The Start of the End, Prequel II

The first installment can be found here.

I waved Mel and Brooks home and walked into the church building while silently rehearsing my new calling boundaries. 

You can imagine my surprise two minutes later when all three members of the bishopric followed me into the bishop’s office. Immediately, I wondered why. Secondly, and nearly as immediately, I justified it—weakly—to myself. “I knew there would be two of them; what’s one more?” I was not worried for my physical safety. But my gut knew that this would not just be a 5-minute release meeting. (My head required some convincing.)

The four of us filed into the small office. We sat in a parallelogram shape: Bishop at his desk, me across from him, the two counselors each taking a seat on the side walls of the office. They were perfectly triangulated; I felt perfectly trapped.

The bishop asked me, “How are you, Sister Facer?”

I cheerfully, maybe a bit nervously, responded, “Fine! How are you?”

“I’m good! I’m good.” Slow nodding.

A pause. Nobody spoke. Then the bishop, again:

“How are you, really?”

And right then, a knowing from my gut rode a lightning bolt of recognition straight up to my head: this is about Melody.

See, those Easter neighbors? Who wanted a family photo? I like them! That family has since moved, and I miss seeing them. And, as helpful context, one of them was the Elder’s Quorum president at that time.

I knew suddenly that he had spread the word of Mel’s transition. He was allowed to do that; I had indicated that this was no secret. But so immediately? For what purpose? Why was this meeting called, and did it really have much to do with my calling? Why, why on God’s green earth, were there so many men in this room? Why did I feel like I was in trouble? I had done nothing wrong, and I knew this. Did they know this?

A quintessential “fawn” response arose: What do they want from me, and how quickly can I provide that to get out of here?

Many people like to tell me that this is when I should have stood up and simply dismissed myself from the interview. I wish, truly I do, that I would have done that. But the reasons I didn’t are perfectly plain to any woman in the LDS church, and they don't have to do with any lack of bravery or desire. Every woman who has suggested this course of action has also admitted (often with chagrin) that she, too, would not have known how to leave. But why not?

Because neither fight nor flight seems like a feasible response when the power differential so clearly supports the male majority in the room. I wasn't part of that majority. I was on defense, and I was going it solo.

Let me lay it out for you.

:: The binarily gendered Priesthood power structure

:: The passive aggressive nature of the bishop's repeated question

:: The misrepresentation in advance of this meeting’s participants

:: The lack of informed consent from me for the group setting

All of those bolded bits are so normalized in LDS culture, and they act together as a tsunami to enforce conformity. Each element is seemingly innocent, as in "nothing wrong here," "oops our mistake," or "sorry, I'm required to ask this." But en masse, they can turn a destabilizing tide with the bonus effect, given their ubiquity, of isolating anyone who questions the norm.

The goal of these systematic mores, particularly toward women, is long-term deindividuation. The message: Women in this church, or at least the good women in this church, find this acceptable—why don’t you? We have all agreed that men exercise power and authority, they set the tone, they hold the meetings and the expectations.

Meanwhile, women cooperate, if they know what's good. If they want good things for themselves and their families. If they want to be good, period. And what woman (what person) doesn't want to be good?

These cultural norms, and the people who uphold them, silently declare, "Question me, and I will question your goodness, your reputability, your humanity." If you don't believe me, I invite you to imagine (literally, go ahead and picture it!) how good, reputable, or human you would feel or expect to be treated if you got up and walked out of a meeting with your full bishopric.

Fight and flight may have led me to higher ground, safe and away from that silent tsunami. But my lifetime of deindividuation was deeply rooted, and despite years of study and a good bit of therapy, I could not climb any path toward higher ground. I perhaps could have seen the path, and my gut certainly sensed the possibility of it, but I did not yet have the legs to take it.

I had been crippled by the mores and the system which kept me in the room. Here's an important point: The mores and the system exist only when perpetuated by the people in the room. Whether my bishopric upheld the social system knowingly or unknowingly, I cannot say. I do like to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Either way, I realized quickly that you cannot stop a tsunami; you can only preempt one. I had not preempted this one. My Priesthood leaders' pile of personal questions and unsought advice would now flood the room, and I was squarely in their path.

You'll recall that I had, in fact, preempted something else entirely, had spent all my prep time building boundaries and words around my next calling and my desire to possibly, potentially, maybe consider declining it. I had done everything I thought might work in an attempt to save my own goodness, reputability, and humanity while still honoring my needs and wants. I was ready at least to swim and to do so in deeper water than I had thus far traversed!

In fact, I had even planned to let the bishop know that Mel is trans. It was not a secret, and it would have to come up eventually. But it was supposed to be at the end, casually, on my way out, lobbed gently like an underhand throw, with kindness in my tone and enough patience to answer a couple of questions.

Alas. Wrong higher ground, Alyssa.

The final installment will be posted tomorrow.