Gender Is a Mystery
On Bluesky, Talia Bhatt asked a question that I’ve been thinking about for a while.
To cis folks who consider themselves sympathetic to the cause of trans liberation: If you were asked "What makes a trans woman a woman?", or some less-respectful variant of that by a transphobe, would you be able to answer? Repeating a shibboleth with no substantiation isn't working.
Here’s what I wrote:
OK. I stayed up late to answer this in my own way, wobbly cis that I am. My apologies to my non-Christian friends and to my Catholic friends, who may cringe at this answer. Here I stand and all that crap, but open to criticism and correction. See if you can spot my cribbing from Butler 😊 (1/8)
thinking as a Catholic, my first response is to say that gender is a mystery. While mystery indicates something that I don't understand fully, it also means that mystery is the visible sign of an invisible reality. Human persons experienced themselves as more or less gendered. (2/8)
This experience of gender starts in the various sexual differentiation of animals, but extends into human society and has been expressed in various and contradictory ways throughout history. (3/8)
On the one hand you have the observable sexual traits and social expectations on an individual, while on the other hand you have the free response of the person. A person knows if they experience themselves as a man, a woman, or outside of these binaries. (4/8)
Indeed social expectations mean most if not all men and women fall short of the social ideal, which they uneasily accept or augment with clothing, status symbols, and medical care. People know how they fit within the social order of the world, or if indeed they fall outside that social order. (5/8)
When Genesis says that men and women were created by God, it means that gender is a central experience of the human person. While I do not fully understand the mystery of gender, I would suggest that any account of gender must include all the factors: … (6/8)
… not only physical characteristics but also a person's lived experience, their own awareness of their personhood, and sense of place in the world. (7/8)
A trans woman is a woman because her experience of herself in the world and how she fits in it is given to her just as surely as her observable traits. I hope to have avoided both biological essentialism (materialism) and spiritual essentialism (fideism) (8/8)
As you can see, I answered this using the humanistic apologetics similar to that common in Catholicism since the time of John Paul II. I didn’t include anything from scripture or tradition, but started from the person. I make no claim to be teaching anything, but simply grappling with reality and the world that I have been given. I am also glancingly familiar with things popes and bishops have said, as well as things that Catholic writers and bloggers have said (although for the most part, the critical ones mainly repeat things written by nonbelievers and make little attempt at creative or critical thought).
As always, I keep comments open here briefly in case someone who follows me has something to offer. If you have a thoughtful critical or supportive take, you are welcome to add it to my thread on Bluesky, but I have absolutely no tolerance for sloganeering or angry shouting, and the block button is pretty handy.
This thread is an unedited hot take at a certain point in time, which does not answer every issue and which yet expresses an illustrative gesture: it has a certain starting point and a trajectory.