Pittsburgh Days

Monday, July 20, 2009
Pittsburgh: Day 3
Day 3 was awesome. I decided to sleep in and so I did. It felt great to stretch out in cold hotel room, with a down comforter wrapped around me, and why do hotels have to have the most AWESOME pillows! If I wasn't trying to uphold some morals and values in my life, my bed would have been HOOKED UP :)

I was online for a while, and then I went to another workshop by Peterson Toscano on moving past trying to "De-Gay" yourself. It was good, and I bought "Homo No Mo Halfway House"...HILARIOUS!!!

Also went to a workshop on gender identity, but it was cancelled, so Mykal from MCC Vision of Hope and I hosted it ourselves. We focused on Trans issues because we figured that's what Rev. Eli (who originally was hosting it) was going to do anyway and no other workshops focused on Trans issues. It was about 12 of us just talking and asking questions and trading resources. It was my favorite workshop (except for the one's by Peterson Toscano!) because it wasn't structured and I heard from so many points of views, including from a trans woman who no longer sees herself as trans, a trans man who expressed he doesn't like the term "female to male", and another pretransition trans man that doesn't know if he wants to transition and who is partnered with another pretransition trans man that doesn't know if he wants to transition. It was really interesting hearing these different perspectives that would normally not come out so honestly and openly.

That evening at worship I read a Spanish reading in front of 200 people...! It was so nerveracking, but I did fine, and I hope to help out with translating in the conference in Acapulco in 2010. Woo-Hoo!!!

The conference was worth my time, my money, my energy. It was so good seeing so many people from all walks of life...truly, from ALL walks of life, come together and worship. It was so beautiful. So many deep moments. "This is a peculiar church. We are a peculiar people."

Saturday, July 18, 2009
Pittsburgh: Day 2
Pitt Day 2:





Because I don’t have a lot of time, here is an excerpt from a letter to TGICB, Angel J:





“I'm glad that I have some time right now to relax after worship this morning and two workshops. There's so much to learn and absorb it's annoying that I can't do it all. This morning the workshop on Oppression struck me called "Thank God I'm Free! Or are we?" We did an exercise where we held hands and the speaker read questions out loud like: "If you were raised with a different language take a step back", "if one or none of your parents never made it to high school take a step back" or "if you have partnership rights at your workplace take a step forward". The questions just rolled over me, and by the end of the exercise I found myself in the back. It made me realize that I have to cover a lot more ground than others to get to where I want or need to be. But that wasn't the point of it. The point is that those in front of me that continued taking steps forward should stretch to continue holding my hand, and I should not forget the people that are even further behind me.”





To add a little to that, the workshop ended in a fruitful discussion of how we can make our multicultural community reflect a commitment to the empowerment of all people and the elimination of oppression and social injustice. It made me remember how when I began attending service at MCC NOVA my pastor, Kharma, embraced my cultural difference and together we began working on forming a Latin@ group. Although because of lack of Latin attendants it has been put off until we can get it going, it was a wonderful welcome into the congregation, and because I was new to church altogether, to the teachings of MCC as a whole. However, the question I had to ask at the end was: Who is missing from the table? Who is not being represented? I will go back with that question in mind to my Youth /Young Adult Group as well as trying to reach out to those that might feel oppressed at NOVA, even if by unintentional ignorance.





Saturday, July 18, 2009
Pittsburgh: Day 1
When I arrived I felt a bit lonely. After spending the past three weeks in a rush-rush of travelling with friends and "family" to the Dominican Republic, Miami, Philadelphia and Lancaster, PA, New York, and a short, unintended stop in New Jersey when the bus broke down, when I arrived in Pittsburgh I felt the weight of travelling alone. I had to physically slow myself down and mentally prepare myself to enjoy my own company. So I had dinner by myself and wrote a few lines to find my center, and then I went to worship. There I saw people that I hadn't seen in a long time. From MCC New Light in Hagerstown, and Rev. Delores Berry (an amazing, amazing soul), and people from my own MCC NoVa that I just hadn't been able to hug and catch up with in a while. After worship I didn't want to let go of myself, so at the urgings of a friend that could not attend I attended "Transfigurations: Transgressing Gender in the Bible" by Peterson Toscano. I will not do him an injustice and attempt to describe it, but anyone interested in learning more about "those people who do not fit in the gender binary, and who in transgressing and transcending gender, find themselves at the center of some of the Bible's most important stories" should go to www.PetersonToscano.com and check it out. I'm not sure what I was expecting. Perhaps a forum on transgender issues, a rap session, an emotional discussion on what it means to be gender queer...but certainly not a play that had me laughing hysterically and for hours afterward reflecting on my own life and those at the margins of our society.


I know the feeling of being different. All my life I have been a social outcast. When I was a kikd and living in New Hampshire I was the Puerto Rican kid (mind you, I'm not Puerto Rican). After, when my family actually moved to Puerto Rico for a year, I was the "gringa" because I spoke mostly English (go figure!). Then, once back in my birthplace Miami, I wasn't part of the majority of Hispanics that were from the Caribbean and I couldn't figure out which of those dialects to should accept as my own. Even in my home I was strange because I was not preocupied with looks or had the same lithe figure expected of hispanic females. My older sister and I could not be more physically different. My mother one day told me that I had the body of a "man". Not to digress, but what does that mean, exactly? Am I not a woman? Ance once I came out at 14, well, by then I just knew that I had to embrace my differences or die. Although I accepted all these differences with amazing patience and understanding, I was still under the impression that my Self, my entire identity, should be congruent. All parts of what makes me Sabrina should align properly and work together to look, feel, and act similarly.


However, relationship after relationship I found myself dominant. I hoped to find someone stronger to submit to, someone that would take over, for the inner "butch" to find reconciliation with the outer "femme". And I find myself taking on roles and pronouncing myself a feminist. But it goes beyond that. It transcends my political or social views. Even while I have so many questions about transgender issues, and while I'm learning that a "binary system of gender" (thank you Angel) doesn't quite cover the entire population, the play (along with some new friends) has helped me to understand that people that cross the lines of gender, break them, bend them, or refuse to choose sides, have a lot to teach us. Indeed, it's the rest of US that have the problem.


The problem that I had of trying to find someone that would just be butch enough to lead me by the hand once and for all, or of trying to find some kind of peace between angrily fighting social roles and at the same time longing for the dominant side of me or the submissive side of me to come to some sort of compromise (!)...I've found some peace by no longer denying that I am who I am, and worrying less about how my partner (whoever that may be; male or female) and I fall into some predetermined set of rules or relationship bylaws that won't disrupt the social order or offend any observers. The roles that I have fought so hard to break were oppressing me from different angels and surfacing in ways I didn't realize or notice. This was affecting the way I viewed myself even while I stood for others' right to choose, I didn't realize that I was living by a standard I had internalized. So, in a way, I'm transgressing gender by accepting that I don't have to live my life in any one way. By happily living life being outwardly femme and inwardly butch because 'femme' and 'butch' are themselves just descriptions made up to label and to standardize gender. And even as I write, I know that this only the beginning. The lines are blurred and I hope in the near future that any semblance of those lines will be altogether erased.