Intersex people, CCSDs, and the sex binary

Transgenderism presents intersex people, that is, people with CCSDs (congenital conditions of sexual development), as evidence that there is no absolute male/female binary. If it’s really true that there is (or was) even a single human who does not fit the binary, then the absolute is shattered.

Abigale Favale’s book The Genesis of Gender does a good job of pointing out that research suggesting that 1.7% of people are intersex is disingenuous. However, even with a more medically precise definition, it’s true that some 0.02% of people have both male and female sexual characteristics, such that their sex is not easily assignable at birth. Even this 0.02% is more than enough to achieve transgenderism’s goal, because all they’re looking for is one individual.

But Favale goes deeper on pages 127-129 of her book:

In the remaining [0.02%] outlying cases, the reality of sex is still present but must be more carefully discerned—not for curiosity’s sake, but in order to support the person’s physical health. This is not because those individuals are neither male nor female, but rather because their developmental pathways of becoming male or female took some unexpected turns.

Discerning sex in these individuals entails looking at multiple factors taken together: karyotype (chromosomes); phenotype (genitalia); gonads (ovaries or testes); internal structures that support gamete production; and hormones… Sexual ambiguity occurs when the phenotype is not readily classifiable as male or female, or when the karyotype is not consistent with the phenotype. Overly broad use of the term “intersex” tends to privilege karyotype and phenotype , while overlooking gamete production and the structure of the body as a whole…[but] gamete production is the foundation of biological sex.

This reflects a common error: reducing biological sex to secondary sex characteristics—seeing sex as merely about genital appearance or breast development. The gender paradigm fundamentally misunderstands what sex is, confusing cause with effect. Secondary sex characteristics develop as a consequence of sex; they are the effect, rather than the cause.

…When faced with ambiguity at the level of phenotype and karyotype, the best response is not to shrug and embrace the spectrum, but to continue the discernment of sex by looking at the anatomical structures that support either large gamete production or small gamete production. Although the term “hermaphrodite” used to be applied to cases of sexual ambiguity, this is a dehumanizing misnomer. Hermaphrodites are species that do not have separate sexes, such as snails and slugs; instead, each member of the species has the ability to produce both large and small gametes and can thus take on either the “male” or “female” role in reproduction. For this kind of species, hermaphroditic reproduction is the norm. Human biology, on the other hand, does not support this model of reproduction. In the rarest CCSD, an individual can develop both ovarian and testicular tissue, but even in this case, he or she will produce one gamete or the other, not both. There have been only about five hundred documented cases of an ovotesticular CCSD in medical history, and there is no direct evidence in the literature of a hermaphroditic human being, someone able to produce both small and large gametes. [Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6737443/]

When all the dimensions of sex are taken into account, sex can be discerned in each human being. To conclude otherwise is to exclude some individuals from a reality in which we all participate.

Thus, Favale argues that a person’s sex must include consideration of whether they produce large gametes (eggs) or small gametes (sperm). This is crucial for her understanding of sexuality. She later defines men as people whose bodies are organized around the ability to be the reproductive donors, and women as people whose bodies are organized around the ability to be the reproductive hosts. A person’s maleness or femaleness involves the totality of biological factors related to one or the other of these reproductive roles (even if they are infertile).

With this definition, Favale is able to defend the male/female binary by claiming that “there is no direct evidence in the literature of a human being who is able to produce both small and large gametes”; even the 500 people (ever!) who have had both ovarian and testicular tissue will produce only one or the other. It remains either/or.

Every human is either male or female. No human is neither. No human is both. There is no third option.

As an addendum, I’d like to point out that it’s important to include “no human is both.” I know of a teacher who, being probably unaware of how Favale successfully defended the inner keep on this issue, has attempted to resolve the question of the 0.02% by denying “a third sex,” but offering instead that we are either “male, female, or both.” But if someone can be both sides of a binary, then it’s not a real binary—not an either/or, not a mutually exclusive dual categorization. If people can be both, then transgenderism still wins, because that premise can be extrapolated to almost all their other conclusions. If the circuit is on, or off, or both on and off, then we do not have something we can build a circuitboard with. If you are male, or female, or both male and female, then we do not have something we can build a Genesis view of sexuality with.

St. John Chrysostom on giving our children riches

As quoted by New Polity:

Let everything be secondary with us to the provident care we should take of our children, and to our bringing them up in the chastening and admonition of the Lord (Eph 6:4). If from the very first he is taught to be a lover of true wisdom, then wealth greater than all wealth has he acquired and a more imposing name. You will effect nothing so great by teaching him an art [i.e. a profession], and giving him that outward learning by which he will gain riches, as if you teach him the art of despising riches. If you desire to make him rich, do this. For the rich man is not he who desires great riches, and is encircled with great riches; but the man who has need of nothing. Discipline your son in this, teach him this. This is the greatest riches. (Homily 21 on Ephesians)

An eternal church service

“An unholy man would not like heaven in the same way he would not like church.” – Cardinal St. John Henry Newman

In trying to imagine myself enjoying an eternal worship service, I think I get glimpses of how it would truly be joyful when I think how there will be no real either-or between our hopes and dreams and our worship of God. We want a beautiful house and a garden. We want a complete freedom from fear of the future and provision for our needs. We want to write the book that has struggled to come out of us. In that heavenly church, all those needs will be met. “In my father’s house are many rooms.” We will meet the fulfillment of every good desire there, in the kindness of God, and he will reveal how it was his plan all along, showing all the “hidden plot elements” of our life story, now finally consummated. God will not only show himself good, but will show the whole world made good. Now that is something for which I think I will never tire of praising him.

Can we say “The Church did evil”?

An Anglican priest’s recent sermon said, “We must listen while secular people talk about how we’ve been the aggressor, while we were in power. We were the people who enslaved people in the south. The Church did that.”

Is it right to speak thus of the Church doing such evils?

I take comfort in the fact that the Catholic church never did endorse slavery, even while the American Protestant churches did. However, I want to take a different tack, to argue why it is wrong for any church with an incarnational ecclesiology to speak like that.

A man may sin in two ways: (1) because his body is not in complete obedience to his spirit; part of him who rebels against his essence. “I did not do as I am.” Such people are deserving of mercy. They struggle. (2) because his spirit wills what is bad. In this sense, a disobedience of the body against the spirit is the only saving grace, for obedience to it is the perfection of sin. Such people, inasmuch as they are not blessed with incontinence, are deserving of wrath, for they do not struggle against evil, but actively will it, and are thus agents of the devil.

Now the spirit of the world is the spirit of Satan, and the grace of the world is that it as yet does not fully obey this spirit with its body, for it yet bears the residual graces of its maker, and the memory of good still lingers.

But the spirit of the Church is the spirit of Christ, and its struggle is to bring its body into conformity with its willing spirit, to act as it aspires to. “For the Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Therefore, it is perfectly right to accuse the Church of incontinence, because that is to accuse the sinful men that are its Body. But to accuse the Church, as such, of bad intention—of a bad heart, a bad spirit, and wrong aims and purposes, is wrong, because that is to accuse Christ, who is its Mind. Christ’s Bride fails often to act according to His intention, but Christ never intends for the Church to do evil.

Therefore it is wrong to speak of the Church as committing sins of intention, of believing wrong and affirming what is false, because these sins are proper to the Mind, not the Body.

Now, when we speak of someone doing an act which is by nature an intentional act, it implies the cooperation of both mind and body, unless we specify otherwise. Thus when we say, “He ran away from home,” it implies that he intended to do so, unless we clarify that he was delirious or insane or disoriented, or any other way which the body may run away from home without the mind intending to.

Therefore it is not right to speak of the Church doing evil, unless we clarify that it was only the Body of the Church, not the Whole Church, body and soul, who did evil. Otherwise, how can we avoid accusing Christ of doing evil by means of the Church?

The intolerable intolerance of Anglican ambiguity

An Anglican priest recently affirmed that both believer’s baptism and infant baptism are acceptable, and that both going to a gay wedding and not going to it are acceptable. He compared the two issues, saying they “mapped perfectly onto each other” as examples of where it is appropriate to have ambiguity of position, to hold different approaches together. In either case, they affirm both options as within the pale of judicious Christian practice, and the choice between them as merely “a secondary issue.” Have your baby baptized or wait until they reach the “age of reason”—either way, they’ll get baptized eventually, and that’s all that matters, because, after all, God doesn’t really look on baptized children and unbaptized children any differently. Go to the wedding or don’t go—neither choice necessarily cooperates in the transgression of a line that God draws.

But in making these claims of tolerance, this Anglican position cannot but become intolerant of those who hold to either side exclusively. What these pastors reject as unacceptable is the assertion that either option is definitely wrong. Someone who claims “It is wrong to withhold baptism from one’s baby” or “It is wrong to attend a gay wedding” are only speaking their personal opinion, most likely out of an ill-advised spirit of contentiousness and a lack of Christlike sensitivity; the claims are not and cannot be objectively true.

But what if God does look on baptized children differently than unbaptized ones? What if baptism is not just a symbol, but a sacrament that makes a person, no matter their age, part of God’s family, part of his Body?

And what if going to a gay wedding does in fact transgress a line that God draws, because the act of attending a ceremony inherently endorses its validity, and God denies its validity?

The terrible thing is not just that these two things are true. It is that many Anglican clergy, by their academic rigor, their excellent knowledge of Scripture, their claim to conformity with the precedent and heritage of the historical Church, do very well know them to be true, and yet tolerate their contradictions, in the interest of civility and some sort of generous or mere orthodoxy that does not ruffle the feathers of the urban center.

It is not like Christ, who said “let the little children come unto me,” to withhold a blessing from a child. Nor is it like him to give a false and misleading blessing in the interest of love. It is no favor to anyone to pander to the spirit of the age, or to speak out of both sides of your mouth. “I would rather that you were hot or cold…”

Anglicanism has survived for hundreds of years by occupying a contradictory via media between mutually exclusive propositions, by adept use of the technique of not following things through to their logical ends. But as the world approaches the coming of the Lord, the bad will get worse, and the good will get better. The watersheds of ideology will be made plainer—Satan and his Minions against Christ and his Church Militant. Against all those who quibble in the middle, insisting upon lukewarmness, the nausea of the Spirit will grow and reach its inevitable consummation.

C.S. Lewis on contraception (and bulimia)

The following is an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress. The quote is from the mouth of Mr. Sensible, a sort of worldly sensualist who likes discussion but dislikes following logic to its conclusions, so, like the Screwtape Letters, we are meant to take the truth as the opposite.

Note how he equates the bulimia or bingeing-and-purging of the Romans with contraception, “praising” both for their ability to extract natural consequences from a pleasurable act.

C.S. Lewis was not a Catholic, and I wonder if he would have held the same views today, where the common cultural heritage against contraception has eroded so much within Protestantism since the 1930’s. But then, perhaps he would have. He was keen at seeing through to the root issues of culture, and he had a devout Catholic for a friend and fellow Inkling.

The bees have stings, but we rob them of their honey. To hold all that urgent sweetness to our lips in the cup of one perfect moment, missing no faintest ingredient in the flavour of its μονόχρονος ἡδονή [one-time pleasure]], yet ourselves, in a sense, unmoved–this is the true art. … Is it an audacity to hint that for the corrected palate the taste of the draught even owes its last sweetness to the knowledge that we have wrested it from an unwilling source? To cut off pleasures from the consequences and conditions which they have by nature, detaching, as it were, the precious phrase from its irrelevant context, is what distinguishes the man from the brute and the citizen from the savage. I cannot join with those moralists who inveigh against the Roman emetics in their banquets: still less with those who would forbid the even more beneficent contraceptive devices of our later times. That man who can eat as taste, not nature, prompts him and yet fear no aching belly, or who can indulge in Venus and fear no impertinent bastard, is a civilized man.

What’s wrong with critical race theory?

Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of thought that could be roughly summarized as follows: history is to be primarily understood as a power struggle between racial groups, and the way to happiness as a society is to restore the balance by reacting aggressively against the racial groups with dominant power. CRT is a decentralized movement, so it’s hard to codify its ideology, but its fundamentally Marxist view of power as the fundamental truth of social reality can be seen in how it is defined by some of its most prominent theorists and proponents. (I’ve selected the following phrases from various reputable sources quoted on Wikipedia’s main page on CRT):

CRT is used to “explain social, political, and legal structures and power distribution through a ‘lens’ focusing on the concept of race, and experiences of racism”; in other words, it’s a “way of thinking about the world, especially the social norms…that govern society” that sees race as as something “used to oppress and exploit people of color,” and consequently seeks to “examine and challenge the ways race and racism implicitly and explicitly impact on social structures, practices and discourses”, with the ultimate goal of “transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.”

It is hard to fault critical race theory for most of its criticisms of traditional liberalism and the historical treatment of ethnic minorities. I am not particularly interested in defending the actions that Europeans have done under the influence of the Enlightenment, whether it be slavery or segregation or any of their vestiges today. I agree that greed and power have gone unnamed in the development (shall we say conquest) of the modern world by capitalists. With the kernel of good within the American Dream there has been also the potential for hubris and excess and exploitation, both of the Earth and of her Children. The roots, I think, are fundamentally economic, but, plainly, the oppression has gone largely according to skin tone. I have no bones to pick with any of that.

The worst and most harmful philosophies are not those that are baldly, laughably wrong, but those that are mostly right—they rightly critique some other wrong—and yet twist the truth at some key point, to the subtle distortion of the whole. I think this is the case with critical race theory. The twisting of the truth, I think, is that people are their race; that their race is the dominant and most determinative trait of a person, or a society. Feminists and modern gender theorists at least have more ammunition on this point, because sexuality does run deep in the human soul, so deep that it goes back to the very beginning, when God created us “male and female.” But race comes later, and, if there is any undeniable cry of those seeking racial justice, it is “People should not be judged by the color of their skin!” But this is precisely what critical race theory does. It places value on all people and all their ideas based on whether they are white or black or indigenous, whether they were (whether or not they knew it) an oppressor or an oppressed person, due to the color of their skin. In short, I believe critical race theory is wrong and harmful because it is racist.

It is one of the ironies of postmodern philosophies that, in attempting to rectify wrongs without the power of The Deliverer, they inadvertently perpetuate the very wrongs they sought to right. Communism, in its opposition to capitalism’s centralization of power into the hands of a few, solves this problem only by centralizing it further into the hands of the One, the State. And critical race theory, in attempting to rectify the wrongs of racism, only makes everything, and everyone, more racist.

I do believe that history matters. The solution is not to pretend that everyone in our society has equal opportunity. But the way that critical race theory seeks to give people equal opportunity is “an eye for an eye,” and we know what quality of collective sight that leads to. If history is any indication, critical race theory will only make things worse.The solution, instead, is something more like the teachings of Nelson Mandela. We must love and forgive. We must believe there is good in our neighbors. We must treat people as individuals— humans like us, with all the same basic wishes and desires and fears—not as mere members of a class of evil oppressors. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood.”

Over the past eight years or so, I have often supposed that I saw glimpses of a false god, ruling both oppressor and oppressed from behind the smokescreen of racial ire that he has stirred up to conceal his movements: Mammon, one of the great Principalities of our nation. Perhaps, if we came together, we could make war instead on him.

Contraception: a parable and an argument

This is inspired by recent conversations with Aubrey Spears regarding contraception. See also my previous article on contraception.

The Parable

A master prepared to go on a journey and said to the keepers of his house, “I am going to send a messenger here bearing a treasure of mine, which is worth more than my whole house and estate and everything else that belongs to me, for I wish to place it in the locked safe within the inner rooms of my house. And because of the hostility of the surrounding country, I am going to send him in secret, so that no one will know of his coming and going, not even you.” So he instructed them to leave open a certain small door, so that the messenger would find it open whenever he came.

But after a while wild animals and livestock and vagabonds and highwaymen found their way into the courtyard and the outer rooms of the house by way of this open door, and the keepers of the house had great trouble. Some of them feared, saying “We will be killed, and the house ruined, if this goes on,” and others grumbled against the master’s command. So they gathered together and said to each other, “Our master did not say that we were to keep the door ALWAYS open, did he? Therefore, let us open it for an hour only, every night, and lock it again, that we will not be always plagued by these intruders. And if the messenger desires greatly enough to enter, he will wait by the door until that hour of night and keep trying to enter, and then, when we open it, he will come in.” So they began opening the door for an hour only, at night, and locking it again.

But it happened that soon after, the messenger came, and sought to enter the door, but finding it locked, he stayed by and continued to try it. But when the vagabonds and highwaymen saw him at the door, they came and beat him and stole away the treasure.

Soon after that, the master of the house returned, and going to his safe, he opened it, to make sure the treasure was safe and sound. But he found the safe empty! Then the keepers were quick to say, “My lord, the messenger never came!” But the master investigated the matter, and discovered what they had done.

Then the master said to them, “Wicked servants! Did I not tell you that this treasure was of more importance than all the belongings of my house? Did you not trust me to take thought of all that was mine, and to see to your well being as well, as a good master? And if you feared that the house would be overrun, could you not have left the other tasks appointed to you, and set up a guard at the door? But you did not wish to turn away from your own pursuits enough to hold such vigil!” What then will the master do to those servants? Indeed, only his mercy would keep them out of the dungeons.

The Argument

If a master discloses his general purpose for something to a servant, and the servant acts so as to partially prevent that purpose from occurring, without consulting his master to ask for permission for the exemption, then he always does this out of a fear or doubt in the master, that is, in the master’s goodness or his competence.

Married people do not know whether God will choose any given marriage act as the one through which to bring about children (or, to put this in the case of the use of contraception, they do not know whether he would have intended it had they not prevented it).

If God has made it known to his people that the conception of children is something he generally intends to bring about by means of their marriage acts, and one admits this, and yet, having not obtained any exception from him, nevertheless attempts to avoid God’s bringing about that general intention in a particular marriage act, then it can only be out of fear of God’s goodness or competence.

All things done out of fear of God’s goodness or competence are wrong.

Therefore, contraception is, for those who acknowledge God’s general purpose, inevitably wrong.

Nor would God ever grant such an exception to his children, for a contraceptive act wounds the soul, and he desires our good.

This is true even for those for whom the prospect of having a child is the most daunting; indeed, it is especially true for them. Who are the people whose trauma makes it good for them to engage in sex while saying to God, “we refuse to bear a child through this but we are doing it anyway”? For whom is that kind of sex good? For whom is the secret avoidance of God’s purposes a balm? Who are they for whom selfishness and inward bent is a blessing? Those who are afraid of having a child, and at the same time afraid of periodically giving up sex, are among those who most need their sexual lives redeemed. It is precisely those who have strong reasons to want to use contraception—whether for debt or age or children already—who stand most to benefit from God’s command, for it is against the closure and predetermination of their hearts that his law stands guard. It is precisely these whose sexuality can be blessed by God through obedience, whether through being open to receive a gift from God, or through the self-discipline of periodic abstinence. It is no pastoral kindness to say to people “if it is too hard for you, do not be distressed—go and do this act which carries within it an inevitable disposition away from God’s grace and self-sufficiency.”

So much for the idea of encouraging contraception out of pastoral magnanimity. That leaves only the encouragement of contraception out of pastoral fear—fear of those others who will balk at the message and turn away from our churches if we express this hard teaching, as those who turned away from Christ at his teaching about his body. But “to whom shall we go”? How can we preach tolerance of contraception, the mother-thought of the sexual revolution, when the ideas sprung from her womb are ravaging our culture with ever-increasing violence? May God give us the courage to speak truth in love, without fear of evildoers.

Fixing the suburbs

My wife and I recently visited Brooklyn and spoke with our city-dwelling relatives about how to do community and how to organize human life well. There’s been a lot of back and forth in my thinking between City Mouse and Country Mouse—the vision of the walkable, beautiful, vibrant urban setting vs. the vision of the pastoral existence where one can cultivate a little eden in view of mountains, near a small town that affords community and vibrancy. Which is better? Each has trade-offs. But in between the two is something that tried to have both and ended up with the best parts of neither: the suburb. On that we and our urban relatives agree: it was a failed experiment, having grown into a monstrosity of uniform strip malls and cookie-cutter neighborhoods where it’s remarkably tough to connect. But why?

On the train back I pondered it a lot, and tried to draw some synthesis out of the apparent conflict between city and country. For one thing, I think Andrew Peterson was right, that the City of God is a place where “culture and nature are in harmony.”

I think another key is seeing the good city (of any size) as a complex cluster of neighborhoods, rather than one large thing. You can only have community in a human-size neighborhood, where things don’t take forever to get to, and where you have meeting places and green spaces. Then there’s the economic component, which is tough to crack, but working together and doing church together are maybe the two major ways to build community that catalyze with the neighbor proximity, and so you’ve got to have some sort of economic co-dependence with your neighbors, and some commonality of belief.

These attributes apply even to the small town of yore, where fewer people is offset by a more full life integration. No one is commuting away from that community for any life function so 2,000 people is fine.

One idea to add to the mix is the role of policy in clamping down on corporate greed’s tendency to sprawl: of collectively aspiring to bring harmony between culture and nature through intentional restrictions upon ourselves through our laws (in distributist fashion). I’m thinking in particular of the Greenbelts of the UK. These have kept urban areas more granular, and at the same time in closer proximity to green spaces. I also think incentives to encourage people to operate in smaller community units are appropriate—like credit unions instead of chain banks, for instance, and farmer’s markets that source locally versus Walmart’s produce section.

But ultimately, the methods must be in line with the goals, and you cannot achieve this mainly through big top-down policy. We should be focusing first on creating viable examples of this in miniature—good homesteads and communities—which can grow contagiously. It is foolhardy to attempt to change the whole architecture of our land by theory first. Let’s find a way to live this balance and prove it to a world that has forgotten it.

Kazaza: The scandal of the prodigal son

Here are some fascinating cultural layers of what is perhaps the greatest story in the Bible, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, according to Pastor Aubrey Spears’ sermon from January, 2022:

The son knew that by losing his inheritance to foreigners, he would be shamed and rejected by the community if he returned. (This was known as Kazaza.)
The son’s moment of saying to himself “I will go home to my father” is not a total repentance for all the right reasons. It is a preliminary, still-selfish step. In Arabic translations the phrase “came to his senses” renders more like “thought of himself.” It’s at least a compulsion by need, with mixed motives.
When the father runs out to the son, he is probably passing through the street of the town, in view of the community, due to the culture and architecture of the time. Thus, he is preempting the shame of the Kazaza and taking the shame of it upon himself. Besides, fathers didn’t run; it was undignified.
It’s possible that the reason why the son doesn’t finish the speech he had planned is because, in seeing the father doing this, his repentance becomes more real, and the desire and need to negotiate falls away.
The feast of his father is a replacement or the Kazaza, through which, perhaps, the community is persuaded to give up the punishment and accept the son instead. But not the brother—his refusal to come the feast would be his refusal to let go of the punishment due to his brother.