desire to tech a younger generation gender normative values.
I am sad by the experience lately, but not convinced that I should stop loving others to love Christ. This means I will be loving the queer community to love Christ as well as loving non-queers to love queers to love Christ. I am convinced love is the only weapon I have to fight hate.
Update: after talking with my over one, the idea of gender normaltivity was not intended to be taught or even said for that matter - it was miscommunicated. So I sit with wondering why I was so triggered by this and how this kind of triggering will manifest itself in the future.