I love shoes. And cute jewelry. And the way I feel when my clothes look good and my hair falls just so and I am projecting the image of a sassy, cute, competent gal! This to me is an integrated sense of self where the outside matches who I know God made me to be on the inside. One of my delights over the last couple of years has been witnessing trans folk in my community experience this same sense of holy integration.
And I especially love when some of my trans sisters talk with me about dresses and shoes and jewelry. We exclaim over feminine things together. I just don’t understand when people say that these women aren’t women. Now I know that not all women like shoes or jewelry or dresses. Womanhood isn’t just one thing so this question of who is a woman and who is not just winds up being a circular conversation that is ultimately about judgement and distrust. To me a person is not what someone’s genitals are or the gender that was clicked when they were born. A person is who they show up as in the world, how they understand themselves to be made in God’s image. And it has been an honor, delight, and joy to walk with trans women and to hear about their adventures in womanhood. Some of which take me back to puberty and some of which introduce me to new fashion, styles, and ideas.
I believe in the expansive love of God. In a way of being that welcomes and rejoices in expressions of personhood. We are made in the image of God. And on those days when we just feel put together and whole there is something holy and transcendent in that. We are radiating God in us. I can never fully know what it is to be you or anyone else. I will never feel the divine spark of your heart or understand when you are in alignment with your true spirit. But I can see the signs. I can feel the love and joy emanating from you. Or the pain and judgment that makes someone’s world so small, so out of alignment with the God of sunsets and rainbows and wonder.
May we all delight when we experience the joy of another and may we make a world where all are free to radiate the way they have been made in God’s image.
-Eilidh
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