Gender Jamboree, Part Two

I heard the squeak of the questing beast,

where it scratched itself in the blank between

the queen’s substance and the queen.

—Charles Williams, ‘The Coming of Palomides’

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Go here for Part One.

CW: genital injury, suicide

The Rebuke of Adam and Eve, Domenico Zampieri, 1646 (source).

Gotta love Adam's 'What?' shrug.

So! God made mankind in his image, male and female, and that’s normally pretty straightforward, but in a small minority of cases we find male and female characteristics mixed; we call this physiology intersex. Accurate estimates of how many people are intersex are difficult to find, as the subject isn’t well-studied, but an estimate of about 1% seems to be a safe generalization from studies that have been done to date, making it only a little less common than red hair.1

Ironically, this knowledge was actually a little more common until a hundred or so years ago. The twentieth century saw an extensive use of surgery on intersex newborns, modifying or eliminating their unusual characteristics; when these surgeries had yet to be developed, and most babies were delivered at home and by midwives, it was familiar enough to them to deliver the occasional intersex baby. Legal cases right down to the eighteenth century make occasional mention of intersex people.

Nor has intersexuality been wholly unknown to the Church. Although there are few references to the phenomenon in Catholic history, they are mentioned in passing (under the title androgynes) by St Augustine, and Gratian, the foremost canon lawyer of the Middle Ages, discusses them briefly. Those canonists who addressed the subject stated that if one sex could be determined to be predominant in an intersex person, that person should be treated as being of that sex (up to and including that a principally male intersex person could be validly ordained2), while allowing that there might be cases in which it was impossible to judge for certain which sex predominated in a person’s body. At least one cleric at that time gave the opinion that, in cases where someone’s physiology was evenly mixed, they were to be given the choice, under irrevocable oath (no pressure), of which was their sex.

However, to the best of my knowledge, only canon law has directly addressed intersexuality to date, and it’s done so rarely. Theological reflection on what defines male and female is not the same thing, though the two are related. St John Paul II’s extensive meditation on male and female in Theology of the Body may, after adequate unpacking, speak to the question; but even understanding, let alone unpacking, that tome is going to be the work of generations. And in the meantime, the sciences do have something more to say, which theology needs to operate upon. (Like any science, theology operates upon facts: the differentia of theology is that some, though not all, of those facts are provided by God’s revelation. The rest are derived from observation and inference, the same place we get most facts.)

The surgical ‘correction’ of intersexuality has come under fire. Initially developed in the 1950s, it was thought at the time that it would be easier for the child to develop as whichever gender they were raised, and that a confused identity would be avoided if the confusing body were adjusted. Nor was the practice even limited to intersex children. Anatomically typical male children who exhibited a micropenis,3 or whose genitals were irreparably damaged in infancy, in some cases received vaginoplasty and were raised as girls.

One notorious and particularly tragic case was that of David Reimer, born in 1965. His penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision4 a little before the age of two. His parents took the advice of Dr John Money (I swear I did not make his name up), a pioneer and advocate of performing sex reassignment in infancy, on the grounds that infants healed much more easily and completely and that surgeries of this kind would be less traumatic if they could not be remembered. Their son was surgically reconstructed as a girl, and raised in a thoroughly female environment. The much-crowed-over success of the procedure, accompanied by some very weird follow-up creepiness from Dr Money, lasted until he was 13. Reimer had never felt like a girl, he had become suicidally depressed, and he told his parents he would kill himself if forced to see Money again. The next year his parents told him the truth about his history, on the advice of his psychiatrist. Reimer then shed his feminine identity and began living as a boy again, seeking multiple medical interventions to restore his physical masculinity, including hormone treatment, a double mastectomy, and phalloplasty. He went public with his story late in 1997.

That story came to an end just over six years later. His relationship with his parents, naturally enough, remained difficult, and he struggled with unemployment; his twin brother died of an overdose in 2002; and in 2004, his wife of over thirteen years asked for a separation. Two days later Reimer shot himself in the head.

A superficially similar, if somewhat happier, case is that of Christiane Völling, born in 1959, who in 2011 became the first intersex person to win a suit for damages over non-consensual sex reassignment surgery. Born with XX chromosomes, her phenotype was unclear at birth: she had ambiguous genitals but was assigned and raised male (an unusual decision at the time, since, to use a very crude phrase, it was considered ‘easier to dig a hole than build a pole’), and experienced a relatively early, vigorous, masculine puberty. Völling was found to have an undeveloped but complete set of female reproductive organs during an appendectomy at age 14; she was told only that she was ‘60% female,’ which caused her severe psychological distress. Her female reproductive organs were removed four years later, despite the fact that the full details of her diagnosis had been withheld from her in the name of protecting her mental health. She continued for some time after that to live as a man, but eventually transitioned into life as a woman. She was awarded €100,000, nearly forty years later, for receiving an unnecessary surgery without being able to give informed consent.

Source.

So cases like these are clear-cut evidence of original biology over imposed sociology, right? Proof that no matter what you do to a person’s body through surgery, you can’t make a man into a woman or vice versa, and that trying to only makes them miserable. Right? Well … hang on. Before we can address that, we need to talk about gender dysphoria.5

Gender dysphoria is the distress a person feels due to their physical sex characteristics not matching their inner sense of gender identity. Most people who identify as transgender experience gender dysphoria, and vice versa, but the two aren’t the same thing. Reimer and Völling exemplify both the experience itself, and the therapeutic and medical steps generally taken to address it; the difference is that they were identifying with sexual characteristics that had been excised from them, whereas gender dysphoria is generally used to talk about people whose bodies have developed normally but whose identity or sense of self is in conflict with their bodies. And the thing is, both transgender identity and the dysphoria that typically accompanies it appear to be just as persistent—just as deeply rooted and intractable to all psychotherapy and socialization—as the gender identities that Reimer and Völling display.

This doesn’t mean that trans identities are therefore automatically valid and unquestionable, no. What it does mean is that our analysis isn’t finished yet. I'll discuss dysphoria and identity further in my next.

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1That the intersex minority is a small one is not, philosophically speaking, significant. What makes intersex bodies important to the discussion is that they exist at all, not how common they are.

2The canonists did say that intersex men could not be licitly ordained, due to canonical requirements forbidding the ordination of men with physical deformities. However, requirements of this kind could in principle be changed (as, e.g., the Church can and occasionally does relax the Roman ban on ordaining married men).

3A micropenis is a penis that is at least 2.5 standard deviations smaller than the mean. It is not a health risk, although it can be caused by growth hormone deficiency, androgen insensitivity, and certain other conditions, as well as by intersexuality.

4The late circumcision was an attempt to treat phimosis, a condition in which the foreskin is too constricting and impedes penile function. Treating phimosis is not generally considered necessary until after the age of three.

5Though it appears in current DSM manuals, this term is controversial in some circles, as some people consider it pathologizing and stigmatory. I can’t really get into that discussion right now; the thing that the term ‘gender dysphoria’ is talking about does exist, and the term is already in use, so, with apologies to any readers who are bothered by it, it’s the term I’ll use for the present.

Gender Jamboree, Part One

Now I know your heart, I know your mind

You don’t even know you’re being unkind

So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways

Just use me up and then you walk away

Boy you can’t play me that way

Well I guess what you say is true

I could never be the right kind of girl for you

I could never be your woman

—White Town, Your Woman (lyrics by Jyoti Prakash Mishra)

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Edit: Now that Mudblood Catholic is up and running on Patheos, I've re-written this post. You can find the new version here.

Due to Reasons™, the new hot-button issue of the kulturkampf seems to have moved to trans issues rather than gay issues. Due to most Catholics understanding trans issues even more poorly than they understand gay issues—an unenviable accomplishment—I feel it’s worthwhile to do some mansplaining here at Mudblood Catholic. However, before I begin, I wish to make two disclaimers. One, which technically is a disclaimer appended to this entire blog (see the ‘About the Mudblood’ box at the bottom of the page), is that I submit everything I say to the final judgment of the Catholic Church. I contend pretty strongly that the Church has not in fact defined her final judgment in these matters, but if and when she does so, by ecumenical council or pontifical definition, I will accept that.

The other is that I write this primarily because I know a lot of Catholics will listen to a cis1 person more willingly than they’ll listen to a trans person. I am not writing this because I’m any kind of expert on trans issues. I’m very much an amateur, and I urge anyone who’s willing to do so to go to trans sources rather than me. Natalie Wynn of the Contrapoints channel on YouTube, though she wouldn’t suit everyone’s taste stylistically, is an intelligent and engaging exponent of trans theory whom I recommend; Daniel Ortberg, a columnist for Slate, is another prominent source on trans issues2; and though I haven’t read their work, I understand that Thomas Page McBee, Imogen Binnie, Raquel Willis, and Akwaeke Emezi are generally well-regarded by the trans community.

Right, now that those are out of the way, what’s up with this left-wing genderist stuff anyway?

A review complete revision of high school biology is in order to start with.3 The format we were taught was that, at conception, XX chromosomes make a girl and XY chromosomes make a boy. This is roughly true, but it is an oversimplification because it was high school biology. Without touching the other aspects of gender (social, psychological, and spiritual), we may consider at least three on a strictly biological basis: chromosomes, gonads, and phenotype. This is going to get kind of technical, so bear with me.

There are two basic sex chromosomes in Homo sapiens, codified as X and Y. Most humans have two sex chromosomes in their cells, of which one is always X: thus, a vast majority of people have either XX chromosomes or XY chromosomes. XX people are female, XY people are male. Clear, but not quite accurate to all human biology.

The other two biological components of sex are gonads, or reproductive organs (either ovaries or testes), and phenotype, or the shape and appearance of the body (including the external genitals, the breasts, and secondary sex characteristics such as body hair and voice). Most of the time, these three things develop straightforwardly and together, but occasionally they do not.

There are several ways and reasons that chromosomes, gonads, and phenotype can diverge from each other. Sometimes the divergence comes in the reproductive cells themselves. For instance, there are a tiny number of XX males: the sex-determining SRY protein, which is normally attached to the Y chromosome, in rare instances gets exchanged to an X chromosome during the production of sperm, thus producing persons who are genetically female (XX chromosomes) but who frequently appear entirely male (male phenotype) and have testes rather than ovaries (male gonads). This is one of many intersex conditions,4 biological states in which male and female characteristics are mixed. Sometimes intersex conditions produce visible ambiguities, sometimes not.

Another example of intersex biology is CAIS, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. People who have CAIS have XY chromosomes and testes, but their cells do not respond to androgens at all (androgens are the hormones responsible for masculine sexual development and characteristics; testosterone is the best-known androgen). Hence, their phenotype is wholly female: the testes don’t descend, but remain where the ovaries would be in the abdomen; a vagina rather than a penis forms—often the passage is shallower than in cissex1 women, but it’s there; the breasts develop in feminine form; body hair and voice are typically female. CAIS typically isn’t discovered until puberty, at which point the absence of menstruation generally prompts a visit to the doctor.5

There are other intersex or otherwise unusual biologies in human beings, and I won’t linger over them, interesting though the subject is. The point I’m making here is not that gender is a social construct because biology is a confusing science—we’ll get to that discussion—but simply to point out that, even though it covers a majority of people, the black-and-white idea that male and female are totally obvious in every case just isn’t true. That doesn’t mean that male and female don’t exist, any more than the phenomena of dawn and dusk mean that day and night don’t exist. But it is a very good reason to be patient and cautious and ready to learn, before we make snap judgments about other people. It certainly calls for theological examination and reflection, as distinct from simply quoting Genesis 2 and calling trans people Satan.

As a matter of fact, Genesis 2, and the rare passing reflections on it made by St Paul, seem to hint at the coïnherence as well as the distinction of the sexes. Adam is caused by God essentially to give birth to Eve6; he is male, and yet he is maternal, as is artistically proper to a person formed out of the earth (which is always Mother Earth in myth). And the Apostle says frankly, in the very act of confirming the distinction between women and men in the symbolism of liturgical dress, that nevertheless woman and man depend upon each other and each comes from the other, and both from God—harking back, maybe, to his earlier7 letter to the churches in Galatia, in which he said rapturously that there is no male or female in Christ. Indeed, the Virgin Birth itself, re-rooting the human race and the Second Adam in a sinless woman, reverses the pattern of the creation narrative: again birth takes place by the direct intervention of God, but this time it is a woman who is given the role then appointed for the male, and the flesh of her flesh, whom she also names, is the male—the same Man who, once again in sleep, gives birth from his side to the Church.

Again, none of this is to say that sex or gender don’t really exist. It is to say that we may not always understand them perfectly, and that God is apparently prepared to do surprising things with them sometimes. There’s a great deal more to be said—we haven’t even gotten to trans identities as such yet. But I think this forms a good period for the moment.

Go here for Part Two.

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1For those not familiar, the prefix cis- is simply the opposite of the prefix trans-; both are derived from Latin: the former means approximately ‘on this side of,’ while the latter means ‘on the far side of, beyond.’ (For example, when a part of the Gaulish people settled in northern Italy, the Romans referred to that region as Cisalpine Gaul, i.e. ‘Gaul on this side of the Alps,’ and to the area of modern France as Transalpine Gaul.) Cisgender, or cis for short, is thus simply the contrary of transgender.

2Because qualifiers are necessary for friggin everything: I’m not saying I agree with everything these people have written (e.g., both are firmly pro-choice, and Wynn at least is an atheist). But it’s always better to learn about a human experience from the horse’s mouth.

3In starting here I am not saying that biology is the only thing to consider, nor the most important thing. But I do think biology is moderately accessible to people of all political and religious views, and it is something that (to be blunt) some churchmen do not seem adequately acquainted with, so it seems like a decent starting point.

4Intersex people used to be called hermaphrodites; the word comes from a myth about Hermes and Aphrodite having a child together, who had male genitalia, feminine breasts, and long hair, whom they uncreatively named Hermaphroditus. However, the word never really signified all intersex conditions in the first place, and is found insulting by some intersex people.

5There’s an incredibly problematic House episode about CAIS, if incredibly problematic House episodes are your thing.

6Perhaps we see here the faintest of hints from the Holy Ghost of our own future scientific discoveries, a sort of Easter egg. Adam has XY chromosomes, and Eve is made from Adam but is not simply a copy of Adam; she is made from his X side alone, which is then doubled, forming a person who is reflective and yet different. Thus man, in meeting his fellow, meets himself and becomes fully human by relationship. (Whether and to what extent Genesis 2 represents historical as well as mythical realities is for our purposes immaterial.)

7Fight me

The Next Catholic Reform, Excursus

‘Trample! Trample! It is to be trampled on by you that I am here.’… I, too, stood on the sacred image. For a moment this foot was on his face. It was on the face of the man who has ever been in my thoughts, on the face that was before me on the mountains, in my wanderings, in prison, on the best and most beautiful face that any man can ever know, on the face of him whom I have always longed to love. Even now that face is looking at me with eyes of pity from the plaque rubbed flat by many feet. ‘Trample!’ said those compassionate eyes.‘Trample! Your foot suffers in pain; it must suffer like all the feet that have stepped on this plaque. But that pain alone is enough. I understand your pain and your suffering. It is for that reason that I am here.’ 

—Shūsaku Endō, Silence

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This was another toughie to write. In my experience that’s usually a good sign—it means it’s worth bothering with.

The colossal scandal of Church corruption that’s been more and more exposed over the last few months, and the non-stop infighting among Catholics which has accompanied it, prompts a question [1]: why be a Catholic at all?

Even for someone who believes that Christ is personally present—body, blood, soul, and divinity—in the Eucharistic species, the Catholic Church is not the only place you can go and find that. The Eastern Orthodox Churches possess apostolic succession too, and their Eucharist is as valid as the Catholic. The Oriental Orthodox have preserved valid sacraments since their division from the main body of Christianity in the fourth century; so have the Church of the East, many Old Catholic Churches, and a few other bodies [2]. Of course, they each have their own scandals—there is no institution that doesn’t, if it’s existed for more than a few minutes. But that is not much of a case for being loyal to any institution, and certainly not a case against dissociating oneself, at least temporarily, from a body that’s embroiled not only in scandal, but in widespread refusal to address that scandal truthfully and effectively.

I’ve rehearsed my intellectual reasons for becoming and remaining a Catholic on this blog many times. I find a God the most satisfying explanation of the universe, Christ the most satisfying explanation of God, and Catholicism the most satisfying explanation of Christ. But is that enough to remain a Catholic, right now? No way. I don’t think I have ever seriously considered leaving the Church, but I know that is not because of my intellectual satisfaction with her claims. I wish I could say it’s because of a solid faith—and, hell, maybe that’s true too; faith is a supernatural gift and my understanding of it, even in myself, is bound to be limited. But really, I know it because I’m unchaste. Knowing Catholic doctrine, its assertions and hypotheses, its nuances and substructures, has never once kept me from unbuckling my belt.

Which lies athwart a quite different problem. Disobedience like mine is pretty straightforward. But what about the criticisms of the Catholic Church that paint her as homophobic, indifferent or oppressive toward women, controlling, and so on? If the Church’s doctrines are true, and if it’s pointed out that the Church also teaches us not to hate gay people or oppress women or any of that, so that those who do are really transgressing, these charges evaporate … right?

Wrong. This isn’t simply a question of people disobeying. Catholic doctrine is dangerous, and no amount of obeying it will make that not be true. The truth of an idea has nothing to do with whether that idea is dangerous. It is true, for example, that God forgives sins, no matter how grave, no matter how monotonously repeated, if we sincerely repent—which includes an intention to, but does not require success at, reforming one’s behavior. Put that truth into an abusive relationship and see what happens. It is true that people have a right to defend themselves against aggressors; put that truth into the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic and see what they do with it.

We have a duty to take thought for the consequences of not just our actions, but our ideas. The Holy Ghost guides the Church into all truth, yes, but he nowhere promises to guide her out of all implications. It is perfectly possible to be an enabler when one ought to be a prophet, without ever once saying anything untrue; and that will inevitably leave people, in a blasphemous paradox, victimized by the truth.

It’s like the water in Flint: you don’t stop needing water because it’s polluted with lead, but lead doesn’t become safe to drink because you have to drink water. Which means that the obvious thing to do is to leave Flint, at least until Elon Musk donates citywide filtration systems. So why not leave?

I won’t, that’s all. This flawed, ugly, corrupt mass of people is my mother, my home. She gives me Jesus—in spite of herself? often, but truly even then. I will do what I can to make her better, and I’ll hide from her cruelties and stupidities if I need to, but I won’t leave.

A darkness descends upon my eyes,
And as I fade into the unknown cloud,
It comes to me:
There is no place that I would rather die. 

—from my poem 'Via Angorosa,' in the collection Christ’s Body, Christ’s Wounds

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[1] Not begs! ‘To beg the question’ means ‘to commit the logical fallacy of petitio principi, i.e. assuming the truth of an assertion that you want to prove as a part of your proof.’ To prompt or raise a question is not the same thing as begging it.

[2] These bodies exist principally in Asia and Europe and are little known in the US. The Church of the East was born of the Nestorian schism in 431, and at one point had sway all over central Asia: there were Nestorian Christians as far east as India, China, and Mongolia in the eighth century. Today they are mostly confined to northern Iraq and parts of western India; some entered full communion with Rome as the Chaldæan and Syro-Malabar Catholic Churches.

The Old Catholic Churches were founded in the eighteenth century through a series of disputed ecclesiastical appointments (rather like the quasi-schismatic status of the Society of St Pius X in the 1980s), and swelled in the nineteenth through Catholics who rejected the First Vatican Council’s definition of the infallibility of the Pope. There are certain divisions within the movement, and Rome recognizes only the communities of the Union of Utrecht (mostly in central Europe) to have apostolic succession. This is itself complicated by the fact that the Union of Utrecht is in full communion with the Church of England, and furthermore practices the ordination of women.

Other groups with valid (or possibly valid) Holy Orders are mostly derived, by hook or crook, from the lineage of Utrecht. These include the Polish National Catholic Church, which is seeking reunion with the Pope; the Society of St Pius V, which rejects all Popes since the death of Pius XII; the Palmarian Catholic Church, which bafflingly reveres Bl Paul VI as a martyr; and a handful of others.

Five Quick Takes

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I.

The assault of Christmas has begun, complete with terrible music. I don’t hate Christmas music per se, but I find that the selection played in public is mostly of that segment I do hate. Generally I prefer religious to secular Christmas songs, not on principle, but simply because there are lots of religious songs in the genre that I like and few secular ones. (That, and some of the secular ones, like Baby It’s Cold Outside, are frankly creepy.) I strongly prefer something that has a mysterious, almost a haunting, note to it, something Mediæval; I’ve always found that note to evoke certain qualities of Christmas—the sense of nestling together with cold outside and warmth within, the traditional magical associations, and the grand mystery of God entering his own creation secretly in the dead of night—which the sugary, sentimental music about presents and Santa and family just fall so far short of.

The movie The Santa Clause, of all things, actually presented a surprisingly complex and winsome picture of the mythos that incorporated a sense of ancientry, that taste of spice and well as sugar, that even a secular Christmas needs in order to keep from being merely just another toothaches-and-hangovers festival. Loreena McKennitt’s enchanting album To Drive the Cold Winter Away does the same; my family opens presents to it every year.

II.

And Thanksgiving also exists. I did a Thanksgayving celebration last year, with a small group of friends who lived away from their families. (My family usually observes the holiday on the following Saturday, since both my sisters are married and have large families-in-law, so the scheduling is a headache otherwise.) I’m not sure what I’ll do this year; possibly, bask in my lack of obligations.

III.

I saw IT: Chapter One with a friend in Pittsburgh, near Halloween. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know exactly how faithful it was to the source material, but it was a pretty good film; I give it a B+.

It got me thinking about horror as a genre. What is it we go to horror looking for? I mean, to be scared, obviously, but why and how? I mean, you can read or watch true crime stuff, which is often pretty frightening yet clearly touches a different nerve; even when the antagonist of a horror movie is a ‘mundane’ threat like a serial killer, there’s always something else, some element of being beyond our normal frame of reference, that makes it more than just a story about a crime. Whether it’s a fantastic element like a ghost or a witch or a vampire, a sci-fi element like an alien or an AI, or merely a realistic yet unknown element like a cult or a lunatic, horror seems to appeal to our sense of being unprotected from an Other.

This, to me, makes it a perfect vehicle for exploring religion. Not only in the sense that sincerely religious characters make excellent horror villains (and excellent heroes, too, like Vanessa Ives and Ethan Chandler in Penny Dreadful), but in the sense that horror, I suspect by its nature, involves itself with some kind of intrusion into the known world by an unknown, which is very largely what religion deals in as well: certainly Semitic religion, such as Judaism and Christianity, and several varieties of neo-paganism as well. It’s said that the most frightening thing to the mind is the unknown, and there’s nothing more incomprehensible or uncontrollable than Deity.

IV.

I could do with prayer, Mudbloods. I’m not in great shape, spiritually speaking. I have no one to thank but myself, and in fact God’s arranged things so that I don’t have to deal with a tithe of the consequences of my actions; but I do need to work on my problems all the same, and one of those problems is not praying well, or much. So, I could use your help.

V.

If my check on Friday is as good as I think it’s going to be, I’ll be able to afford not only Christmas presents, but my next tattoo. I want to get an IHC monogram (a representation of the name of Jesus as written in Greek letters), over my left pec. I have two already: on my left shoulder, the cross and M from the back of the miraculous medal, and on my right, my two favorite lines from Dante’s Purgatorio.1 The monogram would be my third, and I want the sign for Virgo as my fourth, maybe on one of my calves. I’d like to get a few more after that; we’ll see.

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1The lines in question are:

‘Sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor,’

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gl’affina.

These roughly translate to: ‘“Think ye betimes of how I suffer here,” / Then plunged him in the fire which refines them’ (Purg. XXVI.147-148); the words are spoken by a soul in Purgatory, coming to the edge of the purifying fires that sanctify the Lustful to beg Dante for his prayers, and then casting himself back into the penance that strengthens his love for God. I had the first line done in black and the second in red, in imitation of the instructions in a missal or sacramentary (text printed in black is what to say, and text in red is what to do). This doubles as an allusion to T. S. Eliot, another favorite author of mine, who quoted these lines in several of his poems.