It's Her Fault: The Feminist Roots of Transgenderism

What Gender “Is”

To know what to do with something one has to know first what it is. I take this to be true, also, of "Gender." But "Gender" isn't anything. 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" and, subjectively, as "happiness." Moreover, to have a nature is to have it by virtue of being born, or generated, 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 give it 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. Gender is against generation, the meaning hiding in the very term it illicitly takes for itself.

Why? Because to be sexuate is to be caught up and enmeshed in a three-directional set of relations: (i) with our forebears, (ii) with the opposite sex, and (iii) with our future progeny. The fact that we are thus enmeshed, prior to all choice, runs up against the idea of freedom which shapes our public mentality, namely, the one "which prefers to have neither a whence nor a whither, to be neither from nor for, but be wholly at liberty," as Ratzinger put it.[1] Contrary to what these relations once were—sources of life—they are now perceived as "attacks on our freedom." We must, therefore, get out from under nature, in its most pregnant sense. It must be our "Ground Zero."

This is exactly what we are doing now (excluding federal agencies, for the moment). Moving forward, we have moved backwards, or downwards, toward 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, currently a professor at the University of Arizona, wrote in what is now a transgender classic "Performing Transgender Rage": "The transexual 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.

Remote Cause: "Original Sin"

The remote cause, of course, is the aboriginal catastrophe that disturbed the primordial state. In that state, the man and the woman found themselves to be creatures, not the Creator. In Genesis 1, unlike every other mythic account of human origins, this creaturely lot was "very good."

From the "Father of Lies," who suggested that the lot of the creature was "not good," that creatureliness is a precarious state set up by a "Master-Tyrant" who jealously hoards his goods, only to dole them out parsimoniously and arbitrarily. Not God, but like God, they stood on "on their own." They had their own existence and were responsible for it. They were rational, 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, abundant foods they could take for themselves or cultivate through their own work and intelligence, plants and trees which were "pleasant to the sight and good for food." "Eden" was a place of delight, and luxury, as the word signifies: it was also a place for tilling and keeping. The man and the woman were not passively waiting for their next meal: they were freely, intelligently, and creatively perfecting the world, a world handed over to them.

And yet, the world that is theirs is handed over to the man and the woman as a bestowal. The tree "at the center of the Garden"—according to Tradition—was meant to show them that the heart of everything they already were and had was saturated with a link back to the Giver of all good gifts.[3] 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 "plant-ness." They "yielded seed" and so 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.

Sin disturbed this. It began with a temptation from the "Father of Lies," who suggested that the lot of the creature was "not good," that creatureliness is a precarious state set up by a "Master-Tyrant" who jealously hoards his goods, only to dole them out parsimoniously and arbitrarily. The Tempter introduces this new, stingy, and unloving Creator into man's imagination by distorting the command "from that tree you shall not eat" (Gen 2:17) into one that suggests scarcity and starvation: "Did God say: 'You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" (Gen 3:2). The Tempter instills envy into human hearts, what Augustine calls the diabolical sin,[4] 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.

This is no garden-variety envy. It is not a matter of envying God for what he has out of fear that his having it will harm the creature or lessen what the creature has (as Aquinas defines the sin).[5] For the creature came to exist by virtue of what God has (or rather, is). And the creature had its existence in abundance, notwithstanding that God has it infinitely more. What the creature lacks is the mode in which God has what he has: he does not have being as God, as Subsisting Being, as Creator of all things. The Tree at the center represents that "limit." When they grasp at it, they are trying to be on the other side of the "tree," to have God's "lot" as Creator and Giver of all good gifts. They are "grasping at equality with God." Maximus the Confessor sums up what they did in its essence: they wanted to "be like God," "without God," instead of "like God with God, from God, in accordance with God."[6]

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, such as Milton's, in which Eve is a mere child who doesn't know any better. There are the gentlemanly (chivalrous) ones where Adam is at fault: where on earth was he? Why did he abdicate his responsibility?[7] In either case the blame is shifted. It is not really her fault. She's just a victim.

But Eve was no unschooled child. We see her in full knowledge of the commandment when she corrects the Tempter after he misrepresents it. Apparently, Adam had mediated the command to her with perfect clarity: "No, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, only not the one in the middle." I prefer the account that gives "equal opportunity" to women (in sin). It is that of Gertrude von Le Fort, in her masterpiece, The Eternal Woman.[8]

The Fall as initiated by the woman, says Le Fort, is a fall of the creature in the most complete and radical sense, because the woman bears and symbolizes the metaphysical significance of creatureliness, understood in its religious sense as surrender to God, as "awaiting in humble readiness." In grasping the fruit from the tree in the center of the garden, Eve is unfaithful to her own significance. As Le Fort writes, woman

is not only destined to surrender [Hingeben, literally, to "self-give"] but constitutes the very power of surrender that is in the cosmos [according to her very being and innermost meaning]. [W]oman's refusal denotes something demoniacal and is felt as such.[9]

And so, "[t]he woman who falls is more terrible than the man in his fall."[10]

This is to say that the "Devil's envy," enacted by Eve, is the refusal of the creaturely "lot": of having everything God has "from God and with God," not as God. The world that, as St. Paul says, has Satan for its God (see 2 Cor 4:4) does not deny God, for "the demons believe" in Him (James 2:19). Rather, it denies His communion with us as creatures, with man in the flesh.[11] The problem then is not the lack of abundance. Eve knows about the abundance ("no, we can eat from every tree but one"). It is the perceived scarcity at the level of mode, the "lot" of not being God "in the middle" of that abundance that is the object of Eve's diabolic envy.

What this means, says Le Fort, 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 that results from believing the Tempter's promise: "You shall be like unto God."[12] In Hesiod's Theogony, his account of the history of the gods, the "Great Mother," Gaia, is the first form of this idolatry: she is the ultimate refusal to acknowledge the transcendent source of the world and of its generative power. She is the mother of the living without "the help of the Lord" (Gen 4:1). Indeed, she gives birth to her own sexual partner "Sky, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, so that she would be the ever immovable seat for the blessed gods."[13]

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.[14]

Susan Stryker's "transgender rage" is avowedly just this:

[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.[15]

When woman is untethered from the "help of the Lord" she is also untethered from the given terms of things. She will no longer "let be" the life that is given her, allowing it to follow its "own mysterious [given] law of becoming."[16] As Christopher Dawson wrote, the "Great Mother" is a "barbaric and formidable deity who embodies the ruthless fecundity of nature, and [whose] rites are usually marked by licentiousness and cruelty."[17] Walter Ong too:

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).[18]

Worse, we need only think of the almost universal right given to mothers to decide whether or not to allow an unborn child to live or have it killed. "More total power over another is unthinkable."[19]

Here Le Fort refers to the "latter day" apocalyptic figure of the "great whore." Unfaithful to the meaning of the symbol she bears—that is, by refusing her "self-gift" 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.[20]

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 happen only 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. 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 we 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.[21] 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.

Radical Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir

This genuinely post-Christian "original sin" is what we are living with now: we are trying to get behind the way we were born, that three-directional state of enmeshment it imposes on us, and the various "lots" we have with respect to each other. 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.[22] But the application of post-Christian nihilism began to be applied to the sexuate condition in earnest with feminism, especially that of Simone de Beauvoir. Being an existentialist, de Beauvoir thought that to really exist as man, one had to found oneself.[23] Said Beauvoir: "The definition of man 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."[24] This meant that man had to "make oneself a lack of being"[25] through a "perpetual surpassing of what is given" in the direction of an "indefinitely open future."[26] What follows, is that "ethics" is definitely not the pursuit of happiness,[27] since happiness would subject freedom to an objective "end," giving it a course of action and measure of its success or lack thereof. On the contrary, freedom must aim only at itself.[28]

What, though, about the body? There is no place where our given nature (essence) makes itself as felt as with the body, particularly the woman's. Beauvoir had to deal with it and did so at the beginning of her book in a long chapter on reproductive biology. Her account is a nervous one. 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 a fascinating account of the latest discoveries in the field—the discovery of the egg, its positive and active contribution, and so on—she must "downgrade" the body. There is a clear "positive correlation" between greater intelligence and the greater individuality of the members of a species (something Beauvoir likes), and yet this greater intelligence and individuality also correspond to a greater involvement between the sexes and between parents and their young (something she does not like because of what it means for the human female, undoubtedly the most involved in childrearing.) The woman, she says, "is the most deeply alienated of all the female mammals."[29] Gestation "offers woman no benefit as an individual."[30] "At the moment of birth the species has taken possession of her."[31] One might have concluded that this phenomenon is evidence of greater intelligence and agency, in this case, in the formation of human beings and the making of culture. On the contrary, and against the overwhelming evidence she has just laid out, Beauvoir will "conclude" that biology (especially female biology) is just "data" over which society has laid its cultural values. (The very title of the chapter, "Biological Data," has prepared the reader for this conclusion.) 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.[32] In the end female biology is little more than what "humanity has made of the human female."[33] This downgrading of biology will serve the thesis of her book: the "one born" has "become a woman" only because her body has been subjected, forced into a culturally constructed corset setting her up for marriage and motherhood.[34] Here is the beginning of what would eventually be called the distinction between "sex" and "gender": "sex" is "mere biology"—hence "biological sex"—and "gender" is a "spiritual sex," an "identity," imposed on us by society, with no necessary link to "sex." "Gender" is something else.[35]

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, as between 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 human beings into men and women, and that our own biology demands this by the fact that we are born the most vulnerable of all among our animal peers. But the new "sex and gender" binary initiated by Beauvoir does not represent these distinctions. It undermines them. For being and becoming and nature and nurture are no longer distinctions within a unity, each one implicating the other, but two self-enclosed spheres attached arbitrarily and artificially.

With Beauvoir the negation of the prevenient order is not as radical as it has become today. It had not yet become nothing. Beauvoir never questions that the "one who becomes a woman" is a girl. Yet all the signification hitherto associated with the "girl" has been eviscerated from her. The "biological data" that makes a human being a girl means nothing, demands nothing, and has been philosophically "bracketed" from explaining the "stereotype" that a girl should marry a man and become a mother. The body has become almost nothing.

And yet, were the body allowed to "mean" what Beauvoir suspects it does mean she would likely have gone to war with it straightforwardly, like the more "Hobbesian" feminists such as Shulamith Firestone or today's Camille Paglia, who save time and skip directly to the source of the (alleged) problem (between the sexes): nature itself. Such thinkers call for the "elimination of the sex distinction itself," and for replacing natural reproduction "by one sex for the benefit of both" with artificial reproduction, through which "children can be born to both sexes equally, or, independently of either."[36] De Beauvoir is manifestly interested in these possibilities: she has a clear preference for the form of reproduction exhibited at the lowest rung of animal life (e.g., in bacteria, protozoa, annelid worms, mollusks, fish, toads, and frogs) for the obvious reason that it functions with the least amount of relation between the sexes—even none at all (i.e., asexual, hermaphroditic, fertilization outside the female body).[37] Her existentialist ethics is already set up for these possibilities since woman, like man, is "not a fixed reality but a becoming." "Her possibilities have [yet] to be defined."[38]

Post-Feminism: Judith Butler

Judith Butler calls herself a "post-feminist." The reason she keeps the title "feminist" is that, by decoupling "sex" from gender, Beauvoir opened up the path Butler will take. The reason she is "post-" is that she wants to go beyond Beauvoir, by removing any vestige of authority "sex" might have. What Beauvoir didn't see, Butler thinks, is that the "girl" who was made into a woman was already a cultural artifact. Beauvoir followed the naïve modern view that "gender" follows from "sex" as culture follows from nature, "gender" and culture "adding" its meanings to sex and nature, respectively. This is the "causal" view, where being precedes becoming. (The theory needs lots of scare quotes.) First there is a "sex"—a "girl" or a "boy." Then there is what sex has been made to become. On the contrary, says Butler, the very idea of there being something there first, something natural (a "sex," a "girl" or a "boy"), is produced by culture through "deployments of power." The "causes" are really effects. In one of her first articles, she relies on theatrical theory, where it is understood that an actor doesn't just "act" and "express" himself. Rather he enacts himself, bringing his persona into being by performing a "script."[39] So too in life off the stage. This is what she means by "gender" as a performance.

The repeated performance of a "script" brings the "sexual" persona into being, making it look as though "he" or "she" (again, scare quotes) was always there. Now we can perform ourselves into being with our own (actor-written) scripts, perform ourselves out from under our prescribed "lots."[40]

One might notice a certain return to the "political animal," according to which there is a mutual relation between nature and culture. Or, better, to the doctrine of creation which brings us into being. But here the whole "play" is a human artifact, 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," of being something. We are put in our place, "immobilized" and therefore "excluded" from other possibilities: being a girl excludes her becoming an "independent woman"—unmarried and motherless—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 play brings about "gender border control" with each in its own place, each with its own "lot." Which is not good.

Now "sex" has become nothing, without any residual (female) "data." It has been entirely explained away (the "bad guy" and his false narratives about "it" having been exposed.) There is now nothing—no substance—to which a certain course of action or "identity" must conform. Now we can perform ourselves into being, with our own (actor-written) scripts, and out from under our prescribed "lots."[41] 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."[42]

Many radical feminists today rail against this development. What on earth just happened? Is this the finale of the long fight for the very specific and hard-wired identity of woman, with its distinct claims, grievances, and (victim) status? Moreover, feminism fought for the being of woman, cleansed from any particular course of action or "becoming" which were dismissed with such labels of impurity as "sexist stereotypes" and "homophobia." As Helen Joyce, one of the contemporary (pejoratively named) "trans exclusionary radical feminists" said: women could finally "do whatever the hell they wanted."[43]

Now "sexism" and "homophobia" have returned, with women "being" men just because they like camo or are attracted to other women. But is this not the ultimate point of the trajectory feminism set up from the beginning? If the being of the woman is eviscerated of everything "woman" means and entails, what is so sacrosanct about the title "woman"?

The Man Who Calls Himself Andrea Long Chu

The last feminist in this account, then, is, properly considered, a man dressed as a woman: the man who calls himself "Andrea" Long Chu (book critic at the New York Magazine). Chu defends the "gender transitioning" of children, especially now, after it has come under such scrutiny and been "beaten back" culturally. In a review of Judith Butler's latest book Who's Afraid of Gender, Chu wrote a "moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies," under the title of "Freedom of Sex" (March 11, 2024).[44] In it he sought to take on the recent opposition to the medical "transitioning" of children, especially among those on the Left who have concerns about informed consent to what are life-changing treatments (not transitioning per se), many of whom were exiled onto Substack (like Matt Taibi, Andrew Sullivan, Helen Lewis, Abigail Schrier, and Bari Weiss.) They are called, pejoratively, "trans agnostic reactionary liberals" (TARL, for short).

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.[45]

"Sex is real," says Chu. But "so is global warming!" Don't accept it. Like Firestone and Paglia, Chu doesn't need to invent some "bad guy" who has pulled the wool over our eyes (and the eyes of millennia of ignorant women); doesn't need to expose falsehoods concerning sex in order to justify his rejection of it. It's the truth about sex that we shouldn't accept. Chu is a "bio-libertarian," in the sense that we are only free when we are free from the truth, or, in his words, when we are free to change it. And why? "Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread," he says, quoting Butler. There is something ancient about this. Eve rejects reality as she knows it, truly ("we may eat of all but one of trees"), not falsely. "In the middle" of that reality is its givenness, which limits and channels the possibilities of human nature and of the cosmos as a whole.

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 "hard cases" 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 to themselves, Chu's "moral case" is breathtakingly "bio-libertarian": "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." We might add: "if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they were definitely too young to consent to being born a boy or a girl." 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."[46]

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: "No one has the authority to know what counts as harm." Unlike Beauvoir and Butler[47] (and Mill before them), Chu rejects the paradigm of happiness as any sort of goal or measure of success, since freedom has been wholly untethered from (and crowned sovereign over) nature.[48] His article "My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy And It Shouldn't Have To" makes that clear.[49] But however unhappy all of it makes Chu, it is still promoted as the bold and brave good, precisely because one is resisting the prevenient natural order: a nihilistic asceticism, a perpetual Lent. Sex is now something once again, but only as Ground Zero, a site of perpetual destruction, a (real) thing to kill for the sake of our own freedom.

Conclusion

In The Silence of the Lambs a certain Hannibal Lector is in a maximum-security prison for cannibalism. A young, Ivy League detective—played by Jodie Foster—visits him, hoping that he might help her understand the serial killer she's pursuing: "Buffalo Bill," who is killing women so that he can get ahold of female parts to sew into a "suit" he can wear. The enlightened detective suggests: "He's got a psychological problem." Hannibal, who knows what it means to cancel the difference, counters: "No. It's covetousness."

The idea of "gender" is marked by envy from beginning to end. First, by the woman's envy for God, Who is not limited by "a tree in the middle of the garden" or by any created nature in being perfectly Who He Is. But Eve's desire to be "like God" immediately extends towards Adam: in Genesis, as in contemporary life, envy of God (usually figured and hidden away within a general hatred of limits) tends toward the envy of the other sex, whose very presence as another distinct way of having human nature is, once again, a sign of the givenness (and so limitedness) of one's own nature. Gender is to want to cancel the difference: to be like the other, without the other.