Guest post: The long and unacknowledged reach of Christianity

Originally a comment by Timothy Harris on Call me them.

I feel as though the act of misgendering erases the person I have worked so long and hard to become.

How can you ‘become’ in this way? I am a bit long in the tooth now, but even in my mis-spent youth I should not have been able even to begin to think in these terms. All human beings are astonishingly complex, nobody really knows who, intrinsically, they are because your self is not something that exists in some pristine and well-locked little box inside you, and that might be changed by some effort of the will (who changes who?), but is in a state of constant flux & creation through your relationships with others, with society, and with the wider world, with things that are beyond your control.

I find in this sort of statement the long and unacknowledged reach of Christianity, with its insistence on willed belief, and the whole Western insistence on achieving things through force of ‘will’, a mostly meaningless concept whose existence and nature are assumed and never examined. What these people work ‘so hard and long to become’ is in fact a caricature, not a person.

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