“Genderwocky”
The Genesis of Gender — A Christian Theory. Abigail Favale. Ignatius Press, 2022. 248 pages.
Jabberwocky
by Lewis Carroll
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Unity in diversity
I’m guessing that Abigail Favale is around 40 years old as this is written. I, on the other hand, am 71 with 72 coming at me like a freight train. She’s a she, and I’m a he. Our childhoods and adulthoods were very different from one another. She came to Catholicism from an evangelical then academic background. I came from a career in the Army as a hard-shelled agnostic, passing through a Christian introductory short-phase as a Methodist. But having read the first autobiographical chapter of her book, it turns out we have a few things in common. Specifically, there are similarities in our experiences of conversion and post-conversion.
First of all, we both narrate our journey across the Tiber through feminism (yep)— her preference at one time being poststructuralist, mine being “radical” (post-Marxist). Her feminism was a pushback against to her upbringing as an evangelical. Mine was pushback against the conquest-masculinity underwriting the militarism and war which had defined more than two decades of my life. Her pushback was against the imposition of a narrow and subjugated femininity; mine against a narrow and ultimately violent construction of masculinity. These forms of masculinity and femininity co-construct one another, so even here we each left some footprints across the same muddy field.
What really sat me up at attention in her introduction, though, was her description of a “Christian” interlude in which she tried very hard to make Christianity fit together with her earlier political convictions and the underwriting philosophy of those convictions. Mea culpa, I found myself thinking as I read, mea maxima culpa.
Conversions of any sort are a bit like rock climbing. Bring your friction boots and chalk. Everyone needs those handholds and footholds on that precarious psychic rock face of life. Getting from one place to another is a matter of maintaining three points of contact with the rock and reaching for the next hold within range. You don’t let go of one point of contact without locating the next one. Leaping is discouraged, for good reason.
All to say, “I identify.” I also identify with the ways in which she has been and will be unintentionally and intentionally misrepresented. She dropped this book into the middle of a radioactive war zone.
Before I bury the lede too far, I need to underscore that this is a Catholic book, written by a Catholic, for Catholics, and published by a Catholic press. The book has a point of view, a standpoint, and that from within a tumultuous tradition. She’s not trying to adapt herself to the general public. She’s not seeking acceptance within some broad liberal consensus. Likewise, Dr. Favale is not accommodating her faith to philosophical liberalism in the way Stanley Hauerwas denounced as, “Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my opinion.” I’m flashing here on Flannery O’Connor when she said in reply to a interlocutor who’d said the Eucharist is merely symbolic, “If it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.”
If it’s just my opinion, to hell with it.
This book will not be reconciled to any general consensus, even among the secular “gender critical” feminists who share her deep suspicion of gender ideology. It was a Catholic philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre — in his now canonical book, After Virtue — who described the ethical catastrophe of our age, in which moral formulations have been shattered into many incommensurable tongues, a modern Tower of Babel struck down, its former residents pooling off in many directions, unable any longer to communicate at all.
The inevitable misrepresentations of Favale’s book are incarnations of this clamor of incommensurable presuppositions. People will not be reconciled to The Genesis of Gender by arguments, because argumentative reconciliation presumes some shared ontological rapport, a common ground no longer present. Many “disagreements” with Favale’s thesis will begin with such divergent foundational assumptions that no horizon of eventual agreement can ever come into view, leaving us with nothing but assertion and counter assertion, and with shrill (or sly) denunciation. When language fails, we scream; when fellowship fails, we gossip.
Not to let fellow Catholics off the hook — we’re a fractious bunch, as prone to division and strife as any other, and pulled in several directions by the conflicts of a decaying liberal modernity — there will be shrill denunciation of Favale’s book by fellow Catholics, the liberal accommodationists on one end and the authoritarian rad-trads on the other. C’est la vie.
For the rest, Catholics and other Christians who are trying to find their way, to follow Jesus through this bewildering slum of moral incoherence and sloganeering loudspeakers, this is an invaluable book. It’s a very personal book. It’s a very scholarly book. It’s a very accessible book. It’s a very informative book. It also comes at exactly the right time, even and especially in the middle of our ideological war of many armies. While Favale refuses accommodating lies, it’s nonetheless a peacemaker’s book. And we know what Jesus said — and what many, caught in this state of perpetual agitation and irritation, would like to forget — about peacemakers.
Enough, though, of my prefatory endorsement. To the book itself.
Paradigms
The human body, as part of the material world — indeed, its most noble aspect, alone capable of recognizing divine disclosures — serves as sacred symbol, particularly in its dual incarnation. There is no unsexed human being, and the continuation of our existence depends upon maleness and femaleness. Contrary to the innovations of gender theory, which speak of sex as something not read from the body but arbitrarily imputed to it, the Catholic view holds that there is a givenness to our bodies; they are inscribed with sacred meaning that is not determined or constructed by our whim. (Favale, p. 236)
In a nutshell. This final chapter is called “Gift.” And so we arrive at the key set of incommensurable premises. Are we creatures or accidents? Unfold these premises any way you like, and you’ll still never reconcile the resulting architectures. Not even between us and those with whom we make tactical political alliances around particular issues.
It’s for this reason that this Catholic is grateful for this book. We needed something that addressed us directly, from within our faith and tradition, based on our own metaphysical and anthropological convictions. Other works, throwing a wider tactical net, are more abundant each day as a newfound resistance to the — frankly, bizarre — excrescences of gender ideology gain traction; but these other works largely aim at showing what’s wrong with gender ideology. Alternatives to the underlying premises are multiple choice, as is appropriate in the formation of contingent political alliances. Not The Genesis of Gender. It speaks in our own tongue.
The book is a genealogical exploration of gender, buttressed by some basic science, and illuminated by personal reflection, to contrast two “paradigms.” As the title impishly hints, those incompatible paradigms are Genesis (scriptural and nominative, there’s the pun) and gender-ideology.
Early in the book, Favale compares Genesis to Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth against which the Hebrews penned Genesis. I won’t play the spoiler here — it’s good is all I’ll say — except to say that it prefigures the contrast between Genesis’ anthropology (what are humans?) and the implicit anthropology of gender-ideology. In the comparison of Genesis to Enuma Elish, the obvious foundational difference is between a creation narrative of harmony (Eden) and of conflict/conquest. In Genesis, the apex of the creation narrative is human, and humans are created for communion with God. In Enuma Elish, humans are created to be the slaves of a malevolent god (maybe they were proto-Schopenhauerians).
Interestingly, Favale points out that the apex of the apex of the Genesis narrative is the creation of two genders — male and female — who are made for harmonious companionship. Harmony, in music, means a pleasing combination of complementarily different sounds. It’s only as a consequence of the Fall — precipitated by a deceiver/tempter/divider/accuser and the envious pride he kindles in his human victims — that this relation becomes disharmonious and marked by domination.
Genesis . . . uniquely foregrounds the importance of the male-female relationship, and this is a relationship not of domination, but of reciprocity. There is no hierarchy of value, no dynamic of superiority and inferiority. Sexual differentiation is not a mishap, but cause for celebration and wonder. The difference is good, our bodies are good, and both of these are part of the created order, which is good. The emergence of man and woman from the sleep of nonbeing is not a footnote in our origin story; it’s the ecstatic culmination. (p. 40)
Favale corrects the record against patriarchal proof texters who count “your desire will be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Gen 3:16) as an edict (it is not), when the overall context clearly shows that this is one of several undesirable outcomes of an alienation that’s entered the world.
In the Genesis paradigm, God creates and humans name. Nature, or creation, is to be stewarded (stewards are not the king, but the king’s caretakers). In the gender-ideology paradigm, naming itself — by humans — has the power of creation. Nature, un-created, is to be conquered (even our own bodies). In this sense, gender ideology is just re-purposed Francis Bacon, or perhaps re-purposed progress-ideology bastardized with re-purposed Nietzsche.
Favale’s Genesis paradigm is Christian, and her emphasis on Genesis is an emphasis on the Fall. In Christian theology there is a crucial (!) epilogue to the Fall: the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In this narrative, the woman is not made from the side of a man as his companion. In this narrative, the new Eve is Mary, who says yes giving birth to the new Adam — redeemer of fallen humanity through God’s grace.
Favale makes note in Chapter 2 of the law — recounting Jesus’ debate about marriage and divorce — as an artifact of the Fall, a central point in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (especially Chapter 7). Christians are necessarily under the law in the broken cosmos, but in their embodiment of the Kingdom they are “beyond” the law, as those who die are released from law — law no longer necessary, Christians having “died” in Christ. The Kingdom is a gift economy. The law is part of our brokenness. Paul even goes so far as to say that sin came through the law, an almost Derridaean claim.
Feminisms
After establishing her premises, Favale does a flyover of feminist history for readers who are unfamiliar. I found myself quibbling with some of this history, having approached it once as a Marxist, whereas she had approached it in her past as a post-structuralist (two almost entirely incompatible approaches). Her account of “radical feminism,” for example, was partial and inaccurate, having identified it as “lesbian separatism.” In fact, a good number of the radical feminists I’ve known were heterosexuals. They were post-Marxists; that is, what defined them as rad-fems was their transfer of Marxian class conflict theory to the sexes . . . women and men as subordinate and dominant “sex-classes,” or in some cases, “sex castes.” Where Favale seems to posit a kind of inevitability thesis wherein feminism’s very teleology aims at post-structuralism (“gender feminism”), I see post-stucturalist feminism and its offspring, pop-post-structuralism (what Favale calls “trickle-down Butlerism”), as adjacent to and dependent upon the neoliberal turn in capitalism (my residual Marxism, relating the ideological to the material). To dwell overmuch on this criticism, however, would be to fall prey to the sectarian impulse. It’s just a mild and friendly disagreement.
Her summary actually gets pretty directly to her main points, with which I am in general agreement. One of those points, from which I’ll extrapolate slightly, is that there is no such thing as “feminism” in its popular sense; that is, as some identifiable doctrine with which to agree or disagree en masse. Any time someone says they are “for” or “against” feminism (unqualified), they’ve fallen into this conceptual trap (and shown that they have never actually studied feminism). Which feminism? Which author? Which thesis? You can’t avoid this kind of specificity, which requires real and detailed engagement with particular works. Failure to do so is either ignorance (lack of engagement) or bad faith (a hidden agenda).
“Feminist” practice and scholarship has been and remains dependent upon the fields and times to which it has been applied. Without philosophical liberalism for example, feminist approaches — even the earliest — would never have come into being. Ivan Illich (with considerable help from Carolyn Merchant and Barbara Duden) showed how the transition from household production to mass production and urbanization were the material pre-conditions for feminist thought. Dr. Favale shows how feminisms (plural) have all attached themselves to other intellectual projects or schools of thought. So you can have feminist history or feminist contract theory or liberal-feminism versus Marxist-feminism versus poststructuralist feminism, but there is not singular, doctrinal Feminism. That’s why those who claim to be pro-feminist or anti-feminist are both barking up the same wrong tree.
What Favale doesn’t finally spell out is that feminism can only be generalized as any project — intellectual or practical — that focuses on the experience and-or interests of women (as its standpoint). No political commitments necessary. What Favale does spell out is that those who insist on those political commitments are making a fallacious argument.
[Feminist] diversity facilitates a rhetorical move I commonly see: deflecting any criticism of feminism by shrugging it off as “not real feminism”. This is a lapse into the “no true Scotsman” fallacy . . . (p. 56)
What she aims at in her historical recapitulation is the development (whether inevitable or neoliberal adjacent) of the “gender paradigm,” or “trickle-down Butlerism” as the underwriting, and the often unacknowledged, philosophical ground upon which things like “intersectionality” appear in public discourse as axiomatic postulates. In short, identitiarian politics. (In my recent jeremiad against trans-ideology, I made note of how far this has actually strayed even from Judith Butler’s own actual theses, which denounced “identity” altogether . . . it’s trickled waaay down.)
Control & consent
First and foremost, [the gender] paradigm is a godless one. This is taken for granted. We are not created beings; we are products of social forces. Reality, gender, sex — everything, even truth — is socially constructed. A denial of God leads to a denial of nature. By “nature”, I do not mean the natural world of plants and animals, but rather the idea of “human nature”, the notion that some aspects of human identity are pre-social and intrinsic — influenced by social forces, yes, but not wholly created by them. Because telos is connected to nature, what we are meant for is connected to who we are. A rejection of God and nature entails a rejection of teleology. Freedom no longer means being free to live in harmony with our nature, to fulfill our inherent potential; freedom is simply the pursuit of unfettered choice, endlessly pushing past limits and norms. This leads to another consequence: the denigration of the body, because the body itself is a limit [and not a gift -SG]. The concrete reality of the body and sexual difference puts a limit on choice, a limit on self-improvisation, a limit on social construction. The gender paradigm, then, ultimately holds a negative view of embodiment. (pp. 82–3)
Having established her point of departure, the chapter that follows, “Control,” introduces a philosophical critique, not just of pop-post-structuralism in the form of gender ideology, but of its conceptual antecedents in capitalist modernity. Brilliantly, in my opinion, because she can unpack late modernity’s philosophical consequences — in one instance — from the simple observation of a middle aged man in an airport using a dating app.
The gist of “Control,” however, is — as is the book itself— theological. Again, this is neither argumentative nor apologetic. The reader’s Christianity (even her Catholicism) is assumed. The book is catechetical and exegetical.
The “Control” chapter illuminates the incongruity at the very heart of the liberal prix fixe of something called “freedom,” and how — with regard to sex — liberalism cooks this allegedly ultimate value down to a burnt scraping at the bottom of the pan, called consent. Favale points out that at the apex of the #MeToo surge, many who called themselves “feminists” were openly contradicting themselves by calling prostitution a “choice,” while at the same time calling for real accountability when predatory men, for example in the workplace, used subtle forms of coercion — that met the bare standard of consent! — to obtain sex from objectified, less-powerful women.
The theological point has to do with objectification. Not just of women, but of nature itself (Creation). The point of objectifying nature — speaking in the Baconian and industrial sense — is to control and exploit. The point of objectifying women is likewise, in Favale’s words, “instrumental”; a point made at great length by feminist sociologist Maria Mies in her groundbreaking work, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, which pointed out how once Nature became a thing, inert and exploitable, women were then defined into that Nature. Put in the theological register — or the Genesis frame — human beings [assumed to be males by both Francis Bacon and Harvey Weinstein] were no longer creatures — created dependent beings, at the pinnacle of, but still within, Creation. Humans [upper class metropolitan men] were creat-ors, independent, taking control. Bacon wanted to torture [female] Nature’s secrets from her; the postmodern transhumanist wants to rebuild the [objectified] body itself, that embarrassing vestige of natural dependency, as a demonstration of control and power. Freedom is the freedom of those with power and means . . . to control. (Favale, to her credit, doesn’t shy away from the class divides reproduced by liberal “freedom.”)
The popular conception of Catholicism from without is shaped in large part by the fact that the Roman Church still maintains an all-male clergy, which maps onto the popular modern imagination as a kind of (using Foucauldian language here) episteme of control. Men give and women receive. But apart from the all-male clergy — which (not going in depth here) is more of a theo-dramatic convention, with cleric as an actor — the church is designated female, pronoun she, and all her members are seen as cosmically feminine, or receptive. Control, giving, comes from on high; we humans receive. We are not the makers, but the made. We, as the Church, are called to be receptive to our givenness, not controlling through self-invention.
The oldest site — people are unfamiliar with the literatures of the church — of “gender fluidity” in the West is the Church; and it is also the origin of the first sexual revolution, which was the demand — not always followed by members — for male as well as female chastity and fidelity. But I digress. (And yes, males clerics have grasped at power — sin is everywhere — and clericalism remains a Big Problem in the Church. I remain a heterodox advocate for opening the priesthood to women. But the church reality is far more nuanced than is commonly understood.)
In Dr. Favale’s book, the most iconoclastic Catholic point is with regard to hormonal birth control (with legal abortion as its backstop) as an exercise of control over nature and one’s [objectified] body. It’s an article of faith that “reliable birth control and safe, legal abortion” are necessary interventions against women’s natural procreative potential to secure their “freedom,” making this freedom a techno-medical artifact.
Some may be surprised to find out that among the first feminists — people focused on women’s standpoints and interests — to point out all the ways in which this techno-medical “freedom” made women more sexually exploitable by men, were the radical feminists. I reviewed Christine Emba’s book, Rethinking Sex — on all the ways women now feel compelled to have sex they don’t want or enjoy — here. I reviewed Louise Perry’s book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution — showing how birth control and legal abortion were most vigorously embraced by uber-feminists like Hugh Hefner — here. I also recommend Mary Harrington’s book, Feminism Against Progress — on the co-development of late capitalism and liberal feminism, which like all of the aforementioned, including Favale, points to pill-form hormonal birth control as a critical pivot point in the genealogy of gender ideology (Harrington, unfortunately, has more recently begun to espouse a number of troubling political positions associated with the new-right).
(As an aside, I wonder how popular hormonal birth control would be with men if they were the ones who had to put up with disruptions to their entire endocrine systems, with acne, bloating, hypertension, depression, fatigue, dizziness, lowered libido, weight gain, mood swings, nausea, and sore breasts.)
Less emphasized in Favale is the close association between disenchanted sex as transactional (consent) and the rise of neoliberal economics, which, like “sex-positive” ideology, reduces consent to a de-historicized and de-contextualized instant. I would refer interested readers to Carole Pateman’s 1988 book, The Sexual Contract, in which if you can substitute “contract” for “consent,” which liberal law already does, then follow the contractarian/consent argument to its reductio ad absurdum, one could theoretically “choose” in one instant to sign a contract to become someone’s lifelong slave.
Absurdity
Liberal law won’t allow that, of course, but neither can it discuss this contradiction without calling contract or “consent” into question. This is more than the operation of the inherent stupidity of the law, with which most people are already familiar. The law will bulldoze its own stupidities with corrective stupidities rather than acknowledge either its incapacity to account for the complexity and unpredictability of The Real or — and here we get to it — that it is just logically incoherent (requiring bulldozers and guns at the end of the day). This is a rabbit hole of absurdity we’ll leave unmolested for now, except to say we ourselves need not ignore contradictions in the same way. (Reminds me of Romans 7 again!)
Absurdity runs through gender ideology like “a dose of salts” (and produces much the same result).
Our author points to the absurdity in a concept of “freedom” that requires ever increasing control. She likewise identifies two other absurdities. First, the question of “bodily autonomy” (absurd on its face, but widely ignored because it doesn’t fit with liberal ideology) is raised only in response to the fundamental fact determining female-ness, the potential for procreation — a fact that, when actualized, as it was on behalf of each of us, demonstrates our inter-dependency at the corporal level with a special force. Second, she illuminates an absurdity in gender-ideology discourse that tries to claim, at once, that trans-identification is innate (making “being born into the wrong body” — a profoundly absurd and, paradoxically now, a “medical” claim), and that one can “choose” his or her gender identity (a voluntaristic, ultimately libertarian, and political claim). So which is it. It can’t be both.
This brings us to Chapter 5, called “Sex,” but first I’m going to throw in one of my own favorite contradictions, involving a woman named Rachel Dolezal. Her story maps not onto the nature-nurture controversy, as does the preceding example, but onto the question of experience rightly raised by radical feminists and other “gender-critical” feminists (there is substantial, but not total, overlap here): How can a man, with the lifelong experience of being seen and understood as male, portray himself as a woman — whose lifelong experience of being seen and understood as female is profoundly different from being perceived as a male. This question can then be polemically inflated and even twisted by over-universalizing claims about privilege (which can be real), but that nuance and de-universalization doesn’t cancel out the truth of this criticism, or of the many sociological and political entailments that go with it. The fact is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, when all other variables (the social setting, culture, local mores, etc.) are nearly the same, then the lifelong experience of being seen and understood as female is profoundly different from being perceived as a male . . . for good or ill. This is precisely the objection that was raised — substitute “race” for “gender” — by black people (and many others) with regard to blonde-blue-eyed, born of two white parents, Dolzeal’s bizarre, years-long subterfuge pretending to be African American. She was raised by white evangelical missionary parents in Montana, with church-sponsored forays into South Africa. She really did have adopted step-siblings who were black, though in later years she generated an encyclopedia of lies about her past and her upbringing, including the claim that her father was black.
Without recounting her whole saga — which is the history of an academically gifted kid who tumbled into a kind of socio-politically-induced mental disorder — when she was found out to have been supporting her phony claim with many cosmetic interventions to buttress her faux-biography, she became a cultural lightning rod. (See the link above.)
This applies to the subject of gender ideology, because Dolezal’s case mirrors that ideology (she actually coined the term “cis-racial” ffs) and simultaneously reveals both its inhering contradictions and the unabashedly contradictory way in which is was received by many who denounced Dolezal and yet continued to embosom the claims of gender-ideology. Can you “change” you sex? Yes, they say. Can you change your race? No, they say. I’ve sought out as many justifications for this as I can find, and so far the only thing I’ve encountered are incoherent thought pretzels.
(There’s a kind of crypto-Girardian PMC victim-valorization dynamic afoot here, but again . . . different rabbit, different hole, different day.)
Ideologues can’t handle the law of non-contradiction: “that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time, e. g. the two propositions ‘p is the case’ and ‘p is not the case’ are mutually exclusive.” Abigail Favale:
During one of our class discussions, I noticed some students parroting the line that biological sex is “assigned” at birth by doctors and parents rather than identified or recognized. “Wait a second”, I said. “Is sexual orientation innate, something we are born with?” My students nodded readily. This is well-established dogma. “And you’re also saying that biological sex is a social construct, a category arbitrarily ‘assigned’ at birth?” More vigorous nods. “How is that possible? Aren’t those claims contradictory? How is it possible to have an innate attraction to something that is merely a social construct?” (pp. 122–3)
Science and sense
In the “Sex” chapter, Favale commits to a yeoman’s work, that is, addressing in detail the gender ideology fallacies running like a generator in the background of radical constructivism. Key among those fallacies are the suggestion that the existence of “intersex” people somehow disproves a biological gender binary rooted in complementary procreation and the companion idea that sex can be reduced to “secondary sex characteristics,” or appearances.
The former is a logical error, the belief that the existence of an exception to the norm somehow invalidates the whole norm. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. Without exceptions, the norm would be unnecessary. The existence of men who are seven feet tall does not invalidate the larger statistical fact that men’s average heights largely fall between 5 feet and 2 inches (East Timor) and 6 feet 1/2 inch (Netherlands). Likewise, the existence of a few people with sexual ambiguity does not in any manner invalidate the fact that most of us are born with male or female procreative potential (or that most of us fulfill that potential if we live to adulthood). These exceptions are accidents, aberrations (physical, not moral or valuative), in the same way as being born with a club foot, Downs Syndrome, cleft palate, or neurological disorder.
The latter fallacy, the reduction of sex to stereotypical appearances, is just plain stupid, an inversion of the relation between biological embodiment and culturally-determined gender expressions.
Favale does the critical grunt work in this chapter to pull the first of these twin-absurdities up by its intellectual roots, i.e., Anne Fausto-Sterling’s now-doctrinal book, Sexing the Body.
I used Favale’s takedown of Fausto-Sterling in one section of my own long-form essay on trans-ideology just a few weeks ago, so out of pure laziness I’ll excerpt it here, with a more robust attribution to Favale (thank you, Doctor), who herself did not resort to my own general grouchiness:
As to intersex (or intersexuality), there is basically no one such thing. It’s a little like many fellow Southerners I know who refer to ten different species of panfish (spotted sunfish, pumpkinseed, dollar sunfish, bluegill, longear sunfish, orange spotted sunfish, shellcracker, green sunfish, redbreast, and warmouth) as “bream” (pronounced brim).
A lot of bullshit has been written about this deceptive term, intersex, beginning with Havelock Ellis’ first use of it in the early twentieth century to refer to homosexuality. One of the main forms of bullshit is this notion that sex itself is not binary, but “a spectrum.” No, it’s not.
One author, Anne Fausto-Sterling, oft cited in gender studies departments, claimed that 1.7 percent of human beings were “intersex.” The suggestions here are (1) that there is some range of sex between male and female (yes, those procreative categories that facilitated even Judith Butler’s existence), and (2) that the existence of these intersexed people disproves sexual dimorphism. In fact, this category used by Fausto-Sterling included no fewer than thirty different diagnoses under the rubric of “disorders of sex development.” The five most frequent she cites involve not one scintilla of procreative ambiguity; and when these five categories are eliminated, the number of people who really are sexually ambiguous (a congenital defect) is less than 2 in 1,000. (Hat tip to Abigail Favale) Simple logic reveals that these exceptions do not disprove a rule — in fact, they are identified and measured against the rule! Nonetheless, Fausto-Sterling insists there are no fewer than five sexes, even though the term sex has, until the psilocybin sunrise of gender ideology, referred to the procreative potential of sexually dimorphic species. (link to article)
Favale does a detailed and scientifically rigorous review of Fausto-Sterling’s book, which I’ll leave aside for now, except to say, “Buy the book!” Favale calls Fausto-Sterling the “fairy godmother of the intersex gambit.”
Take the condition of vaginal agenesis, which Fausto-Sterling characterizes as intersex. Baby girls born with this condition have a vagina that is not fully developed, along with functioning ovaries, which lead to female sex characteristics. In Fausto-Sterling’s logic, a girl with vaginal agenesis is not “really” female. Ironically, her attempt to critique the Platonic ideals of maleness and femaleness actually reinforces those ideals, by exempting those with variations in sexual development from the sex binary altogether. (Favale, pp. 126–7)
There it is — the re-emergence of a vulgar modern essentialism.
Favale begins Chapter 5 with an Aristotelian solution to the faddish conundrum about answering the question, “What is a woman?” For Favale, as for most people throughout most of history, it has to do with procreative potential. A woman is an adult human female. She is not defined by her gait, her preferences for certain activities, her plainness or prettiness, her dress, her sexual proclivities and preferences, or the distribution of hair on her body.
When the doctor says — or used to say — “It’s a girl,” or “It’s a boy,” it’s no more an “assignment” than me saying, as I look out my window, “It’s a Norway spruce,” or “It’s a downy woodpecker” or “It’s a custom 1951 Chevrolet pickup truck.” It’s an observation, not an assignment. The name (convention) conveys the observation (of the actual object), it doesn’t invent the thing being noticed. I can call the tree a dogwood or the bird a hedge sparrow or the truck a Lamborghini, but that in no way makes it so; and if the spruce has been deformed from protective cutting by the power company or if the woodpecker has lost an eye or the truck has been fitted with wheels manufactured in 2022, those things — even with their departures from normal — are still what they are. Every potential of every form does not always actualize or fully embody its form or potential, else the formal, potential, and actual would be indistinguishable.
This won’t satisfy the ideologues, but its deployment as an argument may stump many of them, because most of them (except for a few professors) will suddenly have been presented with something utterly new and mysterious. (Wait until you break out “teleology” on them.)
Dr. Favale concludes the chapter with a Flannery O’Connor story that poses a Christian alternative, which I won’t delve into here. I don’t want to steal her real thunder. (Buy the book!)
The wocky
Chapter 6 is called “Gender.” Now we get to the meat of the matter, in a manner of speaking. Again, Favale confronts her reader with a prefatory genealogy, this time of the word . . . gender. It’s here where she spells out her thesis about “reliable” birth control in the form of “the pill.” The pill set up, for the first time among the more or less general population, the potential, albeit with may side effects, for women to view sex as something that could be separated from procreation — an attitude long held by grasping, trifling men, that sex is recreational, or worse, “merely” transactional. A friend, De Clarke, once told me, “Nothing is mere.” Presta atención!
Even the word, sex, as used in the preceding sentence, is a kind of etymological mutation of this “sexual revolution.” It was once a popular reference to heterosexual coitus, but was expanded within the post-pill hedonistic understanding of sex to mean any sort of erotic practice. This is not a moral observation, here or in Favale, but genealogical. Historicizing perception, ideas, and linguistic practices is how we overcome the faulty tendency to retroject out own ideas, feelings, and attitudes onto the past.
“If fertility no longer matters,” writes Favale on page 144, quoting Angela Franks . . .
it does not matter whether the bodies are male of female; they are all just raw material for anonymous couplings. (Franks, Church Life Journal, July 24, 2018)
Hello, hookup culture.
I want to extend Franks’ analysis here to underscore the further ramification, mentioned in the previous two chapters. If “man” and “woman” refer to our generative potentiality, changing one’s sex is an impossibility, because a man cannot physically adopt the procreative role of a female, and vice versa. But now that bodily sex has been divorced from procreative potential, reduced to appearance and pleasure-making, having a sex change seems feasible. Elaborate surgical and hormonal interventions can alter the appearance and mimic sex markers, and that is enough for us now, because that is what bodily sex has become. A surgeon and make a “vagina” out of a wound, because the vagina is no longer seen as the door to a womb. [I refer readers with the stomach for it to my long piece on trans-ideology, where I posted some graphic images of these barbaric surgeries. — SG]
By the mid-twentieth century, “sex” qua biological sex was dethroned, both linguistically and conceptually. The word “sex” no longer served merely a shorthand for one’s biological sexual identity, but expanded to indicate any kind of erotic genital activity. “Sexuality” no longer referred to one’s maleness or femaleness, but to the flavor and expression of one’s erotic desires. This dethroning of “sex” created a conceptual vacuum, one quickly filled by the term “gender.” (pp.144–5)
Favale writes in an accessible, non-academic idiom in this book, and it would be easy for some — who fail to recognize their own reflexive reactions to what they may first intuit to be a moralizing account and to her identification of the pill as an historical pivot — to discount what she’s said here as simplistic. In fact, her point is as sharp as it is subtle, and it’s materialistic in an almost Marxian sense. The pill was a material change which ramified into an unexpected conceptual vacuum, a vacuum which was filled from another prevailing ideology.
Departing from Favale here, and speaking only on my own behalf (though I suspect she would agree), the emergence of gender ideology corresponds historically and spatially with the rise of neoliberal political economy. The philosophical postulates operating in the background of both are the very same.
Her introduction (above) to the “Gender” chapter precedes the reader’s introduction to John Money — all in all a horrible human being who conducted a Mengelesque “experiment” on an unfortunate child that led to that child’s sad life and eventual adult suicide (his Money-abused twin dying two years later of an overdose). You can look it up. “John Money” “David Reimer.” Long story short, Money — a radical constructivist — took it upon himself to use Reimer, the victim of a botched circumcision, to attempt female “reconstructions” and convince the parents to raise Reimer as a girl. (Money also sexually abused Reimer and his twin brother.) This guy, Money, is credited with bringing “sexual reassignment surgery” into the mainstream.
Just as liberal feminism is embarrassed by Margaret Sanger’s eugenicism, gender ideology ought to be embarrassed by Money’s cruel, creepy, Nazi-esque experiments. The have a common origin in progress mythology, but that, too, is another story. It should be noted that liberal feminism shaded into radical constructivism, whereas among the strongest feminist holdouts against gender ideology are the “radical feminists,” who, although they share an origin in progress mythology, are post-Marxists, and as such oppose neoliberalism (late form capitalism) and its liberal assumptions: radical individualism, the proprietary body, ahistorical “choice,” etc. The rad-fems are now loudly denounced by the (neo)liberal feminists and the constructivists (often the same people) as TERFs (trans-exclusive radical feminists), even when they/we are not radical feminists at all (though I admit to having learned a great deal from them). It’s a kind of ideological contagion narrative — TERF is now a communicable disease. Meanwhile, in some incomprehensibly ideological way, TERFs have become “fascists” (according to people who have no fucking clue about what fascism was); therefore anyone who questions gender ideology is — just skip the steps . . . gender ideology critical>>>TERF>>>fascist . . . and go straight to “fascist.” Abigail Favale is a fascist. Catharine McKinnon is a fascist. Louise Perry is a fascist. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a fascist. J. K. Rowling is a fascist. Stuart Parker is a fascist. I am a fascist. [Editorial rant over.]
Returning to Favale’s “Gender” chapter, I was delighted to (finally!) find a critique of the sex-gender distinction — one I’d once plunked for myself, but finally jettisoned. Either I’ve been shit at explaining my position against the whole nature-nurture thing, or it’s so epistemologically entrenched that you can’t break it loose with dynamite, or a bit of both. My shorthand has always been, “Human beings are biologically determined to not be biologically determined.” Favale lays it out in three straightforward paragraphs, of which I’ll tease readers with one-and-a-quarter:
At first glance, the distinction between sex and gender in this initial feminist usage seems straightforward: sex is a basic fact referring to one’s biology (femaleness or maleness), and gender refers o the collection of cultural meanings associated with each sex. Upon further examination, however, it becomes difficult to understand where the demarcation between the two actually lies. Take the notion that women are more nurturing, for example. Is this idea a product of biology or culture?
The underlying problem, of course, is that humans are both social and biological beings; our neuroplastic brains respond to the environment, and our biological abilities and limits shape cultural norms. (p. 148)
Maria Mies, in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, influenced heavily by Carolyn Merchant, wrote something on this in 1986:
The distinction between sex as a biological, and gender as a socio-cultural, category may at first sight appear a useful one because it removes the irritation that a woman’s oppression is time and again attributed to her anatomy. But this distinction follows the well-known dualistic pattern of dividing ‘nature’ from ‘culture’. For women, this division has a long and disastrous tradition in Western thought because women have been put on the side of nature since the rise of modern science. If feminists now try to get out of this tradition by defining sex as a purely material, biological affair, and gender as the ‘higher’, cultural, human, historical expression of this affair, then they continue the work of those idealist patriarchal philosophers and scientists who divided the world up into crude ‘bad’ matter . . . By the dualistic spitting up of sex and gender, however, by treating the one as biological and the other as cultural, the door is again opened for those who want to treat the sexual difference between human beings as a matter of our anatomy, or as ‘matter’. Sex as matter can then become an object for the scientist who may dissect, analyze, and reconstruct it according to his plans. Since all spiritual value has been driven out of sex and encapsulated in the category of gender, the taboos that so far still surround the sphere of sex and sexuality may easily be removed. This sphere can become a new hunting ground for biological engineering, for reproduction technology, for genetic and eugenic engineering and last but not least for capital accumulation. (pp. 22–3)
I’m tempted to say, “prophetic,” but really this is the post-Marxist Mies — inflected through Merchant’s The Death of Nature — following ideas through to their logical ramifications. Mies is not taught in most Gender Studies Departments. Favale won’t be either.
“Ultimately,” says Favale, “the concept of gender has driven a wedge between body and identity.” Referring, of course, to the “gender” of gender ideology, and not the “Gender” of, say, fellow Catholic, Msgr. Ivan Illich, (also influenced by Carolyn Merchant) in his own book by the same name.
Speaking of titles, the title I chose for this review, “Genderwocky,” echoes a subtitle by the same name in the “Gender” chapter of Favale’s book. I’ll leave readers to explore unassisted the linguistic acrobatics of Lewis Carroll and how they relate to Favale’s thesis, but I’ll highlight some of the credible-sounding nonsense she identifies in the bottomless abyss of gender ideology’s logic-free, “trickle-down Butlerism.”
The emergent and expanding taxonomy of gender includes, of course, the original illogical taxonomy of LGBT, which links the apples of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (overgeneralized erotic orientations [no lesbian is attracted to all women]) with the orange of transgender (an overgeneralized “identity,” which involves stylized “gender performances”). At best, we might shoehorn these together as “sexual minorities” or something. This letter-salad expanded further into LGBTQIA+, adding “queer,” “intersex,” and “asexual.” Later, the A came to stand for “asexual/aromantic/agender.” The plus-sign means “whatever the fuck you want”: you can add whatever’s not yet covered, or make some shit up. I’m a gay canary. This infinite expansion of categories and reductions is what we now call “choice” and “affirmation.”
Favale dug up the latest (from last year), which were the ABT and Demi3 taxonomies: Agender, bigender, trigender & demigender, demifluid, demiflux. The new Plus is “pangender.”
These are not terms culled from random blogs and discussion forums. These were all taken verbatim. from official websites of American and British universities. (p. 155)
And therein is the problem, the reason why I myself have become ever more exercised over this gender business, because I have no particular beef with people having erroneous, half-baked, or even batshit crazy ideas. All this has been around for a long time, and excluding people for fatuous, sophsitic, or even loony beliefs would cut the associable population, not to mention the friend-pool, down to near nothing. I’ve entertained my share of all of the above at one point or another in my life. We all have, and do. My “issue” with gender ideology, and the issue for many others (driving some of them into an equally irrational and agenda-heavy “woke-panic” political camp), is that it has taken on cultural and legal force to the point where people can be, and are being, punished by employers, institutions, and the law for refusing to believe in or pretending to see this genderwocky, whiffling through the tulgey wood.
August 11, 2022 headline
Mother loses custody of daughter for failing to ‘affirm’ her trans identity
“People who are imprisoned have more communication with their child than I do,” Jeannette said. “Usually, Child Protective Services has a definition of what it means to be ‘unsafe,’ to be either abused or neglected. There was no evidence that I had done anything like that,” she continued.
The genderwocky really does have “the jaws that bite, the claws that catch.”
The linguistic reshaping of reality is working its way into the law. The Equality Act is a bill under proposal in the United States as of 2021; it passed the House in 2019. This bill would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964, replacing the word “sex” with the three-headed hydra of “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)”. As always, gender is defined in a circular way, as “the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s sex at birth.” Legally redefining sex as something that includes gender identity, while in the same breath defining gender identity as something not related to sex, is nonsensical. This linguistic contortion attempts to hold together two things that are in direct contradiction: the view that gender is based in sex and the view that gender is not based in sex. Moreover, this definition establishes gender — manhood and womanhood — to be a matter of appearance and stereotypes rather than biology. (p. 161)
This is a back door to the legal enforcement of “affirmation” for declarative gender. As another editorial aside, I have never liked the Republican Party. Not even during the Reagan years which made them indistinguishable in most ways from today’s Democratic Party (Obama was, for all practical purposes, a Reagan Republican). My special abhorrence for the GOP (as an institution) is based on the demonstrable fact that they include in their shifting coalition two groups for which I have neither patience nor tolerance: racists and climate deniers. A third might be its powerful current of (ever more cross-racial) gun-nuttery machismo. I’m no fanboy of the Democratic Party either. They acknowledge racial disparities and climate change, then do jackshit beyond cosmetic appeals and tokenism about them. My family is extremely racially heterogeneous (I call it military creole), so we have a good deal of skin in the game against race haters with guns who are emboldened by demagogic politicos. My stance on climate disruption is based on . . . well, a lot of study and the fact that the world’s oceans reached their highest temperatures this year that they’ve had since they started taking those temperatures. Denial of this cataclysmic biospheric disruption is either profound ignorance or cynical manipulation. My general critique of both parties is that they collaborated in building this juttering-to-a-stop world system, and neither has a fucking clue about how to address its cascading failures. This is why they’ve staked out culture war as their political battleground. Neither side has any real solutions, but the Democrats — in supporting this kind of outrageous “gender” legislation — have handed the Republicans a gift: a real and really consequential legal battle within which the Democrats are clearly, spectacularly, and insanely wrong. And given the Democrats’ even more insane affinity for nuclear brinksmanship, as of this year, I can’t even justify them as “lesser-evil.”
Now they’re pushing laws that give men access to women’s sports, women’s locker rooms and restrooms, and women’s prisons. They are pushing a law that could conceivably allow what Republicans have effectively used as a scare tactic — drag queens in elementary school classrooms. The state, that is, directly undermining the teachings and values of parents, who — like me — do not want to provoke culture-war reactions with kids as pawns in a sick political contest.
Caenis
The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not comprehend it.
— John 1:5
Elatus’s daughter, Caenis, loveliest of the virgins of Thessaly, was famous for her beauty, a girl longed for in vain, the object of many suitors throughout the neighboring cities and your own (since she was one of your people, Achilles). Perhaps Peleus also would have tried to wed her, but he had already taken your mother in marriage, or she was promised to your father. Caenis would not agree to any marriage, but (so rumor has it) she was walking along a lonely beach, and the god took her by force. When Neptune had enjoyed his new love he said: “Make your wish, without fear of refusal. Ask for what you most want!”
“This injury evokes the great desire never to be able to suffer any such again. Grant I might not be a woman: you will have given me everything,” Caenis said. She spoke the last words in a deeper tone, that might have been the sound of a man’s voice. So it was: the god of the deep ocean had already accepted her wish, and had granted, over and above it, that as a man Caenis would be protected from all wounds, and never fall to the sword. Caenis, the Atracides, left, happy with his gifts, and spent his time in manly pastimes, roaming the Thessalian fields.
— Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VII
A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
— Andrea Dworkin
This was the triple epigraph at the beginning of a book I wrote a few years back, called Tough Gynes — Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men. What a surprise it was to find, in Chapter 7, “Artifice,” of Abigail Favale’s book a reference to the same passage in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. (I originally titled my book Caenis, but my editor said that was too obscure . . . now hardly anyone, it turns out, gets the “gynes” reference, which they pronounce “geens.”)
This chapter begins breaking down the diagnosis of “gender dysphoria.” Even though this symptom, when it is not a result of suggestion (which it often is), has multiple inducements — neurological disorder, trauma, family dysfunction, same-sex attraction, to name a very few. What has happened is the symptom is now a free-standing diagnosis, with an efflorescent overgrowth of profitable “medical treatments,” into which every person — including children — are often arbitrarily channeled.
As Maria Mies warned, “gender” can now be capitalized. Transitioned kids and adults are paying patients and drug consumers . . . for life.
“Artifice” is Favale’s most evidentiary chapter. She shows up with receipts, which I’ll not review in any detail here (whispers again . . . buy the book). The core of her research shows a more than 2,000 percent increase in reports of gender dysphoria (through the burgeoning “gender” industry) over a period of one decade, with the greatest growth (by far) among adolescent girls. She also cites Susan Bordo (whose book Flight to Objectivity poured ten pages into Borderline), with whose work this reviewer has long been familiar regarding “eating disorders.”
Stepping back for a moment, Caenis was a mythical figure who asked to be transformed from a woman into a man (and who was granted her wish). Her motivation was to be “protected from all wounds.”
Back when I was speaking regularly in public, trying to convince people in the antiwar movement that certain forms of masculinity reproduced war, I needed to substantiate my claim that being a woman and being a man were two different experiences, even in identical situations. I’d ask the audience the question, “How many of you check the back seat of your parked car before you get in?” Invariably, almost all of the women raised their hands, and hardly any of the men did.
In the manufactured imagination of the entertainment industry, “feminism” means women acting like men. (Strangely enough, this same phallocentric trope also makes it obligatory that the female protagonist be sufficiently “typically” sexy to make a 15-year-old boy say, “I’d do her.”) We see women in film and television now routinely beating up bad guys (while wearing spike heels); but the reality remains that most grown men can kill most grown women with their bare hands. Women in real life — who have on average 70 percent of men’s lower body strength and less than a third of men’s upper body strength — are more vulnerable than men, at the same time that many (no, not all) men are willing in some circumstances to use that superior strength against women. The deck is in many ways — as least in terms of danger and vulnerability — stacked against women. One in every 71 American males will be raped in his lifetime. One in every five women will be raped. That’s why women check the back seats of their cars. Their world is scarier than a man’s if you except some men’s genuine care for particular women (I fear for my granddaughters in a world where most young men [and many young women now] are learning about “sex” from pornography).
There’s a very good reason why Caenis wanted a sex change, even when she had to ask her rapist god to grant it. Obviously, I’m focusing on one aspect of Favale’s chapter — an explosive cohort of girls with gender dysphoria and now seeking “transition.”
For a brief, bright moment during the “second wave,” we all came to question the stylized, stereotyped, manufactured versions of masculinity and femininity. We had a moment of clarity, like a “brain involved” terminal patient who suddenly “returns to the world” for a few minutes before falling back into his or her fragmenting consciousness. We saw what Sojourner Truth was telling us, that even someone working like a mule in the fields, with calloused hands, leathered skin, hard features, and a back like a steel spring . . . is still a woman. We knew for a glimmering instant that fact and appearance are often not the same thing, and that within being inescapably a man or a woman there were many ways to live out that gendered existence that are not stylized, not stereotypical, not manufactured. Then . . . poof! . . . our culture fell backward into those stylized stereotypes and lost the capacity to discern the book from its cover.
Favale said that “gender performance” is not behaving like the other sex, but behaving like we imagine the other sex to be. And wherefrom comes this imagination in our media-saturated, image-obsessed late modern consumer culture?
I live in a small Midwestern town. If I go to town today, the majority of the women I see will not look like any woman on television or in ads — not even the new plus-size models and whatnot, who are still femininity-stylized. They’ll be fat (we have lots of fat people here) to skinny, old to young, mostly in plain clothes with sensible shoes, often without a dab of makeup, hair austerely stretched back or cut short and practical, maybe with a Marlboro hanging from their lips or scolding a recalcitrant child or trying to negotiate a handicap ramp on a walker or with bad teeth waiting for their drug connection on a corner. There will be some who unintentionally lampoon themselves with stylization, and there will be a few self-consciously un-self-conscious, well-to-do gym rats with sculpted muscle and their perfectly made-up faces “improved” by our local plastic surgeon.
Stylized femininity, of course, is the kind of thing an MTF trans would pursue, the imagination of the thing. But it’s also the kind of expectation that clings like a malevolent monkey on the backs of girls. I don’t know a single girl over ten or a single woman who hasn’t expressed, in one form or another, how much easier it would have been if she had just been born male. Here, meet these impossibly sexed-up (ever more porn-ified) expectations, or be thought less of, and at the same time render yourself more “appealing” to predatory fucking men. Yay . . . where do I sign up?
It is difficult, maybe impossible, to grow up female and not absorb the painful idea behind the myth of Caenis: to be a woman is to be vulnerable, particularly to sexual exploitation. The idea that women exist for the pleasure of men has never been more explicit, more omni-present, than in our ostensibly feminist age. Some feminists have even embraced this, singing the sex-positive praises of pornography and prostitution as somehow liberating for women . . .
. . . When I read these accounts of femaleness, I feel like I want to hide; I want the visibly female features of my body to dissolve and disappear entirely. If this is what it means to be a woman — to be degraded, dominated, depersonalized, reduced to an object for someone else’s use — then I want no part in it. Make me a woman no longer. Is it any wonder that our girls are in revolt? (pp.172–3)
When Susan Bordo wrote her thesis on eating disorders, which I read back when the earth was warm, one motivation was meeting (a distorted version of) stylized “feminine” expectations, but the main motivation for these girls was an exercise of control in a world where they felt they had none. The bulimic or the self-cutter binge-and-purge or pull out the blade when other stressors in their lives threaten to overwhelm them.
When girls with eating disorders, autism, sexual trauma, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, suicidality, dissociative disorders, parental abuse, substance abuse, even simple same-sex attraction, have gender-related discomforts and go online, they find a plethora of “sources” and affinity groups (similar to those infamous eating disorder celebration groups) who now tell them that they all have the same disorder — gender dysphoria (transformed from symptom to diagnosis) — and that there is one sure cure — transition. I’ll leave readers to look into the new, internet-induced phenomenon called rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). ROGD corresponds strongly with the explosion of girls who, without any of the older medical histories and markers associated with transsexualism/transgenderism (once a majority male phenomenon), are suddenly self-reporting as “transgendered.” Parents are being pressured to accept and “affirm” by ideologues, and the growing transgender-medical-pharmaceutical-complex is waiting greedily to greet them with open arms and ready-at-hand invoices.
Fortunately, the medical community and society writ large do not consider anorexia and bulimia as something to be celebrated, which keeps a lid on the contagion and keeps open the possibility that people with eating disorders can pursue healing. This is not the case, however, with the bodily contortions required to support a trans identity. Medical transition is now embraced as the standard of care for those suffering from gender dysphoria, despite the lack of high-quality evidence to support this approach. In 2016, the Obama administration conducted an exhaustive review of all existing peer-reviewed research on surgical remedies for gender dysphoria in order to decide whether those procedures should be covered by Medicare. After reviewing the evidence, they elected not to issue a National Coverage Determination, because the clinical evidence for the efficacy of these treatments remains inconclusive. (p. 179)
In fact, as I found while doing the research myself (see my article on trans-ideology), most of the so-called studies were and are already leaning into the medical-transition-profit complex, and they were and are engineered with cheats (design flaws) that track switch the readers onto the rail line of predetermined conclusions.
Winding up
Favale’s “Artifice” chapter, like all of them, ends — as all her chapters do — with real world examples and an alternative (Catholic/Christian) perspective. I’ve deliberately glossed over those or left them untouched, because that would be a spoiler. Her final two chapters, “”Wholeness” and “Gift,” pull personal experience and the philosophical/theological together, rather like putting those final pieces into a puzzle; so I won’t spoil those either. I will say that I was both chastened and gratified by the incredible sensitivity and graciousness of her response, especially toward those people who suffer from dysphoria and the many, many comorbidities associated with it, including those who are taken in by the gender ideology that underwrites the “therapeutic” industry that thrives on their confusion and misery like vampires.
I know my own sort of cranky, post-military idiom sometimes sounds uncharitable, but I assure you that I reserve my ire for Herod, “that fox,” and not the rest of them . . . us . . . who are like the trash pickers I saw in places like Vietnam, El Salvador, Haiti, Somalia, and Peru; scavenging for what we can find to survive across the fetid fields of postmodernity’s accumulating deceits. Trash is all that’s been left us, and we have to make do. Even our bodies have been torn up and discarded on this shabby landscape of dissolute consciousness.
The postmodern self is more vulnerable to external forces; not to transcendence, but to power . . . The living person at the center of the cosmic wheel, the human being whose body-soul unity mirrors the harmony of the whole — this has been displaced by a fragmentary model of identity. The self is no longer a microcosm, but a smashed idol. (p. 233)
This book is written for a general audience — a book study at the local parish, for example — so there’s a great deal of marginal space for the “I’m smart, too” interventions of testy academics, especially those who share Favale’s poststucturalist background. Poststructuralists have refined the art of pulling “category troubling” questions out of the mud of feigned gullibility to such a degree as to leave any sophist-of-old trembling with envy. The Dawkinsian atheists will have a go at it, too, with their sophomoric two-dimensional scientism. The “rad-trad” Catholics, with their unacknowledged fealty to politics first and their gut-level authoritarian impulses, will have their own red-faced objections. The Christian socialists who are socialist first, Christians second, will parse and object. The liberal Christians who are still — as Favale and I both did — trying to squeeze Christ into a modern or postmodern box will dismiss her as well.
Ignore them all. Read it. See for yourself.
Enter through the narrow gate; for the path leading away to destruction is broad and open, and there are many who enter by it; For narrow is the gate and close-cramped the path leading away to life, and those who find it are few. Beware of false prophets, who come to you garbed as sheep, but who are ravenous wolves within. You will know them from their fruits. (Matthew 7:13–15)