"The concept of gender, then, has ultimately served to pry a wedge between
body and
identity. Whereas sex once simply referred to a bodily given, a fact of nature, here the power of the body to constitute identity is diminished. “Woman” no longer refers simply to one’s sex, but rather to one’s gender, which has become an amorphous cultural construction that has a tenuous relationship to bodily sex. Once this distance between bodily sex and identity was enabled via gender, it did not take long—merely a few decades—for gender to shift meanings once again, becoming entirely disconnected from sex, which has paved the way for an even more fragmented and unstable understanding of personhood. Because gender is no longer anchored in maleness or femaleness, it is endlessly malleable; it is a concept that can be continually altered and redeployed, and we are witnessing in real time the wild proliferation of its meaning.
The various pop narratives about gender often speak as if gender is something
real, even as the concept itself resists the slightest hint of realism. Some examples: Gender is a spectrum; Gender is fluid; Gender is innate; Gender is in the brain; Gender is a construct. While the emphatic rhetoric suggests that the truth of gender is at last being unveiled, it is increasingly difficult to settle on a definition of gender at all, because there are multiple and often contradictory definitions on offer.
Let us take a brief and non-exhaustive tour:
1. There is the decidedly “un-woke” definition that sees gender as a simple synonym for biological sex. This is the view of the uninitiated man-on-the-street, who checks the “M” box on a form without dwelling on the question.
2. Then there is the second-wave feminist definition that defines gender as the social and cultural
accoutrements of each sex. Once cutting-edge, this definition is becoming outmoded, although still prevalent among feminists of a certain age, and the APA.
3. A further iteration is the now-classic one offered by Judith Butler, godmother of contemporary gender theory. Butler argues, at least in her earlier works, that gender is an unconscious and socially-compelled performance, a series of acts and behaviors that create the illusion of an essential identity of “man” and “woman.” In this view, gender is
entirely a social construct, a complex fiction that we inherit and then repeatedly re-enact.
4. And one can find yet
another definition in the standard transgender narrative—gender as the sex of the soul, the innate manhood or womanhood that may or may not “align” with the sex of the body. In this understanding, gender is decidedly
not a mere construct, but is rather a pre-social reality—the inner truth against which the body must be measured.
5. Even more recently we have the cute and overly-complicated understanding of gender popularized by the “gender unicorn” and “genderbread person” memes (the latter of which has already undergone four separate revisions). In this model, personal identity is collated from a menu of attributes, each of which runs along a spectrum. Gender identity,
à la the transgender definition above, is located in the mind; gender expression, a trickle-down version of Butlerian performativity, refers to one’s external appearance and acts; sex, which is “assigned” rather than recognized at birth, is confined between the legs. Rounding out the list is “attraction,” which is further parsed into two subcategories: physical and emotional.
This is the terrain of “gender” in our time: impossible to map, bewildering to navigate. Gender has come to mean whatever we want it to mean, and thus it means many things at once. And yet this unstable, incoherent concept has supplanted bodily sex as the ground of manhood and womanhood—leading to an increasingly fragmented and disincarnate understanding of human identity. To invoke Chesterton once more, we don’t know what we are doing, because we don’t know what we are
undoing.
There is a profound irony here. Through the vehicle of feminist theory, the concept of gender displaced manhood and womanhood from bodily sex. And now, unmoored from the body altogether, gender is defined by the very cultural stereotypes that feminism sought to undo. In other words, when a girl recognizes that she does not fit the stereotypes of girlhood, she is invited to question her sex rather than the stereotype."
(Abigail Favale: "The Eclipse of Sex by the Rise of Gender." 2019.
Church Life Journal:
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articl ... of-gender/)
