It’s admittedly a little bizarre considering my status as a white guy without immediately obvious departures from societal normality, but I’ve always been hyperconscious—anxious, maybe, is the word—of how I’ve been perceived by others. I would argue the most basic element of that perception has been my cis male presentation of gender; it’s one of the first things people classify me by and there’s a host of cultural expectations that go along with it. Particularly being white, a cultural “default” in the society I’ve grown up in, gender takes a role as the most preeminent “basic” defining characteristic I have.
It’s not an identity I’ve exactly leaned into. Before my first brushes with school, it’s not really one I considered, either. At that point, I learned that pink isn’t necessarily a proper favorite color, beads aren’t exactly acceptable craft material—in fact, crafts themselves are a bit meh–and stuffed animals weren’t especially normal anymore. Did any of that expectation really change my attitude toward those things? Maybe a little, but the majority of how I was affected when I was younger was a change in how I presented myself externally. I was happy in my own little corner of existence; everyone else and their opinions could kick rocks. Quiet, a bit withdrawn, and wary of people I didn’t know how to express myself to, I learned how to color within the lines to minimize the headache of imprecise conformance. (And, crucially, it was something I could do in the space of presenting “normally.”)
Of course, the beauty of that was that, as a guy, it was expected as I grew up that I’d be guarded and emotionally unavailable. While I genuinely believe I would’ve enjoyed parts of my life to a fuller extent without the expectations placed by societal expectations of gender, the privilege associated with it undoubtedly afforded me things like the right to be “good” at school, and particularly, “good” at whatever interests I wanted to explore without anyone’s disapproval. This is particularly true as it pertained to fields that continue to have a gender stigma—nobody questioned my affinities for math or computers.
It hasn’t always been easy for me to reconcile the fact that I leaned away from this identity’s expectations, but also was somehow advantaged by it. Among male peers, the fact that I was the last guy stubbornly clinging to a Soprano range in choir (or that I liked choir at all) was…not particularly endearing. Through childhood and adolescence, though, peers are generally only figures of power if the mind lets them be, and privilege is about power dynamics. There’s a fine line between “don’t care what anyone thinks” and becoming an aloof jerk, and somewhere in the middle, I learned for better or worse to care about the thoughts of only a few people, and through that, denied the power dynamic for any of this to really impact me negatively.
As for the true authority figures, who’d spent more revolutions adhered to this planet than I had? I was never questioned as “just a girl,” I was free to pursue whatever I wanted without the idea that something was “too technical,” and nobody ever intimated—or, worse, stated outright—that my fundamental purpose in life was procreation. The application of privilege is often not from things that happen, but things—questions, nudges, “encouragements”—that don’t happen.
The obstacles-unlaid are often less practical and less tangible through childhood and adolescence, though, and the practical utility of maleness is more greatly revealed through adult reality. I can walk city streets with greater confidence than my female peers that I’m not going to be hassled or worse; if something were to happen to me, my clothing wouldn’t be “asking for it” (and, somehow, I’m not responsible, in a large chunk of society’s mind, for my own actions if a woman presents herself a certain way).
The gender pay gap is frequently argued against by adjusting for “choice” and “fields of interest.” This belies the point. Why, exactly, do those choices and interests emerge if not societal influence?
In my mind, this has always underscored the nature of privilege to me: I didn’t ask for these expectations, and in a lot of spots in my life, the most immediately desirable thing might have been to burn the notion of gender expectations to the ground—nevertheless, as long as I am in a situation where I am considered a member of that group, I benefit from the power structures that be one way or another. Struggling with this affects the way I deal with a lot of things.
The intersection of this identity with certain others of mine has been defining as well. For example, being physically adept and ~sports~ things generally meant dealing with people who otherwise took issue with my idea of who I was, I was…not the most excited—plus, I just didn’t embrace the “manly” notion of essentially anything as a policy. I’m not immediately proud of, for example, what that meant for my idea of eating and health—accordingly, size—through much of my life. I’m also, uh, tall, which only lends itself to added masculine expectations. Many of my mannerisms, and general disdain for things I ought to have liked, led to a particular corner of high school that questioned my sexuality. I could spend a lot of time writing about that particular jump in logic, but particularly as it missed the mark, it was more annoying than anything.
But, its intersection with my faith—the other major item I want to touch on—is probably the most important. I grew up in a Lutheran Church, and among the Protestant denominations, it certainly numbers among the more traditional. Whether Martin Luther’s idea of a common priesthood in the presence of “the Christian body” was meant to be limited to men (except when “the Gospel requires,” roughly translated) as a matter of society or theology, there’s no doubt that he particularly elevated the idea of “Christian family” ahead of monasticism that preceded it in the clergy—while it’s not a direct parallel to everyday lives of non-clergy, it did set an example for followers to see, and Luther’s work can be traced as a source of many modern conceptions of gender roles in both society and many Protestant faiths.
Youth groups and Bible studies often separated by gender didn’t really make a ton of sense to me (and definitely were no longer something that interested me, at some point along in time), and the projections of gender that were frequently offered throughout my experiences made even less. Weave this in with a Protestant-aligned environment in middle and early High School and projections of what it “should” mean to be a man relative to a woman flew on all sides. Reconciling what faith authority figures told me about my gender and the gender roles that each person ought to fulfill with my own experience was sometimes not possible. Do I know that I am right in my understanding today? I can only do my best to live the example the Christ cast while knowing falling short is inevitable. I fail to see how a notion that half of humanity ought to submit to the other fits that bill, and that incongruence often made it complicated to understand everything else within my faith.
In spite of those past difficulties, the witness I have in Jesus is one of a world broken by sin and redeemed through selfless divine sacrifice. In particular, I find the call of 1 Peter—addressed to new believers living among a non-believing society in Asia Minor—to live in submission to the authority structure and bear witness to the Gospel through lived action. In essence, a call to win hearts through inspired action and conduct rather than through political subjugation.
It’s ironic, then, to me, to consider the notion of privilege afforded on a basis of my faith, as using power structure to proselytize is antithetical to my understanding of how I am meant to witness. Reality ranges from convenient—but innocuous—to a tad sinister—my religious holidays are generally free from obligations like school, and it is convenient to pass quietly without my faith challenged as outside the norm. There is a disconcerting amount of violence perpetrated in the name of ideas that leech from the legitimacy of Christianity, yet it is generally free of criticism as a “religion of violence,” as Islam is frequently maligned, and I certainly have never faced questions on the matter. Followers of, for example, Islam I’ve known are generally not afforded that same grace. Wearing the hijab alone assumes more implicit risk of societal difficulty in one day than I have encountered as a result of my faith in twenty years. It’s really that simple.
It is easy to skate along while affiliated with the notion of “Christianity” without conviction. In that way, society’s concept of the faith does it a disservice, undermining its callings and facilitating a hijacking in the name of any number of ideas. As for me: My faith has shaped my values, and accordingly has shaped how I deal with every day of my life. There are no smaller ways to write that.
Everyone is the component of multiple identities, both those visible and hidden. Everyone has difficulties in their path through life. The intersection of identity and difficulty, though, is not something that everyone experiences in then same way. I am fortunate that the things I can’t change about myself lend themselves to minimizing that interaction, and that I get to live today comfortable with who I am for its own sake.
