For the past few years, I have been thinking off and on about the relation between religion, sex, and gender. The contemporary issues of male-only ordination, heterosexual-only ordination, and especially homosexual marriage have all brought the subject to the foreground for many people. I have been somewhat reticent to opine on these matters, however, since my relation to them is complicated. This post is an attempt to lay out my thoughts in a systematic way.
It is, of course, notoriously difficult to manufacture any clear approach to the subject on the basis of the scriptural texts, since there are few or none that refer to these issues in a clear or straightforward way. There is also a more fundamental problem, however, concerning the basic conceptual foundations of the issue. Religious discussions typically borrow their concepts of sex and gender from the society in which such discussions occur. In the case of contemporary American society, at least, I believe this causes serious problems.
My thesis is that because our society's concepts of sex and gender are woefully inadequate to biological and social realities, a religious treatment of gender issues (such as homosexual marriage, gender-restricted ordination, etc.) that is based upon these concepts is also bound to be inadequate.
I.
Human bodies display a tremendous amount of sexual variation. With respect to secondary sexual characteristics, this is obvious: degree of body hair, average pitch of voice, variety of hormone levels, build, stature, and other such characteristics have an infinite degree of variability along a continuous spectrum. The same is true of primary sexual characteristics, although we tend not to think of them that way. In early fetal development, the genital tissues are undifferentiated; further development articulates along wide and infinitely continuous spectra of variation. At middling levels of organ pronouncement, it is impossible to say whether a given genital feature is male or female.
At first glance, we might think that chromosomes offer a much cleaner picture: a person is either XX (female) or XY (male). There are a number of problems with this approach, however.
- Chromosomes are a recent phenomenon in human experience. If sex resides not in phenotype but in chromosomal composition, then we are committed to the rather odd claim that for all of human history prior to two hundred years ago, no one even knew that sexual differences existed.
- Chromosomes do not offer a binary view of sex. Chromosomally, a person is either X, XX, XXX, XY, XXY, XXYY, XXXY, or possesses a mixture of cells of two or more types.
- Chromosomal composition is often at odds with or unrelated to phenotypic sexual characteristics. A few high-profile cases involving sporting events, including the Olympics, have recently made this obvious, but most of the people whose chromosomal sex is the opposite of what they assume will never know.
Ultimately, while chromosomes might be an appealing place to situate sex because they seem tidier than the dizzying degree of variation displayed by bodies, they are not really what we care about when it comes to theories of sex.
This diversity of human bodies has two salient characteristics that I would like to highlight.
First, sexual diversity is continuous. Take a secondary characteristic, like amount of arm hair. There are not two types of arm hair growth, "lots" and "none," which we could then try to correlate to other sexual characteristics. Instead, there is an infinite degree of variation along a continuum between those two extremes, and every body is positioned somewhere along this continuum. The same is true of primary characteristics. The organ that is the most obvious feature of nude male anatomy, for example, varies widely from being highly pronounced in some males to being almost absent in some females. The continuous nature of sexual diversity is a problem for the binary theory of sex, which must then draw arbitrary distinctions where the phenomena themselves provide no warrant. In practice, the binary theory must also simply exclude an entire class of phenomena as non-entities or deviations.
Second, sexual diversity is not exclusive. Secondary sexual characteristics often do not appear in the "right" combinations (for example, I am fond of my beard and am often mistaken for female on the phone), and these characteristics are often not combined with the "right" primary characteristics. Even at the extremes, morphology is not exclusive: a person can have genitalia associated with both sexes. The different dimensions of variation are often poorly correlated with each other. This is a problem for the binary theory of gender, which requires that the sexes be viewed as distinct, not intermingled by degrees and on a variety of axes.
Imagine a person, for example, whose theory of color (1) contended the world to be composed of only two colors, red and green, and (2) insisted every object to be either purely red or purely green. When confronted with any actual object, they would be forced to either pretend it fit one of the categories (which could be more or less easy to do in any given case) or dismiss it as an aberration. Whatever else we might say about such a theory, we would conclude it to be a rather poor description of color.
Bodies that cannot be wrangled into the binary theory of sex are known to that theory as "intersex." Consider just a few examples (taken from a nice summary):
- You seem an adult woman and have never doubted this. At some point, your genes get tested. To your surprise, instead of being XX (the classic female chromosome pairing), you are XY (the classic male chromosome pairing). It turns out your blood is loaded with testosterone and other "male" hormones, and you have a set of undescended testes in your abdomen. You have no ovaries and no womb and are infertile. (This is called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome.)
- You are a girl who looks the part and has all the right parts, but at puberty, you are surprised to find that you do not start having menstrual periods -- and far more surprised when your voice deepens, testes descend out of your lower abdomen, and a certain female organ enlarges and becomes a functional and fertile male organ. (This is called 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency.)
- You seem an adult man and have never doubted this. One day, during unrelated surgery, doctors discover you have a full set of normal female parts -- womb, ovaries, Fallopian tubes, etc. -- and you test XX (female). (This is called Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia.)
- You are a girl and have never doubted this. When it is time for puberty, though, nothing happens -- it never arrives. Genetically, you are XY; in all visible respects, you are forever a pre-pubescent girl. (This is called Swyer syndrome.)
- You seem a boy with all the parts, but also the female equivalents. At puberty, you get the worst of both worlds. It turns out some of your cells are XY and some XX. You are bi-fertile. (A cellular mosaic condition.)
The list is longer, but this is a good start. It demonstrates that no biological characteristic can serve as the basis for a exclusive and binary theory of sex and that in many cases, the various biological characteristics with which we associate sex are not correlated with each other.
How common are bodies that do not fit neatly into the binary theory's divisions? Far more common than most people think.
There is a difficulty in measuring, of course. If we just look at the bodies themselves, all bodies are intersex, with each characteristic positioned somewhere more or less distanced in either direction from the arithmetic mean. From the standpoint of the binary theory, the majority of bodies can eventually be pushed into one category or the other, even if it makes for a rather poor fit. On this approach, "intersex" only describes those bodies which are left over, either so ambivalent or multivalent to refuse categorization. Even then, about 1 in 100 people fall into this category. In the United States, that is like the entire state of Iowa or Connecticut, or the city of Chicago or Los Angeles.
If we are not simply going to ignore the mismatch between theory and reality, the major alternative to developing a new theory is to change the biological reality itself. For years, well-intentioned doctors have done just that, performing dangerous and sometimes debilitating surgery on newborn infants ("gender assignment surgery") in an attempt to force the biology to fit into conceptual categories. This, too, is far more common than people think: doctors have enough difficulty assigning a sex to newborns to require the intervention of a sex assignment specialist and warrant surgical intervention in as many as 1 in 500 cases.
For the theory that permits exactly two, mutually exclusive sexes, biological reality presents an enormous problem.
II.
Given its inadequacy to the biological, the modern assumptions about gender, which ground gender on the positing of a biological basis, are bound to be problematic. Indeed, the literature critiquing the relation between sex (male/female) and gender (masculine/feminine) is enormous. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, countless candidates were brought forth to establish a link between the two. From crass theories about how men have larger heads and are therefore better at mathematics, through attempts to confirm experimentally the popular notion that women are "naturally" nurturing and empathetic, to recent theories backed by highly sophisticated brain imaging techniques, the story is the same: advocates of the binary theory think they have finally found a demonstrable link between sex and gender, only to be refuted once again. (A nice treatment of the state of affairs with respect to the recent field of neurobiology can be found here.) While it is certainly possible that there is some aspect of gender that is simply biologically determined, we have not yet been able to find one -- and not for any lack of trying.
While many men may act as strong leaders and many women may act as particularly empathetic, such phenomena are in the same category as the fact that many boys like blue and many girls like pink -- they are based on complex socio-cultural interactions that leave us with no basis for pointing to biological givens as either necessary or sufficient explanations.
The binary theory of gender is both descriptive and normative, stipulating both how the world is and how it ought to be. In a descriptive sense, it is supposed that there really are two genders, two sets of social roles in which all people live out their lives. Of course, one hardly needs any reflection to see this as false; the social story is if anything more diverse and convoluted than the biological. The binary theory rescues its descriptive element, however, by appealing to the sexual determination of gender: since dualistic sexuality is a biological given, and gender follows directly from sexuality, gender dualism is still descriptively valid. That is, even though people do not perform their genders consistently and exclusively, those genders, resting as they do upon the biological, are nevertheless real and necessary descriptive features of people.
The inadequacy of the biological account and the spuriousness of the purported determination of gender by sex together undermine the descriptive claims of the binary theory in an irreparable way. Even if if the biological reality did support a twofold and exclusive theory of sex, such a theory of sex could apparently not be extrapolated to gender.
This also erodes one of the most important pillars of the normative aspect of the popular narrative. After all, it is precisely because (a) there are two sexes and (b) gender is based primarily on sex that there ought to be two genders. With both of these suppositions undermined, it is hard to see on what basis we need be beholden to a specifically binary theory of gender (much less in whatever specific configurations happen to be in vogue at the moment).
III.
Steeped as we are in the theoretical matrix of the dualistic view, it is difficult to imagine alternatives. We always tend to take our own culture's standards for granted, assuming them to be universal, and it takes tremendous effort to begin to see them as one historically contingent form among many.
The diverse realities of human sexuality, however, are not a recent discovery. One needs only a capable observer with human bodies to observe in order to arrive at the inadequacy of a dichotomous approach. Thus, throughout history, different societies have approached sex and gender in a variety of configurations.
- "Zachar," which is roughly similar to our "man" and is usually translated that way,
- "Nekevah," which is roughly similar to our "woman" and is usually translated that way,
- "Androgynos," someone who has both typically male and typically female primary sexual characteristics,
- "Ay’lonit," a person who is identified as nekevah at birth but develops "male" characteristics at puberty,
- "Saris," a person who is identified as zachar at birth but develops "female" characteristics at puberty or loses the phallus, and
- "Tumtum," a person whose primary sexual characteristics are indeterminate with respect to other categories.
These sex categories are dealt with extensively in the classical texts of Judaism. One example from the mishna is illustrative ("zachar" and "nekevah" are translated "man" and "woman"):
An androgynos is in some respects legally equivalent to men, and in some respects legally equivalent to women, in some respects legally equivalent to men and women, and in some respects legally equivalent to neither men nor women. [...] Rabbi Yose says: an androgynos he is a created being of her own, but the sages could not decide if the androgynos is a man or a woman. But this is not true of a tumtum who is sometimes a man and sometimes a woman. (Mishna Bikkurim 4:1,5)
Nor are the Jews exceptional in this regard. We find a similar plurality of sexes discussed in Mesopotamian mythology, in texts which count among the oldest records we have of human civilization. Ancient Egyptian, Vedic, and other cultures similarly understood sex and gender in plural and often fluid terms. A number of contemporary societies interpret sex and/or gender in three or more terms, with the most well-known probably being the Hijra in India or the variety of Native American multi-gender traditions. PBS has put together a good overview of the sheer diversity of sex and gender traditions throughout history laid out on a map.
One of the difficulties involved in discussions of different interpretations of sex and gender is that when your own culture only has concepts for two, it is difficult to think and talk about anything else without describing alternative genders as somehow combinations of or variations on the binary theme.
On nearly every continent, and for all of recorded history, thriving cultures have recognized, revered, and integrated more than two genders. Terms such as transgender and gay are strictly new constructs that assume three things: that there are only two sexes (male/female), as many as two sexualities (gay/straight), and only two genders (man/woman). Yet hundreds of distinct societies around the globe have their own long-established traditions for third, fourth, fifth, or more genders. [...] Worldwide, the sheer variety of gender expression is almost limitless.*
As is so often the case, history can prove an important remedy to the error of interpreting our own recent cultural framework as the only possible one and help us to imagine alternatives that may be more consistent with the reality which we are attempting to understand and explicate.
IV.
While modern American culture tends to think of sex and gender as mutually exclusive dualities, this theory appears to be deeply inadequate. Nevertheless, the majority of religious discussion concerning issues of gender -- homosexual marriage, gender-restricted ordination, etc. -- is uncritically beholden to these conceptual schemata.
The concept of homosexual marriage, for example, is articulated within a matrix of identity and attraction (hetero/homo/bi-sexual) that assumes and reasserts the binary theory of sex and gender. In the movement away from such a theory, this articulation loses its sense. In other words, the controversy surrounding homosexuality takes its force from its dependence upon a mistaken theoretical framework, the erosion of which makes it is difficult to see on what basis a critique of homosexual marriage could be made. To object to (or, for that matter, to particularly praise) homosexual relationships as homosexual seems to require a conceptual framework that is unsustainable.
This does not mean that an ethical philosophy and a theology of sex and gender is impossible or meaningless, of course. Instead, it means that such a philosophy and such a theology must find for itself a different starting point.
As someone who is almost entirely ignorant of contemporary developments in Christian theology, I cannot remark on the status of this project. Perhaps a robust theology of sexual diversity is already in its final stages. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that we simply lack the conceptual resources for such a project. This possibility -- which is at once deeply unsettling and entirely exciting -- has clear precedents in the history of Christianity. Consider the position of the early Church, which had to wait almost four centuries for philosophy and theology to develop the conceptual resources required in order to give a basic articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity! If hundreds of years of waiting and working can be required to navigate even issues at the very center of the Christian faith, we must at least seriously entertain the possibility that some waiting may be required before we can develop an adequate grasp of contemporary issues related to human sexuality and gender identity.
