The Genesis of Gender
As a Christian, I believe that the proper response to any human person is always love and respect, but this does not exempt our culture’s idea of human personhood from scrutiny. What is needed at this juncture is a hard look at, to borrow Chesterton’s phrase, “the idea of the idea” of gender in our time.
Abigail Favale • The Genesis of Gender
The task for women is to create a distinctively feminine understanding of God, one that can facilitate our “becoming” as women. Irigaray doesn’t think that women need to be free from religion; rather, they need to belong to a religion of their own making.
Abigail Favale • The Genesis of Gender
The postmodern Eve.
Perhaps most importantly, this intrinsic sexed identity is not merely about external appearance but also intimately connected to procreative function, one’s generative potential as a male or female.
Abigail Favale • The Genesis of Gender
Like Joseph, with his dream-coat of many colors, whoever sports the greatest array of marginalized memberships is awarded social dominance over peers.
Abigail Favale • The Genesis of Gender
Discussions of “human nature” are implicitly essentialist, because they are concerned with defining a shared, underlying essence common to all human beings.
Abigail Favale • The Genesis of Gender
According to Berry, the underlying malady of our culture is the inclination toward fragmentation. We disrupt the unity of creation by splitting spirit from body, culture from nature, sexuality from fertility. “It is not possible to devalue the body and value the soul”, he writes, and I want to adapt that statement, swapping “soul” for “self”.10 It
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What would it sound like for a therapist to affirm my perception of reality? ... The affirming doctors and therapists do not explore other causes or potential solutions but send the patient straight down the medical transition track.
Abigail Favale • The Genesis of Gender
As she rolled through the list, it sounded like insanity. Like something I imagine Hitler, or his ilk, saying to someone to torture them, not a caring, helpful doctor.
Students tend to latch onto her idea of “gender performativity”, because there is a sense in which it is true. Most people have had the experience of playing up their masculinity or femininity in order to conform to sex stereotypes. There is certainly a basic arbitrariness to some of the visible signals of sexual difference in terms of hairstyles
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I was actually thinking this argument. There is some truth that our society does stereotype gender in behaviors. Pink is only for girls kind of thing.
Human bodies are teleologically organized according to our distinct role in reproducing the species. The structure of our bodies is arranged to produce either large sex cells or small sex cells. These sex cells are called gametes. Large gametes are ova, and small gametes are sperm. A physiology arranged to produce ova is female, and a physiology
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