A Renaming Ritual
May 30, 2009
I recently had the pleasure of attending a renaming ritual for a friend of mine, a transman who has only recently begun the process of switching gender identities (formerly Joy, currently James). Anyone who’s watched a friend grow into a transgender identity knows how difficult it is to switch to a new set of pronouns, a new name, etc, and even the most supportive of friends find long-held habits hard to break.
So, since ritual is probably the best tool in existence for creating transformation in a community, we decided that we needed to have a “renaming ritual” for him, officially giving the support of the community to him and adopting his new name and gender. (Note it’s likely to be confusing, but I’ll refer to Joy/James as “she” before the ritual and “he” after the ritual, since that’s the way in which the ritual was constructed.)
Like most Transmissions, this one was held in the home of friends with lots of home cooked food, but everyone in attendance had been instructed to come wearing clothes of the other gender. (As someone who is not into gender-bending myself, I found this part to be incredibly uncomfortable, which was probably the point.) We spend the first hour or so just hanging out, eating for, playing music, and enjoying each other’s company.
Over the course of this hour, each of us would take a turn putting a braid into Joy’s hair (she had hair down to her waist or so). Then, once her entire head was put into braids, we gathered everyone together and each one of us cut off the braid we had made and had the opportunity to say something privately to her, before her transformation. We were also given the choice of keeping the braid or donating it to locks of love. Once her hair had been shorn, all of us, including her, took of the clothes we’d come in and put on clothes of our “appropriate,” gender – it’s amazing how much more comfortable I was after I was allowed to wear boy clothes which, again, was probably the point.
At this point, Joy no longer dressed or looked like a girl, and hostess of the event introduced him to the crowd as James. It felt quite similar to the moment after a baptism when the preacher holds up a child and introduces him or her to the congregation, or at a wedding reception when the couple is introduced to the crowd as unit for the first time. We each had the opportunity to go to James, shake hands, and say whatever we wished, and the party continued.
This was not a Transmission event, but it felt very Transmission-ish in that was a home-brewed ritual focused on efficacy and built around a community. By the end of the ritual, I found it very easy to refer to this person I’d known for almost a decade by a new name, and he felt affirmed and supported in his journey. I spent much of the time thinking, “Wow, I wish I were still in Seminary so I could write a paper about this!”
It also led me to think about the fact that there are many important transitions in life for which we don’t have liturgies. At The Crossing, an emergent community in Boston, they recently laid hands on a community member about to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and she described it as one of the most moving worship experiences she’d had. Perhaps Transmission should make a project of collecting liturgies which will never be printed in a prayer book…