What Gender “Is”
To know what to do with something one has to first know what it is. This is also true, therefore, of “Gender.” But, ironically, “Gender” isn’t anything. But it’s more than that (if nothing can be increased). It’s the nothing against the something. “Gender” is nihilism’s atomic bomb against the prevenient natural order.
The prevenient natural order is our nature. To have a nature is to be a kind of thing, and, therefore, to have a determinate (objective) end known as “flourishing” or, subjectively, as “happiness.” Moreover, it is to be that nature by virtue of being born, as the word itself indicates (natus being the past participle of nasci, “to be born”). To have a nature is to have been given it, and to be poised to do so in turn.
“Gender” would destroy nature, then, in its strongest and most pregnant sense, by negating or neutralizing the evidence of our birth, namely, our sexuate condition, and thereby sterilizing the possibility of giving birth in turn. Gender is against generation, the meaning hiding in the very term it takes illicitly for itself.
Why does “Gender” want to do this? Because to be sexuate is to be caught up and enmeshed in a three-directional set of relations: those with our forebears, the opposite sex, and our future progeny. The fact that we are so enmeshed, and, especially, all prior to our choice, runs up against the idea of freedom that shapes the public mentality, the one which, as Ratzinger put it, “prefers to have neither a whence nor a whither, to be neither from nor for, but wholly at liberty.”[1] Contrary to what these relations once were—sources of life̶—they are now an “attack on our freedom.” We must, therefore, get out from under our nature; it must be our “Ground Zero.”
This is what we are doing now (excluding, for the moment, federal agencies). Moving forward, we have moved backwards, or downwards, towards the most basic thing. We are no longer asking what we can do with our bodies (sex without marriage, sex without children, sex without the opposite sex); we are asking what we are, if anything at all. The man who calls himself “Susan Stryker,” a professor at the University of Arizona, wrote in what is now a transgender classic, “Performing Transgender Rage”:
The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.
It is, he continues, a technological construction—channeling “rage and revenge” against the “hegemonic oppression” of nature itself.[2]
How did we get here? There are remote causes and recent ones.
Original Sin
The remote cause, of course, is that aboriginal catastrophe that disturbed the primordial state. In that state, the man and the woman found themselves to be creatures. That is, they were not the Creator. Yet, according to Genesis 1, unlike in all other accounts of the beginning, this creaturely lot was “very good.”
Not God, but like God, they stood on their own. They had their own existence and were responsible for it. They were rational and free, capable of forming and generating society, and through that society, of having dominion over the world. They were immortal. Moreover, they were surrounded by resources for their sustenance, apparently in abundance, which, for the most part, they could take for themselves: plants and trees which were “pleasant to the sight and good for food,” “Eden” being a place of delight and luxury,
as the word signifies. Adam was, moreover, capable of cultivating these plants through his own work and intelligence. All of this had been handed over
to them. They were not just passively waiting for their next order or to see when they might get their next meal.
If the being of the woman has been eviscerated of everything that “woman” means and entails, what is so sacrosanct about the title “woman”?
At the same time, all of this had been handed over to them as a bestowal. The tree “at the center of the Garden,” according to Tradition, was meant to show them that everything they already were and had was saturated with a link back to the Giver of all good gifts. This meant that everything they had been given had its own inner givenness with definite terms for its flourishing or happiness. The plants and trees had their own character, their own “treeness” and “plantness.” They “yielded seed;” they had “lives of their own,” so to speak. So too, with man. Receiving his being, he received a given kind of being: in the image of God he was created, male and female.
In short, “it was good” to be a creature. One was not God so that one could be with God. This was reflected on the horizontal plane as well. The male was not the female, and the female not the male so that they could be with each other.
Original Sin disturbed this situation. This began with the demonic temptation. The “Father of Lies” suggests that the lot of the creature was not good, that it was a precarious lot set up by a “Master-Tyrant” who jealously held his goods, only to dole them out parsimoniously and arbitrarily. The image of starvation is suggested when the Tempter distorts the command: “Did God say: ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” (Gen 3:2). Scripture tells us that what the Tempter instills into their hearts is envy. “Envy,” Augustine contends, “is the diabolical sin,”[3] since “through the devil’s envy sin entered the world” (Wis 2:24). Acting on envy then, the first couple commits
the original sin. They take the “apple” from the one tree off limits, the one at the center of the garden, representing their link to the Giver of all good gifts.”
The original envy was no garden variety envy; for it was not a matter of envying God for what he had for fear that his having it would harm the creature or lessen what the creature had (as Aquinas defines envy).[4] For the creature came to exist by virtue of what God had (or, rather, is). And it had it in abundance, notwithstanding that God had it infinitely more. It was a matter of not having what they had in the mode in which God had what He had, namely, as God, as being Being (Subsisting Being), then as Creator of what they had (and were). The Tree at the center represented that. When they grasped at it, they were acting out of envy of God’s “lot” as Creator and Giver of all good gifts, on the other side of and “in the middle” of their abundance. They were “grasping at equality with God.” Maximus the Confessor summed up what they did in its essence: they wanted to “be like God” “without God,”[5] instead of “like God with God, from God, in accordance with God.”
It is worth noting that it is Eve—not “the first couple”—who takes the fruit of the Tree in the middle of the garden. There are patronizing accounts of this, where Eve is a mere child who didn’t know any better. There are gentlemanly (chivalrous) ones where Adam is at fault (on account of his absence). In either case the blame is shifted. It is not Eve’s fault. She’s a victim. But Eve was no un-schooled child. In fact, she is depicted as having full knowledge of the commandment when she corrects the Tempter after he misrepresents it. (Adam had told her about it, and well, apparently.) “No, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, only not the one in the middle.” That the Biblical account gives “equal opportunity” to women (in intelligence and sin) is something that Gertrud von Le Fort fully appreciated in her masterpiece, The Eternal Woman.[6]
In The Eternal Woman, Le Fort writes that the Fall, as initiated by the woman, is a fall of the creature in the most complete and radical sense, because the woman bears, as symbol, the metaphysical significance of creatureliness, understood in its religious sense, as surrender to God “awaiting in humble readiness.” In taking the fruit from the tree in the center of the garden, Eve is unfaithful to that significance. Moreover, because “she is not only destined to surrender but constitutes the very power of surrender that is in the cosmos [according to her very being, and her innermost meaning] … woman’s refusal denotes something demoniacal and is felt as such.” “The woman who falls is more terrible than the man in his fall.”[7]
This is to say that the “Devil’s envy” enacted by Eve is the refusal of the creaturely “lot,” that is, of having everything God has “from God and with God,” not as God. As St. Paul says, “The world that has Satan for its God” (2 Cor 4:4) is not simply a world that denies God—for even the demons believe [in him] (Jas 2:19) . It is rather a world that denies God’s communion with us as creatures, as flesh, as St. Paul says.[8] The problem is not the lack of abundance. Eve knows about the abundance (“No, we can eat from every tree but one.”). It is the “lot” of having that abundance as a creature that chafes.
What this means, Le Fort explains, is that the Fall is not really the creature falling earthward. It is rather a descent away from the earth, from creatureliness in its religious sense, that is, as the not-God from and with God. It is a move towards self-divinization and idolatry as a result of the Tempter’s promise: “You shall be like unto God.”[9] According to Hesiod’s account of the history of the gods, the “Great Mother” is the first form of this. The Great Mother is a projection of the refusal to acknowledge a transcendent source of the world’s generative power. She is the mother of the living without “the help of the Lord.” In that sense it is a stepping out from a communion with the Giver of all good things. Here is where Le Fort addresses the “chivalrous account” which depends on the woman being the “weaker sex.”
It is entirely false to say that Eve fell because she was the weaker. Whenever woman has been suppressed, it was never because she was weak, but because she was recognized and feared as having power, and with reason; for at the moment when [the woman] no longer desires surrender but seeks self-glorification, a catastrophe is bound to ensue. The dark narrative of the struggle over the tumbling matriarchate still quivers with the fear of woman’s power. The most profound surrender has as its opposite the possibility of utter refusal, and this is the negative side of the metaphysical mystery of woman. . . . . In the picture of Medusa and that of the Furies the ancient saga also reflects the horror inspired by the woman who has fallen.[10]
Susan Stryker’s “transgender rage” is exactly this, avowedly.
[W]e have done the hard work of constituting ourselves on our own terms, against the natural order. Though we forego the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth.[11]
When woman is untethered from the “help of the Lord,” she is also untethered from the given terms of things. She no longer “lets be” the life that is given her, allowing it to follow its “own mysterious [given] law of becoming.”[12] She is, as Christopher Dawson wrote, a “barbaric and formidable deity who embodies the ruthless fecundity of nature, and [whose] rites are usually marked by licentiousness and cruelty.”[13]
She is characteristically possessive. As Walter Ong wrote:
Possessiveness can be selfish and kill, and possessiveness relates particularly to woman, as in the widespread mythological symbol of the impersonal, possessive, unwittingly selfish Great Mother, whose children are for her not persons but possessions that she consumes or smothers (envelopes to the point of death).[14]
Worse, we need only think of the almost universal right given to mothers to decide whether to allow an unborn child to live or to have it killed. “More total power over another is unthinkable.”[15]
Here Le Fort refers us to the “latter days’” apocalyptic figure of the “great whore.” Unfaithful to the meaning of the symbol she bears—refusing her surrender to God—this diabolical figure dominates the man through seduction and stops up the sources of life.
She serves but as a thing, and the thing avenges itself through domination. Over the man who has fallen under the domination of dark forces she rises triumphantly, the enslaver of his passions. The whore as utter unfruitfulness denotes the image of death. As mistress she is the rule of utter destruction.[16]
Man, too, dominates in his way—“knowledge through power” and all that. We have heard about it relentlessly. But the reduction of all creaturely things to “raw matter” can only happen if the link with the Creator has been severed. This seems to be “on the woman” who refused to be, for both of them, the “handmaid of the Lord.”
Proximate Causes: Post-Christian Nihilism
(Original) Sin becomes clearer and more radical with the advent of Christianity, for now that the Creator is known to be the creator of everything—there being nothing presupposed—opposition to Him must be opposition to the prevenient natural order as such (not only to what one should do with it). As David Bentley Hart has said, eloquently, once everything is Christ’s there is no place to go to oppose him.[17] There is nowhere else, no something else, no other god, in some other civilization to go to. We must get behind everything, to “the nothing,” to start over. This genuinely post-Christian “original sin” is what we are living with now. We are trying to get behind the way we were born, and the various “lots” this imposes on us.
Radical Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir
For centuries, since the Early Modern Period, society has been fleeing nature, in the strongest and most pregnant sense, through its re-conception of the natural order and the political nature of man.[18] But the application of post-Christian nihilism began to be applied in earnest to the sexuate condition with feminism, especially that of Simone de Beauvoir (antecedents in earlier feminism not to be excluded). Being an existentialist, Beauvoir thought that to really exist as man, one had to found oneself.[19] “The definition of man,” Beauvoir declared, “is that he is a being who is not given, who makes himself what he is . . . man is not a natural species: he is an historical idea.”[20] This meant that man had to stand against the given and “make [himself] a lack of being” through a “perpetual surpassing of what is
given” in the direction of an “indefinitely open future.”[21] What follows is that “ethics” is definitely not the pursuit of happiness, since happiness subjects freedom to an objective “end,” giving it a course of action and measure of its success or lack thereof. On the contrary, freedom aims only at itself.[22]
What, though, about the body? There is no place where our given nature (essence) makes itself as palpably felt as with the body, particularly for the woman. Beauvoir had to deal with this and deal with it she did at the beginning of her book, in a long chapter on reproductive biology. Her account is a nervous one, because while the facts she lays out suggest clear meanings about what a male or female is,
she must deprive those meanings of any authority concerning a specific course of action. Notwithstanding, then, a fascinating account of the latest discoveries in the field of biology—the discovery of the egg, its positive and active contribution, and so on—everything is downgraded to the merely “factic,” since there is a clear link between greater intelligence and individuality (something she likes) and greater involvement between the sexes and between them and their young (something she doesn’t like), and because of what this all means for the human female. Thus, she will “conclude” at the end of the chapter—against the overwhelming evidence she has just laid out—that biology, especially female biology, is just “data” on which, over time, society has overlaid its cultural values. (The very title of the chapter, “Biological Data,” of course, would have already prepared the reader.) If society values the child, then the woman will be valued as a mother; and the “data” will be used to confirm it. Absent such a societal value, the “data” will not.[23] In the end, female biology is little more than what “humanity has made of the human female.”[24] This downgrading of biology will serve the thesis of the book, which is to show that the “one born”
has “become a woman” only because her body has been subjected, forced, that is, into a culturally constructed corset, setting her up for marriage and motherhood.[25]
Here is the beginning of what would eventually be called the “sex-gender” distinction, where “sex” is “mere biology” (or “biological sex”) and “gender” is an “identity” (or “spiritual sex”), one imposed on us by society, with no necessary link to “sex.” “Gender” is something else.[26] Naturally, since the human being is a rational and political animal, there are distinctions to be made: between being born a girl and becoming a woman, and being born a boy and becoming a man through personal (free) appropriation—self-possession and self-communication—and formation within the tradition and customs of one’s culture. (We can even say that culture “turns us into” human beings and into men and women, and that our own biology demands this by the fact that we are born the most vulnerable among all our animal peers.) But the new “sex and gender” binary, initiated by Beauvoir, does not represent these distinctions. It undermines them. For the distinctions between nature and person, and nature and culture (or nurture) are no longer distinctions within a unity—each one implicating the other—but two self-enclosed spheres attached arbitrarily and artificially. (This will be true when, eventually, “gender” is something “deeply felt” or chosen.)
With Beauvoir, the negation of the prevenient order is not as radical as it will become later. It has not yet become nothing. Beauvoir never doubts that the “one
who becomes a woman” is a girl. At the same time, she has eviscerated all the meaning hitherto associated with what a “girl” is, such that there is no reason on the side of the “biological data” that suggests the “stereotype” that a girl should marry a man and become a mother. It has become almost nothing.
And yet, because Beauvoir knows there are good reasons on the side of the “biological data” that a girl is ordered to marriage and motherhood, one can see in her elements of the more “Hobbesian” feminists like the infamous Shulamith Firestone, or today’s Camille Paglia, who save time and go right to the source of the (alleged) problem (between the sexes)—nature itself—by calling for the “elimination of the sex distinction itself” and replacing natural reproduction “by one sex for the benefit of both” with artificial reproduction, “where children can be born to both sexes equally, or, independently of either.”[27] Beauvoir is manifestly interested in these possibilities with her clear preference for the reproduction at the lowest rung of animal life (e.g., in bacteria, protozoa, annelid worms, mollusks, fish, toads, and frogs) for the obvious reason that there, there is the least amount of relation between the sexes—even none at all (i.e., asexual, hermaphroditic fertilization outside the female body).[28]
Her existentialist ethics are already set up for these possibilities. If woman, like man, is “not a fixed reality but a becoming …. her possibilities have [yet] to be defined.”[29]
Post-Feminism: Judith Butler
Judith Butler calls herself a “post-feminist.” The first reason is that she owes her thinking to the feminist decoupling of “sex” from “gender.” The second reason is that she takes it further, by removing any remaining vestige of authority “sex” might have. What Beauvoir didn’t see, according to Butler, is that the one who becomes a woman, is already a cultural artifact. Beauvoir accepted the naïve modern view that gender followed from sex as culture followed
from nature, gender and culture adding its meanings to nature and sex. This is what Butler calls the “causal” view, where being precedes becoming, or where a sex—a girl or a boy—precedes what that sex has been made to become, a woman or a man, respectively. On the contrary, says Butler, the so-called “causes” like “nature,” “sex,” “girl,” or “boy,” are really all effects. (The theory needs a lot of scare quotes.) The very idea that they are given is the (deceptive) product of culture. In one of her first articles, she turns to theatrical theory, where it is understood that an actor doesn’t just “act,” or “express” himself. Rather he enacts himself, bringing his persona into being, by performing a “script.”[30]
So it is also in real life, off the stage, argues Butler. “Gender” is a repeated performance of a “script” which brings the “’sexed’” persona into being, making it look as though “’he’” or “’she’” (again, scare quotes) were always there. It’s a theatrical trick, or a scam when we’re outside the theatre.
One might notice a certain return to the idea of the political animal according to which there is a mutual relation between nature and culture (the city). Or, better, the doctrine of creation according to which God brings us into being by speaking. But in Butler’s mind the whole “play” is a malicious “deployment of power” in which we are given “socially compelled” scripts which place us in a “matrix of intelligibility” with the “appearance of substance,” so that we can be put in our place, “immobilized,” and therefore “excluded” from other possibilities. Just as being a girl excludes her from becoming an “independent woman,” and being a man excludes him from turning sexually to another man, so, too, being a sex excludes the girl from being a boy, and the boy from being a girl. The sinister “play” is just “gender border control” which keeps each in its own place with its own “lot,” which is not good.
Now “sex” has become nothing, without any residual (female) “data.” It has been entirely explained away. There is now nothing to which a certain course of action or “identity” must conform. Now we can perform ourselves into being, with our own (actor-written) scripts, out from under our prescribed “lots.”[31] Butler is conscious of translating, at the level of sexual difference, Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming . . . the deed is everything.”[32]
Many radical feminists rail against this recent development. “What on earth has just happened?” they ask. All their hard-won victories have just disappeared. They had fought not for people who call themselves “women,” but for women, with their distinct claims, grievances, and (victim) status. Moreover, they have fought for the being of those same women, cleansed from any particular course of action (or “becoming”). One of these (pejoratively named) “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” (TERFS) writes that women could finally “do whatever the hell they wanted.”[33] But now “sexism” and “homophobia” have returned, with women “being” men just because they like camo, or are attracted to other women.
But how is this not just the ultimate point of the trajectory radical feminists themselves set up? If the being of the woman has been eviscerated of everything that “woman” means and entails, what is so sacrosanct about the title “woman”?
The Man Who Calls Himself Andrea Lu Chu
It seems right, then, that the last feminist in this account is a man who calls himself “Andrea” Lu Chu (book critic at New York Magazine). In his review of Judith Butler’s new book Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Chu makes a “moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies” under the title of “Freedom of Sex” (March 11, 2024).[34] In it he takes on the recent, and quite successful, opposition to the medical “transitioning” of children by journalists on the Left
who were concerned chiefly about informed consent to what are life-changing treatments, like Jesse Singal, Matthew Yglesias, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Helen Lewis, Bari Weiss, all of whom are exiled on Substack. These he calls, pejoratively, the “Trans Agnostic Reactionary Liberals” (TARLS).
Parting from Butler, who wished away the “biological data” as the effect of “deployments of power,” Chu thinks that there might be something to the older view, that sex is real, after all, and that “gender norms” might in fact follow from it.
It is difficult to explain why the [above] gender norm would exist in the first place if it were not for the actual fact of reproduction, which at this point in the descent of man still requires very specific biological conditions in order to occur, including the presence of at least one of each gamete type (sperm and ova), a well-functioning uterus, and a reasonably sound endocrine system. This is sex as biological capacity; in this sense, it is no less of a material resource than water or wheat. Every human society invested in perpetuating itself—which is to say, every society—has regulated the production, distribution, and use of biological sex. This is more than the sex-based division of labor (hunter-gatherers and all that). It is the actual division of sex.[35]
“Sex is real,” says Chu. But “so is global warming!” “Don’t accept it.” Like Firestone and Paglia, Chu doesn’t need a “bad guy” pulling the wool over our eyes with falsehoods about the real (sex) to justify our non-acceptance of it. It’s the truth about the real that we shouldn’t accept. Chu is a “bio-libertarian,” in the sense that we are only free when we are from the truth, or, free to change it. Why? Because: “Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.” There is something ancient about Chu’s view. Eve, again, rejects reality as she knows it, truly (“We may eat of all but one of trees”), not falsely. Why? because “in the middle” of that reality is its givenness, which constrains the possibilities.
All of this means that for Chu, unlike Butler who has little interest in “sex changes” (there being nothing to change from and into), sex changes must be on the table. And for children especially! These are not a “hard case” for him. To the objection of the “Trans Agnostic Reactionary Left,” who are worried about the freedom of consent for children incapable of understanding what they are doing, the “moral case” is breathtaking: “If children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right.” For Chu, the possibility of sex changes is the weapon against everything we have not consented to, beginning with our birth, and the “lot” it assigns us. With sex changes on the table, we can now “ask” to be born, at least “in a certain way.”[36]
What, then, about regret? Responding to all the “compassion mongering” by people “peddling bigotry in the guise of sympathetic concern” about “bad outcomes,” he answers: “Where there is freedom there will always be regret…and like us, children also have the right to the hazards of their own free will. … They may regret the outcome of a decision, but it is a very different thing to regret the freedom to decide.” It is enough that the sex change is wanted. The medical maxim “First, do no harm” is off the table for Chu. “No one has the authority to know what counts as harm.”
Like the others, Beauvoir and Butler[37] (and Mill before them), there can be no question of happiness as a measure of success, since freedom has been wholly untethered from, and sovereign over, nature.[38] His article “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy and It Shouldn’t Have To”[39] makes that clear. But however bad it feels, it is good, because one is resisting the prevenient natural order. It’s a kind of nihilistic asceticism, a perpetual Lent. Sex now is something, but as Ground Zero.
Conclusion
The idea of “Gender” is marked by envy from beginning to end, in the primordial sense, not for want of something that one doesn’t have—for each of the sexes has the full complement of human nature—but for want of his distinct way of having it. It is to want to cancel the difference: to be like the other, without the other.
In The Silence of the Lambs, a certain Hanibal Lector is in a maximum-security prison for cannibalism. A young, smart Ivy League detective played by Jodie Foster visits him so that he might help her understand the serial killer she’s pursuing. He’s killing women so that he can get a hold of female parts to sew together into a “suit” he can wear. The young, enlightened detective suggests: “He’s got a psychological problem.” Hannibal, who knows what it means to cancel the difference, counters: “No. It’s covetousness.”
[1] Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” Communio: International Catholic Review 23, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 27.
[2] Susan Stryker, “Performing Transgender Rage,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 245, 251.
[3] St. Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus 4. 8: PL40, 315–16.
[4] ST, II-II, 36.1.
[5] St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua: PG 91, 1156C.
[6] Gertrud von Le Fort, The Eternal Woman, trans. M. C. Buehrle (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010). After reading Le Fort’s book, Edith Stein said of it: “I find that, actually, everything else that has been written about woman in the past decades is now superfluous” (Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916–1942,
trans. Josephine Koeppel, OCD (Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1993), 196–97.
[7] The Eternal Woman, 13–14.
[8] “[M]any deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh; such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist” (2 John 7). See also 1 John 2:18–22 where the antichrist is associated with leaving behind the “flesh” of the apostolic Church.
[9] The Eternal Woman, 12–13.
[10] Le Fort continues: “Even the belief in witches during Christian centuries, however tragically it may have erred in individual cases, signifies in its deeper implications the utter rightness of the aversion against the woman who has become unfaithful to her metaphysical destiny” (The Eternal Woman, 13).
[11] “Performing Transgender Rage,” 254.
[12] Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 285.
[13] Christopher Dawson, Enquiries into Religion and Culture (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 226.
[14] Walter Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 100.
[15] Fighting for Life, 70.
[16] The Eternal Woman, 15.
[17] David Bentley Hart, “Christ and Nothing,” First Things (October 1, 2003): “But what is the consequence, then, when Christianity, as a living historical force, recedes? We have no need to speculate, as it happens; modernity speaks for itself: with the withdrawal of Christian culture, all the glories of the ancient world that it baptized and redeemed have perished with it in the general cataclysm. Christianity is the midwife of nihilism, not because it is itself nihilistic, but because it is too powerful in its embrace of the world and all of the world’s mystery and beauty; and so to reject Christianity now is, of necessity, to reject everything except the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity. . .. Our sin makes us feeble and craven, and we long to flee from the liberty of the sons of God; but where now can we go? Everything is Christ’s.”
[18] On the relation between the early-modern departure from natural law and the current thinking about sex, see Pierre Manant, Natural Law and Human Rights: Towards a Recovery of Practical Reason, trans. R. C. Hancock, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). See especially Chapter 1, “Why Natural Law Matters,” 1–18, and the Appendix, “Recovering Law’s Intelligence,” 119–30).
[19] Ethics of Ambiguity, 25.
[20] The Second Sex, 45.
[21] Ethics of Ambiguity, 45; Second Sex, 16.
[22] Second Sex, 17; The Ethics of Ambiguity, 141.
[23] The Second Sex, 46–48.
[24] The Second Sex, 48.
[25] The Second Sex, 47.
[26] On the recent use of the two terms and their eventual bifurcation, see David Haig, “The Inexorable Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex: Social Change in Academic Titles, 1945–2001,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 22, no. 2 (April 2004): 87–96.
[27] Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York City: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 11. See also Paglia, Sexual Personae (London: Yale University Press, 1990), 139.
[28] Beauvoir notes: “The phenomena of asexual multiplication and parthenogenesis are neither more nor less fundamental than those of sexual reproduction” (The Second Sex, 26). One is reminded of the process of “bokanovskification” in the “Fertilizing Rooms” of Brave New World where scores of identical individuals are produced through the budding of one fertilized ovum (5th ed., 1932 [New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1965], 103).
[29] The Second Sex, 45.
[30] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519–31.
[31] For Butler, the question is more complicated than this, since for her there can be no “pre-discursive” substance or subject that (who) stands neutrally outside relations of power. Thus the “subject” (her scare quotes) is always constituted in the interplay of both having been constituted, and the rejection of that constitution. It is constituted in a negative relation. See Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York City: Routledge, 1992), 9. See also Butler, Gender Trouble (New York City: Routledge, 1990), 148–49.
[32] Butler, Gender Trouble, 34 (see also 195).
[33] See my review of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce: “A Friendly Critique of Helen Joyce’s Trans: Why Radical Feminists Have to Go Further,” Public Discourse (September 8, 2022).
[34] “Freedom of Sex,” New York Magazine (March 11, 2024).
[35] “Freedom of Sex.”
[36] We can curse ourselves as Job did—“Perish the day on which I was born, the night when they said, ‘This child is a boy!’”—while staying alive (Job 3:3–1).
[37] For Butler, this means that one must never land in a “gender” lest one become “fixed and immobile.” One must remain fluid, in a state of amorphous nonidentity. See Gender Trouble, 16–25 and Bodies that Matter, 78–79. Commenting on the relation between Butler’s negative conception of agency and the fluidity of the subject (agent), Louis McNay notes that the “model of agency as displacement tends to fetishize the marginal and celebrates, in an unqualified fashion, the notion of nonidentity. The spontaneous and fluid politics of the performative is implicitly aligned with the amorphous. ... Nonidentity is the condition of possibility of all identity” (“Subject, Psyche, and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler,” in Theory, Culture, and Society 16, no. 2 [April 1999], 189).
[38] F. Slade, “John Stuart Mill’s Deontological Hedonism,” in Maritain and America, eds. C. Cullen and J. A. Clair (American Maritain Association, 2009), 86.
[39] New York Times (November 24, 2018).
