“Far from being merely a passing episode in the history of philosophy, Cartesianism is in fact the secret history of Western civilization during the last three hundred years.”
—William Barrett, “The Study of Man”
We have, for a very long time, lost the living reality of the soul and what it means to be the form of the body. The human soul is already outside itself; it lives a radically exteriorized existence. Nowhere is this more evident than in the phenomenon of “transgenderism.” Transgender advocates insist that affirming one’s preferred “gender identity” irrespective of or contrary to one’s actual sex is compassionate. In fact, it is cruel and rests upon a profound anthropological confusion. To separate the psyche or soul from the body is to sunder the most basic elements of the human person. It is to dis-integrate the self, rendering it homeless and alienated from the world and its culture.
A central Thomistic insight clarifies the confusion we face. For St. Thomas, man inhabits a unique position in the order of being. Unlike angels, we participate in a common nature but in a particular way because we are embodied. This is a complex nexus, and so we achieve happiness by a longer way. For us, universal realities are always accessed in the particular experience and never bypassed. We are confronted by this reality in everything we do and in what is done to us, in every action and every event, precisely because we cannot escape our own reality. We access fear, dread, joy, love, childhood, motherhood, fatherhood, death, through our own union of body and soul. The longer way to our happiness means that the particular experience is not merely a vehicle of transcendence as if the transcendent state is something alien and divested of particularity. Instead, particularity is
coextensive with transcendence, unveiling the concrete reality of this person—not idealized personality, ego, gender identity, and so forth, but this
person, at this time and in this place. As the beings who alone inhabit the horizon between time and eternity, we are each participants in the universal radicalized by a holy particularity. Because our unique particularity is, in turn, actualized only through its unity with our shared natures as human beings, each of us has an obligation to participate in the vast demands and riches of human nature.
This very obligation is undermined by the teaching of transgenderism. It not only obscures human nature, it also heartrendingly diminishes the unique particularity of each person which the “transgender person” so desperately seeks to enshrine. Each person comes to understand himself through the stable ground of human nature. When our personhood is extracted and separated from that nature, it shrivels up into something false and dangerous, devaluing itself. We must work against the misleading caricatures of gender identities which close us off from our human nature, fallaciously pitting personhood as a thing to be constructed against and outside of nature’s guiding telos.
Sexual difference does define us; it is profoundly inscribed in us as fundamental to our personhood. Defining is not the opposite of freedom, but its propaedeutic.
Just as we cannot encounter persons by passing over the particular in favor of the universal, neither can we seek to find this living particularity without engaging the underlying human nature which enables such particularity to flourish. We access and describe the supernatural only through the natural. The rose is the rose and so much more: it is the sign of first love, the anniversary, the joy of hours spent in the garden of childhood, the grief observed at the gravesite, the perfumed ardor of the saint, the crown of Our Lady. All these transcendent and particular meanings presuppose the biological basis of the rose. Take away the natural, material rose as foundation, then the access to the transcendental and spiritual meanings is restricted, if not entirely foreclosed. The manifold ways in which we express our personhood necessitate the metaphysical ground of the person, just as the unique and transcendent flourishing of man and woman require their biological signatories as a basis. Additionally, when thought sequesters and suppresses the transcendent reality and its moral and spiritual dimensions, it does not retain the natural. What remains is mechanism and blind drive.
Even to speak of gender fluidity necessitates what it denies: a core stability where each person is
a participant in human nature. Transgenderism trades on the sidestepping and shortcutting of the longer way and is therefore the prime inheritor of the Cartesian divorce. It thus completes, with rabid obedience, all the Cartesian missteps. It utilizes a mind estranged from the body and couples that with an isolated particularity where freedom and truth are non-rational sources accessed by the Will alone.
This divorce is disastrous scientifically, politically, socially, morally, and metaphysically, and these failures are themselves lessons. This alienated separation of mind and body, the universal and the particular, grace and nature, as if each co-part exists without the other, denies the very
meaning of co-part, and then creates bifurcated worldless worlds inhabited by the shadows of truth. These shadows and substitutes for transcendence still need the truth for their existence—as all lies depend on truth and reality for their defection—and this will become clearer to us when we see the language game at root in the destruction of sexual identity through the meandering fallacies of transgenderism.
When Descartes rendered the mind and body diametrically unrelated, both freedom and truth became identified with the Will no longer subordinated to the intellect. This alienation motivates the current societal demands for an intractable pan-agreement on sexual identity and gender fluidity, bolstered further by a pantomimed democracy, becoming increasingly totalitarian as it influences businesses and higher learning. Both the enforced pan-agreement and its companion, a weakened democratic state, are the inevitable result of an understanding of truth and freedom as wholly non-rational and thus unable to be examined, defended, or rejected on rational grounds. Our task is to flesh out the Cartesianism lurking in transgenderism so that when shown in the discerning light of reason, its detrimental moves can be exposed. This will allow us to present the truer formation of human sexuality, faithful to the longer way which unites the universal and the particular within the integral human person.
For gender fluidity to have some credence ontologically, then the soul and its relation to the body must reflect an occasionalism or accidentalism. It must be some variant of the Cartesian attempt to connect what cannot be reconnected—mind and body—after accepting the notion that the mind is self-thinking thought wholly unfettered from, and at odds with, embodiment and its particularity. If my mind self-referentially constitutes who or what I am, then in a way sexual difference would be a purely fluid construct. It would be something I purely and self-referentially assign upon occasions. No longer would the body have any relevance to informing the mind of a person’s sexual identity, because a person—in this view—is equivalent to this self-enclosed mind. Just as unsustainable it is to argue that God
provides the occasion to connect a self-enclosed mental state with experiences in the physical world, so too would it be to claim the body plays such a position. If the role of the body is to replace God as the connector of occasions, then on the same facile evidence that exiled God, the body can be exiled as well. In gender ideology, the body no longer informs us of our sexual difference, the mind performs or assigns it, for the mind alone, as thinking and creating substance, is the only substance capable of such connections.
But transgenderism cannot fully advocate for pure idealism because the real and material body is to be altered. The self-enclosed mind “somehow” reaches beyond that very self-enclosed status it needed to first rationalize transgender ideology and informs us of various a priori genders as apodictically true but only because they are self-referential. This solipsistic mind subsequently determines its identity as many times as it deems fit, demanding that the body, which in one sense had no role to play in informing sexual difference, now has every role to play by following suit, whether through hormones, puberty-blockers, or surgery. Matter matters. But there are many more creeping difficulties with this theory. While metaphysically it sets up the possibility of gender fluidity by sequestering the mind as a separate entity whose makeup is irrelevant to physicality, materiality, flesh and blood (e.g., biological difference), the possibility of such fluidity is, at the same time, thwarted by the necessary consequences of such a sequestering.
A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror; he sees a dummy, an ‘outside,’ which, he has every reason to believe, other people see in the very same way but which, no more for himself than for others, is not a body in the flesh. His ‘image’ in the mirror is an effect of the mechanics of things. If he recognizes himself in it, if he thinks it ‘looks like him,’ it is his thought that weaves this connection. The mirror image is nothing that belongs to him.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”
If gender fluidity is to be a reality, then the mind must not be affected by the body, it must not receive who or what it is through any unified status. But if the soul is in fact the form of the body, then physicality and biology are always elevated into and intermingled with the spiritual. More still, the body would inform the soul of its nature as young, old, male, female, etc. Because the soul is the animating principle of the body, its perfection is to be united to a body, to realize its nature through the body’s particularity as meaning-unveiler. For there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses. But once a mind and body are sequestered and divorced, we have the seemingly ideal language-construct for transgenderism, where sexual difference as a state of the mind is not informed by sex as representative of the body, but that which is performed, assigned, decided upon by the mind’s own self-enclosed solipsism.
Cartesianism has long been outed for its erroneous ways, each unable to account for human knowledge and action. Yet, it is precisely this flawed philosophy that is utilized as the foundation for transgenderism. Why utilize a flawed foundation? Any proper foundation informs its effects as to what can or cannot be situated on its ground; it disciplines the mind. A non-ideological foundation in truth sheds what is antithetical to it and cultivates the richness of what reflects its order and meaning. Transgenderism could not spread as virally as it has if its foundation were sexual identity as the underlying signatory of transcendent meaning. This self-consuming lie spreads because its starting point is flexible as an ideological will-based “assigning” or “performing” “identities” on raw nature (the res extensa of the current “sex”). Transgenderism needs the unwieldy impasse of the Cartesian bifurcation to work with and anthropologically exploit. If it wrestled with a real foundation—the unity of the soul and body for Aquinas—it would find itself yoked by its own contradictions and reduced into absurdity. This is precisely why transgenderism must appeal to and base itself in Cartesian dualism. It is, in fact, the only system of ideas which can “rationalize” the anti-dialogic dividing line between “sex,” referring to the body, and “gender,” referring to the mind, as well as the necessity to have the latter’s assigned value system raised so far above opinion and into the privileged position of certain fact all the while bypassing any natural evidence.
Transgenderism is a logical no-man’s land. Gender fluidity only functions through a mind as arbiter of meaning, disconnected from a body. But such a position also necessitates a body to ratify its fluidity; embodied beings enact this so-called fluidity through clothing, hormones, assignment surgeries. Yet in ratifying its position, the mind must take the body into account, the very thing that will so wholly undermine its self-referential fluidity, either by a genuine notion that soul and body each inform the other in the makeup of the human person, or by the realization that once such self-referential ideas are enacted, they necessarily receive determinations from the material and embodied world.
The Cartesian separation which renders the mind as self-referential has historically found its companion in a mind now identified with the Will. And it is this collapse that brings back the body as extension of this Will-based mind to realize its demands ratified as true by sheer intensity alone. The mind and body are thus in a way reunited, but in a way in which neither one exists unscathed. This new “unity” exists by denying nature in favor of a nature-less autonomy; this means that there is nowhere to grow, to be, to do, for transcendence cannot be enacted in a worldless world, in a vacuum. Transgenderism’s suturing together of the mind and body is a reduction and a conflation. The union is wholly in the world reducible to its material flux, so that it is a world of messages without meanings and impulses without telos.
We are not souls without sexual difference, or purely machines, or brains in vats or any other collapse of the union between soul and body. None of these alternatives when properly examined can provide any intelligible foundation for transgenderism and yet each is provided to square the circle, to rationalize how sexual difference is not fundamentally related to “sex.” The soul is to the benefit of the body just as much as the body is to the benefit of the soul. The moment we begin to think of biological functions as merely or separately or isolatingly biological we have lost our way. We have seen this before in the prison houses of contraception and abortion-on-demand, each promising freedom as autonomy, only to violate natures, thus placing its victims in ever more expansive confinements. Sexual difference does define us; it is profoundly inscribed in us as fundamental to our personhood. Defining is not the opposite of freedom, but its propaedeutic.
It would be incredibly superficial to consider as a mere biological difference the distinction between man and woman, which really shows us two complementary types of the spiritual person of the human species.
—Dietrich von Hildebrand, Marriage: The Mystery of Faithful Love
None of these collapses provides the life of freedom, instead its exodus. Our biological life is
spiritual, and how could it not be, for it is through the body that life and death and all the mysteries in between reveal themselves to our senses which are perceived and realized as senses only because of the soul as moving principle! When we seek to define womanhood and manhood where one aspect of human nature takes unnatural prominence to the exclusion and suppression of the others, whether that be the biological, spiritual, or mental, we have entered the Cartesian minefield with no way out but to reject the division. In particular, the current pan-suppression of the spiritual implications of our biological reality renders our biology one of Will-based re-modelling. But being sequestered to the single biological pole—as if it exists and functions properly without the other—renders mankind unable to account for the transcendencies of human action.
The soul is the form of the body and not indifferently placed in materiality, thus the body’s sexuality externalizes the soul as the soul informs the body. Each is the perfection and realization of the other. Materiality is never purely
material, biology is never purely
biological, as nature is never pure
nature. Embodiment—sexual embodiment—is always a spiritual affair. The moment we accept that the soul is something sexless, implanted in the body, we cannot approach what it means to be man or woman. In a way, this would mean returning to the Platonic impasse where soul and body do not equal the person but where only soul is the person. If the soul is the actualizing principle of the body that allows embodiment to go from potentiality to actuality, if the soul itself is not actually female or male, then it could not actualize the sexual identity of that tiny cell in the womb, and beyond the womb, as it grows into its personhood. The mustard seed may grow into a sturdy tree, but it cannot become a person. In a similar manner, a sexless soul may hypothetically produce a sentient being, but it would not have the actuality to actualize the potential for a man or woman. Sexual difference is thus an intrinsic component in the acting existence of a person’s nature.
Each person is unique and unrepeatable only because there exists a stable foundation where the soul and body are co-parts intended only for union, never for separation. In one sense defining a woman and man appears thoughtlessly obvious. In another and truer sense, it takes a lifetime and more to understand what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. If we damage our entrance into nature through gender assignment surgeries, abortion, contraception, and drugs, how can we expect to know what a woman or man is? There is grace, there is always grace but grace perfects
nature and nature must be present to perfect, and not so willfully wounded it freely renders itself unfit for that grace. Grace is not a magic trick. The attempted destruction of sexual difference has vast implications, as potentially destroying the natural ground needed for grace to perfect nature, precisely because the Delphic command to “know thyself” is terribly obscured. The biological can never be separated from the spiritual. A longer way was indeed assigned to us to achieve our beatitude; mutilating our sex is obfuscating access to our nature and deforming that way into a potential dead-end. The revelation of the feminine and masculine soul begins and remains within our carnality. The signatory nature of sexually dimorphic bodies informs and encourages us to enter the ever-deepening mysteries of womanhood and manhood.
In man and woman we are confronted with two fundamental types of mankind, with their specific values, with their specific missions, and with their specific supplementary gifts.
—Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man, Woman, and the Meaning of Love
