By Karlie Platz, a Junior at Hope College
Photos: Haniah Kring, a Senior at Hope College
What is a man? What is a woman? And why have these questions become so hard to answer? On Thursday, September 30, 2021, the Saint Benedict Institute was pleased to host Dr. Abigail Favale, whose lecture titled “The Genesis of Gender” explored these very questions. Favale is the Dean of Humanities at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. An evangelical convert to Catholicism, she outlined her conversion story in her memoir Into the Deep. Her scholarly work exploring the Christian understanding of reality, human identity, and sexual difference has been featured in several literary and academic journals.
The topics of sexuality, gender, and the body are undeniably controversial in our current culture, and Dr. Favale did not ignore the tension surrounding her lecture. Having previously identified herself as a postmodern feminist, Favale understands the perspective of those who oppose her and believes their views ultimately come from a place of goodwill. Nevertheless, she is steadfast in her belief that the only way to approach such a challenging and divisive topic is to “hold it up to the light of divine revelation.”
Favale opened by providing a brief overview of the history of gender. Up until the 1950s, she explained, gender was a binary category equated with sex. Males were men and females were women. However, things quickly became more complicated, in part due to the work of the French writer Simone de Beauvoir and New Zealand psychologist John Money. Both Beauvoir and Money believed that gender was a malleable social construct that we are taught at a young age. Money even tried to test this theory by prescribing gender reassignment to a boy named David Reimer after a failed circumcision. David rebelled against this reassignment and tragically committed suicide in his thirties, but Money’s social construct idea of gender had already been widely accepted by then.
This idea went one step further in the 1990s and early 2000s when philosophers such as Judith Butler began to propose that sex, in addition to gender, was a social construct. Butler argued that “nothing is real,” including sex. This resulted in a complete reversal of the roles of sex and gender. Rather than biological sex determining gender, the gender that one felt most aligned with was supposed to determine their sex. This isn’t problematic if sex “isn’t real,” as Butler claims, but Favale argues that the physical reality of our bodies invalidates that argument. In her eyes, this new concept of gender has “driven a wedge between body and identity” and created a new “gender paradigm” that is fundamentally at odds with our origin, identity, and purpose. Her solution? To replace the gender paradigm with what she calls the “genesis paradigm.”
The gender and genesis paradigms provide two different worldviews through which to understand ourselves, our bodies, and our purpose. They ultimately disagree on six main points, which Favale discussed in order: creation, reality, body, sexual difference, language, and freedom. Favale explained how the gender paradigm implies that we ourselves are the creator, free to choose our own identity at will. Conversely, the genesis paradigm identifies God as the creator. We “do not come from something” but “from someone,” and our first and most important identity is that of an image-bearer of the one from whom we came. Since we are not the creator, reality is not a malleable construct that we can grasp and recreate to our liking, but a gift we must receive and tend to.
Furthermore, as image-bearers, our bodies are not meaningless objects but sacraments, or visible signs of an invisible reality. Favale explained that sexual difference further communicates this invisible reality. Rather than being an “illusion,” as the gender paradigm would suggest, sexual difference is a revelation of God’s love. The physical complementarity of the two sexes that enables them to become “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24) allows our love to be a complete gift of self. This is a symbol on earth of Jesus’s love for us and the absolute, perfect union he desires to have with each of us in eternity.
One big problem with the gender paradigm’s view of sexual difference as “not real,” Favale argues, is that it attempts to assign reality using human speech. On the contrary, the genesis paradigm asserts that “divine speech makes reality, human speech identifies reality.” Favale believes that sexual difference was spoken into being by the Word of God when he made them “male and female” (Genesis 10:6), and therefore our language can only recognize and proclaim this reality rather than create a new one.
The final aspect of the two paradigms that Favale touched on was freedom. Ultimately, the gender paradigm views freedom as transgression: permissiveness, pushing the boundaries, and making our own meaning. The genesis paradigm views freedom as belonging and becoming who we are as God’s beloved creation.
After outlining the irreconcilable differences between the gender paradigm and the genesis paradigm, Favale offered a somber but important piece of wisdom: if we don’t make a conscious decision about which paradigm we inhabit, it will be made for us. Favale believes that our ultimate purpose is to give and receive love, but in order to do that, we must accept our bodies and the identity they give us as a gift from the Father. Therefore, she asserts that the genesis paradigm provides the best lens through which to understand our sexual difference. Man and woman must be defined by embodiment because it is the physical sign of our bodies that reveals our purpose: to bear God’s image and unite ourselves to him through self-giving love.