Dear Beekeeper,
I feel called to lead and preach, but I worry I’m too girly — too feminine — in how I talk and dress. How can I get people to take me seriously without giving up the parts of me that feel true?
Love, Girl Talk
Dear Girl Talk,
Girl, yes. YES. Queen, YES! First: I’m imagining you, whomever you are, wearing your absolute favorite outfit.
Maybe it’s dresses and pink, flowers, and glitter, tutus and tiaras. Maybe it’s a power suit and silken scarf. Maybe it’s an LBD* with bangin’ accessories. For me, my absolute favorite casual outfit (these days) is a full body catsuit. (What? It’s a one-and-done and I’m a busy femme.)
While the bees aren’t too committed to what they wear, (with the exception, perhaps of the cutest lil pollen pants you ever did see), they ARE all in on Feminine Authority. And what I love learning from the hive is the way that even when it looks simple: A queen bee surrounded by attendants…. it’s really not.
The queen is the most important bee in the hive. It’s her role to lay the eggs. There is so, so much more I could say about the queen bee: she only leaves the hive once, for a mating flight, to go get the genetic material necessary for all the eggs she’ll lay in her life. And yet, she is genetically exactly the same as all the worker bees… yet she’s been raised up by them to be the queen.
A hive adapts to ensure that they will always have a queen. The worker bees ensure feminine leadership, building queen cells here and there just in case. They act from the collective knowledge that their power comes from each bee having a role, including the queen. It’s not optional, Girl Talk. It’s survival.
What’s been true for me is that my external choices of attire are how I express myself, and also how I pull on the Full Armor of God between me and those who would do me harm. When I first started preaching, I began going BIG and BOLD in my eyeglasses. Something like the shield of faith, perhaps. But the lived reality that people were more apt to comment on my glasses, than my body, when I preached the word of God.
Is it painful when folks are not able to hear the Gospel through how you look? Heckin’ yes.
Is it right? Nope. Not a bit.
And so for me, how I present (especially as one who identifies as Femme) became a way for me to claim that truth in my OWN Feminine Authority, rather than let someone define it for me. I pull on the full armor of God; place my coordinated frames on, breathe deep, and GO.
Not everyone is prepared to witness that power, or equipped to take it in as such. This goes for all of us told we are “too much” of anything— too feminine, too loud, too bossy— or even the things of bodies that cannot be changed: too queer, too Black, too trans, too young… all of that and so, so, much more.
Odds are, those that can’t hold space for this— they aren’t your hive. Your people are the 5-year-old girls looking to you, seeing themselves, the outfits they always wanted to wear, and seeing your authority preach. Your people are the trans girls wondering if there is a space for them in God’s kindom. (There is.) Your people are the men nodding along wishing this truth for their daughters. Your people are the Femme Leaders calling together the exact right outfit for Pentecost, with a hat that matches, because this, too, is a way to honor God in adornment.
I think part of finding your hive is the continued commitment to your truth as power. And that is a collective journey with so many of us coming into power, leadership, preaching, teaching, writing, buzzing, bee-ing— together. We are collectively building conditions of possibility for leadership of the Feminine Authority in our communities, again and again, and again. We are building the queen cells.
Just as so many queens have done before us, all through the centuries:
from Sofia Wisdom to the Marys to Coworker Lydia…
to Ella Baker, to Anne Braden, to Dorothy Day…
to Rosemary Radford Ruether to Marcella Althaus-Reid to Katie Geneva Cannon…
to Beyoncé to Dolly Parton to Chappell Roan…
The queens are building the path, and so are we.
Together, we will continue to build the queen cells that our sister preachers (and I want to be clear— SISTER preachers, not CIS-ter preachers…) can emerge, come closer to community, come closer to God, and preach the truth that only they can access. It’s a hive project.
Your feminine truth IS your power.
And, Girl Talk, am I ever glad to be on this path with you.
Now, excuse me while I go plan out my outfit for tomorrow’s leadership adventure.
*Little black dress.
P.S. Dear Reader— yes you! Are you holding something close for which you might need a little honey? Then write in and and join alongside this ever-growing hive of hope and care! 🐝