This Female Body

In this moment, being locked inside a female body holds an incredible level of salience for half the population of this nation.  In the days ahead,  a group of aging white males will decide again how we who happen to occupy female  bodies are used, valued, and viewed.  Thankfully, two strong white women are being lobbied to stand in their way.  For me, it’s taken a lifetime of challenges to navigate this world in the body of a female.I was the youngest and only daughter among three children  in our family of five.  Before I had a say, that meant frilly dresses, lots of dolls, piano lessons, flute lessons, and dance lessons.  These were important to my very feminine and fashionable mother who was also an accomplished pianist with a beautiful singing voice.  However, the only thing I liked on that list in those early years were the dolls.  I preferred pants and sports.  Thankfully, my mother had played field hockey in high school and so she tolerated my desire to play sports so long as I also learned to cook, clean, and sew.

During PE in elementary school, only boys were appointed to be the team captains, but I was always among the first they would pick to be on their team no matter the team sport we were playing.  We never questioned why the boys were always in charge;  it seemed so natural that the boys were the leaders and the girls were followers.  That’s how we were socialized.  At the time it was enough for me that I was athletic and could compete with the boys.  I was proud that they wanted me on their team.  I think having two older brothers only contributed to my athletic acumen.   But it was when I was eleven that I learned that beating a boy one on one could actually be dangerous.

When I was eleven, my brother and I were competing in a friendly game of “Around the World”, a basketball shooting contest, when I beat him.  The next thing I knew, his hands were around my neck.  The violent outburst took me by surprise and thankfully he was stopped by a bystander and later punished for laying hands on a girl, not just his sister, but a “girl”.  We never competed again.  In fact, I never again took on a boy in direct athletic competition.  I started junior high the following year and the opportunity to play with sports with boys vanished completely.  I began to realize that being in this female body meant others thought they could and should control me.

Puberty brought a whole new realization that my body, being female, could both grow a baby and then feed it.  Beyond my growing breasts and hips, there was a monthly reminder of this reality.  I’m glad that this monthly reminder ended some years ago and in retrospect, I’m very grateful that I never had to endure a menstrual cramp or wild mood swings like so many women.  My body was very regular and luckily it would never have any fertility issues or problems with giving birth.  I recognize now that limited career expectations in those days meant younger mothers with fewer fertility and childbirth issues. For a time, the design of this female body and society were in sync, even if the human spirit locked inside disagreed with the expectations being forced upon it.  I silently held to the notion that the real me was more than this female body, despite a monthly reminder and the wonder of being capable of nurturing life.

In church, I learned that I, as a female, was required to be chaste and virtuous.  It was in church that I was taught that my primary role as a female was to follow the lead of men.  I was to be submissive.  My ideas didn’t matter as much as a man’s.  My intelligence didn’t matter as much as a male’s.  My desires took second place.  What mattered was that I bore babies and obeyed the men in my life.  This was my God-given role as a female: to nurture children and support men.  I was taught that it was against God’s order for a woman to lead a man.  Women were to keep silent in the church.  Women could only exercise leadership among other women and children.  At sixteen my response was, “yikes”.  I remember telling my brother that I was never going to get married. I wholeheartedly rejected the notion of the brainless baby maker who deferred to a man simply because he happened to occupy a male body.  I knew my two brothers and they certainly weren’t better than me in brains, talent, or temperament.  Why should they have greater opportunities?  But love got in the way and I soon relented and got married.  Thankfully, the man I married shared some of my beliefs about women.  He was a feminist in some ways.

For a long time, I held to the church’s notion of marriage and a pro-life stance.  But my propensity to analyze things eventually got in the way.  Watching enough  men make horrible decisions and seeing enough women agonize over unwanted pregnancies, I began to think differently.  I rejected the notion of male leadership strictly because they are male.  Women have brains, too.  Women have talents, too.  Women have skills, too.  We were all spirits, occupying a body that is simply made of dust.  In my view, the core of who we  are and what we have to offer the world only resides inside this body.   And as I looked closer at the scriptures used to justify a pro-life stance, I found them lacking.

When God created man out of the dust of the earth, man didn’t become a living “soul” until He breathed life into him.  Breath.  From my thinking about scripture, life and death are determined by “breath”.  So, in my view, when God says in Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you…” I glean that the body is being form in the womb but the spirit or soul is something more, something eternal that transcends this body. The body (tent or temple) is simply an earthly vessel that the spirit will eventually occupy.  In the womb the earthly body is being formed, prepared, or knitted together, but it is not a “living soul”.  That happens when the spirit enters that newly formed body, when we breathe our first breath.  I believe that it is through breath that human spirits enter a premature body, a full-term body, of any color, gender, anywhere in the world.  God designed that the destination of the spirit is a body for a limited time on earth.  Many may disagree with this notion, but it is this belief that makes me pro-choice.  It is this notion that makes me open to LGBTQ rights.  And it is this notion that makes me keenly aware that no one’s life should be limited by the color, gender, or location of the body they happen to occupy.

So, for the lives of women who are breathing on this day and in this nation,  I am committed to protecting our right to choose whatever kind of life will be fulfilling to us.  Our lives as women should not be proscribed by and limited by males any longer.  We are not their play things.  I’m ready for another women’s march if things go badly this year.