Recovering the Discarded Image of Man and Woman
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Books reviewed:
Favale, Abigail. The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2022. 248 pp., paperback; $17.95.
Grabowski, John. Unraveling Gender: The Battle Over Sexual Difference. Charlotte: TAN Books, 2022. 184 pp., hardcover; $24.95.
Few topics inspire more controversy today than human sexuality and gender identity. There is no shortage of Thomistic reflections on the nature of sexual difference in human persons. Typically, Thomists must navigate between the manifest image of human sexual difference and Aquinas’s assumption of medieval Aristotelian biology (e.g., Nolan or Johnston), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the post-scientific image of gender adopted in indefinitely diverse ways by our contemporaries. An array of ethical and moral theological literature on marriage, the conjugal act, and the family is ready to hand. Some are expository, others polemical, and others engage modern authors, such as Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body and related schools of thought (e.g., Petri’s Aquinas and the Theology of the Body or Waldstein’s Glory of the Logos in the Flesh; Sr. Prudence Allen’s trilogy adopts a Thomistic personalist lens; see also De Solenni). Others approach the topic in debates over philosophically informed biology (e.g., Finley, Newton) while attending to ethical consequences (e.g., Feser, Gondreau). Extant Thomistic resources are not as numerous but still to be found on issues about gender dysphoria within psychology and morals or debates about transgenderism in light of gender ideology (see Schumacher; Austriaco; Allen; Thibault; see also the recent volume of John Finley (ed.), Sexual Identity: The Harmony of Philosophy, Science, and Revelation).
Two recent books also aim to provide more light than heat to contemporary gender debates: John Grabowski’s Unraveling Gender and Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender. Both books have been discussed elsewhere by the authors (e.g., see Favale here and here; Grabowski here and here). Why review these books on a website devoted to Thomistic thought? Indeed, direct reference to the thought of the Angelic Doctor is only occasional in these books, written to reach broader audiences than your typical Thomistic tome. Nevertheless, students of St. Thomas ought to learn from these books so as to bring the principles of Aquinas to more concretely and determinately understand, interpret, and address the crisis of human identity in our time.
Lighting a Lamp
John Grabowski’s Unraveling Gender: The Battle Over Sexual Difference is a helpful entry in the burgeoning literature responding to contemporary theories of sexuality and gender. These theories, along with their failures and successes, are cogently presented in this slim volume, aimed primarily at a generally educated Christian readership. While those already familiar with these debates will not learn anything essentially new, Prof. Grabowski’s work will provide a broader, sufficiently receptive, and well disposed audience with key insights and pointers to resources for deeper study of the topic. In seeking to address “the further unraveling of sexual difference in law and culture,” he “provides ways to think about the rich reality of sexual difference from Scripture and Tradition.”
However, this book’s main focus centers on what the Church has come to call “gender ideology.” While gender ideology has multiple origins, some from long ago, its impact today has accelerated because of large cultural shifts. Ultimately, gender ideology is best understood as a modern expression of Gnosticism, the ancient heresy that opposes Christian conceptions of creation, the Incarnation, the body, and sexual difference. (pp. 8–9)
As Grabowski notes, “Gender ideology is not, as some have suggested, ‘nonsense’ that has ‘no clear referent.’ It is very real and poses a formidable threat to the Faith and to human flourishing” (p. 13). This assessment informs the book’s motif, expressed in its subtitle. The “battle” is with an ideology, its ideas, and “the spiritual roots of these ideas” (p. 16), not with the people who promote them.
Grabowski frames his book by following the diagnosis of the problem of gender ideology provided by Pope Benedict XVI. The setting is one of sober concern, not alarmism. After a review of warnings issued and reading the cultural signs of the times (chs. 1–2), an examination of gender ideology’s sources in the deeper historical and philosophical past (ch. 3), as well as in various historical movements since the 19th century (ch. 4), Grabowski then argues that the ultimate root of gender ideology lies in the heresy of gnosticism (ch. 5), before concluding with the truth proposed to all by the Catholic Church (chs. 6–7).
Of particular interest are the book’s third and fourth chapters. In the third chapter, Grabowski highlights the distinction between first and second-wave feminism by noting the existentialist presuppositions characteristic of the latter, substantiating his claims with key selections from Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and Shulamith Firestone, among others. The process ontology and Marxism underpinning the second-wave are also noted and explained. The discussion of Firestone’s aims of “replacing pregnancy with gestating children in artificial wombs” (p. 75) is particularly striking and continues to be an aim of some activists.
The fourth chapter reviews how the conceptual bases of gender ideology were incarnated in society through three key periods: the industrial revolution, the sexual revolution, and the technological revolution, which “have destabilized our understanding of the human person, sexual difference, and the family” (p. 82). Grabowski argues that these three “are not diverse and unrelated events” (p. 100). Rather,
When it comes to their impact on views of marriage, sex, children, and sexual difference, they form a complex and interlocking whole, undermining and destabilizing a Judeo-Christian vision based on Scripture. This destabilization affected both individual persons and institutions such as the family and the Church. This, in turn, allowed the effects of the various forms of modern thought surveyed in the previous chapter [4]—the bitter and toxic waters of existentialist, post-modern, and Marxist thought—to flow much more widely. With human nature and its Author denied, people increasingly view the body as a blank slate—raw material with which to construct any identity they so desire. Sexual difference in the form of being male or female lost its telos without an anchor in fertility. Since fertility is increasingly seen as a problem rather than a gift and blessing, personal identity is seen as unrelated to the biological realities of being male or female. This is increasingly true not just of persons dealing with the clinical reality of gender dysphoria, but of whole groups within the wider culture who dispute the idea of a sexual binary with procreation as one of its principal aims. (ibid.)
The “digitalization of identity” (ibid.) in the form of online avatars adds to this destabilization of human identity, Grabowski contends. The arguments in these chapters and others are all bookended by scriptural motifs of marriage, family, and how the divine image is essential to human identity. Indeed, it is the focus upon the transcendent givenness of the human person over and above the historical changeability and technological malleability of human individuals that comes across strongly in the book.
However, as already noted, the book requires an audience predisposed towards its principles while lacking only a coherent and irenic overview of how the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition have been attacked by gender ideology. For one not already so prepared, many of Grabowski’s points—as true as they are—will ring hollow or come across as false equivalences. Indeed, many will be put off by Grabowski’s rhetoric of “battle” and “the long defeat” (pp. 168, 169), however well he justifies such language. It seems to me that, even on these pages—for instance, where he appeals to Tolkien’s mythological-theological view of history—Grabowski could have brightened this rhetorical modality and perhaps even broadened its appeal by highlighting Tolkien’s notion of eucatastrophe. Indeed, even as Grabowski concludes his book by arguing that the “battle” against gender ideology requires transcending the Catholic “left-right” divide, he points to a Catholic philosophy and theology of history which, to my mind, requires our full attention when it comes to answering fully the deficient narratives of post-modernity.
Going Back to the Beginning
Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender is a helpful complement to Grabowski’s text in many respects, while also possessing strengths of its own. It is also not professorial in tone. Rather, Favale adopts an eloquent narrative approach. This complements the subject-matter well, since it involves her own intellectual journey and conversion (the latter is the topic of her first book). As she leads the reader through her own story of feminist education, disillusionment with it, and discovery of deeper truths, her realizations become our own.
The book is divided into nine chapters. The first chapter recounts Favale’s education into and then out of feminism as “a totalizing worldview” (p. 30). Against the “gender paradigm” of her initial education, Favale proposes the “paradigm of Catholic Christianity” of her re-education, the theistic, teleological cosmology in Genesis providing the natural place and deep narrative for the human person (see ch. 2). This leads her to a survey of feminist thought, from its first to its “fourth” wave (ch. 3), highlighting many of the themes composed within the modern gender paradigm which were also noted by Grabowski: the existentialism of de Beauvoir and the post-modernism of Butler. For readers who find themselves outside the central range of Grabowski’s audience, and especially for those inclined to agree with soft or quasi-baptized forms of modern feminism, Favale’s opening chapters serve as a personal invitation towards deeper and clearer thought.
Having set the stage, the remainder of the book takes “thematic plunges, adding depth to breadth, with more sustained looks at sex, gender, and embodiment” (p. 83), respectively in Chapters 5–8. The conclusion in Chapter 9 serves as an overall response to the gender paradigm thematically analyzed in the book. However, the central four chapters receive an extensive and insightful preface about technological control at the service of human desires (ch. 4). While substantively concerned with hormonal contraceptives and the range of their deleterious effects, the fourth chapter more broadly connects feminist theory’s focus upon autonomy as an end in itself with the modern, Cartesian project of the mastery and possession of nature:
When freedom-as-choice becomes the open-ended telos of human existence, the body quickly becomes a problem, particularly for women, because our fertile physiology ties us intimately to other bodies and to the rest of creation. In adopting this telos, feminism’s march towards freedom has simultaneously been a flight from embodiment. ... With Sanger, this ideal of autonomy is concretely imposed on the female body, achievable only through technological control. (pp. 110, 111)
Indeed, it is this idea of control in the service of seeking fulfillment that radiates through the subsequent chapters: defending an essentialist view of sexual difference against the nominalism so unthinkingly popular today (ch. 5), exposing the linguistic constructivism behind the incoherent attempts at separating gender from sex (ch. 6), and considering the pain of gender dysphoria and the lies told about proposed surgical treatments which ignore the wholeness sought by transgender individuals (chs. 7–8).
In particular, Favale argues in Chapter 7 that hyper-sexualization of women and girls is in part contributing to the rise of gender dysphoria; the chapter also highlights the deficiencies of surgical interventions and hormonal treatments, as well as the ideological assumptions driving these recommendations when their long-term ramifications remain unknown (see in particular pp. 179–87). In Chapter 8, she argues strongly against “transgender anthropology” and ”its denial of the sacramental principle that the body reveals the person ... The lie—I have to force my body to reveal my true self—supplants the truth: the body I am is always already revealing my personhood” (p. 199). She defends both speaking the truth in love (“When it comes to men and women, we need to use reality-based language” p. 208) and the art of loving accompaniment according to truth: “Accompaniment is a way of journeying with someone deeper into the heart of Christ. ... Even as we speak honestly about the machinations of the gender paradigm, we have to realize that there are real people, real lives, being churned up in its gears. We have to welcome these people into our parishes, into our families, into our communities” (pp. 213, 214).
How to Listen, How to Respond
These books can be read together with profit. Both together or either separately could find a place in a suitably designed course or seminar on these topics. While diverse in their literary and rhetorical styles, both present in clear terms a fully Catholic cosmology and anthropology. Both agree and have substantive argumentative overlap in their diagnosis of gender ideology (Grabowski) or the gender paradigm (Favale). For instance, both note the concrete social role of the conditions enabled by the industrial and sexual revolutions. Both highlight the catalytic effects of the internet and social media when it comes to propagating and sustaining the gender paradigm, whether at the academic or personal level.
Both authors provide succinct recapitulations of the beauty of the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, with a particular focus on the magisterium of St. John Paul II (Grabowski, in ch. 6; Favale, in chs. 2 and 9). Whether it is through argument, analysis, or evocative quotations from Wendell Berry, Flannery O’Connor, or the recent popes, they furnish an effective counter-narrative to the gender paradigm.
Indeed, their work proposes the only effective counter-narrative, the calling of humanity out of the darkness of non-being into a purposeful cosmos for the end of participating in God. Grabowski unfolds this in an extended discussion of the vocations, gifts, and roles of men and women (Unraveling Gender, pp. 153–63). Favale adds moving personal stories of those misled by the gender paradigm. When telling the story of Daisy, a detransitioned young woman and convert, she writes:
The Christian frame that Daisy slowly entered into was not a punitive, legalistic one, a frame of cold tablets etched with condemnation—you are nothing, your desires don’t matter, you are innately depraved. Instead, it was the recognition of a deeper desire. “Maybe there is an innate part of everyone that actually wants to live with God”, she said. ... This was not a negation of self, but a rediscovery; not a repudiation of identity, but an unveiling. (Favale, The Genesis of Gender, p. 224)
Ultimately, both authors highlight the deeply spiritual causes at play: Grabowski argues that gender ideology is a form of gnosticism (pp. 115–20), while Favale, in slightly different terms, argues that the gender paradigm “diabolic” in the literal sense where “the diabolic is ultimately a force of fragmentation, discord. It splits apart and disrupts meaning” (p. 235). Both authors underscore the crucial role of the technocratic paradigm of the kingdom of man, a “kingdom” whose rise and oncoming fall has been told in precise detail and insightful depth by Rémi Brague. To exert total control over human nature in the name of self-referentially defined freedom is to deny the meaningfulness of nature—to put by force the synthetic in place of what ought to be received with gratitude according to nature and grace. Finally, both authors exhort Catholics to a fully evangelical and ecclesiological response.
Catholic thinkers ever appear to be playing at reading and reacting to secular proponents of modern gender theory. In a way this is true, and in a way not, for of its nature received wisdom is not activism. Yet being called to account or being called upon to respond is not a disadvantage, as the Congregation for Catholic Education’s document “Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education” recognizes. Our attitude must be “to listen, to reason, and to propose” where “this threefold method mimics that employed by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae” (M. Brungardt 2022, p. 35).
Indeed, the political, legal, bioethical, pastoral, and especially personal responses in this area must originate from deep anthropological truths, since “the century that is ahead of us is going to struggle with the more fundamental questions of human identity” (Austriaco, Biomedicine and Beatitude, p. 5). Thomists must seek more and more profound engagement on the issues of human identity, sexuality, and being male and female, and seek it with the quintessential evangelical and pedagogical aims of their master. Books like Grabowski and Favale’s will aid in those efforts to make perennial truths more intelligible to contemporary audiences.