Are Monks Men?
The greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate
“67. Alexander the Great either could (Diod Sic xiv.17.2) or could not (Plut, Alex 58.4) swim; in this he was typical of the Greeks.”
—Lawrence Norfolk, In the Shape of a Boar
Creatures, what up. In this edition, are “man” and “woman” traps, or can they be homes?
In St. Perpetua’s fourth dream-vision before her martyrdom, she says, “My clothes were stripped off, and suddenly I was a man.” Brought into the arena, she transforms into a wrestler, defeats her opponent, and receives the palm from her trainer… who tells her, “Peace be with you, my daughter!” The image of victory through manly strength resolves into something a little closer to the woman’s waking reality, where defeat will bring her a victory greater than any the arena could provide.
Late last year, Catharine MacKinnon keynoted a panel discussion at Oxford University on “Exploring Transgender Law and Politics.” The transcript was released last month, and it gained a fair amount of attention because of second-wave icon MacKinnon’s strong defense of trans inclusion in feminist movements. MacKinnon makes clear that she is still grappling with her own understanding of transgender people’s experiences. For me the transcript is striking because MacKinnon reaches conclusions I agree with—political and violent targeting of trans people is evil, and trans people’s self-identification as men or women deserves respect—via a number of claims I reject strongly.
Look, MacKinnon is in some ways a perfect foil for me here, because I extremely don’t want to be sexually harassed, so I am very grateful to her on that count, but her underlying philosophy of womanhood could not be more different from mine. She treats the body as banal; I believe the body is sublime. She’s so certain that gender and sexuality are the result of structural inequality that she flirts, you should pardon the expression, with the idea that people choose to be gay: “[M]any lesbians see being lesbian as a political choice,” which a) no they don’t, that’s like five people, and also b) but would you want your daughter to marry one? I too am sort of a social constructionist but you have to listen to what actual people say, you know. MacKinnon presents choice in general as a lot more binary than it seems to me to be: She argues that prostitution is not chosen, because it’s the result of economic desperation, but gender transition is chosen even if it’s done to relieve unbearable psychological pressure. This again is distorting (imho!) others’ experience to fit your Procrustean theory; it’s covering their faces with your idea.
But the core of my disagreement comes here: “[G]irls and boys are seeking to escape diverse genders for potentially separate reasons.” Throughout MacKinnon’s discussion, she can only imagine trans men as escapees from misogyny. MacKinnon, with an irony that is maybe too much at other people’s expense, calls feminism itself “a more extended form of dysphoria, if you will,” because feminism is dissatisfaction with what it means in our society to be a woman. She quotes a friend saying, “Catharine, to be honest, I found that the best way to keep men away from me was to become one.” This friend is the only trans person MacKinnon quotes, so the many other ways trans men have articulated their experience disappear, including understandings in which being a man is a positive experience or vocation or identity rather than a power move. She views trans women as obviously women in large part because they’re victimized like women. She uhhhh doesn’t try to understand their reasons for transition, which I guess is better than imagining their womanhood as masochism, collaboration, or self-harm. It’s significant that the last word of her speech is “escape.”
One of the panelists, Finn Mackay, gently confronts her position, responding that trans men’s identities are
not reducible to a flight from femininity, as some kind of camouflage or safety net from male violence when queer communities know only too well that we are not immune.
These identities are not an exit. They are not a flight from anything necessarily but a flight to a public identity that has been long felt; they are a flight toward a name by which to be seen and known.
(By the way, Mackay has a very good short profile in The Grauniad which models a willingness to live in ambiguities, in the difficulties of one’s real position, in which the politics of one’s body may feel more like a tense alliance than like peace.)
I think there’s a pretty big difference between someone who doesn’t want to be a woman anymore, and someone who identifies with being a man. The latter person is seeking the complicated home of manhood, not the mere refuge of social power or invisibility or safety. But you can only make that distinction, which imho is really important for the emotional and spiritual well-being of gender-questioning people, if you are able to see both manhood and womanhood as good realities and potential homes. If womanhood is just powerlessness and manhood is just oppressor status, like yeah, of course people would want to escape both of those things for different reasons, but transition-as-escape seems like a promise that will always be broken. It also, and I can’t emphasize this enough!, is an interpretation I’ve seen far more often given by non-transgender people than by people describing their own lives.
Like… I have seen well-intentioned cisgender Catholics defend transition by pointing to Origen’s alleged self-castration, or St. Rose of Lima disfiguring herself (to discourage men or as an act of humility), or, as it happens, Perpetua’s dream of herself as a male wrestler. And I’d say, first, that if your teenage daughter wants to rub pepper on her face to make herself uglier, you should have a pretty intense and firm talk with her; if you want to castrate yourself to become a “eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven,” know that even Origen himself plus basically everybody else says not to do that, come on. But also—all of these people were fleeing some aspect of their gender, sexuality, or embodiment. They weren’t seeking out a different form of gender or embodiment. Perpetua is the only arguable exception, and fwiw I think the most obvious “reading” of her dream is that manhood is an image of strength, just as the athlete’s “trainer” was a conventional image of the Holy Spirit.
When I asked transgender, gender-questioning etc readers to share insights on their own spiritual lives, none of them named Rose or Perpetua as inspirations or companions. (One person cited Origen’s theology, but not his actions.) Instead, two people named the same saint: Marina the Monk. Marina sought out and lived within the monastic vision of manhood, even in the face of misunderstanding and rejection. We may not know how Marina the Monk understood gender or embodiment; Marina left no “Catholic anthropology.” We only know what Marina ran toward—and how that quest was a call to love.
Peace be with you, my creatures.
I couldn’t find an image of St Marina the Monk under a Creative Commons license, so here’s Claude Mellan, “St Bernard Receives a Monk’s Habit.” Via Wikimedia Commons.