The Genesis of Gender

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

A month before I started my master’s program in gender studies, I did something unconventional, at least for someone starting a master’s program in gender studies. I got married. To a man, no less. At the age of twenty-two. This was so perplexing to my feminist comrades that they nicknamed me “the queer wife”; in the world of feminist academia, I w

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

Accompaniment is a way of journeying with someone deeper into the heart of Christ. Contrary to the cliché, conversion is not a one-time zap; the Holy Spirit is not a fairy godmother who makes you insta-ready for the ball. Conversion is a steady pilgrimage, a long trek into the heart of God. There are detours and switchbacks along the way; none of u

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 desi

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.

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.

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.

“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.