“Lived incoherence brings a kind of human demise,” for the untruthfulness of incoherence entails a failure to be human. Or so the six authors of an excellent new monograph tell us in their introduction to Sexual Identity: The Harmony of Philosophy, Science, and Revelation, edited by John D. Finley. As an example of “lived incoherence,” they offer:
A woman is to be celebrated, but no one knows what a woman is. A man is suspect in being masculine, but not if his masculinity defeats women in a sporting event while he identifies as one of them.
For these authors—all Catholic theologians, philosophers, and medical doctors—it “is not just that transgender ideology makes us unable to speak coherently about man and woman,” it is that it annihilates the meaning of experience and life as men and women.
While an array of books have appeared recently that try to address the growth of this ideology over the past decade, which has moved and morphed like cancer, I have not seen any as ‘straight shooting’ as this one.
Abigale Favalle’s book was too autobiographical to fulfill the expectations of a comprehensive study that its ambitious title, The Genesis of Gender, suggested. John Bursch’s work neatly collected and summarized numerous episcopal statements and various scientific studies without attempting to add ground-breaking analysis.
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, the hefty tome authored by Carl Truman, took an insightful magnifying glass to the enlightenment roots of “Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.” But this work did not focus on harmonizing the science that belies that road with the formulation of a philosophical alternative. That was not his aim, and the excellence of his scholarly detective work regarding the history of thought should not go unpraised.
While these three books—and others like them—no doubt have their virtues, they are insufficiently deep overviews. The book Sexual Identity, however, is contemporary yet academically substantial while being highly accessible. It aims at just what its subtitle suggests: the harmonization of three fields as they stand at present, appealing to the most up-to-date research, established theological understandings, and philosophical debates, and presenting its case well within the grasp of the layman.
With chapters dedicated to the “philosophical articulation” of “what men and women mean to us,” the “biological understanding of the sexes,” the “psychology of the sexual difference,” with details of what transgender surgery does (and doesn’t) do, and a “note” on the metaphysical relation of soul, body, and sexuality, the 290-page book wraps up with a “theological account” of “man, woman, and creation.”
I enjoyed chapters 1-4 immensely, which covered the philosophical, biological, psychological, and surgical questions surrounding sexual identity and transgenderism. Despite the merits of its first half—which alone, I must emphasize, make it worth purchasing—the book does not live up to its title: the harmony of its listed disciplines it is not. The theological treatment was a disappointment.
After five solid chapters, the sixth, on theology, is seriously underwhelming. Chapter one proceeds in a convincing manner with scarcely a single footnote—and therefore appeals to authority as an argument—through a philosophical exploration reminiscent of a Socratic dialogue whereby the lesser known is made apparent through examination of the better known. The scientific chapters, while relying more heavily on footnoted studies, make their content understandable in ordinary language, supported by serious, measured, and sometimes contrasting authorities.
After breathing such an air of serious thinking, the opening sentence of chapter six truly comes as a surprise: “On several occasions, Pope Francis has reflected on the meaning of human sexual difference in the relationship between man and woman.” It is difficult to convey my amazement that the book starts its “theological account” of “Man, Woman, and Creation” not with—gosh, let me think of some obscure examples—the Book of Genesis, Matthew 19, the Holy Family, the nuptial blessing, even John Paul II … but Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si and its treatment of sexuality as part of “the ecology crisis.”
To be fair, chapter six doesn’t say anything wrong. It is all true. It does all the usual backflips to reference John Paul II and Benedict XVI alongside Pope Francis while reiterating numerous points from the Theology of the Body. But the other chapters argue from first principles, drawing in serious and coherent thinkers to corroborate their claims. Chapter six, on the other hand, undermines the book’s credibility by hanging its flag on one of the most inconsistent thinkers of our day, someone whose self-contradictory statements lead to the very incoherence the authors claim they want to address in the introduction. Pope Francis has gutted the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, favored abusive and pro-homosexual clerics like Rupnik and James Martin, and opened the door to legitimizing ‘marriages’ of divorced couples whose spouses remain alive. He can hardly, then, be put forward as an authority on traditional sexual morality.
Making Francis a key player in the theological account will date this book once his pontificate is over. That said, the idea of sexuality as part of ecology and anthropology as central to theology is quite promising. But while everything was above board theologically, this was not an interesting or illuminating treatment of those ideas.
It is hard to summarize the middle section of the book, given the ground it covers. It does what it sets out to do: it offers a “careful, non-technical articulation of our common experience as man and woman,” and experience that gives “contextualization” of the biological account of the “anatomic, reproductive, genetic, and molecular” differences of being sexually differentiated beings. Since differences in physiology entail differences in psychology, behavioral and cognitive aspects of the distinct sexes are discussed before addressing the question of whether men and women are “interchangeable.”
The fourth chapter on ‘sex-change surgery’ was one of the more revealing, for me personally at least. Written by a plastic surgeon, it explains just what these surgeries involve. The most shocking thing to me was how clearly it showed the incompleteness of these surgeries, which do not even give the ‘transitioner’ functioning sexual organs. I shall spare my readers the gruesome details, but I will say that however harrowing one imagines these surgeries and their effects to be—which are in fact not surgeries at all, but mutilations—they are much, much worse.
To sum up, this book is an excellent introductory yet fairly detailed exposition of the way in which “male and female constitute two ways of being human.” While the theological aspect of the book is not particularly striking or original, the majority, which builds a philosophical and scientific understanding of humanity as sexed, provides insightful and well-rounded building blocks for further discussions of the topic.
As there are already many good books on the theology of marriage and sexuality, I welcome and recommend this publication for its pre-theological contributions to understanding the sexes. This book’s strengths lie in the fact that the majority of its content relies on reason rather than faith, while also appealing to the teachings of the Catholic Church. “Without man and woman, the human race does not exist,” we are reminded. Sexual Identity increases our ability to be human by cutting through the incoherence that characterizes our world today.
