Welcome to my blog!

Image of Mattie on New Year’s Eve 2023.

Happy New Year! Congratulations on finding the blog. I am so happy that you're here. Whether we know each other or not, I'm confident this will be a valuable journey for both of us. One of my favorite parts of life is engaging in critical thought and discourse about ideas that fascinate me. This website, and especially the blog, are places where I plan to share commentary on issues facing our world, excerpts from my academic work, reflections on my personal and professional adventures, and more.

In the spirit of everything I just said, I might as well continue and make this a real first post...

Trigger warning: mentions of religious trauma, homophobia, and transphobia.

With that said, I’ve been thinking about religion a lot recently. Many of you know that I was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition but stopped practicing this faith after I entered high school. While I now identify myself in terms of gender and sexuality as a queer transfeminine person, I identified for a portion of my life as a cisgender gay man. During that time, I found it difficult to feel like I belonged in the church due to a climate that has, over time, come to stigmatize homosexuality in some religious spaces. Up until recently, I held a deeply rooted perception that was formed based on my own experiences with people of faith, as well as those practicing religions who have been represented in the media. This perception told me that as an LGBTQIA+ person, I would overall not be welcomed, affirmed, or embraced in religious spaces. Obviously, ‘religious spaces’ is an incredibly wide umbrella, and I want to acknowledge that the scope of my experience with faith has been extremely limited, with most of my exposure being to Roman Catholicism. Simultaneously, I want to validate the feelings of myself and others who have experienced discrimination and bigotry in religious and non-religious spaces and acknowledge that these experiences often lead to perceptions like the one I shared above.

Perhaps you’re wondering what experiences I’m referencing with Roman Catholicism that led my brain to form these perceptions. A simple Google search will populate many different results indicating that there is a complex and fraught history to the relationship between ‘same-sex attraction’ (or as I would say, embodiments of sexuality that are perceived as a deviation from normality — which in this context I define as an expectation or set of expectations that is set by members of a group and/or society for how people should engage in relationships). In addition to media representations, hearing individual narratives of homophobia like this one led me to form this perception of an overall sense of bigotry existing in religious spaces. I acknowledge that my perception of religious spaces was incredibly warped. There’s nothing that makes this ignorance morally sound, but perhaps the reason for it was that I, like many individuals in western society who were/are raised to practice Roman Catholicism in recent years, had little to no exposure to other religions while growing up. It was only in high school and college that I began to understand what I didn't understand — both about religion and life in general. In terms of religion, in college, I had the opportunity to meet people who practice other religions. Sure, there were a few folks of different religious backgrounds in my K-12 life, but the diversity that exists on my college’s campus (which is still not what it could be) is vastly larger than that of my primary and secondary schooling environments.

You might also be curious what I mean when I say, ‘…a climate that has, over time, come to stigmatize homosexuality in some religious spaces…’ I do not consider myself to be a scholar of Religious Studies, so I can only speak to my own experiences and knowledge, but from what I know, there are many modern religions that are accepting and embracing of LGBTQIA+-identifying people. Take for example the Memorial Congregational Church of Sudbury, MA (MCC). I know the Pastor personally, and he is extremely affirming to me and other queer folk. Not only is he personally affirming, but the institution as a whole has also taken an inclusive stance: “Our study of Hebrew and Christian scripture has discovered numerous affirmations of the goodness of all creation and the love of God for all people, including Acts 8:27-38 which demonstrates Christian acceptance of people who are not within a gender binary.“ You can learn more on the section of their website that discusses this topic. Other religious traditions, such as Roman Catholicism, have taken a more conservative stance. Check out this blog post from the Human Rights Campaign for more information.

It’s also worth noting that I have only discussed Christian traditions. This brings me to another key idea that I want to nail home through this post: it is on our society as a whole to do a better job of exposing young people to a variety of religious traditions. A common sentiment that I heard in church as a young child was that only my family’s religion was worth paying any attention to. Anyone who practiced another faith would not make it to ‘heaven,’ they said. I don’t blame any single entity for the lack of exposure to a range of religions when I was growing up. I believe that what is responsible is the systems of oppression that support the kind of informational segregation that I reference in this post.

As I have taken time to recover from the religious trauma mentioned above, I have started to expose myself to religious spaces again. In doing this, I have both personal and intellectual objectives. I would define my faith now as something extremely ambiguous. Over the past year or so, I have consistently found myself engaging in fellowship and faithful practice loosely following the traditions of mindfulness and Buddhism. From what I have learned, individuality and love of others is a key tenet within these traditions. That includes respect of other religions, as well as lack of religion.

I have invested so much time in trying to unpack my own relationship with religion, because I believe there is an opportunity that has left unturned prior to this point. Religion is an opportunity. There are so many positives to organized religion — people who leave their homes to engage in religious practices often get to engage with others and share in community in ways that they may never have the opportunity to if it were not for their religion. Furthermore, religious spaces are ones in which people have existing communities with which they can have conversations. In order to move forward in a productive manner, humans must engage with each other in conversations to better understand the parts of the world that they don’t yet understand.

I believe that hatred and bigotry are, in large part, fueled by ignorance. This ignorance is in no way an excuse for bigoted acts, but it may indeed be at least part of the reason. Hearing directly from as many individuals as possible who want to share their own stories is the path forward, whether it be reading, listening, consuming other artistic media, or something I haven’t listed here.

I have many more ideas about this topic, but for now, we’re going to wrap up the first blog post. I invite you to engage with the blog through leaving comments, or emailing me directly at hello@mattiebaird.com with your thoughts. Thank you for reading!

Warmly,
Mattie