A while back, I had read through an article on transgender issues in the church in Christianity Today (see here). While I'm not terribly familiar with the specific details of this debate, it seems that many of the same problems come up in sundry issues involving social- and bio-ethics these days. So, here are my relatively uninformed questions to the two sides:
Pro-Transgender: How does one feel like a woman/man in a man's/woman's body? It would seem to be that at the very moment when physical gender is so plastic, the gender stereotypes must be more rigid than ever in order to create this turmoil. There must be a determinate "feeling" of woman-ness or man-ness for this to make sense, but the stronger this is, the more it is simply a social construct rather than a physical issue (whether or not it would be more than a social construct to begin with).
Anti-Transgender: The whole notion that "God doesn't make mistakes" simply does not apply. First, God could have intended to create someone who would later have a sex-change operation, and thus have not made a mistake; after all, we are born naked, but we put on clothes, we are born little, but we grow, we are born foolish, and (some) gain understanding. How we are born does not determine what God has intended. Second, God does allow evil in the world, and this, as evil, is what should not be. In other cases, we are called to overcome it; why could this case not be analogous? After all, we are all programmed with hormones, but we shouldn't be following them indiscriminately. Instead, we have to deny them (and say that God made a "mistake"?) at times. Others around us may be working injustice; do we sit back, because God has created that situation? In short, in order for Evangelicals to even begin this line (in any case; euthanasia IMHO has similar issues), they need to work out a much fuller natural law ethics than they currently have, and I don't see many willing to put the time into this (what the typical Evangelical "feels" is right does not count as a basis).
2 comments:
That seems to sum up well what my questions are. Thanks for articulating them.
It is indisputable that some babies are born that are neither XX nor XY, and some babies are born with malformed genitalia (sometimes of both kinds!), and some babies have abnormal hormonal issues in the womb. The conservative position seems to me a knee-jerk reaction to complexities of definition (what is "normal"?, what is biological sex?) that scare them (us). Everything is not a simple as it appears.
The real ethical questions seem to me to be: how should indvidiuals, families, and societies act in these unusual situations? The same goes for issues of determined (rather than chosen) sexual orientation. Including, what should we call "normal" and "abnormal", if anything? And what philosophical basis do we have for doing so?
In my view, gender roles are social constructs, and culturally relative. I find myself asking why it should be immoral or sinful for a professor to wear a dress, wig, and makeup (Sammy Morris men do this all the time!), just because these are associated with one gender or another in our culture. On the other hand, I find myself asking what it is about someone's brain chemistry that could possibly make them more inclined to play with Barbie dolls and wear dresses and makeup? Even "normal" girls learn that through socialization.
I'm inclined (through my paltry study on the topic) to say that there are objective gender roles, but as potentials rising out of the biological factors. That is, to simplify for the sake of analysis, there may be roles A, B, C, D, and E which a male could fittingly choose, and roles D, E, F, G, and H which a female could fittingly choose. Furthermore, these may interact: if men tend to be socially indoctrinated into role A, women may naturally be inclined to F or H, for example. (And of course, there could be multiple roles for each sex, and so on and so forth). There are some biological differences which would seem to lead to some differences (such as different hormones, and different brain wirings), even if any single role has not been determined. So, these are socially determined roles within given (highly complex and still malleable) limits.
I'm also inclined to say that these are practical categories (most people are either straight-up male or female), and so have some application, but the fact that there are some outside of these categories should come as no great surprise. They are "abnormal" in that they do not come within our nice, neat schemata, but that's our fault with our expectations.
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