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The Surprising Evidence that Gender Matters, and What to Do About It

The Surprising Evidence that Gender Matters, and What to Do About It

Last updated on: May 26, 2016 at 12:30 pm by Jennifer Fitz

The Surprising Evidence that Gender Matters, and What to Do About It 2016-05-26T12:30:31-05:00 Jennifer Fitz

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When future generations reflect on the fall of the American republic, they’ll no doubt get a chuckle over our obsession with having every aspect of our lives carefully legislated, to the point that our proto-emperors have now taken it upon themselves to dictate where and how their millions of citizens might relieve themselves.

Keep in mind we already have laws concerning toilet problems. Whether you are worried about hygiene, or sound plumbing, or commodes-per-occupant, or sewage treatment, or voyeurism, or sexual assault: We have laws for that. We are not living in the Wild West of waste elimination. And thus, curiously, the recent spate of gender-themed bathroom legislation and regulation reveals to us not only that American law is working badly, but that Natural Law is still working quite well.

When we say “Natural Law” in this context, we don’t mean the “laws of nature.” Your need to pee after drinking that beer is a law of nature, but it isn’t “Natural Law.” We’re speaking rather of the idea that certain truths about the world are so plainly obvious to us humans that we understand them even without thinking about it much. It’s as if these ideas are just imprinted on our very selves.

Natural Law is the thing that causes virtually everyone, everywhere, to abhor stealing — even though there are cultural variations in what counts as “stealing.” Likewise, humans everywhere abhor unjust violence but recognize a need for self-defense, even when we’re quibbling over what constitutes an injustice. We have different cultural norms about the rights and obligations of parents towards their children, and yet we all agree there’s some kind of sacred bond between parent and child. If all the humans around the world universally get their pants in a bunch about some aspect of human life, that’s Natural Law rearing her head.

And thus we have this odd situation: In the very fervor with which transgender activists are trying to explain that gender isn’t really a thing, we see that it is very much a thing.

What I Am vs. Who I Am

Let’s look at a few more terms. When we talk about a being’s “nature” we are answering the question of “What is it?” Is it a dog? A tree? God? An angel? A human? We also have a second question of identity that comes after the question what, that might be posed as “Which one is it?” or with respect to persons, “Who is it?”

When we recently celebrated Trinity Sunday, we celebrated the mystery of the answer to two questions about God:

What is it? One God, eternal, perfect, all-powerful, all-loving, etc. etc. etc.

Who is it? Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Other beings are a bit less mysterious.

What is it? An angel. Who is it? Gabriel. (Or Michael, or Raphael, etc.)

What is it? A cat. Who is it? Mr. Purrkins. (Or Tin-Tin or Pookie or Sunflower or . . . too many cats have lived in my home.)

Now watch what happens when we ask this question about the humans.

What Kind of Person Am I?

We humans have a powerful urge to identify ourselves. To know and be known, to love and be loved, to serve and be served . . . that’s humanity right there. Your dog doesn’t lay awake nights asking questions about who he really is and what his purpose is. (He may lay awake nights doing other things that cause you to ask why you thought getting a dog was a good idea — that’s the nature of dogs.)

We see this quest for self-identification in literary form in children’s stories about personified animals trying to figure out where they fit into the world. Am I duckling or a gosling?

This is where transgender activists have tipped the hand of natural law: It turns out that whether I am male or female is not part of who. It’s the answer to what.

The Evidence for What

This is not intuitive to me. If you told me that our nature — that what we are — is “human,” and that male or female were merely part of our identity as who we are, as individuals within this vast collection of the category “human,” I’d probably buy that theory, at least on first glance. After all, I can see that so many of the constructs around our cultural norms for boyishness or girlishness are just constructs.

The mounting evidence, though, is that gender isn’t merely an aspect of one’s personality. We see that evidence in the desperation of transgender activists to be recognized as inherently male or female.

It isn’t enough to be just a human.

Everyone agrees that this or that person begging for gender-recognition or gender-change surgery is a human. The bathroom thing, for a transgender activist, isn’t about bathrooms. It’s about validation. Am I duckling or a gosling?

–> The people who use the men’s and women’s rooms are vastly varied. In either place you’ll see people who are effeminate or manly, stylish or dowdy, delicate or massive, elegant or outdoorsy, prim or brusque. In either place you’ll hear tenors and sopranos both. Every profession, every hobby, every state of life gets represented in both places.

Who am I? I’m a nurturer who stays home fulltime rearing my children, and who likes to garden, and bake, and craft, and revel in beauty. That answer to who can visit either restroom.

No one steps into the bathroom seeking to validate their who identity, because who is far too malleable and personal and unique. Who is the thing that makes us different from everyone else in our category. Who is the unrepeatable, the inimitable, the distinctive.

How do you tell Mr. Purrkins from every other cat? Cat is his what, but being Mr. Purrkins is the reason my daughter would accept no substitutes if I told her we were just going to replace Mr. Purrkins with some other cat.

If all you are searching for is a safe place to relieve yourself, the law already provided for that. American law (the republic isn’t dead yet) likewise protects who — our uniqueness and our personal expression — both in our constitutional right to free speech, and our right not be discriminated against by class-categories.

The passionate quest to be admitted to a particular class — to be defined by being lumped together with a particular half of humanity — is the frank evidence that gender is not about who we are but about what we are.

The evidence is that nobody wants to settle for merely “human” in answer to the question, “What am I?” We want to be recognized as either “human male” or “human female.” We feel ourselves shortchanged if we don’t get the complete categorization.

It is as if we know deep within ourselves that being either male or female is fundamental to what it means to be human.

The Difficult “What” Part One: Ambiguous Physical Gender

There is evidence that gender is inherent to what we are as humans in the difficulty experienced by the minority of persons in whom, for various reasons, determining physical gender isn’t obvious.

Were gender merely some fluid construct of personal identity, there would not, in our enlightened times when gender roles are by no means rigidly prescribed by society, be very much angst over such an ailment. You’d go with the flow. Just another normal but unusual variation, like being ambidextrous, or having two different-colored eyes.

In those situations where the child’s apparent gender at birth is disrupted at puberty by the characteristics of the opposite sex, it would be like discovering at your driver’s test that you need glasses after all, or reaching high school and realizing you’re getting too tall to ever be an Olympic gymnast. An inconvenience, a disappointment, but we adjust and move on to better things.

This is not the experience. Our who as human beings is constantly growing and changing; our what is meant to be enduring, lifelong. It is normal to wrestle through life with the question of who we are. It is disconcerting in the extreme to have to wrestle with what we are.

What to do? The Catholic response, which is to say the moral response, period, to those with ambiguous physical gender is to leave the wrestling to those most expert: The individual, with the assistance of parents and personal physicians. If it requires time to fully understand the situation, so be it. If you initially think you’ve got the right answer, but it turns out you were mistaken, rectify and move forward. Difficult situations are difficult, and sometimes require patience and reassessment. So be it. You are no less human in the meantime, or anytime.

The Difficult “What” Part Two: Gender Dysphoria

Gender dysphoria, in contrast, is a different kind of problem. In this case, the person’s physical gender is patently obvious. There is no question of it. There is no need for time or patience or careful evaluations to make a decision on whether the person is male or female.

What is the case for resting with the physical facts? Our human impulse to consider male and female as an inherent part of what we are, derives, like all natural law, from the supernatural. As I wrote the other day for #TOBTalk:

The trouble with Christians is that we’re both body and soul. The tendency is to treat Christianity as being only about your soul, as if it were the “real” prize and your body were just the packing peanuts. Don’t ingest, don’t expose to open flame . . . just kind of keep the packaging from making a mess and you’re good.

Our bodies aren’t packaging. Our bodies are an integral part of us, and how we live in them is what our Christianity is. When we say humans are made in the image of God, male and female, the human body is part of that divine image. We literally can know something about God by looking at our bodies. Our bodies and souls, together, provide a snapshot of God. That’s what it means to be an image of something. My photo isn’t me, and it doesn’t tell you everything there is to know about me, but it is an image of me. It does reveal things about me you wouldn’t know if you didn’t have the photo.

Humans are body and soul, and in theory we could decide that the state of our soul carries sway over the state of our bodies where gender is concerned. Is my maleness or femaleness just the coincidental alignment of my body with my soul?

And yet we know that it is possible, in other cases, for our internal feelings to be wrong about our bodies. I feel like eating one more of that delicious appetizer, and yet the physical evidence is that I’m full — I just had to loosen my belt, my stomach is so distended.

Conversely: I feel like my body is grossly overweight, it disgusts me to put one more bite into my mouth, but objectively I have to agree I do have the same proportions as concentration-camp survivors.

We can experience physical sensations that don’t reflect the reality of our bodies: I feel pain in this hand that was amputated six months ago. The pain isn’t imaginary. It’s real pain. But the perception of the hand still being present is false. The physical reality is that you feel real pain that seems to be coming from the hand, but by definition must be coming from something else, because the hand isn’t there.

There are thus times when our inner life, be it physical or psychological or spiritual, is mistaken. It is our bodies that bear witness to the truth.

Who to the Rescue

In the struggle between inner and outer life, who questions can be damning or saving. Disorders of mind and body abound. What will we make of them?

Take the example of a who problem like alcoholism:

I’m an alcoholic. For some reason, whether it’s childhood trauma, or a physical disposition, or who-knows-why, I have this powerful compulsion to drink so much I put myself and others in danger . . .

We persons with free will, capable of thinking and acting and choosing, can take the reality of that disorder — even if it’s an overwhelming, uncontrolled disorder — and let it define us either for evil . . .

. . . therefore I’m useless and no good. I’m a blight on society, my life will always be a disaster, and it’s no surprise I can’t keep a relationship together because I’m frankly unlovable.

. . . or, by giving a different answer, for good:

. . . so that’s the thing I have to fight with every day. Sometimes I don’t win that fight, sometimes I do. It takes everything I have in me just to be as sober as I manage. But I’m worth fighting for, and I can sense that this struggle is making me a better person, even though a lot of people can’t see that.

This is the human condition. We have disordered bodies that won’t carry out the will of rightly-ordered souls. I meant to finish that rosary, I fell asleep instead. I meant to finish mowing the lawn, I had a heart attack instead. We have disordered minds, we have disordered souls.

Discernment is the art of parsing it all out. When is my body right? When is my body wrong? Do I have a healthy soul, oriented towards growing in the love of God, that happens to be limited by a sick body or mind? Or am I in fact just spiritually lazy?

Am I exhausted and overwhelmed because I need more sleep? More exercise? More prayer? Thyroid medicine? A job that pays the bills? My spouse to quit beating me? A miraculous healing from this brain disorder that causes uncontrollable depression?

Gender dysphoria is no less real a problem than any other human affliction. It can be powerfully painful because it strikes at the question of what we are.

But what we are is immutable. We are the beloved children of God, destined for eternal life, made in His image.

Suffering is never relieved by trying to change what we are — which would be to unmake ourselves. It would be self-destruction. Suffering is overcome by growing in who we are.

Artwork: SS. Apollonia, Agatha and Lucy, [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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