Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.
—Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Listening is what Quakers do. I’ve lived too many lives that were not mine to lead—lives that led me to very dark places—until the wisdom, light, and corduroy sensibilities of Quakers such as Parker Palmer taught me to stop and listen. Quaker listening is directed inward as much as it is upward; that essence of the divine is right there inside. I had only to open myself to its message, and listen. Maybe I wasn’t expecting that inner voice to be female, but then again . . .
Being true to my self-ish nature is another way of saying that authenticity matters. Authenticity was important to me long before I began my gender transition journey, but with that journey it took on a depth that eclipsed any earlier understanding I may have held to. Authenticity also happens to be a central theme in Quakerism, and in my own values—two categories which are converging more and more all the time. Being immersed in Quaker sensibilities, convictions, and community, I frequently forget that we Quakers are a tiny and (to some) even quaint religion, best known for a smiling face on an oatmeal container. That association is ironic; it was adopted as a very successful brand by a nineteenth-century Christian evangelist and philanthropist, Henry Parsons Crowell, who was not a Quaker. I am not surprised that some people think of us as an anachronism, or express surprise to learn that we still exist.
Claiming our continuing presence doesn’t convey who we are as Quakers. That’s a confusing task, because we’re characterized perhaps more for our diversity than for any common creed or articles of faith. We may be better known for our belief in the centrality of a faith community, a belief which for me was to prove instrumental to the success of my transition.
All who are associated with the Religious Society of Friends, as Quakers are formally known, trace a common origin to the turbulent mid-seventeenth century of Britain, when many peace churches emerged. From that origin, nearly all Quakers would be likely to describe their faith as one in which access to the divine is available to every person, and need not be mediated by or through a member of the clergy (although some branches of Quakerism do have pastors). We don’t try to define what “the divine” is, often simply referring to “the Light.” Probably most adherents of my faith would also concur that how we live our lives as Quakers is far more important in describing our faith than are any words we might offer, even though as a faith, most American and British Quakers don’t proselytize. For Quakers, our authenticity is probably best evaluated in the consistency of our actions and our principles, religious or secular, and in our commitment to speaking truth to power. “What cans’t thou say?” is a Quaker challenge from our earliest days, charging each of us to align our life with our faith and values. It’s a challenge that is directed as much to ourselves as to others.
My first awakening to Quakers was when I learned of their courageous and principled stance against the Vietnam War, and against the forced conscription of young American men that supplied so many warriors for that conflict. It wasn’t until I was living in London in 1990, however, that I found my way into a Quaker meeting. As so often happens for Quakers who come to this faith in their middle years, I felt immediately at home. Westminster Friends Meeting in the heart of London, adjacent to Trafalgar Square, provided me a nurturing and congenial community, blessed with some spiritually weighty older Quaker women whose wisdom and caring guided me at a very vulnerable time in my life. My decade in Africa was over; I’d just left my home, career, friends, and a failed first marriage in Kenya and was making an all-out effort to settle into a new architectural career in London, find new friends, and create a new life. At Westminster Friends Meeting I came to know remarkable women who became important spiritual mentors in my life. Hope Hay Hewison was an author who had once lived in South Africa. She often spoke eloquently about issues of the day and persons in her life, in a manner that was consistently and effortlessly framed by her Quaker values. Of the same generation, there was also Audrey Wood, whose self-effacing manner endeared herself to me. Her mentorship and remarkable spiritual insights led me ten years later to advocate for naming my own daughter Audrey, which thankfully my spouse consented to. And finally there’s Diana Galvin, now quite elderly, but an exemplar of salt-of-the-earth spirituality and a person of unbounded caring and resilient warmth. Diana is a friend in every sense of the word, and I have treasured her affection for me over the years.
While Quakers are few, we are widely scattered. In my travels in Britain, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Mexico, Canada, and in many places within the United States, I’ve visited with Quakers and always felt completely at home with them. While they sometimes vary in their traditions and priorities, every visit has the effect of strengthening my convictions that it isn’t just my beliefs that make me a Quaker. For me, being a Quaker is more about my commitment to participate in a genuine spiritual community of listeners, each of us staying intentionally open to discerning a divine will, and giving our best efforts to live our lives in harmony with that discernment. It can be a truculent and even unlovable community at times, but it is my spiritual community.
Quakers do come together around a number of shared testimonies, which bear some reflection in the context of my own life journey. These testimonies offer one vantage point from which to consider both personal and global challenges, but before weighing in on these pressing concerns, Quakers generally wrestle with a preliminary question. Should religion focus on the realities of this imperfect world (and, in my case, my previously imperfect embodiment within it) or instead give priority to some world to come?
For most Quakers, Eden isn’t history. Eden exists, but at a deep, ineffable level. It’s not commonly perceived by Friends as a primordial world order in which a unity of purpose and harmony once thrived, but instead many of us perceive it as a foundation of original vitality and integrity that we can still connect with. The spiritual lens of Quakerism is both selfish and world-affirming, and offers a remarkably healthy and inclusive perspective for one on a journey across genders. The shared testimonies of my faith include simplicity, peace, truth and integrity, community and equality, and stewardship of the environment; each of these testimonies has a central place in my wholeness and in my journey.
Simplicity takes many forms in Quaker life. For most Friends, living a life that is as uncluttered as possible by material possessions and the noise of trivial distractions allows us to be more attentive to listen in silence for the spiritual leadings upon which we depend. Simplicity also expresses a level of solidarity and opens a door to a better understanding with those whose lack of material possessions is not a matter of volition, but of economic reality. Finally, leading lives that are simple allows the richness of common humanity to express itself more fully and more directly, in all genders and sexual orientations. To some extent, simplicity has been thrust upon me as my economic resources have dwindled, but I have never been attracted to a life of clutter.
The Quaker peace testimony relates to a view of a world in which—through concerted peacebuilding actions—the reasons for war will cease to apply. Early Quakers were called Friends of the Truth, and although that appellation is no longer in use, Quakers frequently still refer to each other as Friends. The Quaker testimony of Truth and Integrity challenges Quakers to avoid duplicity and hypocrisy, to honor promises, and to speak from conviction, even in the face of powerful opposition. Being honest to my convictions and my sense of what is authentic, and living my life in an honest effort to achieve that level of integrity, is a spiritual discipline that underpins my transgender journey and probably even made it possible.
Community and Equality can be compared to a cosmopolitan moral perspective, in which the moral worth of all is held to be equal, anywhere in the world. Even in the England of the 1640s, Quakers adopted what was then a radical position in their belief that women and men possessed equal spiritual authority and moral value. Now we are challenged to take that conviction beyond a binary view of gender. The testimony of Equality is also pertinent to issues of social inclusion amidst diversity, avoidance of exploitative social, economic, and political relationships, and the embrace of an increasingly multicultural and diverse world. We need to get beyond “the other” and see that—in all the most important aspects of being hu-man—we are all one.
In our own stubbornly outspoken ways, Quakers are often agents of change within secular society. As described above, our Quaker testimonies have direct bearing on the repugnance of discrimination against trans-gender persons. Such discrimination is a global problem, and even here in the United States only seventeen states and the District of Columbia have laws to protect transgender persons from discrimination. Those laws vary in their coverage and effectiveness, but I feel that vulnerability—particularly in light of the recent political upheaval in this country. I struggle to understand how it can be that so many people of differing faith traditions and beliefs choose to remain silent about the plight of transgender persons. As transgender people, we are either of little interest to, or strategically exploitable (at the margins) by, the politically and culturally powerful. As Quakers we view our world with our eyes wide open, and don’t pretend that the current world order and the recent American political change is benign for disadvantaged minorities such as transgender persons. Quite the opposite; Quakers often feel called to find nonviolent means to confront powerful institutions of intolerance, violence, oppression, injustice, ignorance, and occasionally malice that underpin these negative forces.
On a personal level, my Quaker faith has been and continues to be a strong guide to my transition. Being authentic to my discerned gender means listening inwardly for a clear calling to resolve the dissonance, to create wholeness, to be present as myself to my family and friends, and to open the door to integrity and keep it open.
The door to integrity is of course a metaphor. This particular door to integrity leads to a room behind. I’ve often described my personal “door to integrity” as analogous to living in a home where I perceive there’s something amiss; the proportions don’t feel right, the corridor is just too long. At the edges of my consciousness, I play with the idea of a room that the builders never completed and just sealed up, but in my metaphor I know that it’s an absurd notion. Absurd, until the day comes when a door I’d never seen before is simply there, in the middle of that long corridor. I summon my courage and open the door.
Inside, the room is lively, sunny, and very feminine in its appointments. Pink wallpaper? Perhaps not. What’s most memorable, however, are the multitude of drawers and cupboards—some ornate, some simple, some enormous, some very tiny and intricate. Each drawer and cupboard is an invitation to discovery, and I sense that in each I will find a part of the Chloe life that is now available to me, to be aired and incorporated into my story, my life. The contents of some drawers are playful and frivolous, while in others there are heavy challenges and profound leadings. Of course the room also boasts a beautiful gold-rimmed mirror, in which I see my reflection as Chloe with a clarity and wholeness—integrity—that I have never before experienced. It’s a glorious room filled with light, warmth, and softness, and I know that it is now there for me—with abundant discoveries still to encounter and reflect upon—for the rest of my life. It will take me more than that long to open each drawer and cupboard, and to be present to what each contains. Naturally the contents of these drawers and cupboards defy material description. Much of their content is symbolic, even ineffable. Call them elements of the soul; these are the spiritual essences that contain meaning, identity, and warmth for this self-ish Quaker woman called Chloe.
One Sunday in 2010 a woman in my Quaker Meeting in Adelphi, Maryland, felt moved to rise and speak out of the silence, as Quakers sometimes do. In her message, she talked about what she called “thin places” that we all experience in our lives—places and situations where we feel only thinly separated from some great meaning, some great significance, and occasionally, some great peril. She described how those thin places are sometimes the reward for something that we’ve sought for a long time, but how at other times the thin places are encountered when we’re being challenged by something hard, sad, or mysterious. She described being present at a birth or a death as examples of thin places that we all experience at points in our own life journeys, where the separation between us and divine meaning or miracle is very thin indeed.
Her words had a deep resonance for me. After a long period of weighty silence in the meeting, I found myself on my feet, as a message moved through me. My words described an image that had come strongly to me, filling my mind. It was an image of crossing an icy river—of being challenged to get to the other side, but having to deal with thinness along the way. In my message I shared the metaphor of a river, and the knowledge that my life lay on the mysterious other shore, even though it meant leaving all the comforts and familiarity of my own shore—all the “thick places” that had allowed me to live a relatively easy life. I was drawn to the far shore, but as I crossed the frozen river I could hear the danger signs of cracking ice underfoot. It was getting thin, and the water was deep and turbulent below. Finally, I got to a point where the ice felt remarkably thin, and was ready to give way. I lacked the courage to go on, but then I noticed that others dear to me had also joined me on this crossing. They had places—ways across the river—that were parallel to mine and also thin, but not thin enough to break. They were close to some deep significance in their own lives, and confronted their own sense of peril and risk, but their paths were not my path. We are all on spiritual journeys, not just those of us who are transgender.
Even as I spoke aloud to the meeting, I found my moment of grace. I knew that my path was to fall through the thinness, and to trust the waters below. I had to believe that the waters would actually be warm and life-giving, and that I would rise from the waters reborn, to continue to the other side with my spirit—my soul—transformed and ready for what awaited me there. The challenge was to have that faith, and to hear the cracking of the ever-thinning ice as an invitation and not a threat. I knew that I would step forward, and give myself to the fall. And the waters would be warm, and comforting, and transformative.
As you might imagine, that message offered a very strong—even mystical—sense of the journey I’d embarked upon. Taking that fall in reality was when I finally came to understand that authenticity and meaning came from accepting that I am a woman, that I am Chloe, despite the dangers that the cracking of the thin ice portended. It was time to give myself to the journey of wholeness, to listen to where my life was trying to lead me, and to be intentionally self-ish.