The Middle Way
Although I have lived as a Christian for many years now, I have always been drawn to the teachings of the Buddha. As someone who lived a life of excess during my late teens and early twenties, when I entered a religious community and began to explore asceticism in some small attentions to discipline, I was struck by how very wise Lord Buddha had been in commending the ‘Middle Way’ between ascesis and indulgence. I knew that Lord Jesus had seemed to tread a very similar path, as he negotiated a narrow path between living under the Law and license. For many years, I found that holding these two great systems of thought in tension very hard - on the one hand the Way of Christ, and the other the Way of the Buddha. In my practice I was Anglican Christian, but in my thinking I was influenced by Mahayana and Zen Buddhism. Thus, for me the saying 'If you see the Buddha on the road, then kill him' was translated into 'if you see the Christ on the path, then crucify him'. This is because what we see as the Buddha, or Christ, will not be the truth. This is a perspective that permeates many different approaches to spirituality, such as Sufism, one of the disciplines that influenced me greatly when I was in my early teens. When I left the religious community, aware that I was not really cut out for a life in brown habits, I tried to follow this middle way - sometimes veering to one side, then the other, negotiating that tightrope between the Law and license. I also realized that these two great systems of religion did not have to be reconciled in my own mind in order to co-exist - like holding an apple in one hand, and orange in the other, they simply were what they were, and could easily sit side by side. Crossing an apple with an orange would probably produce something quite inedible - but as an apple and orange, the two sit well together in a bowl, can be used in fruit salad, or eaten one at a time. It was not for me to try and reconcile these things, just to let them be, and let them be in me. This brought me a great sense of relief, because there was no struggle in me between these two systems. In a similar way, treading that middle way, between law and license, between ascesis and indulgence, this also lifted a huge burden from me - I no longer had to 'get it right', simply walk a path, and if I lost my footing somewhere along the way, I would see signs that showed me I was going the wrong way, and would find my way back to the path.
So, now I come on to this new 'Middle Way' I find myself walking. Some years ago, having fought against my inner drive to change sex for many years, I found that this problem - call it gender dysphoria if you wish - had become so enormous in my consciousness that I found it increasingly hard to function. My work suffered, my relationships suffered, my health suffered. I knew that there was so much to do, so many good things that needed to be done, and the time available to do them was limited, and this 'thing' to do with my gender seemed like a big boulder in the way of my path. So, I did the only thing I could then see might resolve this situation. I set about changing my gender. Within a very short time, through snippets of information (off-hand comments, small bits of detail) let slip by doctors, I began to unravel things about my own past that shocked me to the core. I discovered that I had not been the person I had always thought I had been. As I took the time to learn more, the things I learned tore through my life, and I was like a piece of fabric torn in two. Had my father not badgered me in a way that made me more tough, had the things I discovered about myself not made me more tough, had my four years in analysis not helped me to assimilate disturbing information, had my time practicing religious discipline not helped me to find a centre in times of distress, I am not sure I would have survived all this. So, this new knowledge helped assure me that I was making progress, and I changed my life by being as a woman. What I found remarkable was that I tended to get treated in much the same way as I had always been treated - only it made more sense that people were relating to me in the way that they did as a woman.
A short time passed, and I realized that I was not a woman, only living as one, and I would never be a woman. In the same way, I could not be a man, and had never been a man. The gender I chose became purely that, a choice. I found myself living as a woman, so decided to stay this way because I had no idea how I could be anything else.
Over the next few years, I found the two models of gender increasingly difficult to understand - because on the whole people are just not as clear cut as that. I look at people out on the street, and I sometimes cannot be sure of 25% of them that they are clearly men or women - and often it is only what they wear that acts as a sign that they are one gender rather than another. I have found over the past year, I find it increasingly difficult to make those efforts to give out these signs that denote female over male in my own appearance. I get called one thing by one person and another by the next. I do not bother correcting them, because in a way they are right.
So, this is a calling, a vocation if you like, to walk this new 'Middle Way'. This is a ‘Middle Way’ for our time. A path between the two statutory genders, another way, a narrow way, and one that is like entering a crack in the universe from which come knowledge and power. But, as happens when any realization is reached, this is nothing to do with “how I have become"; this has to do with the way I am. This is how it has always been for me, physically, mentally, emotionally, in so many different ways; only now I understand this. This is how it is for me, and finding myself in this place is like a religious calling, for this is it; this is how it was meant to be. This is the middle way between gender, like the two-spirit way before, and it can sit comfortably within any spiritual path or discipline, if we just think of things like apples and oranges rather than right or wrong, true or false. Holding one in each hand, the male and the female, like the apple and the orange, and let them be, and walking a path that draws strength from them both, instead of just the one. Not a third gender, but walking a path between the two genders, fully aware that gender is just an illusion, a social construction, Maya to be overcome on the path to Moksha.
