Transcript for Episode 79

Grant: My guest today is Abigail Favale. She's Professor of the Practice at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame. She writes extensively on women, feminism and gender from a Catholic perspective. Her most recent book, Genesis of Gender, was an excellent treatment of these topics. My wife and I both read it recently with great interest.

Welcome to the podcast.

Abigail: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Grant: Yeah. We'll go ahead and get started right at the beginning.

What is the difference between paradigm and ideology?

Abigail: Hmm. That's a good question. That's a good question because in the book, I specifically chose to use the word or the phrase “gender paradigm” instead of “gender ideology.” And part of that was a rhetorical strategy because I think as soon as you use the term gender ideology, then it's like a dog whistle, like a political dog whistle, a little bit, right? You're signaling a certain tribal affiliation. And I didn't want to do that. I wanted to hopefully have some readers who are maybe in the more messy middle on this conversation. So that's one reason why I use the word “paradigm.”

But I think one reason that “paradigm” is more helpful is that I think that even people who aren't consciously ideologically committed to the premises of the gender paradigm, we're all nonetheless influenced by it. So I think a lot of especially young people, they're not necessarily idealogues, although you definitely have idealogues, but they're swept up in this trend and borrowing some terms and some labels and some categories for interpreting their own experience. And some of them do, I think, get ideologically captured and really swept up in it.

But I think there's a lot of people – and I've talked to people who identify as trans; I've talked to people who engage with a gender paradigm – but who don't necessarily buy into all the ideological commitments. And so I thought it would be helpful to make a distinction there. Because I do think that there's a dominant cultural framework that is shaping how we interpret our experiences of gender, and that for some people that becomes an ideological commitment. For some people it's more like the water they're swimming in. 

Grant: So what did you find thrilling or liberating as a young evangelical about women’s/gender studies?

Abigail: Well, someone actually talking about women for one thing in a serious way.

I grew up in small town, Mormon land, and as an evangelical Christian. And to be honest, I don't think I ever heard a sermon about a woman. I never saw a woman preach.

I had this NIV Student Study Bible that had all these “tracks” that you're supposed to, you know, you check off and you read. And the one that I read over and over and over was women in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. So I immersed myself in these stories because I was hungry for women's stories. And women's stories that were interesting and kind of weird. And I was interested in Old Testament women that were a little crazy. Like Jezebel, she's just the best – I still think she's probably the best villain ever in any kind of literary or historical genre. She's just amazing. But, I mean, in a bad way, in a nefarious way, in a villainous way.

So I was hungry for women's stories. I was hungry for a deeper exploration of what it means to be a woman. And I think part of that hunger was that I didn't really fit the narrow script that I was given about womanhood. And I have a lot of male-typical traits in some ways. And so I think that primed the question for me. Like, “Okay, I'm a girl. I'm fine with being a girl.” You know, the idea that I wasn't a girl wasn't really on the table, right? Which makes me wonder how I would be growing up now. But nonetheless, that wasn't a narrative I had access to back then. So I was like, “Okay, I'm a girl. I'm going to embrace it.” But yet I felt this sense that I needed to prove that being a girl was interesting and I could “keep up with the boys.”

And so when I got to college and began reading, initially, especially feminist biblical criticism, because as an evangelical, so much of the debates about women revolve around “How do you interpret this First Corinthians verse and this verse from Timothy?” And so that's where I started. And at first I thought, “Yes, this is amazing. This is exactly what I've been looking for. Finally, serious people are saying serious things about these questions I'm interested in.”

Grant: How do you think it would've changed your experience if evangelicals had a more elevated view of the Blessed Virgin?

Abigail: Oh, I love that question now.

Well, certainly, I can only speculate, but I think that would have changed things. One of the things that first attracted me to Catholicism was simply the iconography, the iconic presence of women in Catholic spaces, right? Because it was this wordless expression, but this display of the sacredness of being a woman and the goodness of being a woman and that having a power that's related to holiness, like a spiritual power, not this temporal understanding of power. And I wonder now how I would've grown up with that. You know, my kids – I'm raising my kids Catholic, and so I look at them and I think, “Wow, they have access to all this fullness.”

Because for a time I veered really hard into feminism, and then it was just like everything was about women. It was like, “Okay, I'm going to pray to God as Mother.” It was almost this goddess worship, strange world where I did basically the inverse of what I was experiencing, right?

Because I think in the evangelical context in which I grew up, it was like all the feminine aspects of Christianity were lopped off. And then with that imbalance, then these beautiful masculine metaphors, they become too loud or too dominant, because there's no counterbalance. And I kind of veered directly in the opposite direction where I looked at with suspicion on any masculine language related to Christianity, right?

So within Catholicism, I feel like I've been able to enter this world where both of those notes, so to speak, the note of the feminine, the note of the masculine are being sung and there's this beautiful harmony to it.

So I think that – I don't know. I can only speculate, but I would think I would've loved that, you know? And, I've never had any hangups about Mary, aside from a tiny bit of scrupulosity about how exactly I should pray to Mary initially, when I became Catholic. But, if anything, it felt like it was something I was hungry for.

Grant: Yeah. One thing that really surprised my wife before and after our conversion to Catholicism was the elevated view of women, particularly in the tradition. She got very interested in Catherine of Siena. And this whole idea that Catholicism is anti-woman: she went in expecting that and was so surprised with how untrue that is.

Abigail: Yeah, exactly.

So I mentioned being super into the biblical female characters in the Bible, but as an evangelical, you basically have the New Testament and your local church and that's the vision of Christian history that you're given. So I had no access to this amazing genealogy of the faith that - And again, at first I first encountered it in Anglican context. And Catherine of Siena, yeah, she was one of my first saints that I fell in love with, and it was so wonderful to be able to discover that genealogy that I'd never had access to.

Grant: In an early paper, I think it was in First Things that you wrote, you made the case that there's some creeping gnosticism within American evangelicalism or American evangelicals, especially vulnerable to some of the arguments within the gender paradigm, given that Late Gnosticism.

Abigail: Yes, I think that's absolutely true. So something that – ah, yeah, I have so many thoughts on this.

So what inspired that piece was my experience teaching an honors seminar to freshman at a Christian college. And almost all of our students were raised in the Church. And we spent that semester going through literature and theology and philosophy of the early Church and reading Scripture.

And I was just fascinated by the fact that some of them had not even really heard that there will be a resurrection of the body. And that idea freaked them out. And those that were familiar with it had interpreted it in such a way that it was almost like this ghost body that we will have. But there was just this undercurrent of suspicion toward the body, or very much this interpretation of the Pauline language of flesh and spirit in a literal way where you have, “the body is bad” and the spiritual component is good. And so it's wonderful. In that semester we would actually read Augustine's City of God, and he has this whole discourse on how people misinterpret Paul there. And that Paul's talking about flesh as in the “fallen man,” body and soul and spirit as the “spiritual man,” body and soul.

So I absolutely think that this denigration of the body that's present in evangelicalism, it does perhaps prime evangelicals to more readily accept the idea that your body could be wrong while you have this inner spiritual self that speaks the truth about who you are.

And I remember when I was in graduate school, when I was writing my dissertation. One of my things that I regret now is that, in my dissertation, I basically characterize Christian tradition as dualistic and denigrating of the body. And I spoke with a kind of authority that now I think I should not have had because I just thought, “Well, I was raised Christian, so I have this authority to be able to speak on Christianity.”

And Augustine was a villain, I guess, in that narrative. But I never actually read Augustine, right? I read feminist theologians talking about Augustine's dualism and his denigration of the body. And so I had this framework where I was like, “Feminist theory is this antidote to the dualism of Christianity that denigrates the body.” So it was so wild to actually encounter some of the Catholic intellectual tradition and to suddenly realize, “Oh wow, this is that story I'd been told and that I myself had told is not true.”

In fact, recently I was on a podcast with America Magazine, having this dialogue with a theologian who has different perspectives than I do on gender. And toward the end of the conversation, I was so fascinated where she actually just came out and said that she thinks the Catholic Church values the body too much. And I just, I thought that was such a fascinating moment because I was like, “Yeah, I'm actually glad you said that out loud because I think that's true.” I think that feminism has really gone down this road of Gnosticism, and I have lots of theories about that. But, I think it's true that Christian tradition, especially in Catholicism, safeguards the dignity of the body specifically in a way that almost every other philosophical and theoretical system has abandoned.

Grant: So I do want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the relationship between sex and gender. It seems to me that at its core, what you refer to as radical feminism, their biggest contribution was to show us that there's this performative nature of our sex bodies, right? That there are all sorts of socially mediated ways to express our sexed bodies in public. We seem to understand that sexed social roles are malleable across time and culture. That seems self-evident. So to me this seems rather uncontroversial, that there's some social expression of our sexed bodies that, again, is culturally conditioned, socially constructed.

So in what ways are radical feminists truly radical or not?

Abigail: Right. And it depends on what you mean by radical feminists, too, but…

I guess I would pick up here maybe to pick up this question with Judith Butler, where you have in the postmodern feminist theory – which is really where gender theory comes from, right? You can even just watch this shift happen in what women's studies departments are named. First we have “Women's Studies” departments in the seventies and eighties and nineties, and then in the late nineties there begins to be “Women's and Gender Studies” departments. And now there's been a shift where it's almost all “Gender Studies” departments. So I think a lot of that shift comes through postmodern feminist theory, postmodern gender theory.

So Judith Butler, what she's saying is radical because she's not just saying what you just said, which is that there are a lot of culturally conditioned expressions and norms associated with sex. What she's saying is that sex itself is a social construct, right? Even our tendency to categorize human beings in these two discreet sexes, that that's a social fiction rather than a matter of fact.

So essentially, or non-essentially, anti-essentially what she's saying – sorry, that's a little private joke because she's very anti-essentialist – but basically what Judith Butler is saying is that everything's gender, everything is the social construct, everything is just the performance. So sex itself, this ground of reality or facticity that Second-Wave Feminist Theory still held onto, she really had pulls the rug out and says, “No, everything is gender,” this socially compelled performance that we're all unconsciously doing, that creates the illusion of something real. And that I think is a radical, like anti-realist…

Grant: Unpack that formula a little bit. When I read that in one of your papers, I just, I can't wrap my head around the ways in which, like, for instance, my penis is a social construct. Give me a little more sense of what that means. It seems like that's one of the most “realist” things that I have.

Abigail: Yes, and I do my best to really give as much of a charitable interpretation as I can. But it's hard for me because I also don't really understand how you could make this argument.

But essentially what she's saying is: there's all kinds of physical differences among human beings. But we have chosen, of all these constellation of characteristics, to categorize people as male and female according to this, what she would probably say is an arbitrary kind of assemblage of characteristics. Why not characterize people according to hair color or eye color? Now, of course, the elephant in the room for me is, “Well, because those particular sets of difference are the only way that new human beings come into the world.” So that I feel like is the elephant in the room with Judith Butler.

And I think it's important to realize that her goal is to dismantle heteronormativity. So she really wants to deconstruct the idea that there's something natural about heterosexuality. That's her foremost goal. So it's this unquestioned premise. She's starting from the premise that there's nothing natural about heterosexuality. So she has to then somehow deconstruct sex. So it's not as if genitalia and the matter of genitalia themselves are socially constructed, but our naming of them and our associating those things with these broader categories of “maleness” and “femaleness,” of "man” and “woman.” That is the social construct.

Grant: So to what extent – I don't know if Judith Butler did this herself, or it was done later – to what extent did her thinking have to be adapted in order to make space for what we would call “trans women”? Did it have to be adapted or is it just in there?

Abigail: No, I had to be adapted. So then this is a really fascinating “transition,” haha, in gender theory, I think, that I'm still thinking about and trying to disentangle.

But, yes. Right. So, if you think about her most influential idea, this idea that gender is a performance and that sex itself is also that gendered performance or that social construct, that's not very hospitable to the narrative that I have this inner essence that is being expressed when I perform my gender in this particular way. So there's a certain transgender narrative, “I'm born in the wrong body,” that is very essentialist and is, I guess, asserting a new realism on maybe a gnostic realism, right? And that really doesn't align with Butler, at least early Butler. So in her later works, she, I mean, the nice thing about being a postmodern is you can just really just hedge and duck and roll and then use some obscure language and get yourself back on the right side of history, which she does in her later work.

I guess what still intrigues me about this broader question is that there is now this constant equivocation that I see both in academic gender studies, but also in the popular versions of these debates about gender. And that is gender is talked about, in this Butlerian mode, as a social construct. That's kind of a cliché now: “Gender is a social construct.” You'll still see that in every sociology textbook, any gender studies textbook, you will see gender as a social construct. You'll see that sentence probably early on in the introductory chapter.

But then there's also this claim of gender identity theory, which is that gender is this internal sense of self, and increasingly that gender identity is being talked about as if it's pre-social, and it could actually be at odds with someone's socialization. So a child who's been “assigned male at birth” quote unquote and who's been socialized as a male can suddenly realize that he's really a girl. Okay?

So that's a very different concept of what gender is, because that posits gender as this pre-social essence that's innate and that is so immutable that the body has to be all altered to accommodate it. And that seems to me very, almost at odds and contradictory with Butler's idea of a social construct.

Grant: Well, it's very essentialist.

Abigail: Yes, exactly. But here's what I think has happened, how the dominoes have fallen this way, at least the theoretical thread of it. Because this radical social constructionism around gender basically cleared the deck for a new kind of essentialism to be layered onto it and accepted.

And I think that's because people, human beings by nature are not anti-realists. I think Aristotle is right, that all human beings by nature desire to know. And we approach the world as if there is something real. We think about identity as if we do have selves that can be expressed and revealed to the world, right?

And so I think in this aporia basically, or this lacuna, I don't know what metaphor you want to use, where the meaning of sex was deconstructed, that made room for this new gender identity essentialism to take hold. And that's what's fascinating to me, because it's really taken hold in the institutions now. But the gender construct is still there. So there's this constant equivocation that you see.

Grant: Right.

I do want to take a little step back and talk historically. One thing that's always been difficult for me is that when I look at the term “gender,” there's clear biological and procreative etymology, right? Like we think of “genitals,” “generative,” “generation,” and birth, I think, if I can remember back to my Latin, is “genos.” Was the use of the term “gender” to refer to social roles wholly invented in the mid-20th century? If I talk to someone in say, 1840, and I said “gender,” would they assume that I was talking about their body, or has this been wholly invented, or is this a phrase that's transformed, or is it just, there was a break in the mid-20th century where we invented this thing called “gender” as a social construct?

Abigail: So the word “gender” was around, okay, prior to that. It was around  – it was a linguistic term. 

So words would have gender, like in certain language masculinity and femininity. And you could also see the phrase of, say, “the feminine gender” or “the masculine gender” because it was used more almost like a class or a category, like a group category. So you would have to add some, what I would now call a “gendered term” to “gender” to make it elicit that sense of masculinity or femininity.

So it was already there, a little bit, on the scene, but I think the linguistic shift of one, “having sex” come to be shorthand for sexual intercourse, and then that made it a more difficult word, a more tricky word to use. But then also I think in the mid-20th century, that's when you had John Money was the first one to really – the sexologists basically borrowed that term to begin to name basically that idea that there is a part of maleness and femaleness that can be culturally inculcated, right?

So for Simone de Beauvoir, for example, in The Second Sex, she's conceptually anticipating a lot of the ideas in gender theory, but she doesn't use the term “gender.” And I've been reading Edith Stein a lot and she doesn't really use the term “gender” too, but I did see it once in one of her essays. And again, it was in this generic sense where she's basically saying, “the feminine category,” right? So it's not laden with that meaning, but I do think it served as an alternate term, like a synonym of the category of sexed human beings.

Grant: So I've begun to wonder recently if this is even a useful term at all, anymore. Because it seems to imply, again, to your point, there's a sense in which it was a publicly enacted social role of the sexed body and now it's this internal felt feeling. Those seem to be different concepts and I wonder if we just need to say other things in order to express what we're actually expressing because it creates…

Where is the confusion part of? Is the confusion a bug or a feature of the paradigm? Would it be helpful to have new words? Do we continue using this word given the tremendous difficulty in sussing out what we mean by it?

Abigail: This is a great question and this is one that I am wrestling with and have been since I was writing the book. I'm actually writing a paper right now called “Is Gender Too Troubled?” because I want to think through this question. I actually don't really know where I'm going to land.

I do think it's a feature rather than a bug in the gender paradigm. Because one of the premises of the gender paradigm is this postmodern idea that all of reality is linguistically constructed. And if you really think that everything – knowledge, reality – is a linguistic and social construct, then it makes sense to use language in this uprooted way, where you can just change the meaning of words for whatever happens to be politically efficacious at the time. Where equivocation, where it's a problem for me, because I do think that Aristotle's principle of noncontradiction is true. Like it bothers me, so it's a bug. But in terms of the gender paradigm, I think it's a feature.

But, as for the question about whether it's useful to retain… In general, I think, in law, for example, it should be sex-based. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to… And when I can use the word “sex” in a way that's clear, I'll try to use sex-based language. 

But at the same time, because you're right, there's this entomological root to the word “gender” that I think could be reclaimed. And also in terms of just reaching a readership and the way people are thinking. People are using the term “gender” in the discourse right now, right? So in some ways I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to use this term because I want to engage with this conversation, but I'm going to make sure that I define it in the way that I'm using it.

But, one thing I've been thinking about actually is that – because here's something gender theory, whether it's the postmodern gender theory or even the gender identity theory, they will say that, “Oh, you shouldn't conflate sex and gender. They're totally different things.” And I'm kind of like, “No, actually you should conflate them.” So I actively encourage people to conflate sex and gender when they're proposing a positive understanding of gender rather than just maybe critiquing a concept of gender.

Grant: Coming back to this question of the relationship between feminism and trans feminism: Is there an ironic sense in which the trans woman, so a biological man who identifies as a trans woman, is the ideal modern woman in feminist ideology, completely liberated from fertility?

Abigail: I love this question. See, sometimes I get labeled as a turf. And it's frustrating to me because I'm like, “Clearly you haven't read my work.” Because one of the arguments I make actually is that trans-inclusive feminism is this offspring of radical feminism. So the idea of what it means to be a woman, and especially this pathologization of fertility and even the practice of seeing women's liberation as being about disrupting their normal physiology through technological means, that comes from feminism, that's downstream from feminism, right?

So I really see these two things, even though they're kind of engaged in this apocalyptic war right now, I really see one as downstream from the other. So in the book I talk about how feminist theory, at least since the second wave, has always been very anti-essentialist and very unwilling to hold onto the idea that there is a universal stable category “woman,” right? Because essentialism is this taboo in feminist thought. And so that creates this situation where “woman” is used as a term in a nominal way, as more of a category that's convenient for political organizing. And so I think that allergy to essentialism is one of the things that has led.

But I think probably more significantly I see the connection in the use of technology, especially exogenous hormones to disrupt normal physiology and that being seen as women's liberation. And so women, to be successful in society, to be fully formed human beings, they essentially need to go to war with their own bodies and use technology to control and resist their natural physiology. And that's exactly, I think, what the transgender movement is seeking to do, right? To completely liberate this self-determining will from the natural limits, especially when it comes to fertility and sexuality. So yeah, I think there's something to that argument, even though I know a lot of radical feminists would really not agree with me on that.

Grant: Right. So I posed the same question of Michael Hanby, in a podcast recently, who – I don't know if you know Michael, he's at Catholic U. and he's very interested in the question of technology and ontology, so, how does our access to technology sort of change the way we see the world, right?

What came first, the belief that someone with a penis could be a woman or the surgery necessary to make that possible – the surgery and the medication to make that possible? Did we have that belief in search of a technology? Did we have a technology that then changed our understanding of the essence of what it meant to be a woman?

Abigail: I think if I had to choose one, it would be the technology that makes it possible, or at least the technology that… Because it's not a promise that's fulfilled, right? But it's because I, one of the first people who attempted to transition, gosh, now I can't remember his original name, George something. But his female name was Lily Elba. And Elba tried to transition, and this was back in the pre-Nazi Germany when there was a lot of experimentation on gender and sexuality happening. And they tried to implant a uterus in Elba and that killed her. But one of the arguments I make in the book is that it's interesting to me that Elba thought she needed a uterus to be a real woman. Because fast forward to the fifties and the sixties, when we have the first transsexual celebrity, Christine Jorgenson, at that point we had developed the technology to manipulate hormones. And also we had become a contraceptive society. And so what transition looked like then had nothing to do with organ transplants or adopting the procreative potential of the opposite sex. It all had to do with secondary sex characteristics.

So one of the arguments I make is that contraception has shifted our cultural imagination about what it even means to be a woman and what it even means to be a man. So when we think about what it is to be a woman, we no longer think about this innate potential for gestation and motherhood. Now it's much more about boobs and high heels and a particular social role or behavior. It's like this aesthetic, it's like this avatar.

And I think that that shift was driven by technology. And I think that someone like Elba, even though this person might have been gender nonconforming or having some kind of what we would now call gender dysphoria, the possibility, the technological possibility, the fact that there was a clinic that said “We can offer this kind of surgery,” I think that's what really opened the door to this becoming possible. And then these other shifts, conceptual as well as technological, made that seem more and more plausible to the average person.

Grant: I want to talk a little bit about Tumblr. To what extent is trans feminism, at least as it's understood and manifested now, a product of Tumblr as opposed to academia? Did something enter Tumblr and emerge as something else? Or is it just a popularization and amplification of what was happening in the academy?

Abigail: I love that you asked me this question because I have been researching this exact question and I want to write about it because I think, of all the threads that I trace in the book, this shift from Butler, gender social construct, anti-realism to gender identity theory, realism is still something I'm like, “What's going on here? What changed?” Right?

I mean, I'm doing academic gender studies, and, let's say I finished my PhD in 2011. And this stuff wasn't nearly quite as prominent as it was. And then I remember distinctly, actually, once I was teaching gender theory, I remember a shift happening between teaching gender theory class spring of 2013 and teaching it next fall of 2014. And the shift was that previous to that fall 2014 class, all the jargon was introduced through me. I introduced the concept of heteronormativity and taught them what that meant, right?

But what I noticed in beginning in the fall of 2014, but then was really pronounced in 2016, was that students came into the classroom with their own jargon. So they were already familiar with “heteronormativity,” “gender queer,” some of these academic-y terms, but they brought this whole new jargon that I didn't understand. And I was like, “Wait, what are you talking about? Like ‘demisexual?’ Let me google this really quick.” And so one of the ways I've been researching this is through the Google Ngram, which is basically, you can – You know what I'm talking about? You can just search any – 

Grant: I know exactly what that is.

Abigail: It's so fun. You can search any word or phrase and it will show this graph of the frequency of that phrase being used in publications. And you can set the date range, right? And these are published works, so not online necessarily, but…

So what I started to do is I would search words that I knew originated in academic contexts, like “heteronormativity,” for example, or “gender queer.” So a lot of the queer theory terms originated in academia. And sure enough, you can see a graph that slowly goes higher through the nineties, and then into the 2000s begins to increase. But when you search a term like “non-binary,” right, which is not originally an academic term, or something like “agender” or “asexual,” then it's like a flat line until right about 2012 and then it just spikes up.

So I think that absolutely, not only is there this trickle down Judith Butler, like I argue in my book, but there's this other phenomenon of trickle up Tumblr. And so what I think happened – and again, I'm still trying to understand this phenomenon, but I think Tumblr was unique in social media platforms in that things like Facebook, for example, when they first originated, your social network was connected to your network in the real world. And oftentimes to connect with people on Facebook, you had to be part of the same institution.

But Tumblr was a place where you had people of all ages engaging over shared interests like fandoms. And so you had a lot of adult-teenager, adult-young person interaction, a lot of highly sexualized content that was unregulated, a lot of adult content. And I think it created this incubator for these obscure, anti-realist, gender theory terms to trickle down. But then they changed forms and proliferated into all these strange directions.

And Tumblr as this microblogging platform is very, it's all about hyper categorization too. So like any little post you write, it'll be tagged with 10 different labels. So I think there is this hyperlabeling of gender and all these Tumblr genders, so to speak, I think, that that really took off. And so now I would say my current hypothesis is that the current field of gender studies and the institutions that use gender theory are probably more shaped by 15-year-old girls on Tumblr in 2013 then they are shaped by high academic gender theory. That's my current hypothesis.

Grant: Interesting.

So in one of my classes – it's called “Public Policy and Human Flourishing” – one thing I'm talking a lot about is what's coming after liberalism, reading particularly Pat Deneen, I'm having them read Pat Deneen right now. And I make the case in class that capitalism and trans feminism are very closely linked phenomena, at least in the attempt for us to break down the bounds of nature. They cannot see it. They cannot see it because they hate capitalism, but they're also very much in favor of trans feminism.

How do you respond to that connection that I make between capitalism and trans feminism?

Abigail: I mean, I would say it's so clear that there's a connection there, that trans feminism is so highly influenced by consumerism, where the body itself becomes this consumerist object that you change and alter. And I think these desires are being created for things. There's a demand-and-supply thing happening. There's a demand that's being created for say, facial feminization surgery, and suddenly it's something you can buy. These body modifications, everything that you hate about yourself and want to change you can now change through buying those procedures. Of course there's also this effort to have those procedures covered by insurance or subsidized healthcare.

But I think when – like I'm working on a piece right now that's analyzing a presentation from last fall, the WPATH conference there, and it's about adolescent transition. But it's this group of clinicians and they're offering this new framework for adolescent assessment prior to gender transition.

And they explicitly say “This shouldn't be about identity. This should be about ‘embodiment goals.’” So you should ask the child, and they use the word “child,” you should ask the child. “So what do you like about how you're showing up in the world right now? What do you not like? What do you wish was different? No boobs? Less boobs? More hair? Less hair?” Like, I'm not even kidding. Like I'm going to title the piece “More Boob, Less Boob?” because it's such an evocative quote. But just listening to that I'm thinking, this is an ideation session between an adult clinician and a child about all the different kinds of body modifications that they could possibly get, and then that's packaged as medically necessary treatment. And then there's a hell of a lot of money that can be made off of that child, especially if there's thousands of them.

So, yeah, I mean this phenomenon is a money maker, and that’s –

Grant: Ivan Illich says the best technology is the one that both creates a problem and solves it in one fell swoop, and that seems to be applicable here.

Abigail: That's exactly what's happening. Yes.

Grant: I want you to opine a little bit about the future of the gender paradigm in the United States and across the world. I'm going to put it within the context of a couple of trends. First, the rising number of Latinos and Asians as a proportion of the U.S. population. The rise of China as the new pole of international influence. Softening of Europeans to the most radical forms of gender ideology; at least it seems to me that that's happening in Europe. So it seems to me that white progressive Americans’ sway and influence over culture and politics is likely to ebb in the next 30 years, particularly on this issue. How does this potential decline in the capacity of white progressive America to project soft power of the world impact the power of the gender paradigm into the future?

Abigail: I love that question. Yeah. But people often ask “What's going to happen in the future?” I'm like, “I don’t know.” I don't think the gender paradigm will go away. I think that now that we have this technology for this kind of body modification, that there will always be a market for it and there will always be people who choose to participate in that.

What I do see changing, however, is the idea that that is medical care, right? This is already shifting in Europe. I don’t know if that's what you were alluding to, but –

Grant: That’s right.

Abigail: – a lot of European countries like Sweden, most recently Norway, Finland, UK, France, at least when it comes to youth gender transition, have really almost entirely put the breaks on medical transition for young people. So I do think we're going to see that change. The “trans”-ing of children and adolescents I think will change. But I think that there will still be an adult population that opts into this.

But in terms of the cultural, I don't know – I wonder if it's peaking now. I don't know. It feels like it's such a fever pitch right now and it seems like it just can't stay at this level. And the further they push certain boundaries, like even in the U.S., the sports thing seemed to be what really bothered a lot of so “normies,” so to speak.

So I think the – and actually I'm kind of hoping that these clinicians that I was just talking about who are like, “It's not about identity, it's about embodiment goals.” I was like, “Oh, can I give you a megaphone and can I have you say that on camera? Because that would be really helpful. Thank you. If you would just say that so that everyone can hear that this actually isn't about identity,” right? That that's just part of the story that's being told. And because I think that narrative would be much less palatable to really anyone except an already committed transhumanist.

Grant: So I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talk about the two words that you put together, “Catholic feminism.” What do you mean when you say “Catholic feminism”?

Abigail: Yes. I think that's a great question. I think, in general, feminist theory tends not to have – it tends to be grafted onto other philosophical systems. That's why you have so many different kinds of feminism, right? You have Marxist feminism, you have liberal feminism, you have postmodern feminism.

So when I say “Catholic feminism,” what I mean is that the roots are a Catholic understanding of reality that take seriously Catholic anthropology, the Divine Revelation, through Scripture and Tradition that does not have a relationship of suspicion toward those things or deconstruction towards those things, but actually wants to genuinely think with them and in harmony with them.

And that's where I think that, when I say Catholic feminism, it would be different than say… Just by looking at the kinds of events that they host that are always pro-abortion, always pro gender paradigm, right? There's no critical reflection there. It's just they're all-in on the typical progressive feminist gender theory bandwagon. And so I think I'm coming from different premises.

Grant: Right. And it sounds like you're trying to speak to the general public, as you said, but also within Christianity. What do you have to offer other Christians – particularly, I'm talking about Protestants here – when you put the tag “Catholic,” how can you be helpful to other Protestant Christians?

Abigail: I think most of the arguments I'm making are Christian and not necessarily specifically Catholic. And that's one reason why the subtitle of my book is “A Christian Theory.” There are times I think where maybe what I'm saying about sacramental theology or redemptive suffering, or certainly Mary, where I kind of veer into more specifically Catholic territory. But in terms of like Christian anthropology, in terms of the deeper meaning of what Genesis reveals about sexual difference, all of that is Christian, right? Not just Catholic.

And I've been encouraged to see more and more in Protestant contexts an incorporation of Theology of the Body. So that is definitely happening, and I think it's great. I'm actually kind of shocked at how many requests I get from evangelicals to speak. So I think it actually helps in a way that I'm “bilingual,” so to speak. I grew up evangelical, now I'm Catholic. I mostly worked in an evangelical setting, as an academic, though. And I think the fact that I've also been a committed post-modern progressive feminist, right? I've inhabited all of these spheres before and I –

So what my goal, I think, especially when I think about what to offer a Christian audience are two things. One, to just help people better navigate the current conversation with more confidence. Because I think it's so confusing and it's changing so quickly and it's just disorienting. And so I think a lot of people are like, “What's happening? What do we do?” So just to help people, like, “Okay, let me explain a little bit more about what's going on, to help get more confidence.”

But I think even more importantly, and this was my main aim in writing the book, The Genesis of Gender, I really wanted to articulate that – because I see this in evangelicalism a lot. I think evangelicalism is actually in a crisis at the moment. – And I wanted to articulate that if you do embrace the gender paradigm in an ideological way, you will be departing from a Christian paradigm. There are places where they are incommensurable. And that's something that I think a lot of Christians, especially in traditions that don't really have much of a tradition, where it's so much about “how you interpret this verse” and “how you interpret that verse.” And so I would see it a lot in my students as well, that slippage from Evangelicalism into a progressive form of Christianity that's so progressive that it's no longer recognizably Christian.

And so I guess I wanted to articulate “You're an existentially free being. You get to choose what you believe, but you can't believe both these things.”

Grant: So speaking of Catholic “hot takes,” what ways are vasectomies in some way conceptually consistent with gender-affirming surgery?

Abigail: Yeah, I mean, it's the same argument about contraception really. There's a natural limit imposed by my body that I don't like, that is inconveniencing to me and is somehow in inhibiting my quote unquote “freedom.” And so I'm going to technologically create disorder in my body in order to allow a greater permissiveness to my will and my desires.

And I understand too, there are sometimes very grave reasons why faithful, you know… it's not just this flippant… for some people, I think it's pretty standard. Like, “Oh, well I've had three kids. Time to snip it.” But I know some Catholics who have very grave and difficult situations to navigate in terms of pregnancy being life-threatening. So I'm not trying to be trivial here.

But I will say working on this gender stuff, I do see those things as so connected, either sterilization for straight couples or just contracepting in general, that for me it's like “If I'm going to be making publicly these arguments that this isn't good, I sure as hell better be living up to that in my personal life.” Right? So for me it's like there's almost this sense of this consistency and solidarity. It can be tempting to just want to go along with what everyone else is doing. 

Although, I have to say, since I've been on birth control, as you know, before I became Catholic for like 10 years, it's nice because I don't romanticize it. And so I'll tell my Catholic friends sometimes where they're like, “Oh, I wish I could just get on the pill.” And I'm like, “Actually, you'll kind of be depressed and you won't want to have sex anyway,” so, you know.

Grant: Yeah.

So, you know, your understanding of womanhood has certainly evolved over time and seems to be at least partially linked biographically with your own pregnancies. At least that's the sense that I got from your book. So given how tied your definition of womanhood is to your own pregnancies, how might those incapable of childbirth understand their own womanhood consistently with the way that you describe these things?

Abigail: Hmm. Yeah. In some ways I think my pregnancies – I think some of the reasons they were affecting or effective in some ways were a deeper conversion is more about suffering than about pregnancy, per se. Like pregnancy is just a really good source of fruitful suffering.

Grant: Right, right, right.

Abigail: So I would say the very Catholic, but also depressing thing, “But you can suffer too, in other ways!” right?

But I have more to say. One, I think it's really important to realize that when I talk about generativity, when I talk about procreative potential, that potential exists and every woman has it, whether or not it's ever fully actualized in childbirth.

So even the category of being infertile – and again, infertility is such a painful experience, and an acute source of suffering, right? But again, I think that suffering can be fruitful. So it's important to realize though, that being infertile does not in any way make one less of a woman, because the very category of infertility is pointing toward an innate potential that a woman has that for some reason is being prevented from being actualized, right? So the question then becomes: because I think every woman then, whether she's able to biologically reproduce or not, every woman is called to live out the vocation of motherhood, so what does that look like in your particular context? What does that look like in your circumstances right now?

There's a profound spiritual reality to motherhood. You know, if you think about someone like Mother Teresa, right? We even called her “Mother Teresa,” like, wow, what an icon of the profound power and holiness of spiritual motherhood, right? So I think it's really important to tell every woman that there is this gift of motherhood that you are called to bring to the world and what that looks like will really vary from woman to woman, will vary from season to season in a woman's life, right? So I would still say that there is this call. This is this vocation of our nature to motherhood and to live out that love in a variety of ways.

And so I guess I would say you're still called to that. And so discern what God is calling you to, because with this – and that any cross that he gives, he can make fruitful. And so praying for that suffering to be fruitful as well. And I think that's probably the most powerful prayer I've ever prayed.

Grant: My last question is very personal for me. I have a 12-year-old daughter and all the joys and sufferings that that entails both for her and for her parents. Is alienation from one's body a natural part of adolescence for girls? And what can I do – or probably better, what can my wife do – to help her feel less alienated from herself during these years? Because she's particularly vulnerable to these challenges that emerge in adolescence as we are trying to get used to these new bodies that we have. What can parents do to help, particularly, girls in these moments, again, feel less alienated from their bodies? Or do we just help them suffer through it?

Abigail: I think it's probably “both and,” right? I do think that there's something, not necessarily inevitable, but I would say pretty typical – a typical experience of puberty is to feel a sense of alienation from one's suddenly rapidly changing body. And with those changes, a change in how you are perceived and treated in society. And that is incredibly disrupting, right?

It's funny, I have this random memory of being in a car as a teenager and suddenly looking down at my lap and just seeing my legs, my thighs, like taking up so much more room than they ever had and just feeling disgust, and also just like, “These are not my legs.” You know? Like, “I don't know what these are, but this is not me.” You know? So that, and similar dysphoria surrounding breast development. So I do think that that's a very typical female experience.

And so one thing is to just even speak that, right? That, “Yeah, what you're going through, it's a rough road. It's turbulent, but it doesn't last forever,” you know?

I think that this dissociation from the body can be really worsened by too much immersion in online realities, which also create a sense of dissociation from bodily reality. So if there are things that she likes to do that involve using her body in positive ways, like whether that's sports or art, or some kinds of activity, I think really encouraging those things. Like I was super athletic as a teenager and I think that helped enormously. Just to get out some aggression too, and just – I think I had a positive sense of like my body in terms of its strength and its capacities there that now, if I imagine feeling the way that I did and then just being immersed in social media all the time, that just sounds like a recipe for hell. So that's one suggestion.

But also, yeah, sometimes I wonder too, if we aren't teaching young people how to suffer well. As parents, we're just so distressed at the thought that our children could suffer. And we also live in this bizarrely novel historical moment where we can imagine the possibility of a life without suffering even. Of course, that's not actually going to happen, but still, I think in prior historical periods suffering was so ever present that there was never this like, “Wow, maybe if I just play my cards right, my child will always be happy.” So I think that's a false temptation we can fall into as parents. And so thinking about, “Okay, how do I help my adolescent, my child, whatever, suffer well?” And puberty provides a lot of occasion for that. So good luck to you!

Grant: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Abigail, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. This has been a really, really fruitful conversation and a lot of my friends have been asking me when I'm going to do this interview because they've found your book to be so helpful and they wanted to hear us in conversation. Thanks so much for your great work. Thanks so much for giving me some time, and I really appreciate it.

Abigail: Yeah, this was great, and I appreciate the work you're doing too. I really have enjoyed the interviews you've done that I've listened to. 

Grant: Oh good. Well, thanks so much.

Abigail: You're really good at this. Interviewing is hard –

Grant: It is.

Abigail: – but you're really talented. 

Grant: Oh gosh. Thank you.

Abigail: It’s hard to do. Harder than it looks.