XX, XY and a guitar or two

 

Musik G.G.E. 20215

I just spent a bit of laid-back, feelin’-cranky-with-everything time, listening to Alison Kraus sing Goin’ to Carolina in my Mind. And I wondered, “Why would a pretty girl with a voice like hers long for that slop-hole of a state of red necked, bigoted politics …” (Yah, cranky! Please forgive me all you Carolinian brethren and sistern.) And then I had a stupid thought (an ungoverned mind tends to go down such rabbit holes occasionally) which was, “How is the girl who is Alison Kraus different from me, or vise versa. I'm thirty years older; there is that. But I could sing Teach Your Children Well and, of course, you’d find a dozen ways in which we sound different without half trying. But would the song mean the same thing in my mouth as it does in hers?” Assuming I’m a man … with a manly voice, of course, and a Canadian, and a lib., etc.

More than enough has already been said about the difference between male and female, and Daily Wire will be all too happy to take our money so they can explain it to us, should we have doubts. That comparing at the level of our DNA shows we men missed being born women by a split-haired, “coin-toss” at the crossroad where serendipity decides sex, does that help our understanding of same and different? Or when I see a doctor in emergency, and am given a he will see you or a she will see you and he/she comes and says, “Hi, I’m Doctor Fixya and how can I help,” and I feel no welling up of a spontaneous gender value judgment, does that help clarify where I’m at on gender stuff? Or have I experienced enough female doctors to complete my learning about what does and doesn’t matter in practicing medical arts?

Heaven knows, there are plenty of YouTube philosophers deeply committed to telling us what’s what. “If there’s a penis, it’s a man, if there isn’t, you’re looking at (and probably shouldn’t be) a woman.”

But still, to deny that in this Twenty-first Century, being woman or man amounts to a trifling variation in how our lives will be allowed to proceed, well, that would be just plain stupid. Jordan Peterson’s apparent contention is that the differences are immutable features of our design, and that we all do best when men are the manliest men we can be, and women aspire to robust femininity. (I’m exaggerating for effect here; still cranky) I somehow doubt that that’s what Alison Kraus was thinking as she sang in a trio with Suzie Bogguss and Kathy Mattea, Teach Your Children Well. Gender definitions and who makes them up would be clearer if we confined ourselves to more traditional views of gender, of course; I can’t help but think of the Taliban in Afghanistan, or my mother birthing and raising twelve children in tough circumstances over twenty-five years. “So, Taliban-guy, so, mommy, what IS a woman really? (“Oh, look,” says the doctor, pointing at my crotch, “you have another boy, Mrs. Epp.)

And then I remember that Teach your Children Well first proceeded from the mouths of Crosby, Stills and Nash, all men, men who did the worst version of it, in my estimation.

So much of our discourse is founded on the premise that there is a right way to be a human being. This becomes most pronounced among fundamentalist religions and political ideologies, where efforts to remold others into facsimiles of ourselves can border on the bizarre.

And failing to remake the world’s people leaves us with that old us and them syndrome that pretty much characterizes the news these days. Women speak of men as “them.” And vice versa, of course. And isn’t “them” now an appropriate pronoun for a single, transgender person, as in “I’m travelling with ‘them’” (one Adrian Brownwinkle, let’s say). (I can imagine this declaration: “I’m travelling with them (Adrian Brownwinkle) and them (that bunch of all-women). They and they all have passports.”

At eighty-one, I’m not sure I have enough time to get a firm handle on the new pronouns. At least, I understand that my confusion cannot possibly justify cancelling the transgendered as we have done. (If only people were drawings on a whiteboard; they’d be much more easily erased.) 

And some change … just seems to happen. I listen to music on YouTube frequently, and lately, I’ve tended toward country and western artists, as you may have gathered from the above name-dropping. Age-old gender prejudices reassert: Trisha Yearwood, for instance, does a way-more-appealing rendition of John Denver’s Country Roads than he ever did … in my elderly opinion. Were I to be regaled by a trans-female singing You Light up my Life, I’d wish from the depths of my prejudice that it would have been Debbie Boone instead.

I sometimes say stupid things like, “If you women want equality, equity, STOP PAINTING YOUR TOENAILS!” I often listen to old recordings of Eric Clapton singing Wonderful Tonight or No Tears in Heaven and realize again that there is within me a serious longing for women to keep wearing flowing silk dresses, flowers in their long, equally-silky hair and, yes, painting their toenails. Let’s keep it simple, binary, like positive/negative, up/down, black/white; I can deal with that.

When Jesus of Nazareth—the teacher whose disciples Christians claim to be—introduced humankind to a new way, he was declaring himself a theological liberal as compared to the calcified conservatism of the teachers of the law, the pharisees and the rest of the temple administration. “You’ve heard it said … but I tell you …,” repeated several times in the Sermon on the Mount, was signal for necessary change in order to please the very God the people pretended to worship. “You have heard it said, ‘eye for eye and tooth for tooth, but I say, love your enemies.’” The Sermon is not a compendium of admonitions to be true to what has passed, but an announcement of change, a change so profound that achieving it would demand much, as if forsaking the shelter of the valley to climb a perilous, steep mountain.

For me personally—as calcified in attitude as any pharisee—the call to climb the mountain has a different shape than it did to Peter, James and John and the rest back then. They were admonished to be loving to the Romans, their enemies. I am being urged to be loving beyond, above the bounds of gender identification that juts out like a steep outcropping in my generation, on this my mountain. When I fail in the effort, or refuse to engage it, I’m siding with the stubbornness of the pharisees and teachers of the law.

How does one talk about these things with a few guitars, a piano, a bass player and backup voices blended in close harmony though? I used to be a bit of a snob (probably still am) about music, so thinking about country/pop music as inferior meant the cancelling of the musicians who made it. Christians cancel nobody, ever. I had to climb a bit of a mountain to take a look on the other side. But I give you the silky voice of Anne Murray singing Just a Closer Walk with Thee; tell me what you think. Just copy the URL and paste it into your search engine. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evG6mLukuw4

(One final note: all the songs mentioned are available on YouTube. Just call it up, type title and musician or group into the search box, cancel or sit through an ad or two, and enjoy.)