Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me

trying to ask better questions about gender identity

Creatures and creatxres, welcome! There are few enough queer Catholics who speak publicly about trying to be obedient to the magisterium that all of us basically get all the questions, even the ones we are ill-equipped to answer. So in this newsletter I’ll set out sort of broad question groupings about gender identity, where I would like readers’ recommendations, especially readers with personal experience. Sometimes the way we ask questions can shape the kind of answers we get, so a) feel free to challenge or suggest alternative question “shapes,” but also b) I’m hoping some of these questions help us go to new and better places. If I’m making too many creepy outsider assumptions, I hope one of you all will say so….

And I know a fair number of my readers disagree with some of the stuff I’ve said about these things here, and I hope you all will read to the end. The final item is both the most urgent, and the one where I am, by far, the most confident in my own position.

But I’ll start with theological or ontological questions—especially the ones I haven’t already heard discussed in depth. What are possible orthodox Catholic ways of understanding the sexed body, and how do these ways of understanding illuminate or fail to illuminate the experiences we group together as “gender incongruence” or “gender dysphoria”?

I am not sure Catholics can accept anything that would force a division between body and soul, as if there is a “real person” trapped in your body, or as if a soul could somehow get dumped into the “wrong body” by mistake. But there are a whole lot of ways of understanding gender incongruence without disregarding, downplaying, or, idk, stigmatizing the body. I tried to gesture at one possibility here, but who cares, what is more important is that trans perspectives that honor the body already exist in ordinary people’s narratives and in artists’ work—and I’d love to encounter more of them. Jay Prosser’s Second Skins is a relatively early study of the many ways trans autobiographical narratives can treat the body, and I got a lot from that book but would appreciate more recent and/or more Christian work. Things I haven’t seen, and would love, include:

# an account of sex difference that treats manhood and womanhood as realities without collapsing into Procrustean “if you have this physical structure it must mean X no matter what else is going on” mechanics on the one hand, or gender stereotypes on the other. Catholics often fall into the latter trap in, like, “feminine genius” discourse; Chris Roberts’s Creation and Covenant offers some interesting and imho accurate criticism of St. JPII’s reliance on gender stereotypes in Mulieris dignitatem, as vs. the more mysterious and existential account of sex difference in the Theology of the Body addresses. What if our sexed bodies are icons rather than instruments? Does that mean anything? I don’t know, but maybe it should!

# reflections on where people experience their bodies or bodily sex as witness, as kenosis, as silence, as… other ways to experience God that I don’t even think to ask about.

# reflections on art and the lives of the saints. Where do you see some of your own experience of gender and/or sex difference? Whose intercession is precious to you here?

Second, there are questions of diagnosis/discernment and treatment/vocation. How do we know what to do, in our bodies? My general sense is that we need medical and psychological studies, and the best judgments of seasoned professionals, but we also need to gather narratives. This is important work for its own sake, but also because we may discern patterns of experience, approaches that tend to go better or worse for people.

I’d like to (and I’m trying to) hear people’s stories, across a really wide range of experience: trans people who sought medical, inc. surgical, transition, with all the widely-varied reasons people make that choice, and trans people who have decided that medical transition isn’t the best path for them; people who experience gender dysphoria but do not have a deep desire to be any other sex either, and people who are trans but don’t experience dysphoria; people who have made decisions for and against transition for social, medical, and religious reasons. People who have detransitioned, temporarily or permanently, because they couldn’t afford treatment; because they wanted biological children; because they no longer believe that they personally were ever trans; because they no longer believe that anybody is trans.

It would be tense and difficult to get people from all these backgrounds in a room together, but all of them have had to do some hard thinking and painful discernment, and the judgments that they’ve come to as a result of that discernment deserve my respect. Right now it seems like most cisgendered Catholics are either just not hearing these voices at all, or listening only to the voices that reinforce their preexisting beliefs and affiliations. This seems disrespectful and even dehumanizing.

Are there good anthologies or films or what have you, that put many stories in conversation with one another—or that you, my readers with experience in the gender identity mines, have found personally helpful in reflecting on the decisions you’ve made, the advice you’ve received over the years, and the ways your perspective on those decisions and that advice has shifted? What has helped you articulate the things you wish you’d known ten years ago, or twenty years ago? What has helped you negotiate doubt and ambivalence, or tell the difference between epistemological humility and culturally-induced self-hatred?

Third, there are canon-law questions. This is hilariously above my pay grade, but we do have sex-linked sacraments (priesthood and marriage) and I expect there are at least some precedents to scrutinize here, which people who aren’t me can either build on or maybe correct. I also have questions of obedience, like, I literally don’t know what it means for transgender Americans who might want to be obedient Catholics that a subcommittee of the USCCB has issued a doctrinal note barring all forms of medical transition.

And fourth, there are political and moral questions. Per a newly-signed law, in Florida someone entering a public bathroom that doesn’t match their gametes can be charged with trespassing if they refuse to leave. So people will be arrested, and I think you know something about what that experience will be like for them. They will be jailed and I think you know something about what kinds of violence they will be vulnerable to. This law is based on gametes and not on e.g. driver’s license. If somebody thinks your license is fake or you had it legally changed, I don’t think we know how you’re examined for sex fraud. This would still be a frightening law if it were only going to affect trans people, but for the record, a friend of mine was harassed for being in “the wrong bathroom” when she is a cis lesbian who was using the ladies’.

Target has removed some Pride-themed gear because people were knocking over the displays and “angrily approach[ing] workers” and customers. In Montana a trans lawmaker was silenced for using, let me just say, incredibly normal rhetoric. You can think she is wrong about the law and still protest this use of the idea of “civil discourse” to stigmatize and punish. The Archdiocese of Denver requires teachers in its school system to inform parents if their child “begin[s] to assert an identity at odds with their biological sex,” regardless of the child’s reasons for telling a friend or a trusted teacher before their parents. This is putting the children of the Church at risk of violence, rejection, and homelessness; and it’s also just a betrayal of trust, since even kids from very accepting homes often prefer to “practice” coming out with a friend or trusted adult before they come out at home, and regardless of what you think about how they’re understanding their experience, if you out them to their parents they will listen to you and your Jesus less not more.

Right now, trans people are being used as political scapegoats and targets; they’re being spoken about and legislated against in ways which are obviously intended not to protect but to degrade. So I have to ask how I can protect people. Friends have had really good experiences with the suicide-prevention Trevor Project, and I’ve donated to them, but I want to know what more I can do.

And I guess I’m also saying that if you disagree with my judgments about the theological stuff, okay, but draw a line in the sand. What kind of treatment of trans people is unacceptable to you? I guarantee kids on the playground, legislators, and police are already crossing it. How are you acting to defend actual real trans people from violence and cruelty?

How can we create the conditions under which all our questions will receive loving answers?

When Adam delft and Eve span, who was then under a Creative Commons license? Both of them! Durer print via Wikimedia Commons.