The Genesis of Gender

Book Review (Abigail Favale)

In this book Favale offers a Christian theory of gender. That's a bold thing to do. Firstly, Gender itself is just such a hotly contested topic. On the one hand, you have the theologically conservative position aligned very tightly with conservative politics, which just wants to say something like, "there are two sexes, male and female, and two genders, and that's that. Also, men are in charge." I caricature, but many people's position is not far off this. On the other hand, you have the other extreme, in which gender is entirely a construct, so much so that politicians will answer questions along the lines of "What do you consider to be a woman?" with "I don't know, I'm not qualified to answer that".

Favale situates herself in terms of her own narrative and journey - raised in an American Evangelical context, she was challenged by Feminism, became at first an Evangelical Feminist at college, and then through further study became much more Feminist, much less Christian, until she was doing doctoral work that cast her into an Irigarayan post-modernist feminist. We then see Favale teaching Gender Theory in the academy, before finally her conversion to Catholicism, which caused (or co-incided) with her own crisis of knowledge over the very field itself.

Chapter 2 (Cosmos), then, is Favale's offering of an initial account of a Christian theory of gender, grounded in the Creation narrative, and in dialogue primarily with John Paul II. This chapter by itself is worth reading. For myself, it's so valuable to read a Christian perspective outside the debates that happen within Protestant circles themselves.

In Chapter 3 (Waves), we are given a historical account of the development of Feminism. This is not an area I'm well versed in, so I found it really helpful to have Favale walk through the major theoretical (and practical) dimensions of 1st - 4th wave feminism, as well as major texts by authors such as Friedan, de Beauvoir, and Judith Butler. She also delves into the influence of Foucault (inter alios) on Butler.

Favale also here gives an account of intersectionality and what she terms intersectionalism. This section, I confess, is harder to follow. I think more work needs to be done here, because intersectionality at its basic, heuristic level makes a lot of sense - a person who is both Black and a Woman, is likely to experience increased discrimination because of the intersection of those two categories. Favale says as much. Favale doesn't say enough about how intersectionalism functions as a theoretical framework at the level that, say, Butlerian gender-as-construct-as-power does.

Chapter 4 (Control) turns to the history of sex reassignment (aka gender confirmation) surgery, contraception, and other forms of controlling the body to conform to the mind's vision and version of gender. She traces the rise of contraception to Sanger's work, with its mix of righteous indignation at the suffering of women, mixed with eugenicist solutions through the subjection of the female body. Favale also links Sanger's position with de Beauvoir:

Like Sanger, de Beauvoir sees women as enslaved by their biology. Like Sanger, de Beauvoir claims that true freedom can only be found in a socialist utopia that enables women to control their bodies with contraception and abortion. Both women implicitly sculpt their vision of freedom according to the male ideal. Women can only find true freedom by making themselves as much like men as possible. p79

There is something powerful about Favale's point here - if your version of feminism rests on pathologising, even demonising, what is inherent in female bodies - the procreative possibility, then this ought to be a problem. It's not valuing and affirming of women qua women that their ultimate triumph and self-actualisation involves a denial of their own biology.

At the same time (I would say), neither can we attempt to locate female identity in biology, because then you end up treating women as [only] truly women if they have sexual intercourse, bear children, and are mothers. Essentialising sexual activity and procreation as necessary expressions of human (and sexual) existence falsely dehumanises and devalues all humans who don't.

So it seems to me that what is necessary is an account of what it is to be a women must be grounded in actual sexual differentiation, without essentialising sexual activity. Otherwise we are going to be left with a socio-psychological idea of feminity as a gender that is collapses into circularity: "I feel like I am a woman because I feel like I am woman"

Sex

Chapter 5 is about Sex, and here Favale tackles this very idea. She lays out essentialism - the idea that there is a property, some 'thing', "womanness", that makes a woman a woman. And how this idea has been critiqued because almost any definition suffers from the "not all women" objection.

In gender theory, essentialism is often contrasted with social constructionism, which is the idea that there are no differences between men and women at the level of being; any differences we perceive are products of society and culture. p103

Feminism tends instead to be nominalist, and somewhat existentialist. We can group women together with the name of women, even though this name and idea is a social construct.

Favale offers a solution. It is one that draws on Aristotle and Aquinas, and it locates womanness in potentiality:

A woman is the kind of human being whose body is organized around the potential to gestate new life. p106

The potentiality suffices, she argues, to undergird womanness. Because even when it does not reach actuality - age, pathology, immaturity, celibacy, infertility - the potentiality is innate.

The very category of “infertility” does not undermine this definition, but affirms it. A male human who cannot get pregnant is not deemed “infertile”, because he never had that potential in the first place. p106-107

There is a danger, which Favale anticipates and acknowledges, that such a definition reduces women to procreation. She deals with it deftly:

Our consideration of womanhood must include bodily sex, but must also extend beyond it to consider the whole person. That’s the lively tension we need to inhabit: to remain rooted in the body but not reduced to the body. p107

The Science of Sex

Here Favale ventures to explore the question of biological sex, and particularly the thorny issue of intersex conditions. It certainly is true, as Favale notes, that opponents of the concept of dimorphic sexual difference like to trot out, "what about intersex?" as a response. Intersex conditions, or Disorders of Sex Development are a difficult topic to approach with both informed clarity, and judicial restraint. Firstly, because definitions vary, secondly because we are discussing a range of conditions, thirdly because what counts as "intersex" is contested. At its broadest, it's any condition where "“individual who deviates from the Platonic ideal of physical dimorphism at the chromosomal, genital, gonadal, or hormonal levels.” (Fausto-Sterling, cited in Favale, p111; Fausto-Sterling et al have an expansive definition and estimate prevalence as up to 1.7%; Sax responded by ruling out several conditions, and estimates 0.018%. This all depends upon which specific conditions are included).

Favale advances her own thesis, that we define (biological) sex not by secondary characteristics, but simply by the organisation of the body in relation to gamete production. I am not sure that this is really a sufficient position, but I do think it has some advantages - I think it trends in the right direction, but I would need to do a whole lot more scientific and other reading to reach a truly informed position. For example, some conditions (Swyer Syndrome, XX Male Syndrome) seem to involve a person who has a complex biological condition in which sex-assignation is complicated by mismatches between chromosomes and phenotype, which require a less simplistic analysis of ‘sex’.

But what I do agree with is that there is a biological basis for a dimorphic understanding of biological sex, and of understanding intersex conditions as variations within a binary, not a deconstruction of the existence of a binary.

Gender

I think this is actually one of the more difficult chapters in the book to come to terms with. Here's why: Favale is doing an historical account, an etiology, for where the idea of gender as distinct from sex came from, and the damage that this dualism does; and yet, and yet, I do think we ought to distinguish gender from sex, and I don't know that Favale does enough justice to that idea.

So, what Favale does do, is look at the work of Foucault, and particularly, the way that the impact of contraception produced a society-wide shift in our thinking - reproduction became divorced from sexuality,

Sex, for Foucault, is about “bodies and pleasures” (quoting Angela Franks) p 127

I agree with this, because in this view sexual intercourse is just about human bodies of various configurations getting together and engaging in pleasurable activity. This is the prevailing view of sex, and male/female is seen mostly in terms of the body parts you bring to that activity.

Favale next looks at the emergence of the idea of gender, and especially the role of John Money. This lead in turn to the idea of gender as a socially constructed set of corollaries, the socio-cultural-psychological accoutrements of sexual difference.

One of Favale's complaints is that the line between sex and gender is very hard to draw. I don't think that's such a strong objection. Just because it's hard to work out what is nature and what is culture, doesn't mean that those categories don't have value. Similarly, just because gender is socially constructed doesn't mean it's not "real". Race is also socially constructed, but it's very much a real category. So, contra Favale, I want to say that it's insufficient to say that something is socially constructed as a defeater, this doesn't mean something is unreal, or infinitely flexible.

Favale also resorts to the argument, "if you feel like a cat, are you a cat?" and "if you feel Italian, are you?", and most pointedly, "if you feel like a Black person, are you?"

There is a weight to this argument, yes. Most people reject the idea that simply identifying or thinking/feeling yourself to be Black is sufficient to be Black. There is a small but significant problem in Canada of people claiming to be Indigenous with no basis. There are people who feel that they are not actually human (trans-species, otherkin).

However, and this is my big caveat, this type of argument is also regularly trotted out by people I'd identify as simply right-wing conservatives, without a sound theology undergirding it at all, and with the implicit or explicit accusation that there are men out there simply claiming to be women as a deception, either of others or themselves. That itself is a mythical piece of fear-mongering, and if I can refer back to Yarhouse's book, people genuinely experiencing gender dysphoria do not choose to do so. If there's any people out there who volitionally choose to identify as trans-gender, "because that's who/what I want to be", it's a very, very small number. This type of argument can be used in a deceptively polemic way.

For Favale, gender has to, sooner or later, get grounded in the body. If male/female gender concepts are nothing but cultural stereotypes, then they are kind of arbitrary and meaningless. "Nothing but" has to do a lot of work there, but I think there is a real insight here. If a person doesn't feel like they are particularly male because they don't identify with, say, a 1960s ideal of American manhood that involves violent sports, guns, trucks, the colour blue, and being the sole breadwinner, this doesn't necessarily tell us anything about gender/sex mismatch, so much as it suggests that our concepts of masculinity are oh-so-cultural.

This is why I am incredibly sceptical about every book published in the "here's what it looks like to be a biblical man" genre. All those books are incredibly socially located, and often tell us much more about the author's cultural constructs, than anything about what maleness means. We should think of gender as socially constructed, but at the same time gender is grounded in the body, in sexual differentiation, and yet equally at the same time we should be sceptical of baptising cultural models of gender because they are supposedly tied to innate sexual characteristics.

Artifice

This chapter deals specifically with gender dysphoria and with transitioning. In particular, Favale engages with what Yarhouse would call the strong version of the Diversity framework, that sees transgenderism as part of the diversity of human reality, a matter of identity, and always to affirm and support people towards (medical, usually) transition. Favale in particular is interested in writing about FtM transition, and the cultural and ideological reasons she sees behind these trends.

I'll skip over the next chapter, Wholeness, if only because I've said too much already. In the final chapter, Favale returns to the beginning, and encourages a view of the body as Gift. Embodiedness is how we are, we can be no other.

Concluding thoughts

This is a hot book in certain circles, and I can see why. It offers a classical Christian perspective on gender and theology, from someone who has gone through the feminist and Gender Theory world, and emerged on the other side. That immediately makes it palatable. I say this with a little bit of cynicism. At the same time, it is an intelligent, informed and critical engagement with both theology and gender theory, from someone who has thought through these issues at length, and come to a very Catholic answer. In that regards, I think it's a far more robust engagement and offering than a lot of treatments of these issues from pop-protestantism. There is a depth to the theological view of embodiedness, femininity, and grace, that is needed for substantive thinking on these issues.