Worth Watching: Did God Have A Wife?

I just finished watching this documentary. Part of the BBC's "Bible Secrets" series, "Did God Have A Wife?" shows compelling evidence that early Judaism was polytheistic, an offshoot of Canaanite religion, and featured a powerful and holy goddess figure who was a counterpart to good ol' Yahweh.

The parts are on YouTube and can be watched via Unreasonable Faith.

The whole show is really interesting, but the part that I found the most compelling (though horrifying) concerned Asherah, El's wife and the goddess of life and fertility. According to Dr. Stavrakopoulou, some of the first scholars to get their hands on Asherah took one look at her exaggerated breasts and vulva and decided that she was, essentially, a porno goddess and that her followers had all succumbed to their love of teh secks.

Really, guys.

I can only try to communicate my disgust at this reaction. For me, Asherah is a beautiful, wonderful figure. She represents the fact that once upon a time in the history of the religion that shapes our world, a woman's organs were considered holy, not obscene. They were a source of power, not shame. They were more than the value assigned to them by our modern society, who has the presumption to look back on them and decide that she must have been a horrible character not from evidence but because of their own filthy misogyny.

I guess what I'm trying to say is Asherah is every woman. As Dr. Stavrakopoulou expresses at the end of the video, her erasure from the pantheon and subsequent (though cleverly concealed) demonization represents nothing less than the fall of womanhood from its rightful place as an equal way of being to a state of less-than-human. It enables laws that make a woman responsible for her own rape if she does not cry for help, laws that turn that woman into a piece of property who must be bought from her father, the continued absence of laws to accommodate a painful and awkward time in the life of most working women, the treatment of women as "bitches" or "chicks" who exist to lavish love and attention upon men, and the sickening double standard that forbids women and only women from baring their nipples in public.

While men make representations of themselves for various uses, erect large phalluses in each other's honor (see the Washington Monument), and get together to brag about how many holes they've stuck their penises into, women are told to cover up the same parts of their body that were once venerated as wonderful and necessary to humanity or else they'll get into trouble.

It's sick. Just sick. To repurpose a quote, my vagina is offended.

I Am Invisible

I am invisible.

I usually don't realize that because I spend a lot of time hanging around transgender-safe message boards, but the fact is: I am invisible. When people talk about atheists, even though they don't specify, they are thinking of cisgendered atheists. When people talk about gays and lesbians, even though they don't specify, they are thinking of cisgendered atheists. Men means cisgendered men. LGBT means L, G, sometimes B, and those other weirdoes we heard were out there. Transgendered people are invisible.

Obviously there are some people out there who know we exist - shows such as Family Guy, The L Word, Coronation Street, and Degrassi have had transgendered characters. The film The World According To Garp has an excellent portrayal of a trans woman, and there are other movies that are just about us. But to the majority of people, we do not exist - or exist only in a theory so abstract that we may not exist at all.

I know. I used to be one of those people.

For the first eighteen years of life, I either didn't know about transgendered/transsexual people, or what I knew was very abstract: sometimes there were boys that felt like they should be girls, and underwent treatments to become girls, and often their parents kicked them out of their homes and they ended up homeless and/or addicted to drugs but sometimes they turned out okay. I'd heard somewhere about FTM's (courtesy of my mum, actually) but it never sunk in for me. Why? Because I didn't know anyone who is transgendered. I didn't know anyone who knew anyone who was transgendered. I'd never bumped into a transgendered person on the Internet, and when I did, I didn't spend a lot of time with him. My mother was on the site, watching my every move, and she didn't approve of his "lesbianism." Plus I think I was afraid that if I told the forumites that I felt similarly I'd be laughed at. You can't be a "gay man in a woman's body," after all. You can only be a straight woman. But I digress. Naturally, I never thought to include trans people in any of my writing or correspondence or anything.

This is the mindset that prevents trans people from getting their rights. Someone introduces a piece of legislation that covers trans people (or gays, or POC, or atheists, or whatever), and you think that since you don't know (or like) anyone who will be affected, it isn't important. So you let it slide.

People can't live like this. You can't go on holding in your minds that transsexual people don't exist, or there are too few of us to count. There are never too few of us to count. This is something that I didn't truly understand until I became a member of two of the least regarded minorities in the United States of America, and looking back I am ashamed to think that I once thought differently. Here is what I didn't realize: The majority, or the average if you will, does not equal the default. There is no default for the human condition. I am not a cisgendered white male unless I specify otherwise. It's not easy to remember this, with our parents, teachers, peers, and the media convincing us that diversity equals deviance. Society is not a dichotomy between white males and everyone else. It is a complex mosaic of people. Some of them are descended from Europeans, some from Africans, some from Asians, some from Eurasians, some from Americans, some from European-Asians, some from African-Caribbeans, some from people of many different continents. Some of us are Christian, some are Hindu, some are Jewish, some are Muslim, some are Jedi. Some used to be religious but aren't anymore. Some were never religious at all. Some are close to six feet tall and others are closer to three. Some are HIV-positive, some have cancer, some have diabetes or syphilis or angina or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or missing organs and some have no outstanding health problems at all. Some are organ donors; some aren't. Some are female, some are male, some are intersexed. Some are cis, some are trans, some are genderqueer. Some are bisexual, some are straight, some are gay, some are pansexual, and some are one or the other but willing to experiment. Some of us have very little money, some of us have a lot; some of us just have what we need to get by comfortably. Some of us live in the cities. Many of us live outside of them. Some of us love only one person at the same time, but some love more. Some of us masturbate. Some of us don't. Some of us do and lie about it. Some of us promise our parents that we'll never have sexual intercourse until we find the one we'll be with for the rest of our lives. Some of us wouldn't have found the one we'll be with for the rest of our lives unless we had sexual intercourse first. Some of us love feet. Some of us hate feet. Some of us couldn't care less about feet. Everything about you is part of your identity, and it is no less diverse, beautiful, and strange than that of someone whose traits are less common than yours. And here's the thing: every trait about that person, to the extent that it does not harm another person, deserves to exist and be respected and protected by human law. If your identities are protected, and you can't find the time to make sure others have the same courtesy, then you don't deserve the protection you have.