On The Genesis of Gender and Strange New World (part two)

This is part two of my review of Abigail Favale's The Genesis of Gender and Carl Trueman's Strange New World – books that have garnered attention among evangelical Christians for addressing gender identity in a way that bolsters traditional accounts. 

As mentioned, neither of these books is a work of biblical or theological scholarship, but they do share a theological premise, so I am thinking them through together. 

In part one I shared some appreciations of both books and focused on what was lacking in Trueman’s. I’ve been reminded that his was more or less an abridgment of his longer book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, but my criticisms stand. Here I will turn to Favale’s book. All page numbers in brackets relate to whatever book is under discussion in the immediate proximity. 

In The Genesis of Gender, English professor Abigail Favale narrates her deconversion from the feminist "gender paradigm" and calls it a socially constructed "illusion" (30, 74). Her account of feminism is skewed, as will be illustrated below, but her book has a lot more going for it than Trueman’s. Not only is she an elegant writer, but her argument is considerably more thorough. 

I already quoted this, and will return to it below, but I want to highlight Favale’s conclusion, where she writes: “we don’t choose our unique amalgam of qualities and traits, those threads that form the tapestry of personality… Yet there is one thing we can freely choose – free only because the gentle fingers of God have loosed what binds and blinds us. We can choose to receive all these things as gift” (239). This is compelling stuff, and I will come back to it later. But since I was unconvinced and concerned by this book, allow me to explain my reservations. 

Part 2: What is lacking in Favale’s The Genesis of Gender (for evangelicals at least) 

The complicated question of bodies 

In part one I found Trueman’s approach to sex and gender simplistic at best. For her part, though she comes to similar conclusions, Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender offers a more thorough overview of the many biological factors that contribute to maleness and femaleness. 

In “The Science of Sex” Favale enumerates the variety of biological factors that contribute to a person’s sex – including chromosomes, hormones, and so on – and argues that the most foundational of these is gamete production, which is entirely binary (128-29). Gametes are cells that contribute to reproduction, and since it takes two to tango in that regard the idea is that when you get down to bare essentials the human being is basically sexually dimorphic. 

I’m not here to weigh in on the scientific debate about what determines sex or gender, but it is worth noting two things: one is that this only answers the question of gender variance if one is committed to binding gender to basic sex; the other is that the decision to pin sexual identity to gamete production is itself informed by a prioritization of procreation. In other words, there are theological commitments informing the interpretation of biology (which is fine, but needs naming). 

The problem, it seems to me, is that this reduction to gametes lends to an under-appreciation of the physiological variances that spread out and intertwine from that apparent dimorphism. Even before one considers the social constructs of gender (in either premodern patriarchy or modern alterity), there are bodily variations which overlap. When it comes to gender identities, then, some want to open up a spectrum, others want to spread out between two magnetic poles, and others want to stick with two distinct boxes. 

We are of course using metaphors here. In LGBTQ+ discourse it may be that the spectrum metaphor works better for Q and the poles metaphor works better for LGBT. When the dust settles on this debate, I’m not sure if users of the spectrum metaphor will be saying the array of genders is infinite or was only ever indefinite. If it proves to be the latter, perhaps it will be possible to think in terms of two magnetic poles between which a wide variety of gender identities are spread out. In 1990 Judith Butler called this an open-ended conversation, and as far as I know the matter has not closed. 

For her part, Favale prefers the metaphor of boxes. She argues that “we need to make room within the boxes of male and female for a range of body types and personalities” but “we do not need to abolish the boxes altogether” (135). The range of gender diversity must remain fixed to the constant of sex, which is determined by gametes, as supported by the patriarchal ordering assumed in Scripture and affirmed in the natural reasoning of the Catholic Church. 

Incidentally, while this is meant as an alternative to the spectrum metaphor, it is not clear to me that it is incompatible with the metaphor of magnetic poles. If men and women share most characteristics, the ranges overlap a lot. Therefore it remains an open and intricate question which factors ought to be considered determinative, who makes that choice, and when. It’s an interesting and important conversation, and at present it would be unbiblical and unloving to simply foreclose it. At the very least this is a “Gamaliel’s rule” type of situation. 

Favale may be right to question rhetoric that suggests an infinite spectrum of self-chosen identities, but just because there may be a limit to how far this can go does not mean a retraction to binary boxes is required. It is true that the definition of gender continues to grow and has not finally settled, and that this can be confusing and chaotic, but it is presumptuous to belittle the conversation because some parts of it are unresolved or experimental (see 150-55). 

Surely there exists a condition known as gender dysphoria – which Favale defines in terms of the “distress that stems from a feeling of incongruence with one’s sex” (167) – but that does not mean that any and all transgender persons are suffering from a “psychological illness” that can only be cured (196). From what I’ve seen and heard, the majority of health practitioners and experts are careful about how they resolve dysphoria, and do not recommend transition hastily. And when people do transition or identify as transgender it does not usually sound like an invention but a homecoming – as if they’ve finally come to peace with their bodies. But Favale portrays transgender people as if they are ignoring or denying their bodies, thereby breaking the harmony of the created order (43). 

I am not convinced this is a fair representation of either the transgender phenomenon or of the theology. Let’s turn our attention to the latter. 

Does a sacramental principle lead back to natural law? 

Like Trueman, Favale locates her theological argument for traditional gender in natural law. Unlike Trueman, Favale provides a theological rational for this. That’s not to say that she elaborates or considers counterpoints, but she does root her natural-law approach in what she calls a “sacramental principle” (136). This is a relatively novel phrase, but Favale seems to be saying that the incarnation of Christ provides a qualified stamp of approval to natural law, which in turn gives a certain authority to the body in matters of moral discernment. Because the Son of God became incarnate, we should see “body as sacrament” (as one subtitle puts it).

From where I sit, the only thing odder than seeing Favale refer to the body as a sacrament is seeing evangelicals gravitate to this book who otherwise don’t even use that word. To be clear, Favale is not sneaking the human body itself into the seven sacraments of Roman Catholicism, but is extending the logic of the sacraments into a sacramental principle that underwrites keen attention to the material creation that God called good and invested with God’s very self. The latter is a fine point, and evangelicals ought to incorporate it into their theologies of creation, atonement, anthropology, and eschatology. What’s at issue is what Favale does with it. 

“The sacramental principle is always at work,” Favale explains: “the visible reveals the invisible. The body reveals to us the eternal and divine reality of the person—a reality that can only break into the tangible, sensible world through embodiment” (136). 

As best as I can tell, this is Favale’s way of rooting gender and sexuality in the (typically Roman Catholic) belief that there are natural laws that reflect eternal laws – and she’s taking the incarnation as a divine confirmation that this analogy holds up. There are considerable unresolved theological problems with this (see the debate between analogia entis and analogia relationis), especially for Protestants, so it can hardly be the grounds for disfellowship. How does one adopt a natural law approach to morality while holding to the authority of Scripture, let alone the authority of Christ? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it isn’t easy. 

Even if we were to accept the natural law premises of Favale and Trueman, we would still have to reckon with a number of complicated problems. On the scientific level there remains the problem of determining which biological factors are determinative, and behind it the problem of distinguishing nature from nurture. On the ethical level, there is the problem of the distorting effects of sin on centuries of social construction, and behind it the problem of drawing moral laws from physical laws in the first place. And on the theological level there is the overarching question whether such moral laws and social constructions could yet be idols that hinder us from following the lead of Christ himself. These books insist that modern individualists have made up social constructs to suit themselves, call us back to natural law, and ignore the ways that patriarchy may have previously misshaped what is deemed natural. 

In sum, Favale uses the sacramental principle to underwrite the essentializing of both sex and gender according to the dimorphic reality of gamete production. Since persons bear within them one of two contributions to procreation, their varied expressions of gender should remain aligned to whichever of these two potentialities their bodies hold. Never mind the virgin birth or the celibacy of Jesus or the Pauline relativization of male and female. This is natural law. Those who identify otherwise than their gametes are sinning against the sacramental principle. There’s definitely an argument to play out here, but would that it were so simple. 

Once again, a simplistic privileging of body over spirit 

When it comes to privileging gamete production in the designation of male and female, one could provide a theological argument by rooting it in the centrality of procreation in the creation mandate and the traditional goods of marriage. On this score one would have to engage with the work of Robert Song and Eugene Rogers, but that’s not where Favale goes. Instead, like Trueman, Favale focuses on an apparent conflict that has arisen in modernity between the given body and the expressive self. 

Highlighting the perennial “conflict of body and spirit” (49), Favale says that “Enlightenment progressivism” brought about a shift in focus from outside-in “control over our passions and desires” to inside-out “control over biology, over nature itself” (90-91). To the degree that this is true it is a problem, not only for “progressivism” but for the whole modern West. We see this in colonialism, racism, and the marginalizing of disability. On this we are more or less agreed. 

Not every aspect of the modern turn is universally bad, however. We might debate the net benefits of some technologies, but are readers of Favale’s book prepared to part with the medical advances of the twentieth century? Surely it depends what we’re talking about. Favale names contraception as a symptom of the supposedly feminist demand for control over nature, which may find broad agreement among Roman Catholics, but I wonder if evangelicals realize what they are agreeing to when they nod along with this. Are they prepared to outlaw contraception and fertility treatment along with transgender identities? 

Favale sees the transgender phenomenon as an act of collective and individual concupiscence, which she describes as “an inner conflict between body and spirit” wherein the untethered spirit steps out of line and overrules the givens of the body (49). It is interesting to see concupiscence extrapolated as a problem of self-misidentification, but it is worth recalling Augustine’s more specific use of this term. For Augustine it names the problem of desire that is misdirected toward possessive grasping and self-serving lust. For Favale, this is the temptation of gender dysphoria as well, but it is not clear to me why the solution has to be a doubling down on cisgender heterosexuality. Why not continue to direct sexual desire toward the telos of covenantal love? If the heart as a “battlefield between love and concupiscence” (49), as the oft-quoted John Paul II puts it, why not offer marriage (rather than cisgender heterosexuality) as the provision through which one learns to overcome selfish lust by giving oneself to another? 

Even if we grant Favale and Trueman’s point that LGBTQ+ identities are a case of the spirit overruling the body, is it the case that privileging the spirit is self-evidently a drift away from the Christian tradition? This suggestion seems problematic, if not bizarre, since it was precisely the misdirection of bodily impulses that Augustine sought to resist by orienting his soul to God. 

It is odd to see someone in the Christian tradition so plainly claim that is a “lie” to “force my body to reveal my true self” (199) -- what with passages like Romans 7 and 1 Corinthians 9:27 and the long tradition of utilizing spiritual disciplines to conform the body to the will of God. One could easily cut and paste Bible verses and ancient theologians to argue for the opposite priority of the soul over the body as an essential of Christian life. 

In any event, I think Favale joins Trueman in missing the deeper point here. The modern issue is that men historically took control of women, not only in the material conditions of patriarchy but also in the conceptual way that patriarchy channelled gender norms and identity. Control over nature was not invented by progressives or feminists. Control of some parts of nature by others is actually a big part of what feminists have sought to correct, and in the wake of that correction the prior gender categories are up for careful reconsideration. 

Rendering patriarchy as an essential of Christianity 

To her credit, toward the close of the book Favale returns to a more consistent theological rationale for privileging procreative capacities in the maintenance of gender identities. The theological reason for retaining boxes of man and woman is because the biology of reproduction serves as a sacramental sign of the “relationship of God and humankind” (236): 

The man has the capacity to transmit life outside of himself, while the woman has the capacity to gestate new life within. If we take these biological realities as a mirror for God and humankind, the male sex is analogous to God because God endows life from himself but stands apart from it; he transcends. The female sex is representative of humankind because its power lies in receptivity; the human being is created to receive the love of God, be inwardly transformed, and let that love bear fruit (237). 

These notions have certainly been prevalent in Christian theology. They formed the social imagination of first century Christians, they were transcribed into Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and they’ve been upheld by modern Protestant theologians like Karl Barth. Favale calls this the “Genesis paradigm” (235) and does not delve into theological debate about these claims, but could have pointed to Ephesians 5, where the patriarchal arrangement of husband and wife is held up as a mysterion (the Latin Vulgate said sacramentum) of the relationship of Christ and the Church. 

It is certainly true that Ephesians 5 uses this patriarchal asymmetry of men and women as a metaphor for the Christ/church relationship, but the way it unpacks this is not with reference to the sex act but the political relationship. In a culture where men held authority and primary agency, a husband provided a fit symbol for the Christ who sacrificially gives himself in love and a wife provided a fit symbol for the Church who receives and reciprocates it. It is nonetheless a matter of debate whether we need to retain patriarchy in order to understand and appropriate this, especially since the text’s own exhortation is toward mutual submission (v. 21). 

The thing is, even if we agreed that heterosexual procreation and patriarchy need to be retained in order to uphold the mysterious symbolism of Ephesians 5, why would this require the total exclusion of same-sex marriages or transgender identities? No one is arguing that all human beings must become transgender, or that all marriages need to be same-sex, or that ancient patriarchy needs to be erased from the historical record. Historical knowledge of patriarchal cultures could still carry the Ephesians metaphor, and the persistence of heterosexual marriages in general could still partially fund the metaphor Favale provides. 

It is worth noting that Favale’s Roman Catholicism puts her on the side of a complementarian interpretation rather than an egalitarian one, which presents a serious problem for evangelical churches who have opted or allowed for egalitarianism but aim to take this book on board. There are more problems than this, of course – especially since Favale’s sacramental principle owes more to a natural law argument for patriarchy than to biblical or theological material. Evangelicals looking to enforce this gender paradigm had better find more consistent grounds. 

When Favale depicts feminism as a “continual grasping for power over others” that over-reacts to the male domination of history (52), it is a selective and unfair caricature that ignores the legacy of Christian feminism and its emphasis on mutuality. The caricaturing is on full display when Favale takes Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that “work alone can guarantee [woman’s] concrete freedom” and associates it with the Nazi slogan Arbeit macht frei rather than hearing it as a reassertion of the woman’s part in the creation mandate of Genesis 1 (66). 

Favale’s characterization of Christian feminism as “secular feminism with a light Jesus glaze on top” (based on an anecdote from one of her classes) is insulting to both Christian feminism and to the reader (55). The irony is thick when Favale typifies Christian feminists as having forgotten to mention Christ (54), when it is her book that shifts its weight from Christ to natural law. 

To be fair, it must be pointed out that Favale is not pining for a return to Wood’s "American Gothic". Though she argues for traditional “boxes” of gender and sexuality, these are not meant to be constraining but liberating. In fact, Favale thinks of male and female, man and woman, as categories within which wider variabilities of gender can wonderfully play out (216). There is sensitivity to diversity in this book, and it made me wonder if there might yet be some use in finding a better metaphor between infinite spectrum and discrete boxes. 

Conclusion  

The Genesis of Gender is better than Strange New World, in part because its theological premises find a relatively comfortable home in Favale’s Roman Catholicism. But I would not recommend it to evangelicals. There are too many gaps to fill and corrections to hear. That said, I want to close by returning to a thread in Favale's book which I found compelling. 

Abigail Favale eloquently describes sin as the fracturing of the gifts of creation and says this fracturing is what turns our differences into oppositions (51). What appears to be needed, then, is a greater appreciation for communion in diversity, unity in interdependence, and the flourishing of the church’s witness as a gift-sharing community. 

In part 1 I quoted a beautiful passage from The Genesis of Gender about the importance of receiving the body as a gift, and about learning to live a life of love. Allow me to quote it again: 

There is much in life we can’t control, such as when we are born or where… We don’t choose our unique amalgam of qualities and traits, those threads that form the tapestry of personality… Yet there is one thing we can freely choose – free only because the gentle fingers of God have loosed what binds and blinds us. We can choose to receive all these things as gift. We can choose to say Yes to a Love that is stronger than death (239). 

Even though Favale does not approve of transgender identity she does well to recommend that readers take a loving posture rather than a fearful one, and to personally relate to others in the “way of accompaniment rather than rejection” (212). This is undermined by large parts of the book, including its refusal of preferred pronouns, but there’s hope in this conclusion yet. I won’t pretend to know where this conversation ends, but I hope we will receive this cultural moment as an opportunity to truly accompany one another in truth-seeking, to listen and learn and love. 

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One last comment for my church context, since these books have been added to our denomination's reading list for ordination under the heading of "biblical anthropology": For a more fulsome intro to theological anthropology an ordinand would be wise to read the recent paper commissioned from our theological committee. As for an intro to the topics of gender and sexuality, it would be wise to read Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views and Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church. Then we could really talk about this.