These are not terms culled from random blogs and discussion forums. These are all taken, verbatim, from official websites of American and British universities. While it might be tempting to eye-roll and hand-wave away what those “crazy college kids” are doing, I would make this reply: official websites are run by administrators, not students, and

We must follow a path of contemplation that sees the various dimensions of personhood in order to receive the miracle of each person. This is a path that moves toward integration, from disorder to wholeness. The postmodern approach to sex and gender runs in the opposite direction, into fragmentation, a piecemeal self, where body and psyche and

Somehow, Hildegard managed to balance equal dignity with meaningful difference, in a way I’d not yet encountered. I wish I’d followed that thread; perhaps it would have pulled me into the Christian cosmos earlier. Instead, I let it go and lost myself in the labyrinth of postmodern feminism for the next ten years.

Sacred Scripture, taken as a whole, highlights three states of identity and relation between the sexes. There is the original order, described in the first two chapters of Genesis. In this order, sexual difference is understood and experienced as gift, as a source of fruitfulness and love. There is a dynamic balance between sameness and difference,

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

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

Discussions of “human nature” are implicitly essentialist, because they are concerned with defining a shared, underlying essence common to all human beings.

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

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.