The Absurdity of Non-Transgenderism: A Critique of a Critique

By | May 11, 2015

In Public Discourse a few months ago, Carlos Flores provided what he called “a stern and necessary critique of transgenderism.” His critique is indeed stern but perhaps not sufficiently nuanced as to be necessary.

In speaking of “the absurdity of transgenderism,” Flores seems to share the common conservative assumption that genitalia are the sole differentiator in determining whether one is male or female. However, a more complex though still complementary view of gender will be more helpful in these conversations. Under such a view, transgenderism need not remain the contemporary antagonist of gender complementarity. Rather, transgenderism, understood as a disconnect between one’s self-perceived gender and the most obvious gendered attributes of one’s exterior anatomy, can help us further penetrate the mystery of the human person, particularly the mystery of sexual difference.

At a recent lunch, a woman told me the story of her son. Natalie was born anatomically female. She had a happy and normal childhood; both of her parents held stable jobs as professionals. She did well at her public school. Unknown to her parents, around fifth grade she started attending school as “Jack.” Her parents didn’t discover until high school that their daughter attended school as a boy. Jack didn’t have any trouble with classmates or teachers; to anyone else, he was a normal kid.

But this wasn’t normal for his parents. As soon as they found out, Jack’s parents sought the help of counselors and therapists to understand what was going on. They wanted to support their child, but they didn’t know what to do: affirm Jack’s “chosen” gender or reinforce Natalie “as she had been born”? Was this just a phase? Why was this happening?

Eventually, they contacted other parents whose children had undergone similar experiences. One woman told them about “vanishing twin syndrome,” in which one twin disappears while in the womb. In some cases, the other twin will absorb his or her sibling and retain the twin’s DNA in some parts of the body. Natalie underwent some DNA testing, and her parents discovered that, in addition to XX chromosomes, some parts of Natalie’s body had XY chromosomes, the chromosomes of a fraternal twin they never knew existed. Natalie’s identity as Jack wasn’t just a phase or an illusory experience, but the manifestation of the complex realities of the embodied person.

The New England Journal of Medicine has studied such cases of “chimerism,” where a hermaphroditic person has both XX and XY chromosomes, which “must have resulted from amalgamation of two embryos, each derived from an independent, separately fertilized ovum.” Transgenderism in these cases might have once been dismissed as mere personal preference in rejection of the created body. But in reality there exists a complex relationship between transgenderism and intersexuality, and we ought not be too quick to reject the former simply because we cannot easily see the latter.

The transgender experience is diverse and varied, with many possible causes and explanations. A transgender person can have contrasting sex chromosomes, genitalia, brain sex, hormone levels, and psychological dispositions, making it difficult to clearly decide whether that person is male or female. This does not mean that male and female do not exist, but it does mean that this distinction can be ambiguous and unclear for and in certain individuals. This ambiguity is often not simply about arbitrary preference.

One response to these realities would be to simply choose a person’s genitalia as the deciding factor in determining gender. In asserting that “gender reassignment surgery is not medicine,” Flores argues that “our bodily faculties are ordered toward certain ends” and that gender reassignment surgery “involves the intentional damaging and mutilating of otherwise perfectly functioning bodily faculties by twisting them to an end toward which they are not ordered.”

One must ask, however, of the transgender person: to what end is his or her body ordered? If sexual difference touches upon various non-genital—as well as genital—aspects of embodiment, the question of determining gender and how to encourage or integrate this gender within the rest of one’s life can become quite complicated. Could it be that, for some, brain or chromosomal sex may be closer to a person’s ontological gender—that gender with which each person is created and which is manifested, albeit imperfectly at times, in our bodies—than his or her genitalia?

Gender is not simply about reproductive processes, but about man and woman in the entirety of his or her being. Like any embodied reality in an imperfect world, gender may not be so easy to understand and identify.

Flores makes an excellent point in identifying the limits of some non-genital factors in determining gender. He notes that brain structures develop and change with time, experience, and habit. Because of this, he argues that the fact that a person has brain structures that “resemble that of a woman’s” while having male genitalia, does not mean that this person is a woman. He continues:

We don’t even need to grant that the presence of such-and-such brain states is relevant at all. For example, we may suppose that, through habitually behaving as a sixteen-year-old, the brain activity of [a] seventy-year-old … ‘resembles’ that of a sixteen-year-old’s. Does it follow, then, that the seventy-year-old really is sixteen years old?

The comparison falls short, in that some seventy-year-olds are developmentally sixteen-year-olds, not because they chose to act like sixteen-year-olds their entire lives, but because, in part, their brains never fully developed. Flores’ comparison risks inflaming the not-infrequent tendency of “healthy” and “normal” people to treat the weak and vulnerable as a societal aberration to be rejected, as are unborn children with Down Syndrome and the infirm elderly in many Western societies. In some cases, it may be best to push someone to “act his age,” but to push those whose neural development ceases prematurely because of an enduring biological reality is ridiculous and cruel. Such cruelty may lead to shame, societal ostracization, marginalization, and a belief that the only way to fix one’s life is to end one’s life.

As Melinda Selmys has pointed out, Flores’ comparison may be helpful in some ways, but in its full presentation and ultimately weak analogies it suffers from a fundamental flaw: He charges transgender people “with mental illness in order to harness the stigma associated with the mentally ill—but without providing the compassion and understanding that we extend to people who genuinely suffer from serious cognitive conditions.”

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  • Austin Ruse

    Overwhelmingly, those who are confused about what they are as youth straighten out as they grow older. Those who don’t, and go through, ugh, surgery, are in for a world of pain that surgery only exacerbates. According to the best study of this phenomenon — in Sweden, a pretty trans and SSA friendly place — the incidence of transsexual suicide at later ages is sky high.

    Rick Fitzgibbons, Dale O’Leary, and Paul McHugh and others have a better handle on this than anyone among the New Homophiles.This piece is deeply regrettable.

  • Austin Ruse

    I would urge all who might be persuaded by Mr. Damian’s piece to read this. It is a paper by Dr Rick Fitzgibbons and others on the causes and reasons of transgenderism.

    http://ncbcenter.org/document.doc?id=581

  • Andrew M. Haines

    Thanks for this. The article by Fitzgibbons et al. is extremely helpful in clarifying (among other things) that sexual reassignment surgery qua sterilization is morally problematic. This piece does not challenge the soundness of Flores’ argument that SRS is “not medicine” since it mutilates “otherwise perfectly functioning bodily faculties.” It asks whether reproductive health alone is the criterion for “ontological gender” (not the term I’d use, but I think carefully enough employed to mean the end toward which one’s sexual characteristics ought to aim). Damian suggests it’s not a sole criterion, which I think can be challenged. But I don’t think there’s a moral issue at stake in trying to work out the intelligibility of “ontological gender” under a hylomorphic framework.

  • Austin Ruse

    Fitzgibbons et al show there are two sources for transgenderism:

    “Homosexual Transsexual Males

    According to the Blanchard analysis, HT males are men whose appearance,
    gestures, and speech are perceived as feminine and who are attracted to masculine men rather than other homosexual men. HT males believe that if they can appear to be real women and can “pass” as such, they will be able to attract these men.”

    And

    “Autogynephilic Transsexuals

    According to Ray Blanchard, who named the syndrome, AT males are men in love with the image of themselves as women.”

    Damian’s piece contributes to the general confusion about this issue.

  • Jim Russell

    ****Gender is not simply about reproductive processes, but about man and woman in the entirety of his or her being. ****

    This one sentence belies the genuine bankruptcy of Mr. Damian’s views, when compared to the truths of the Catholic faith, particularly as expressed in the papal magisterium of St. John Paul II. As the root of the word “gender” suggests, gender *is* most assuredly about “genitalia” and “generation”. Just as certainly as JPII taught about the irrefutable “spousal meaning of the body” and that we don’t merely “have” a body but really “are” bodies, so too is it certain that our sexuality is *intrinsically* and irrevocably ordered toward the conjugal love of a man and a woman, as taught in the Catechism itself (cf. CCC 2360).

    The Church does not teach that sexuality is *only* about procreation, but it clearly teaches that it is *always* supposed to be ordered toward it. Our being-male or being-female is *intrinsically* associated with our being bodily-male or bodily-female.

  • alana_newman

    well done!

  • Pingback: Reviewing 'Gender' - Ethika Politika()

  • zebbart

    Yes, how could a Catholic writing about gender mention reproduction only briefly and in passing? Damian is right about one thing - gender is not essentially about genitals, but it is essentially about gonads ultimately. What makes a man a man is that he can be a father, and likewise with women to mother. A man may be born with a vulva and undescended testes, but if he produces sperm he is a man with a deformity, not a woman. Men can have “feminine” traits and women “masculine”, in “chromosomes, genitalia, brain sex, hormone levels, and psychological dispositions” and other areas, but that does not change their nature or form.

  • zebbart

    I’d like to know what “ontological gender” is. Male and female make sense as relates to procreation, and masculinity and femininity make sense as social relationships that either sex may exhibit in relation to another. So we are the Bride of Christ, even us men, and male mystics experienced a very intense sort of femininity in relationship to God, but they did not become women in those experiences. Maybe if our culture allowed for more diversity in personality and affect, so that “feminine men” and “masculine women” weren’t ridiculed and shamed, we wouldn’t have so many people living under the delusion that they are “really” the opposite sex.

  • aloysiusmiller

    Baffling. Transgenderism can only be defined by one’s self assertions. If one says one is then one is, because the word only means that one fantasizes that one is the opposite sex. But it is surely a sickness when we invest meaning in the word that elevates it above psychotic imagination. Love the transgendered indeed but humoring their psychosis is the weakest thing we might do.

    Clearly, I find the DNA references in this article dubious.

  • Dan Heck

    So what about an intersex person who has a vagina, breasts and a penis. According to your definition, this is a man, right?

    What about an XY intersex person who presents as a woman in every way, but has male testes and cannot have children through any natural means. Traditionally, they would have been considered infertile women. But according to your definition, I assume they are neither male nor female…as are all infertile people?

  • Dan Heck

    Thank you for a brave, sane and helpful article. Catholic bioethics, and Christian sexual ethics more broadly, need to do a much better job of grappling with the real, irrefutable and observed complexity of human sexuality. Pretending that intersex and transgendered people do not exist is not a solution…but it is the response I often encounter on this, which is profoundly disappointing.

    I’m grateful for the article, and I’m grateful for the courage of EP in publishing this. This is certainly not going to be an audience-pleaser, with your main audience.

  • Thaddeus Kozinski

    The whole point of the satanic transgender movement is to make the meaning of the word “gender” denote something humans can transform and even create by their will, not something unchangeable that God has already created. Once that is clear, then we can talk about the complex reality of gender in a fallen world.

  • Thaddeus Kozinski

    As Michael Martin asks in his excellent The Submerged Reality: “Dos not the notion of elective gender-reassignment surgery, like nominalism, assert in the clearest terms that universals do not exist?” What are the implications for the existence of a universal human nature, and gender as, primarily, a metaphysical and spiritual reality (however that reality is fallibly enmattered due to the fallen material cosmos), of Damian’s argument?

  • Liliana Bittencourt

    People have sexes. Gender is newspeak, in an orwelian sense, to mask an ideology.And no, we must not ask a person to what end is his or her body ordered to know the truth about its nature. It is not the person’s doubts that will determine what has been previously determined. I am sorry to say it, but there is a grave inconsistency in this article.

  • Rachel Meyer

    Actually, as an avid ToB student, I don’t think there is anything wrong with the quoted sentence per se. It’s true that sex/gender is necessarily sexual and therefore procreative. But JPII emphasizes that women are different from men fundamentally in body, soul, heart, mind. So in the exceptional case where the body seems male but the heart and mind female, why should the body fundamentally decide which one you “are”?

    It’s true that with a male body, this person could reproduce as a male. But could he/she be a good husband or father? That would deny the personal component of complimentary. Could a person with a uterus, but without the feminine nurturing soul, really be a mother? While philosophically we say that your experience of being male or female is necessarily tied to your anatomy, there are some people who have a real psychological disconnect from that normative situation, and we can’t deny that experience because of our philosophical objection to it.

    Clearly a person in such a state has a problem, a disorder. But it’s not clear that they really ARE whatever gender they can physically reproduce as. This is an important distinction from many people today who try to use the rare case of a true gender-ambiguous person to deny the nature of gender at all; these people are the reason that many like to deny the possibility of being gender-ambiguous. (I think that term is more accurate than transgender.)

  • Rachel Meyer

    Chris, I think you make a good point that we cannot deny the experience of some (few) people whose experience of their sex and sexuality really do seem to be at odds with their physical sex, just because we dislike the philosophical ideas that many wrongly extrapolate from this experience.

    I find your suggestion that gender reassignment surgery could potentially be helpful, though, to be troubling. Please reconsider. It’s cruel to force someone to artificially behave according to their physical sex; it is also cruel to artificially attempt to conform their healthy physical body to match their mentality. (Assuming that they have a healthy body of one sex and are not hermaphroditic, in which case surgery might sometimes be a legitimate option.) You would be going from the extreme of “sex is purely physical” to “sex is purely mental.”

  • Austin Ruse

    Hard cases make bad law, even bad natural law.

  • Aaron Taylor

    I for one am outraged by this piece. Outraged! Trans people are different from me and experience the world differently to how I do. That makes me feel uncomfortable and scared. And things that makes me feel uncomfortable and scared are wrong. Wrong!

  • Chris

    One of the benefits, though not the only one, of St Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of masculinity and femininity are that these are due to the physical material that we are comprised of. Thus our bodies are amazingly important to how we understand ourselves, not merely Platonic externals that our soul has been chained to.
    Thus, people who suffer from gender dysphoria deserve our profound support. It seems difficult to imagine people who are more lost in this world.
    But the author of this piece does not help these individuals by claiming that we who call their being lost are being cruel. The frank admission of a physical medical problem is not tantamount to saying that a person is disgusting.
    Ultimately, I think our physical make-up should be corrected so as to correspond to our DNA. Thus, it is only for Intersex individuals that I think these questions are truly difficult. In these cases, the more traditional genetic view that a Y chromosome makes one male, regardless of the presence of multiple X chromosomes seems to be the most reasonable. Of course, there will always be chromosomal problems, but it seems that if we take our physical bodies seriously, then we have to start here to discuss the biological implications of being male and female. But of course, the only reason we look here is the profound dignity that Christ provides when He is willing to take on human form - where he says that our bodies are not sin for us.

  • aloysiusmiller

    This is an irony fail. Try again.

  • aloysiusmiller

    Rare beyond discussable.

  • zebbart

    Why do you think DNA is so important? Needless to say, it had nothing to do with anyone’s idea of sex for thousands of years, and no one looking just at the DNA would implicate sex to it. DNA does not code information about the body (or the person), rather it tends to materially cause certain morphologies. DNA is an organ of the body, not it’s blueprint. But the organ of the body ultimately tied to sex is the gonad. If you have testes and produce sperm you could become a father, and so you are a man - even if you have XX chromosome pairs in any number of cells in your body.

  • Austin Ruse

    Ho-hum.

  • zebbart

    Humans are obviously not the only species divided into two sexes. Looking at all of Kingdom Animalia, what do the males share? Not all have penises, not all have XY chromosomes (or any chromosomal dimorphism), but all produce sperm. I don’t know why this is confusing - if you could be a father, you are a man. If you could be a mother, you are a woman. If you could be a father or mother but for inadequate genitalia or non-viable gametes, therapeutic medicine may offer healing or you may accept what fallen nature has given you. But sex-wise you are what your gametes would make you if you reproduced.

    Can we admit of a woman being a father, or a man being a mother? No. It is a contradiction. Only people born with no gonads or with both are really a challenge to this understanding. I can see no basis for calling them man or woman. They are intersex or sexless people, and they deserve respect and freedom to live as they wish, but neither they nor those using them as examples can overturn the truth about the connection between sex and reproductive roles.

  • MikeeD

    “He charges transgender people ‘with mental illness in order to harness the stigma associated with the mentally ill…'”

    But how does this necessarily follow? So he thinks that transgenderism is a mental illness therefore he is harnessing the stigma associated with mental illness? Sorry, but I don’t follow. I tend to see transgenderism as a mental illness myself, but having family members (including myself) who suffer from mental illness, I feel A LOT of compassion for those who have to go through similar issues. So I guess the question ruminating in my mind right now is… how does one argue that point (that transgenderism is a mental illness) in such a way that at the same time we express compassion for those experiencing said issues? Or… is it the case that we cannot argue that point at all, because any attempt to portray transgenderism as a mental illness will be seen as de facto unkind, lacking compassion, and creating social pressure for these people to commit suicide? And if that is the case, how is this author’s article anything else than a call for any opposition to basically shut up (albeit under the guide of being compassionate)?

  • Dan Heck

    What does that mean?

  • Dan Heck

    Okay. So according to your definition, an XY intersex person, who looks like a woman and identifies as a woman, and is universally identified as a woman, is a man. Is that correct?

  • Dan Heck

    And for a bit of background, here you go:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome#Management

    These folks almost always identify as heterosexual women, and are identified that way publicly. Traditionally, they would have almost certainly been considered women who happened to be infertile. But you’re saying that they are unambiguously, definitely men. Is that right?

  • Dan Heck

    I disagree. We’re talking about exceptions here. If law can’t deal with exceptions, even natural law, then it is bad. Exceptions exist, and they matter. And in this case, they are persons made in the image of God.

    Natural law that only deals in abstract generalities, and that simply stops when it finds an exception isn’t natural law. It is human abstraction, imposed proudly on Creation. And when creation doesn’t conform to it, such natural law proudly says, “So much the worse for the Creator, and for Creation.” Good natural law instead says, “Where I have not understood Creation, so much the worse for my model of natural law.”

  • Thomas Storck

    Dan,

    Your point is surely correct that natural law should deal with what is. That I hope is obvious to everyone. But since the world is fallen, I’m not sure that the rest of what you say or imply follows. Even Aristotle, a pagan and who certainly had no developed understanding of the Fall, noted that nature works always or for the most part. So it seems to me doubtful that simply because there are some individuals who fall into an ambiguous status that we must therefore scrap - or at least significantly modify - our primary categories of the two sexes along with our effort to sort out everyone in terms of those two categories.

    But I think this article and this conversation are valuable, since those of us who are not persuaded by its argument need to sharpen our own arguments to deal with the evidence brought up here, not simply dismiss it out of hand.

  • http://newarkistheplace.com/ Thomas Mullally

    Indeed, the focus on DNA and RNA and mitochondrial components is just superstition. Our kids are being trained to parse and determine life and death based on base elements, but if left alone the elements change in ways we could never fully track and understand. What a waste of time…. Then are they are forced to say, er, um, it is a, er, um…. miracle? No, that is called a “mutation”… :)

  • aloysiusmiller

    Very rare situations provide no framework for dogma, policy or other generalized responses.

  • Jim Russell

    If I follow your point, then this would explain your past outrage toward Pope St. John Paul II-he makes you uncomfortable and scared? :-)

  • Aaron Taylor

    You know full well why I objected to his canonisation (like a lot of other people). If such things don’t make you uncomfortable, too, then you have a serious problem.

  • Jim Russell

    **** But it’s not clear that they really ARE whatever gender they can physically reproduce as.****

    I’m trying to imagine someone being a different “gender” (what does that actually *mean* btw?) than the *sex*-either male or female-by which they are capable of reproducing. Got an example?

    As to JPII, JPII *never* used the term “gender” in TOB, and he never seems to separate the terms as is done in “gender theory”….

  • Jim Russell

    So why seek to ridicule those with objections to Chris’s post? If you expect me to understand your objections to JPII, then it would seem fair for you to seek to understand objections being raised here to this post….

  • Aaron Taylor

    It was light-hearted. Sorry if that didn’t come across but this is the internet. I don’t even necessarily agree with Chris. And who says I expect you to understand my objections? Go home, Jim.

  • Jim Russell

    I am home. On several levels.
    But, yeah, I kinda missed the wink-wink, nudge-nudge on that one….

  • Jim Russell
  • Rachel Meyer

    I completely agree with you on gender/sex. I think of gender and sex as essentially synonymous and use “gender” when it’s already been used in conversation rather than always correcting to “sex.”

    The example is an exceptional person who, while being physically of one sex, has a personal and mental experience of being, in part, of the opposite sex. Should we necessarily say that such a person is male because he is physically male? Is there nothing more to being a man than having male body parts? Perhaps the person really is male, but I’m not sure that that is perfectly obvious to answer unless sex is purely physical.

  • Dan Heck

    Yes, I’d agree that we need to take fallenness into account. I’d just be careful to identify the fall with an absence of sexual reproductivity. I hold celibacy in high regard, for example.

  • zebbart

    No sex is not determined by chromosomes, it is determined by gametes. Who has sperm is man, who has ova is woman.

  • http://catholictrans.wordpress.com Anna Magdalena

    Bravo, Chris!

  • happiernow

    As someone who has befriended various people who identify as transgender and/or who were born with certain intersex conditions, I applaud you for this piece. While reading it, I could not help but think of my friend with congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Imagine going through puberty twice, first a female puberty, then a male puberty! Imagine being identified as one sex at birth but always knowing that you should have been classified as a member of the opposite sex. From knowing people like this friend and others, I have learned that sex and gender are far more complicated than much of society is comfortable with accepting, and that external body parts and/or chromosomes do not always reflect the truth of some people’s lived experiences. I would encourage those who are inclined to dismiss the reality of these people’s lives as nothing more than mental disorder to really listen to their stories. You might learn something new about the mystery and complexity of human life.

  • Jim Russell

    Being male or female is *always* corporeal because *we* are corporeal. Being male or female is not *only* corporeal because we are not only corporeal….yet, one cannot be male apart from corporeal maleness and one cannot be female apart from corporeal femaleness.

  • Rachel Meyer

    I agree with all of that 100%. But I would also agree with it if you replaced the word “corporeal” with “spiritual” or “psychological.” I think being male must necessarily involve the physical, the psychological and the spiritual. Would you agree with your above comment if you replaced “corporeal” with “spiritual”?

  • Jim Russell

    The noncorporeal dimension of the human person is the *soul*, but the soul is the “form” of the body. As such, the soul’s maleness or femaleness, so to speak, is designed by God to cohere with that of the flesh. Anything “psychological” or “spiritual” that could be construed as *contrary* to the flesh would then count as something out of synch with God’s plan for the human person-something to be healed, not something to be interpreted as a basis for changing one’s view of the human person such that he or she is no longer viewed as male/female in accord with the evidence of the flesh, so to speak. Ambiguities present in a person’s body will clearly sometimes make it difficult to ascertain the sex of that individual, but this does not count as a basis for concluding that being something other than male *or* female is part of God’s plan for us. In *all* cases-whether physical or not-the right response is healing toward a personal integrity that *must* cohere with the “evidence” found in the flesh.

    Thus, someone like Bruce Jenner will *always* be, before God and the world, a man, not a woman. That’s easily clear.

    Alternately, someone with profound *physical* sexual ambiguities will always present the most difficult cases to consider and respond to. In such cases, one hopes science can continue to progress in understanding and clarifying the “reality” of the body for those persons, while the faithful does what is possible to minister to persons facing this real though very rare situation.

  • Thomas Storck

    I didn’t think I’d identified the Fall with ” an absence of sexual reproductivity.” Rather, results of the Fall include abnormalities of all sorts in our bodies, the inability to procreate (obviously this doesn’t mean a conscious and legitimate choice not to do so), and with any kind of feeling of being uncomfortable in one’s own body.

  • Rachel Meyer

    First of all, are you trying to make a point about my use of the word “spiritual?” Body:corporeal::Soul:spiritual.

    While the soul and the body should be perfectly in sync and manifest one another, this is not always the case in fallen humanity, and it does seem to be the case that some individuals do have these conflicting elements. Yes, surely this is broken, and healing such a situation would be ideal if it were possible.

    I’m not trying to invent a third sex, or a non-sex. I’m not even saying that a physical male who considers himself female isn’t actually a male. I’m arguing that you are taking the physical aspect of sex as necessary and the non-physical aspect as only accidental in order to make everything black and white and avoid any possible philosophical difficulty raised by transgender persons. Why are physical ambiguities a real problem to be dealt with, but nonphysical ones clearly and obviously irrelevant?

    What if some hermaphroditic people, upon complete and perfect scientific evaluation, could not be said to be really physically male or female, but were truly and equally both? Would acknowledging this be incorrectly changing our view of the human person? If not, why is acknowledging a person who possibly has real elements of two genders, though not physically, causing this problem?

  • Jim Russell

    Therein lies the problem in our exchange, I think-there is no such thing as a non-physical “sex”. While you seem to use gender/sex interchangeably, it just doesn’t work. Example: please define “non-physical gender” *without* reference to physical sex, as in male and female. Not. Possible.

  • Rachel Meyer

    I wouldn’t define non-physical gender. You’re right - it’s impossible. I have referred several times to non-physical aspects of gender. Are you saying that gender (sex) does not have non-physical aspects at all? Or that it does, but it is impossible to have them apart from the physical ones? If the latter, how do you explain the transgender experience?

  • Dan Heck

    I guess I try to follow the account in Genesis a bit more closely than that, and I think that this kind of thinking represents an over-extension of the notion of “fallenness.” Abnormalities, for example, can be positive or neutral. I don’t think that double-jointedness is a result of the fall, but it is abnormal. I think that the distinction between chosen and unchosen inability to procreate is a nice one, but I find it difficult to get that distinction out of natural law, especially when paired with Biblical reflection. (Procreation is good, but again, I don’t think the fall is about the absence of any good whatsoever, in any situation whatsoever.) And finally, I’ve often felt uncomfortable, but in ways that have stretched me and helped me grow. Taken at face value, I think that “discomfort = fallenness” yields an impoverished and very decadent theology.

  • Jim Russell

    I’m saying that “feelings” or “experience” of being male when somatically female or being female when somatically male are defects or disorders because such feelings and experiences are grounded neither in the objective *reality* of the spousal meaning of one’s body or in the truth of God’s plan for the human person. Seeking to claim something is “real” (namely, “I’m not really the male or female that the ‘language’ of my body says I am”) when it’s demonstrably *not* real is not conducive to human flourishing.

  • Thomas Storck

    “Taken at face value, I think that “discomfort = fallenness” yields an impoverished and very decadent theology.”

    Perhaps, but did you notice that I never said anything of the sort? I spoke of one sort of discomfort only, and obviously in the context of commenting on the article, which concerns in part those who experience discomfort with the sexuality of their bodies. It might be interesting to discuss whether unfallen humans would have experienced any sort of discomfort at all, but that was not the topic here, nor can my remarks be reasonably taken to touch on that wider point.

  • Mark

    Hm. “Brain sex” seems like a concept invented to promote transgenderism.

    Can there be subtle intersex physical situations that maybe help explain a predisposition to transgenderism? Sure.

    But at the end of the day “feeling like a” man or woman is a psychological and socially constructed reality whether we’re talking trans or cis.

    Accepting biological determinism of complex things like gender identity or sexual orientation…is fundamentally dangerous and really bad philosophy.

    Desire and identity are ultimately acts of self-interpretation requiring language and cultural lenses and scripts through which to read oneself.

    Believing “because biology!” as if it could ever do more than non-deterministically predispose opens the door to a strange behaviorist/mechanistic view of human feelings and behavior.

  • Mark

    I think that distinguishing between gender and sex here actually helps though.

    Gender is the social construction of sex. Gender is the abstract conceptual field of more or less vague associations between the two sexes and per se accidental things culturally associated with them.

    Sex = male and female. Gender = masculine and feminine.

    Society usually has two gender roles or gender scripts, man and woman, divied out for the most part by sex, and even people who identify or function as one or the other can have different levels of masculinity/femininity on the spectrum.

    Transgenderism seems to involve a sort of confused reverse application of gender. Psychological non-conformity with society’s gender roles or scripts is taken as necessitating an actual change in sex.

    In this sense, it’s not transgenderism which is problematic at all, really, but the interpretation of transgenderism as implying transsexualism.

  • Mark

    Transgenderism, though, is an attempt to rationalize or essentialize what is actually a social/psychological tension.

    In this sense, it’s not that trans people experience something different, but that they attempt to impose on all of us a particular framework of interpretation that would, taken to its logical conclusions, apply even to ourselves.

    I have a friend for example who basically says that if he accepted that psychological gender-non-conformity “meant you’re supposed to be” the opposite sex…he’d be trans, no questions asked. He feels quite a lot of discomfort or dissonance in being asked to play by the Man social script in even the most minimalist possible way, his personality just grates in a lot of deep ways against the set of assumptions and associations placed on him by everyone merely because he can’t hide his physical maleness (for better or worse, his physique is not terribly conducive to androgynous line-blurring or ambiguity).

    But he just finds the idea that this means he should change sexes or at least try to present as the opposite sex and be perceived as such just so that he’s eligible for the more fitting social classification to be a fundamentally false-consciousness, a naive and overly simplistic way to cut the Gordian knot and resolve the tension.

    The fact that society catches us in a web of symbols that tie many accidental things about personalities to sex unnecessarily…is a reality that we all negotiate. But believing that one needs to reconstruct ones body in order to fit the script that best matches ones psychology is a sort of gross “literalism” that suggests to me that the problem is less with bodies and more with society’s gender scripts being too confining and, paradoxically perhaps, too tied to physical experiences.

    When the “best fit” identity script available for some very masculine females is the Man script, and that script heavily emphasizes specifically male physicality (“locker room talk”)…of course there are going to be dreams of changing the body to allow w perfect correspondence.

    But to me, this suggests: a) we need more scripts for gender non-conforming members of both sexes and b) assuming we maintain gender-based role categories, we need to emphasize physicality less in them, such that a “female Man” doesn’t have to feel like she’s missing out on something essential to her identity category unless she ditches her breasts and gets a penis.

  • Mark

    Totally agree.

    But this is the contradiction of the conservatives, really: they don’t want to give up traditional gender norms (or assignment to those roles based on physical sex) either.

    So they wind up putting some people in irresolvable tension.

    Something has to give. Either you restructure the social constructs to lessen the symbolic tension and relieve the pressure highly gender-non-conforming people feel to obtain a “matching” body for the sake of a total “organic” coherence within their best-fit category…or you accept that some personalities are going to inevitably want to restructure their bodies to obtain such a consistency within the more rigid framework.

    You can’t maintain both.

  • Mark

    The new homophiles are not a monolith on trans issues other than in saying we need compassion and to see people as people not ideological problems or vanguards of political agendas.

    I, for example, am a new homophiles who would not accept an essentialist framing of transgenderism at all. I try to be sympathetic and understand the underlying causal tensions, but at the end of the day I’m not going to accept that a physiological female is “really” a male ontologically.

    I might treat the person politely according to their identified social role, as a Man, I’ll even concede pronouns. But I’m not going to accept them as a Male, I’m not going to admit them to the priesthood or accept some narrative by which their body is “wrong” as if they’ll resurrect with a vagina.

    I think that’s a fundamental miscognition about the nature of what they’re feeling and the true social causes. I think the trans narrative is a tragic, if inevitable, obfuscating-simplification or essentialization that confuses the nature of social constructs in a sort of naive realism or reification.

    You should remember, Mr Ruse, that most of the new homophiles are characterized by leaning more towards social constructionism about these issues than essentialism. It is actually your crowd which, ironically, shares the premise of essentialist framing with your enemies (and then merely argue about what the essence is).

  • Austin Ruse

    I have no idea what this means:

    ”

    I think that’s a fundamental miscognition about the nature of what they’re feeling and the true social causes. I think the trans narrative is a tragic, if inevitable, obfuscating-simplification or essentialization that confuses the nature of social constructs in a sort of naive realism or reification.”

    So, if you say I am dong something or other, I suspect I wouldn’t even know what you would mean either.

    I believe transgenderism is a kind of mental illness that certain ideologues want us to believe is normal and natural.

  • Rachel Meyer

    I understand what you’re saying, except for the second paragraph from which I can get no meaning at all. Rephrase?

    In my usage of language and my thought,
    male and female = nouns.
    masculine and feminine = adjective form of the same nouns.

    You are correct that there is a difference between sex in itself and particular roles that a culture assigns to people of one sex or the other. But I would say that masculinity has a deep and universal meaning for personal behavior and experience beyond fulfilling the typical male role of one’s culture. Denial of this universal reality is the primary problem that I see with gender theory. It goes from correctly pointing out that some “masculine” traits and tasks are culturally conditioned to denying that there is anything universally masculine at all beyond body parts.

    You also make an important point about transgenderism. I think that there are two really very different meanings of this word that are unhelpfully conflated. One of them is a man whose real problem is that he has traits and prefers tasks and roles that his culture associates with women, so he believes that he must become a woman in order to be himself. This is a sad result of cultural close-mindedness to the wide range of male personalities and behaviors.

    There is another type of transgenderism/transsexualism which we are primarily discussing here in which a person not only lacks specific cultural traits of his gender but some of the more universal and deep experiences of his own gender, to the point that he has an unhealthy dissociation with his own body and feels that it is wrong. It is a much more complex problem that wouldn’t be solved by socially allowing him to, say, stay at home with his children, enjoy fashion, etc.

  • Austin Ruse

    Deacon Jim..i am wondering what you think of Sister Constance Allen’s defense of what she calls “gender reality”. she is not willing to give up on the word “gender” since mere “Sex” is limiting, while “gender” is more encompassing of the person:

    “Gender Reality holds that human beings are ‘always or for the most part’ women or men, female or male. Gender Ideology holds that human beings fall along a continuum of 3, 5, or even 15 different loose groups of genders. Gender Reality is rooted philosophically in a descriptive metaphysics (Aristotelian and Thomistic grounded) and Gender Ideology is philosophically rooted in a revisionary metaphysics (Neo Platonist or Cartesian founded). Finally, Gender Reality depends upon a hylomorphic (soul/body composite unity) understanding of a human person, woman or man; Gender Ideology leads to a deconstructionist approach to the human person as a loose collection of qualities, attributes, or parts.”

    You should read her paper on gender at Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics.

  • Jim Russell

    Thanks, Austin-I will track down the paper and give it a read, and let you know!

  • Austin Ruse

    I wrote a bit about it at Crisis.I met her at the Vatican family conference last fall and was much taken by her and her proposal:

    http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/save-gender

  • Jim Russell

    So, I just read Sr. Prudence Allen’s paper-I think I read at least some of it previously. I think her approach is pretty rock-solid, though I’d quibble over this: “Gender Reality holds that human beings are
    ‘always or for the most part’ women or men, female or male.” From what I can glean, the “for the most part” language here originates with Aristotle. I’m more inclined to stick with the Scriptural fundamental of “male and female He created them” rather than anything resembling “for the most part, male and female He created them.” :-) Even if the “for the most part” is in reference to forms of physical hermaphroditism, let’s say, I’m currently of the opinion that we need to remain focused on the clear content of what God, prior to the fall, intended for us.

    As to “redeeming” the term gender, I’d be for that if it were really possible, but I’m skeptical about how practical that really is in our cultural climate. We *can* live without an effort to redeem the word by emphasizing the reality of the term “sex” over the unreality of the meaning secular culture currently gives to the term “gender”, much as is seen in the way JPII handles the language. But, I’d be happy if *both* the terms sex and gender could equally reflect *reality* when in use. Sr. Allen seems to be pursuing that conclusion in her paper, which is praiseworthy.

  • Mark

    Once again, speaking of “15 genders” is not really accurate. Gender refers to the masculine-feminine spectrum, so it is an error to use it to refer to any discreet boxes.

    Gender is an abstract noun referring to the social construction of sex or surrounding sex.

    One might imagine a society or culture having “three gender-roles or -scripts or -identities” available to people, but this would not meant people “are a gender” in the way you are or have a sex. You “relate to” gender.

  • Dan Heck

    It is perfectly fair to distinguish between types of feeling uncomfortable in one’s body. I affirm your desire to do so.

    Still, I think this sentence can reasonably be taken to touch on the wider point:

    “Rather, results of the Fall include … any kind of feeling of being uncomfortable in one’s own body.”

    I point this out, not to litigate the exegesis of one of your sentences, but to assure you that I’m discussing this in good faith. I hope you can see that I wasn’t twisting your words intentionally or being unreasonable, given the fact that you said “any kind.”

    I would suggest than when a transgendered person, such as someone whose body is a result of chimerism, experiences discomfort, that the discomfort itself is not a direct result of fallenness. Rather, it is a result of the accurate perception of their own sexual complexity. In that sense, I would associate it with a turning away from the effects of the fall, since all truth is God’s truth.

    Another distinction I’d like to introduce is how something is oriented toward the fall, and not just whether it is associated with it. For example, the crucifixion was arguably part of the fall. Without death, it couldn’t have happened. At the same time, I don’t think this can be used to mount a critique of the crucifixion. It’s close association with the fall doesn’t make Jesus wicked for undergoing it. In a similar way, let’s just assume (for the sake of discussion) that chimerism is a result of the fall. That doesn’t tell us whether the honest recognition of the state of affairs, and the effort to address it as humanely as possible, is worthy of critique.

    I’d also like to be clear that I’m not suggesting that you’re wrong, because you haven’t developed this particular discussion in our brief comments here. I’m not suggesting that it is impossible to articulate your position fully, or that you are obligated to have already developed this position here. What I am saying is that I see room for disagreement, and that I don’t think the observations I’ve seen, so far, should necessarily lead me to arrive at what appears to be your position.

  • Chris

    Rachel, I did not say that there should be gender reassignment. Rather I said that the surgery may be helpful to fix a medical need when necessary to restore somethin

  • Thomas Storck

    I don’t understand, to be frank, the interpretation you’ve put on some of my remarks. But I’ll take your word for it that you’re trying to respond in good faith.

    But I think we’re not getting anywhere here, and as I imagine you agree, comments boxes are not the best place to have an intelligent discussion. So finis as far as I’m concerned.

  • Dan Heck

    I’ve actually had a lot of great conversations in almost every kind of internet forum. I feel like the conversation has moved forward substantially, with a couple of immediately relevant distinctions…and I think that carefully articulating our theology of the fall is a worthwhile endeavor.

    But of course, you’re free to spend your time how you like, and I completely understand if you have other priorities :)

    Take care.

  • Austin Ruse

    If someone thinks they’re fat when they’re Auschwitz-thin, we are “essentializing” for thinking they need help in understanding they are not fat?

    And frankly, i have no idea what you are talking about. I read your words and I just hear a dog mewling. Seriously. I am just not as smart as you.