The Genesis of Gender

It is a sad paradox that a movement centered on the rights of women has led us to this curious juncture where the very definition of “woman” is under fierce dispute. How this happened is a strange story, rich in dramatic irony, and ultimately ruinous. The gender paradigm is feminism’s offspring, and it has proven, as we will see, to be an Oedipal o

I frantically scribbled notes in a small green notebook, trying to track with the steady flow of ten-dollar words echoing from the podium. I remember thinking to myself as I transcribed: I have no idea what she is talking about. This should have given me pause, but it didn’t. I just dutifully collected her words, assuming their sagacity was out of

For Butler, that statement is a foundational premise. Nothing is natural.

I was going a step farther, confusing “understandability” with “knowability”. God is beyond our understanding, but he is nonetheless knowable, because he is able to make himself known. As a postmodernist, I focused all my attention on the inability of human language and understanding to reach out and fully grasp a divine being. I had lost sight of

When de Beauvoir writes that one is not born but becomes a woman, she is driving a wedge between “woman” and “female”, arguing that “woman” is a social and cultural fiction that is layered onto the biological reality of femaleness. She writes this in the 1940s, prefiguring the postmodern turn. It didn’t take long for a movement centered on the idea

“I feel like I’ve been giving my students poison to drink”, I said. For so many years, I’d been careless, careless with their minds and, most disturbingly, their souls.

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.

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

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 ar