Gender Idolotries

When I was nine, my mother drove me two and a half hours to enter a beauty pageant. Spoiler alert: I lost. But the "why did we ever think that was a good idea?" of that story still haunts us both.

We got caught up in stories about what "girls" were supposed to like, and do, to make sense in this world — stories that even then had very little to do with who I actually was. And for a minute, it felt good to believe I could fit inside one.

We all have something like that. Something we cling to a little too tightly, mistake for solid ground, build our whole world around — only to find it was a lot less solid, or a lot more partial, than we let ourselves believe. It happens when we talk about what's ultimately true and holy. And it happens when we talk about gender (which, it turns out, is also holy).

Listen as we explore the truths about gender we treat as ultimate — and what happens when we grow past them, and find on the other side a wilder, fuller, more dynamic freedom than those old stories could ever have given us.