Abigail Favale

Professor @ Notre Dame University

Examining the Sources of Gender: Why Sexual Difference Matters

Two Resources:

1. First, an expert guide on youth gender medicine that Abigail co-wrote with a pediatric endocrinologist; this gives a thorough overview of the research on gender medicine for young people.

2. Second, the study from Finland on the question of suicide mentioned in the discussion, with an analysis of the study here.

Next in GFCF 2024-25

September: William Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry (new book/tome).

November: Denis Alexander, Finding God Through Dawkins.

January: Jeremy Begbie, C. S. Lewis and Unfulfilled Longing: An Exploration through Music.

March: Dr. Quentin Genuis, Rethinking Medical Ethics in Light of the Good.

Abstract

How do contemporary theories of gender compare to the understanding of gender in the Christian imagination? This talk will provide a sketch of two distinct paradigms–the “gender paradigm” and the “Genesis paradigm”–and bring those two frameworks into conversation with one another, highlighting points of consonance and dissonance between them.

Biography  

Abigail Favale, Ph.D., is a professor in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. She has an academic background in gender studies and feminist theory, and writes regularly about these topics from a Catholic perspective. She is the author of The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (Ignatius 2022) and Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion (Cascade 2018), as well as numerous essays and articles. Abigail’s essays and short stories have appeared in print and online for publications such as First Things, The Atlantic, Church Life, and Potomac Review. She was awarded the J.F. Powers Prize for short fiction in 2017. 

See also Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

Quotes from Favale’s Book:

Difference between men and women have too often been used to justify a strict hierarchy of value and roles between the sexes. In the effort to reject this, feminists thought has typically regarded sexual difference itself with hostility and has downplayed difference in order to affirm equal dignity.

We must engage the vital questions of personhood, sex, identity, and freedom at the level of a worldview. The gender paradigm affirms a radically constructivist view of reality, the reifies it as truth, demanding that others assent to its veracity and adopt its language. 

The Gender Paradigm (feminism’s offspring): According to the gender paradigm, there is no creator, and so we are free to create ourselves. The body is an object with no intrinsic meaning; we give it whatever meaning we want, using technology to undo what is perceived to be “natural”. We do not receive meaning from God or our bodies or the world–we impose it. What we take to be “real” is merely a linguistic construct; ergo we should consciously wield language to conjure the reality we want. To be free is to transgress limits continually, to unfetter the will. “Woman” and “man” are language-based identities that can be inhabited by anyone. Because truth is just a story we tell ourselves, all self-told stories are true.

Creation/Genesis/Biblical Paradigm: We are unities of body and spirit; our bodies are an integral part of our identity that connect us to the created order and serves as a bridge between our inmost being and the outer world, and a sacramental sign of the hidden mystery of God. Both man and woman are made in God’s image, and our sexual difference is part of the goodness of the created order, signalling that we are made for reciprocal love. We have been granted a share in the divine power of language in order to make words that reveal the truth about ourselves and our world.

Michel Foucault is the god-father of contemporary gender theory. Angela Franks aptly describes the Foulcauldian view of sex, which now holds supremacy in our culture. Sex for Foucault, is about “bodies and pleasures”…. Bodily sex has been divorced from procreative potential, reduced to appearance and pleasure-making.

John Money’s malleable and disembodied concept of gender swept through the academy, becoming thoroughly entrenched in feminist theory and the social sciences…. Sex refers to biology, and gender refers to social meanings attached to sex.... Ultimately the concept of gender has driven a wedge between body and identity.… This has paved the way to an even more fragmented and unstable understanding of personhood. Because gender is no longer anchored in bodily realities, it has become a postmodern juggernaut, impossible to capture, impossible to name. Unlike sex, gender can be continually altered and deployed, and we are witnessing a wide proliferation of its meaning.

Judith Butler, godmother of gender theory … argues that gender is an unconscious and socially compelled performance, a series of acts and behaviours 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 reenact.

In culture today, we are seeing a gnostic split between body (sex) and soul (gender). We now have an inherently unstable concept of gender. The concept of gender has driven a wedge between body and identity. “Gender” can be continually altered and redeployed, and we are witnessing in real time the wild proliferation of its meaning. From the trans definition, gender identity is seen to be located in the mind. Others see it as merely a social construct.

“The more I study what gender has become, the more it feels like an empty signifier, a word that is only a shell, conveniently waiting to be filled with whatever meaning is most useful. There is a gender category for every proclivity, every flick of mood, every possible aesthetic: Agender, Bigender, Trigender, Demigender, Demifluid, Demiflux, Pangender.” Abigail Favale

There are people in turmoil and the gender paradigm has become the dominant lens for interpreting that turmoil, and that’s not good. We are living in an era when our young women are increasingly deciding they would be better off as men. Many young women are rebelling against the hypersexulaization of the female body, but in doing so, they are turning against the body itself. The female body, in our shared imagination, no longer signals creation, nourishment, and primal compassion, but rather the prospect of sterile pleasure.

Medicalizing the Problem: The affirmation approach encourages violence to the healthy body rather than carefully working through underlying causes of psychological distress and considering ways of managing that distress that does not cause physical harm.

The new wave of pop gender theory offers a choose-your-own-adventure self. This framework, which has captured our cultural imagination, fragments personhood into mix-and-match categories of gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, and biological sex.

A Different Way of Seeing: Considering oneself as a being who is created moves the discussion of identity to new ground, setting the frame of a transcendent order–an order beyond the natural that sustains its existence and safe-guards its meaning. To be a creature rather than an accident, establishes the human person as a being-in-relation with the divine. We are not alone in the cosmos.… When we see the world as a created cosmos, this transfigures everything: embodiment, sex, suffering, freedom, desire–this is gathered up into an all-embracing mystery, an ongoing interplay between human and divine…. Once understood as created, selfhood, including one’s sex, becomes a gift that can be accepted, rather than something that must be constructed.

We are confronted in our time with two divergent understandings of freedom: on the one hand, freedom according to postmodernity, an open-ended process of self-definition whose only limit is death; on the other, freedoms an ever-deepening sense of belonging and wholeness, not only with oneself, but in relation to all that is.