Last year, I wrote a long Substack post analysing the transcript of Rory Stewart’s and Alastair Campbell’s discussion of the Supreme Court ruling on their Rest is Politics podcast. That previous post is available here, but I’m sharing an updated and much shortened version with a few extracts of their most questionable claims because it seems relevant to the current debate, which has been revived by the first anniversary of the ruling. Here’s the link to the previous post:

Background

This ruling was the outcome of a case initially brought by three Scottish women who had concerns about Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. The women formed the campaigning group For Women Scotland, which went through a protracted crowd-funded legal process to defend the legal status of biological sex. They finally won their appeal in the Supreme Court in 2025. The Supreme Court ruling clarified that, under the Equality Act 2010, biological sex and not gender identity is a protected characteristic for the purposes of access to single-sex services and facilities. To be clear, this was a clarification of an existing law. It did not take away any legally-specified trans persons’ rights, which enjoy full protection under the law in this country, though not in the US. There’s a good interview with Susan Smith, one of the founders of For Women Scotland, on BBC Woman’s Hour at this link:

Last week, the first anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling was the catalyst for a viral spat on X/Twitter between gender-critical feminists and Alastair Campbell, because of Campbell’s comments on last year’s Rest is Politics podcast.

J.K. Rowling and Alastair Campbell have gone head to head:

Many have pointed out that Campbell seems to get all his “knowledge” about gender politics from his comedian daughter Grace. In that 2025 podcast, he acknowledges his opinions have “been informed by Grace my daughter and her friends, almost all of whom I think just found this judgment really quite alarming and dangerous.”

Alastair Campbell’s Source of Information

So let’s see where Alastair Campbell gets his information from. Here’s his daughter Grace in conversation with trans woman Charlie Craggs.

They mock the women celebrating outside the Supreme Court after the ruling, laughing and shouting “freaks”, “ugly” (shouting together); “with the worst hair and the worst clothes,” (Campbell); “and the worst views” (Craggs – echoed by Campbell); “and they’re not aspirational in any way. I don’t want to be anywhere near them in a room” (Campbell); “put me in the men’s, I can handle it and I can handle your husbands. I will give your husbands what they are not getting at home with you, with your ugly haircuts,” (Craggs, on not being allowed to use women’s toilets); “I hate the smugness on these women’s faces” (Campbell); “I don’t even like women … Look at me, and look at all those women outside the Supreme Court. You think I’m interested in them? If that’s their hair up there, what do you think it’s saying down there, girlie” (gesturing towards their crotch, to giggling hilarity from Campbell). There is also much mockery and disinformation about J.K. Rowling; claims that trans women have never been a real threat to women, etc. All these claims are easily disprovable by checking the facts, but when did truth and facts ever get in the way of misogyny and mockery?

This juvenile wittering would be of no interest or significance, if it didn’t suggest that Alastair Campbell’s views on gender politics come more from his daughter’s prejudices than from any attempt to inform himself.

The Rest is (Gender) Politics Podcast

In what follows, AC and RS refer to Alastair and Rory respectively, and my interventions are in boxed italics. I’m only singling out a few of their claims.

AC: I think then we should talk about this Supreme Court ruling in the UK seeking to answer the question what is a woman which it is claimed has brought clarity to the debate. I’m afraid I don't think it’s brought clarity to this debate at all.

RS: This is very much a debate in the States where most people on the progressive left are on the side of transgender, and most of the opposition to transgender comes from the conservative right. Britain is very unusual because it’s in Britain that you have figures like JK Rowling and others, who are feminists from the left who are strongly opposed to what they see as the excesses of transgender ideology. So this whole dynamic doesn’t exist here, and actually explaining to an American audience why left-wing progressive feminists like JK Rowling or Kathleen Stock are troubled by transgender ideology is actually quite difficult.

AC: Do you understand it because, you know, I get the thing about women feeling they want quote “safe spaces”.

AC: One of the most moving things I was at last year, Fiona and I did an event for a company, we were talking about mental health. And on the same day on the same platform, there was a guy who’s a trans man, so somebody who had been a woman, now a man, working in this place, who gave a presentation. And it was just really moving how everybody accepted it. Nobody saw it really as that big a deal.

AC: … and this is the problem with this judgment is that it’s being taken as a woman, is only, you know, you cannot change your sex, is essentially what people are saying out of this.

AC: Let’s be honest, the British debate around trans is pretty vile, pretty noxious, pretty toxic. And you just had to see. So there’s the judge saying nobody should take this as a victory one side over the other. Cut to shots of lots of women popping champagne corks, pictures of JK Rowling smoking a celebrity cigar.

RS: My sense is that there are two completely different positions here. There’s the position of the trans community, which is that you are somebody who’s biologically born male but you identify as a woman, or you’re biologically born a woman, you identify as a man. Although that second category doesn't really feature in this debate oddly. Very little of this debate is about people who are born women who identify as men. It’s almost all the other direction is where the controversy is.

RS: A trans woman, somebody biologically male who identifies as a woman, would want to have all the rights and access and opportunities that would normally be granted to a woman because they identify as a woman. On the other side, on the JK Rowling, Kathleen Stock side, you have people saying that women’s rights were very very hard fought for, and that the rights, accesses, protections and opportunities for women should not be eroded by creating an ambiguous blur around the edges of who’s a woman and who isn’t, because it might allow men to be able to claim some of the access, opportunities, protection of women without being women. …

My position would be okay, this is a very difficult question of two competing claims of identity and rights, so let’s try to find practical compromises. So, you know, in the Rory Stewart world I would say, trans women should not be able to compete in women’s sports. Seems to me unfair. I would probably be in favour of gender neutral bathrooms in many contexts to get around this issue, right.

I would also be in favour of looking at a case-by-case basis on a trans woman wanting to go into the female estate in a prison, because you have to balance the fact that trans women are at a lot of threat. I mean, you just pointed this out, right, if you go into a male bathroom and you’re a trans woman and you’re wearing a skirt, you can be beaten up by a man in that bathroom or you could, in a prison, you could be very badly treated by fellow prisoners.

RS: You could also theoretically, although there actually aren't that many cases of it, but it has happened, you could pose a threat to women. So I would be trying to argue that you look at this on a case-by-case basis and you try to navigate your way through these very difficult claims of values.

AC: If you look at some of the rhetoric around this, this is essentially saying there’s no such thing as a trans person. If you’re born a woman you’re a woman for the rest of your life. You’re born a man, you’re a man for the rest of your life.

RS: It’s partly formed for me by a good friend of mine who was biologically a woman but doesn’t identify as a woman. And they find this issue both something that's very personal but also central to their work, because they run a clinic which works to provide puberty blockers for young people, young people who are often suicidal, who feel that they desperately need support in protecting their gender identity, who don’t want to transition into a gender that they feel doesn’t belong to them and feels that they’re doing work which matters deeply to them personally in their own identity, but also to some very vulnerable people. But at the same time that’s balanced with the fact that as the Tavistock report showed, there are many complexities around why people want to transition and how you back the evidence on the risk of suicide against the evidence, the damage that might be done for inappropriately blocking somebody’s development, and how parents play into this and how social media plays into this.

RS: I think it’s a classic example of something which has become very, very complicated, which is for many people very niche. I mean, you often get bad policies when you’re dealing with something which I guess probably 85% of the British public doesn’t have much of a view on, doesn’t think about very much.

AC: During the last election if you looked at the polling on the issues that people felt were important to them, and it wasn’t asking about their voting intentions, just the issues that were important to them. Trans was very, very low down, very low down the the pecking order. I do think we have a media that’s made the most of it. We now have a president in the United States who wants to make the most of it, and who actually even in his acceptance speech did a big thing about, you know, there are only two sexes, You’re either a man or you’re a woman, and let’s get these sports people out and and all that stuff. So weaponizing, if you like.

AC: So when I see Keir Starmer today saying I think this is great, this has all been cleared up, I’m sorry, I don't think it has been cleared up and I think ultimately Parliament is going to have to another look at this at some point.

AC: Now I know we’re both going to get, from various angles we’re going to get absolutely sort of lacerated, but I do feel strongly. … I think trans people have enough on their plate without also constantly being thrown into the middle of a political debate, the heat of which does not necessarily get us to the right place.

I’ve included links for all my claims, so that if Rory and Alastair want to dig deeper and be more informed, they can do so. That might not change their minds, but it would strengthen their arguments.

In a companion post to this one, I explain why I decided to publish it—with some trepidation. You might like to read that post first:

I am an admirer of Dominican friar and cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, and I know him personally. His recent Daily Telegraph interview with Eleanor Doughty created a flurry of interest on social media because of the clickbait headline.

His comments on trans issues are more nuanced than the headline suggests. My concern is with what he goes on to say about women priests. Here’s the relevant section from the article, when Doughty addresses the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood:

Though he is open to this change if the Church so decides, it’s complicated. “If you talk to Catholic or Anglican bishops in Africa, they would be progressive politically, with a massive sense of the injustice of the world economy; they would have a passionate commitment to fighting for the poorest, and they would probably wish to engage with Muslims and other believers.” But they remain overwhelmingly opposed to women priests.

In October, some African prelates reacted to the appointment of Dame Sarah Mullally as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury by rejecting her authority. “I know Sarah,” says Radcliffe, “and she’s wonderful. But it would be an arrogance of the West to say that our ideas of progress are the unique ones.”

It isn’t the case, he says, pragmatically, that women have no voice in the Church. “For the first time in history, women are in charge of two Vatican departments. If you look at education and healthcare in the world, no group has made a bigger contribution than Catholic sisters. You’ve had great abbesses in the past before whom bishops quailed in terror. The idea that women have been a poor, oppressed minority is false.”

Critics argue that the ban is a form of discrimination and institutionalised misogyny, and there is a growing movement to overturn the ruling. “It’s not the most important question. Ordination to the priesthood isn’t the big priority. If we’re going to shift it, it has to be done with the consent of the whole Church.”

Why is it that, when any issue concerning women is raised, even brave and learned Catholic clerics back down and become apologists for the most misleading and theologically nonsensical claims?

As the article makes clear, Timothy (which is how he prefers to be called) is highly respected in the Vatican, but he is no Vatican stooge. He reached out to AIDS sufferers and was a pioneer of the Soho Masses for London’s gay Catholics at a time when official church teaching was mired in homophobia and there was widespread stigmatisation of people with AIDS. He says the phrase that has stuck with him most on his travels is “All are welcome”, and that “You have to develop the art of opening your ears, your mind, your heart to other people”. He adds that Dominicans “believe in the beauty of thinking, that engaging other people with different ideas is exciting”. Why then does he seem unable to listen to and engage with what women are saying to the Church, and why do his integrity and courage desert him when he’s asked about women’s ordination?

To refer to bishops quailing in terror before medieval abbesses is the kind of tedious in-joke among male clerics that has become part of the culture of these supposedly women-friendly clerics. Pope Francis made many such “jokes”. It’s patronising and demeaning to women who are asking serious, theologically literate questions about where we belong in the Church today, to fob us off with this kind of flippant remark. And if putting women in charge of Vatican departments is meant to encourage us, I’d respond that there are many more opportunities for professional advancement in the secular world, where women leaders don’t have male clerics looking over their shoulders and ready to censor every word they say. The question of ordination concerns sacramentality, not careers in Vatican bureaucracies.

The Catholic Church is a multivocal and often quarrelsome collective from vastly different cultures, contexts, races, and classes. If no change could happen without the consent of the whole Church, it would be trapped in a paralysis of inactivity. There is, for example, rampant homophobia among many of the Church’s bishops, especially those from Africa, but Timothy does not cite them to defend the Church’s condemnation of homosexuality. Many American bishops publicly flout Catholic social teaching. Timothy would not say that their dissent should have the power to silence any criticism of US politics—on the contrary, there is growing criticism of some US bishops from the Vatican—so why does he use the objection of some bishops as an argument against women priests? I wonder if it’s to avoid having to defend the excruciatingly bad arguments based on an appeal to nuptial ecclesiology, which now inform the Vatican’s opposition to women priests? (See below)

Few African bishops listen to women, and one might ask how many of these women’s voices filter up through the hierarchical ranks until they reach the ears of the men in Rome. Why doesn’t Timothy listen to and speak for and with women instead of just parroting the prejudices of male bishops, just as he has always listened to and spoken for and with gay men, even when that has meant not falling into line with his more conservative brethren?

It is true that women’s ordination is not as much of a priority among women in the African Church as it is among many in the Western churches, but that is because we have more time and energy to devote to the struggle for ordination than African women struggling against multiple forms of economic, cultural, and clerical exploitation. Much of my work now is with African women religious. Many are robust and articulate feminists, whose feminism is rooted in a passionate biblical sense of justice and a deep personal trust in the companionship and love of Christ. There is widespread dismay about the ways in which priests abuse their power, including the sexual exploitation of women in religious communities. To dismiss as false “the idea that women have been a poor, oppressed minority” is shocking, coming from someone who places so much emphasis on the need to listen, think, and engage.

It’s right to point out that Catholic religious orders and NGOs continue to be in the frontline when it comes to providing education, health care, and social support to women and girls in the world’s poorest communities. The Catholic Church has done more than any other historical movement or institution to preserve the names, writings, and stories of many thousands of women in its cult of the saints. But the institutional Church has also always punished women who have not said what the Church’s male leaders want to hear, and church teachings contribute to the oppression and silencing of women in cultures where male domination is the norm. Anyone who listens to women from Asia, Africa, and Latin America will hear shocking stories of abuse and misogyny perpetrated in the name of traditional Catholic family values. See, for example, Kochurani Abraham’s book, Persisting Patriarchy, about the ways in which culture and Catholicism create oppressive domestic environments of subservience and exploitation in Kerala, even for women who are high achievers in their professional lives. Or watch Nontando Hadebe’s performative explanation of how African women navigate three conflicting spheres of culture, Catholicism, and secular rights in their daily lives:

While the voices of clerical control may be more muffled in western European countries, (though not I think in the US), many of us are spiritually exhausted by the paternalistic and sometimes misogynistic attitudes with which we have to contend if we want to remain active and engaged in Catholic life.

Moreover, while some aspects of gender politics may be imposing “the West’s ideas of progress” on other cultures, that is demonstrably not true of women’s ordination. Women had leadership roles in many traditional African cultures prior to colonialism, and this is reflected in the strong roles played by women in African independent churches today. When church structures don’t conspire to keep women out, African Christians of both sexes have shown themselves supportive of women’s ordained ministries. The first woman deacon to be ordained in the Orthodox Church in modern times was a Zimbabwean called Angelic Molon, who was ordained in Harare in 2024.

The Kenya Evangelical Lutheran Church has just elected its first female bishop, Rev. Catherine Ngina Musau.

So it’s time to stop using the African bishops as a smokescreen to deflect increasingly urgent and persistent questions about women’s ordination, to which the Church’s leaders have yet to provide a credible or defensible theological response.

I am not a liberal feminist. My advocacy for women’s ordination is not about equality and rights, far less about power. It is not about women being naturally better than men, though I do think that women priests would have a leavening effect on the cultures of toxic masculinity that breed in the Church’s clerical ranks. But my reasons for arguing in favour of women priests are to do with sacramental theology, and exposing a doctrinal shift in the understanding of incarnation and sexual difference that has dire implications for the theology of women’s redemption.

I have explained some of this in a recent post, so I won’t rehash the arguments.

Let me engage in a little doctrinal provocation. This is my way of laughing in the face of irrational male power, as a small and feeble sign of solidarity with women who risk so much more (see my last post), but who still refuse to keep quiet.

Transitioning the Priesthood

Did you know that in 1976 the entire Catholic priesthood transitioned from gendered women to sexed men?

Here is an extract from the 1965 Vatican II Decree On the Ministry and Life of Priests, Presbyterorum Ordinis:

Through virginity, then, or celibacy observed for the Kingdom of Heaven, priests are consecrated to Christ by a new and exceptional reason. … [T]hey profess themselves before men as willing to be dedicated to the office committed to them—namely, to commit themselves faithfully to one man and to show themselves as a chaste virgin for Christ and thus to evoke the mysterious marriage established by Christ, and fully to be manifested in the future, in which the Church has Christ as her only Spouse. (Paragraph 16)

Admittedly, one might need a little help from Judith Butler to decipher this, but the priest here is either the feminised bride of Christ, or nuptial ecclesiology is a celebration of same-sex marriage. I suspect the latter was not the intended meaning, so we must assume a gender-fluid priesthood in which the priest becomes symbolically/sacramentally female to represent the Church as Bride.

The question of women priests had yet to arise with any real urgency and persistence during Vatican II, but fast-forward to 1976, by which time it had become impossible to ignore.

Here is a short extract from the 1976 Decree Inter Insigniores, the first Vatican document to defend the essential biological maleness of the ordained priesthood, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and approved by Pope Paul VI:

The Christian priesthood is therefore of a sacramental nature: the priest is a sign, the supernatural effectiveness of which comes from the ordination received, but a sign that must be perceptible and which the faithful must be able to recognise with ease. The whole sacramental economy is in fact based upon natural signs, on symbols imprinted on the human psychology: “Sacramental signs,” says Saint Thomas, “represent what they signify by natural resemblance.” The same natural resemblance is required for persons as for things: when Christ’s role in the Eucharist is to be expressed sacramentally, there would not be this “natural resemblance” which must exist between Christ and his minister if the role of Christ were not taken by a man: in such a case it would be difficult to see in the minister the image of Christ. For Christ himself was and remains a man. …

Christ is the Bridegroom; the Church his Bride, whom he loves because he has gained her by his blood and made her glorious, holy and without blemish, and henceforth he is inseparable from her. …

That is why we can never ignore the fact that Christ is a man. And therefore, unless one is to disregard the importance of this symbolism for the economy of Revelation, it must be admitted that, in actions which demand the character of ordination and in which Christ himself, the author of the Covenant, the Bridegroom, the Head of the Church, is represented, exercising his ministry of salvation—which is in the highest degree the case of the Eucharist—his role (this is the original sense of the word persona) must be taken by a man.

So the refusal to ordain women cannot be blamed on African bishops, nor is there any enduring tradition to say that the priest is the essentially male Bridegroom. At least until the Second Vatican Council, he was the feminised Bride. Those who uphold the ruling against women’s ordination on the basis of essentialised sexual difference must give theological reasons for doing so, because tradition doesn’t support them. If that means defending the indefensible, let them have the courage to say so.

I have written extensively on these issues and have unpacked the misrepresentation of Thomas Aquinas in Inter Insigniores, so I’m not repeating the arguments here.

There is so much more to say, but that’s enough for now.

“Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine.
“They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said.
Then I asked some women students, “Why do women feel threatened by men?”
“They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.

Margaret Atwood, edited extract from “Writing the Male Character”, Hagey Lecture, University of Waterloo (9 Feb 1982). Published in a revised version as “Writing the Male Character,” Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1960-1982 (1983).

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I draft many Substack posts that I don’t publish. It’s a way for me to think aloud and decide whether to share my thoughts. Last week, I drafted a critical reflection on The Daily Telegraph’s recent interview with Dominican friar and cardinal, Timothy Radcliffe, whom I respect and know personally. I found his remarks on women’s ordination trivial and belittling, and I wanted to say why.

I sat on my draft, wondering whether to publish it. In these darkening times, the Catholic Church has had two popes—Pope Francis and now Pope Leo XIV—who have not been afraid to speak truth to power. Pope Leo is being widely quoted as a wise and authoritative voice challenging the growing militarism of world leaders. This is not the time for Catholics to break ranks.

Yet last week, I looked at images of the cardinals gathered in Rome for an extraordinary consistory called by Pope Leo, with a growing sense of alienation and dismay. How can these men continue to think that they have the competence to lead the world towards a more peaceful and unified vision, when they exclude more than half the human race from their ranks solely on the grounds of male sexual privilege?

Then came the execution of Renee Nicole Good, and stories of Iranian women rising up against the regime. I went back to that draft post with an emboldened sense of having to stand up and speak out.

However inspiring the rhetoric emanating from Rome, the optics tell a different story. The Catholic hierarchy gives justification and encouragement to those who think that men have natural, God-given authority over women, and woe betide any woman who suggests otherwise.

The Guardian carried a story last week about the growing demand for Bibles among young people, noting research suggesting that it’s primarily young men, rather than women, who are being drawn to Christianity. The article cited Jordan Peterson as a possible influence. Tommy Robinson has appropriated Christianity to promote nationalist white supremacy. J.D. Vance is a Catholic. Unlike many liberal Catholics, I don’t advocate excommunication for people whose politics and morals I despise. Rather, I ask what it is that attracts such men to the Church, and it’s time to join the dots.

The Church’s vision of social justice pales into insignificance in the face of its guarantee to misogynists everywhere that it respects their desire to control women’s bodies on everything from contraception and abortion to ordination. Church teaching is used far more effectively by Americans who would criminalise abortion than by those who support gun control, because the male hierarchy leans heavily towards one side of these debates. Modern church dogma gives fundamental justification to male power by continuing to insist that women cannot represent Christ because they are not men. This is the ultimate act of doctrinal violence, for it excludes the female body from the incarnation and denies that female humans are made in the image of God. Upon that act of violence, every misogynist can build his fortress.

Meanwhile, women around the world are refusing to bow down to male authority. The women of Iran set light to pictures of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with their cigarettes:

The women of Afghanistan set light to their burqas:

Renee Nicole Good and her wife Becca dared to joke and banter when they were supposed to cower and obey before the macho power of ICE:

These women all risked their lives to defy the men who would seek to control them through the toxic combination of religion, politics, and misogyny. Renee’s killer, Jonathan Ross, is a Trump supporter whose family say he is a committed Christian. As he walked away from her killing, a male voice was heard on his phone recording saying “f*cking b*tch”.

And let’s not forget the brutal treatment meted out to Sinéad O’Connor when in 1992 she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II as a protest against the sex abuse that was happening on his watch. In her autobiography, Rememberings, (gloriously self-narrated as an audiobook), O’Connor describes the torture she suffered at the hands of her devout Catholic mother, while that same picture of the Pope hung on the bedroom wall above her. O’Connor was later vindicated, when the full extent of the cover-up of the sex abuse crisis began to be revealed (and there’s still a long way to go, if you listen to women in Africa).

Women today have three options when threatened by male power: save yourself if you can (as Renee Good tried to do); collude and get ahead (as many do); stand your ground and speak out (as the women of Iran and Afghanistan are doing).

I face nothing like the threats they face. I have been trolled and verbally abused by deacons and priests and banned by bishops and cardinals, but at least for now, I don’t risk being burned at the stake or shot in the face. So I stand my ground and speak out. I won’t leave the Church, and I won’t collude. I have a voice. I must continue to use it while I can.

So with some trepidation, I have decided to publish a lightly edited and updated version of something I hesitated to publish when I wrote it. These situations become complex and painful when good men are involved, but taking the risk of criticising somebody one respects in the context of a public debate is I believe an expression of respect and trust. No cause is served by cowardly silence.

You can read the post here:

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The role of women in the Church is causing much discussion in the Catholic media, including social media, following yet another report by a Vatican commission appointed to consider the question of whether or not women can be deacons. This is the third attempt to produce a coherent response to an issue which is part of an increasingly neuralgic debate about women’s ordination. Once again, a female diaconate remains open to discussion but the answer for the time being is “no”.

Read the Vatican News write-up here.

Read Gerard O’Connell’s report in America magazine, which provides background information.

I cannot find the full report online, but this is how Vatican News reports it:

The report summarizes arguments for and against. Supporters argue that the Catholic and Orthodox tradition of reserving diaconal ordination (as well as priestly and episcopal ordination) to men alone seems to contradict “the equal condition of male and female as the image of God,” “the equal dignity of both genders, based on this biblical reference”; the profession of faith that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for you are all ‘one’ in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28); and social developments “which promote equal access for both genders to all institutional and operative functions.”

On the opposing side, the following thesis was advanced: “The masculinity of Christ, and therefore the masculinity of those who receive Holy Orders, is not accidental but is an integral part of sacramental identity, preserving the divine order of salvation in Christ. To alter this reality would not be a simple adjustment of ministry but a rupture of the nuptial meaning of salvation.” This paragraph was put to a vote and received five votes in favor of confirming it in this form, while the other five members voted to remove it.

I have written extensively on ordination with regard to issues of sex, gender, and the female body. Here, I focus on that second paragraph which is causing some perplexity, but before that, a couple of relevant asides.

First, it is not true that the Orthodox tradition reserves diaconal ordination to men. The Vatican often appeals to the Church in Africa to justify its opposition to women’s ordination, but the first woman deacon in modern times was a Zimbabwean Orthodox woman, Angelic Molen, ordained in Harare in 2024.

Second, the language of gender is misleading in that reference to “the equal dignity of both genders”. The debate about women’s ordination is not about gender but about sex. Christianity is incarnate. We are our bodies, and our fundamental human equality is to do with our sexed bodies, not our gendered roles.

In terms of gender, i.e. the cultural-linguistic meanings and behavioural expectations that different societies attach to concepts of masculinity and femininity, the Catholic tradition outdoes Judith Butler in its performative gendered fluidity. When this is interpreted literally, conflating sex and gender, much of the mystical and ecclesiological language of the Catholic tradition becomes incoherent. We might as well go looking for cats and dogs falling from the sky on a rainy day, as look for sexed bodies in the richly analogical poetics of a theological tradition that has no problem referring to “the womb of the Father” (Eleventh Council of Toledo, 675 AD), or to Jesus and St Paul as our mothers (St Anselm, 1033/4-1109 AD). I have argued that Christ’s body on the cross was depicted as polymorphous in 13th and 14th century art—a self-impregnating body that incorporated both male and female procreative capacities.

In an analysis of Pope John Paul II’s 1988 Apostolic Letter on the Dignity of Women, Mulieris Dignitatem, I counted at least six genders. Here are screenshots from a Powerpoint presentation that I use for teaching. My argument is that there are many genders but only one essential sex in modern Catholic teaching. The male is essential, the female is inessential. The male body can be any body—woman, bride, virgin, mother. When a priest celebrates Mass in an all-male community, the bride/woman/mother are fully present in the male congregation (i.e. this is about gender, not sex). However, it is not possible to celebrate Mass in an all-female community, because the sexed male body must be present in the form of the priest, who is essentially male (i.e. this is about sex, not gender):

But the point of this post is to address the confusion created by that report, in the paragraph about the nuptial meaning of salvation: “The masculinity of Christ, and therefore the masculinity of those who receive Holy Orders, is not accidental but is an integral part of sacramental identity, preserving the divine order of salvation in Christ. To alter this reality would not be a simple adjustment of ministry but a rupture of the nuptial meaning of salvation.”

This nuptial language has a long history, going back to the Hebrew Bible. God’s faithful love for his adulterous and wayward bride Israel forms the foundation for the nuptial ecclesiology of the Church: the Church is Christ’s Bride. There is much that can be problematised about this language, both in terms of the abusive relationship that sometimes features in the language of the Hebrew prophets (and is taken up by Hans Urs von Balthasar—see the full version of the essay linked below), and in terms of Freudian anxieties about the relationship between Mary and Christ, when she too becomes bride as well as mother. But the language is poetic and analogical, with a potent capacity to inspire reflection, to arouse desire for that which is beyond all grasping and naming, and to open doorways into mystery beyond rationalisation. When it becomes literalised as sexual desire which finds satisfaction in the marital sex act, then we are entering a dangerous realm of potentially abusive relationships fuelled by projections, fantasies, and obsessions.

When we speak about God’s unfailing love for creation, our most intimate, loving, and complex human relationships offer themselves as the closest metaphors we can find to describe this wordless mystery. The divine (God, Christ) is spouse, lover, friend, father, mother, sibling, child—all these at various times carry meaning in the language of the Bible and of Catholic doctrinal and devotional writings.

With the rise of feminism and the emergence of questions about women’s ordination in the mid-twentieth century, the Church’s leaders faced a challenge they had never seriously faced before. The exclusion of women from the sacramental priesthood had been justified by appealing to long-standing cultural and theological beliefs about the hierarchical ordering of relationships between men and women. (See my open-access essay, “Human Dignity and Rights in the Context of Gender and the Sacramental Priesthood” in which I unpack these ideas). In this, the Church reflected prevailing cultural values and beliefs about the relationship between the sexes. However, as cultural values changed and women sought equality in all aspects of life, the Church shifted from an hierarchical model to one that posited equality in difference through a doctrine of sexual complementarity. That was when sexual essentialism entered the scene, and church teaching began to move further and further away from cultural ideas and practices.

The belief that men and women are essentially different in all aspects of their psychosomatic make-up owes more to 19th century science and romanticism than to the Catholic tradition. A sexual hierarchy of created authority/subordination, superiority/inferiority, intended by God for the good ordering of society and lacking any ultimate ontological or eschatological significance, was replaced by ontological sexual difference which has dire implications on two fronts: first, it risks excluding the female body from the saving power of the incarnation, and second, it introduces a new sexual literalism into the language of nuptial ecclesiology. That latter point is what concerns me in this post.

I’m sharing extracts from an essay I wrote, published in the Journal of Moral Theology, exploring the implications of this sexualised theology for the understanding of priesthood and the sex abuse crisis: “Theological (De)formations? The Sex Abuse Crisis in the Context of Nuptial Ecclesiology and the Theology of Priesthood”. The full article is available to read at this link.

Extracts from “Theological (De)formations? The Sex Abuse Crisis in the Context of Nuptial Ecclesiology and the Theology of Priesthood

Introduction

Some reports into the sex abuse crisis recommend investigating how theology contributes to clericalism.[2] I ask if postconciliar nuptial ecclesiology, influenced by Hans Urs von Balthasar’s idea of the Marian and Petrine Church and Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body (ToB), invites critical reflection in this context.

I argue that the shift in theological symbolics brought about by ToB and its Balthasarian underpinnings constitutes a move from patriarchal to phallic theology. Whereas the exclusive masculinity of the priesthood used to be justified by an appeal to the natural, God-given authority of the male and the subordination of the female for the good ordering of society, household and Church, now it is defended by an appeal to the symbolic significance of male sexual anatomy.[3] This has dangerous implications for the Church, mired as it is in the scandal of clerical abuse.

[A long section has been omitted here, but the full essay is available to read in the link above.]

From Patriarchy to Phallocentrism

In Balthasar’s post-conciliar writings, the rhetoric of rape and conquest is replaced by an appeal to the masculine sexuality of the priestly role. In a reflection on Ephesians 5 in the context of Humanae Vitae, he makes repeated references to the analogy between the fertile sexual relationship in marriage and the fruitful relationship of Christ with the Church, including an explicit reference to the kenotic significance of the male orgasm: “Unlike the man in the act of intercourse, Christ does not give away just a little of his substance. No, Christ gives away his entire substance …”.[55] In an essay titled “The Christian and Chastity,” Balthasar asks, “What else is his eucharist but, at a higher level, an endless act of fruitful outpouring of his whole flesh, such as a man can only achieve for a moment with a limited organ of his body?”[56] He writes with his customary extravagance about what it means for Christ to give his flesh “prodigally” in the Eucharist, by way of a comparison with sexual intercourse in marriage: “The man, even and specifically in the sexual act, must show perfect, loving self-giving, which at the same time takes up the self-giving of the woman and gives it form; the wife is the one who allows herself to be formed, without setting inner limits on the love which she has received.”[57] This conjugal love is, claims Balthasar, “taken up” into the “nuptial love” of Christ for the Church: “Human sexuality is precisely created by and for such love.”[58] Again, I can only ask what might go on in the mind of an abusive priest, if he deceives himself into believing that he is offering spiritual love to his victim, who should set no “inner limits” on how that love is received. Many victims of abuse report how their abusers explained their behaviour as a form of spiritual or mystical love. One woman who described being abused by Jean Vanier said that he told her, “This is not us; this is Mary and Jesus.”[59]

….

Balthasar’s phallic theology of priesthood and kenosis finds popular expression in many contemporary interpretations of ToB, in ways that constitute a significant departure from the more restrained language of John Paul II. Christopher West is widely promoted on diocesan and parish websites.[63] In a video titled “Why Women Cannot Be Priests,” [64] West appeals to the capacity of the male body to produce sperm as the justification for restricting priestly ordination to men: “unless priesthood has something to do intrinsically with the fact that only men produce sperm and only men can be fathers then it is a matter of unjust discrimination to say women can’t be priests.” The “essential act of the priesthood” is, claims West, “the conferring of the Eucharist and, as Saint John Paul II says, the Eucharist is the sacrament of the bridegroom and the bride. You need a bridegroom to give the seed that leads to new life and you need a bride to receive that seed to conceive the new life.”

…

There is an abundance of material online and in publications which encourages this kind of thinking. It may be a distortion of John Paul II’s theology, but in his linking of the priesthood so closely to the married sexual relationship and the essential heterosexuality and spousal meaning inscribed into the human body “in the beginning,” it was perhaps inevitable that this kind of theology would develop, particularly as arguments against women priests are being chiselled away so that only anatomical difference remains.

Conclusion

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Pope Francis has set the Church on a trajectory towards a more life-affirming and liberating ecclesiology. However, unless and until women are full and equal dialogue partners in discussions about the theology and practice of priesthood, including the symbolics of gender that inform it, I fear there will be no end to clericalism. The dysfunctional and often abusive dynamics of masculine clerical power will continue to distort the sacrament of ordination and turn ordinary, good men into frustrated and lonely sexual predators.

[2] Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, “Final Report: Religious Institutions,” (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017), www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/file-list/un-redacted_final_report_volume_16_book_2_-_religious_institutions.pdf; Jean-Marc Sauvé, “Sexual Violence in the Catholic Church France 1950-2020, Summary of the Final Report,” Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church, www.ciase.fr/medias/Ciase-Summary-of-the-Final-Report-5-october-2021.pdf. For the full report, see “Commission Indépendante sur les abus sexuels dans l’Église” (CIASE), www.ciase.fr/. See also Gerry O’Hanlon, “Learning from the Murphy Report: A Theological Reflection,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 102, no. 408 (2013): 423–433, www.jstor.org/stable/23631196.

[3] Tina Beattie, “Human Dignity and Rights in the Context of Gender and the Sacramental Priesthood,” Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, 6, no. 1 (2020): 140-157, doi.org/10.30965/23642807-00601009; Mary Anne Case, “The Role of the Popes in the Invention of Complementarity and the Anathematization of Gender,” Religion & Gender 6, no. 2 (2016): 155-172, doi.org/10.18352/rg.10124.

[55] Hans Urs von Balthasar, “A Word On ‘Humanae Vitae’” in New Elucidations, 217.

[56] Balthasar, “The Christian and Chastity” in Elucidations, 150.

[57] Balthasar, Elucidations, 149.

[58] Balthasar, Elucidations, 149.

[59] Quoted in John J. Conley, S.J., “My conversations with Jean Vanier raised many questions. I have no answers,” America: The Jesuit Review, March 13, 2020, www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/03/13/my-conversations-jean-vanier-raised-many-questions-i-have-no-answers.

[63] There has been debate around what some see as West’s excessive sexualization of John Paul II’s theology. See McLean Cummings, “Theology of the Body: A Vigorous Discussion,” Faith Magazine, May-June 2010, www.faith.org.uk/article/may-june-2010-theology-of-the-body-a-vigorous-discussion.

[64] Christopher West, “Why Women Cannot Be Priests,” Theology of the Body Institute video, youtu.be/hGUmkDPmg7s. The video is based on Christopher West’s book, Good News About Sex and Marriage: Answers to Your Honest Questions About Catholic Teaching (Cincinnati OH: Franciscan Media, 2018) with a Foreword by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput.

This recent interview might be of interest to followers. I’ve cut and pasted the interview below, but you can also read it on the LGB Christians website at this link. I’ve added a few additional images and links here to break up the text.

Tina Beattie, Professor Emerita of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton in London, is a feminist Catholic theologian of global repute, and a founding supporter of LGB Christians and Friends. Novelist, broadcaster and blogger, Tina makes regular appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, addressing a range of social and ethical issues. Tina is interviewed here by Dr Mark Chater, a Core Team Member of LGB Christians.

Introducing Tina Beattie: From Typist to Theologian

Mark Chater: First of all I want to say thank you, Tina, for agreeing to be interviewed for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Christians and Friends. For supporters of LGB Christians who might not know much about you, could you start by telling us about yourself, how you came to discover the major themes of your academic work, and how those themes have brought you to friendship with LGB Christians?

Tina Beattie: I spent most of my early life in sub-Saharan Africa, and we came to the UK in 1988 with our 4 little children. I left school at 15 and went on to become a typist and secretary. When our youngest child started school, I went to Bristol University as a mature student, and eventually became Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton, which was about the furthest from my girlish ambitions as it’s possible to get. But here I am.

“Gender Ideologies”: The Vatican and Beyond

I was a fairly recent convert to Catholicism when I went to university, and I became interested in the history of devotion to Mary. Up until then, as a Presbyterian, I’d harboured deep suspicions. So I did my PhD on Marian theology and devotion, and I did it by engaging mainly with Luce Irigaray, and with continental philosophy and theoretical and psychoanalytic sources.

In my undergraduate studies, I’d been introduced to feminist theology. As a woman, a mother, a wife, I recognised the questions, and the feminist critique resonated, but I did not share the pragmatic liberal optimism of some feminist theologians of the 1980s and 90s. That’s why I went down the road of continental theory. I was doing all this at the time of what academics call the linguistic turn, when there was a shift from the rhetoric of pragmatic liberal politics to psychoanalysis, and Marxist and linguistic theory. Because of my African background and my conversion to Catholicism, this resonated deeply with me. I was interested in the roots of desire and violence, love and hate, why are we so divided, and why is the Church so afraid of the sexual female body? Those were the questions I thought we had to grapple with, and I did so in the context of sacramental theology and gender.

Naively as a convert, I believed that doing Catholic theology, one celebrated the marriage of reason and revelation, and that theology and philosophy were in a mutually illuminating relationship. Well, it wasn’t long before the Vatican banned me, because I couldn’t see any rational argument against same-sex marriage or women’s ordination, and it was clear that issues like abortion invited a more nuanced ethical perspective than theological absolutism. So on all these things, the Vatican decided I was persona non grata. So that was the first gender ideology that I ran into.

But these issues are not about absolute positions. They’re about relationships of power: who is being allowed to speak, and who is being silenced and why. So as gender has become a more complex and controversial issue, power relations have changed, and my position on gender has become challenged, I won’t say changed. I’m still against the gender ideology of the Catholic Church, or at least the magisterium. But I am also against the gender ideology of a new movement that has sprung up, associated with the ever-expanding 2SLGBTQA+ movement.

The Nuance of Trans Issues and the LGBTQIA+ Movement

Mark: Please unpack your opposition to 2SLGBTQA+ as an idea or movement.

Tina: There clearly are genuine cases of gender dysphoria, which is a condition that still needs far more research in order to understand its sources, causes and cures. I was a trans advocate in my teaching and writing, when I believed the initial narrative, that these are rare, complex and distressing conditions, and sometimes the distress is eased by hormonal and surgical interventions. I know that for some people struggling with a lifetime of gender dysphoria, transitioning allows them to lead full lives. I personally know a number of trans women and men for whom that’s true. But trans activism goes far beyond this, and research has undermined many claims about transitioning as a cure-all for a wide range of mental health struggles, suicidality, and body issues. The LGBTQIA+ movement has gone beyond gender dysphoria as a complex problem that needs more research. It’s promoting an ideology based on fantasies and myths about the sexed human body, which more and more scientists and medical practitioners are exposing and resisting.

I cannot support a cause when I don’t know what I’m supporting, or why this is a persecuted or marginalised group that needs defending. Gay and lesbian relationships have been under social and sometimes legal censure for much of Christian history, and therefore I have no problems identifying which rights I’m defending and why. But, for example, when have asexual people been denied their rights? The Church has been trying to make women asexual for 2,000 years! So tell me what Catholics are defending when they add that “A” to their list of causes. One of my concerns is that by tagging on these meaningless slogans, legitimate struggles in the name of feminism and gay and lesbian rights become diluted and undermined.

Queer used to be synonymous with gay, but now it occupies a separate category in the alphabet soup, which is fine, but again, I can’t use that rhetoric if I don’t know what it means. Queer is a theoretical approach to the history of sexuality, which I find helpful. But when Queer becomes yet another identity demanding legal recognition and protection, it’s no longer Queer, because the word Queer in theory refers that which is able to stand obliquely to fixed identities and sexualities in order to subvert the status quo. So these are some of my concerns. That’s why my position now is more ambivalent and conflicted than it was before. Sorry – that’s a very long answer!

Mark: But a very wonderful and rich answer, Tina. Thank you. It’s so interesting, and there’s so much that you’ve said that I and others in LGB Christians heartily agree with, particularly the ridiculous incoherence, and worse than incoherence, of the Pandora’s box that is LGBTQIA+. A slight digression, if I may. Are there any other theologians, alive or dead, who you think might come to your side in recognizing the gender ideology of the Catholic Church, and the more recent gender ideology of LGBTQIA+, and the importance of embodiment – the importance and primacy of our sexed bodies, as you have put it. Are there any other theologians?

Tina: In the 1990s, I was attracted by the arguments of some feminist theologians who engaged with the linguistic turn, such as Serene Jones, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Rebecca Chopp, and also by medievalists doing gender such as Caroline Walker Bynum.

It was about giving women for the first time a language for our sexuality, our bodies, the goodness of the female body, which is why, though I’m not uncritical, theorists like Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixous, and Lacanian theorists, were resources I could draw on. But the people who in the 1990s were saying, we need to reclaim the female body in language, we need to talk about female sexuality, are not saying, Hold on a minute, you know this language has now been colonised. Breastfeeding is chest feeding. Women are people with vaginas or wombs. Pregnant women are pregnant people. Some lesbians have penises.

We women had hardly even begun to claim this language of female sexual embodiment before it was appropriated by men. I was probably nearly 50 before I had words I wasn’t ashamed to use for my own body. I was in my forties when I first got naked in women’s communal changing rooms. Why have so many feminists just given up on that struggle, and said, Oh, you know, so long as you call yourself a woman, come and join us? I don’t understand it.

In this country the Supreme Court has changed the dynamics with the recent ruling, which is far more nuanced and limited than its critics are saying. Basically, it defends the rights of women to single sex spaces and activities, without taking away any of the rights that trans people already have in this country. If I lived in the US now with Trump’s regime, I would be speaking out against the violation of trans rights. If you want to use the term transphobic in a meaningful way, most certainly Trump and MAGA are transphobic, or at least, they are exploiting transphobia for cynical political ends. I think the way they are treating trans people, for example by arbitrarily banning them from military service, is appalling and must be spoken out against.

It’s complicated, and it’s the refusal to deal with complexity that troubles me. That’s why I speak now about two ideologies, the Vatican and the LGBTQIA+ movement, whose methods turn out to be the same. I’ve been banned by both. I can no longer contribute to the blogs of an American university, because I come from what some in the US refer to as Terf Island and I argued in one of my blogs that there are good reasons why some British women, mainly on the left and many of whom are lesbians, are gender critical feminists.

I was invited and then disinvited to give a talk in Canada, because I would upset their 2SLGBTQIA+ community. So there we go. I’m stuck in the middle with a few, stuck in the middle with you!

Theological Perspectives on Embodiment, Gender, and Freedom

Mark: Well, don’t worry. There’s plenty more of us. Looked at theologically, what do you think gender ideology is and why does it have such a strong grip? And I’m thinking particularly of the second of the two gender ideologies that you have analysed. What is it? It’s a phenomenon of some sort, and we need ways of understanding it theologically.

Tina: I would distinguish between an ideology and a use of language that is creative and poetic. So I think the mistake has been made in refusing to recognise the difference between sex and gender, and that’s where the two ideologies meet up. With the Vatican your sex should dictate your gender and, unfortunately in my view, with some LGBTQIA+ activists, your gender should dictate your sex. Both of these are ideologically dangerous. Whereas the Vatican says you must alter your psychology, your character, your sexual orientation, everything, in order to conform to deeply problematic binary heterosexual stereotypes, on the other side is an ideology that says, if you feel feminine, if you feel masculine, you must adapt your body to conform to gendered binary stereotypes – at least as far as some aspects of the trans movement are concerned. Trans women like Dylan Mulvaney and Jordan Gray perform the female body in ways that are exaggerated expressions of the most infantilising and degrading feminine stereotypes. The LGBTQ magazine Attitude made Mulvaney its woman of the year in 2023, and ‘her’ acceptance speech on YouTube is cringeworthy.

I don’t know why so many feminists think this is okay. Gender critical feminists, many of whom are lesbians, recognise the problems, but a lot of women just seem willing to go along with it. Feminists have struggled for years to break free of these stereotypes, only to have them reinforced by some men who seem to think being a woman is nothing more than a parody of femininity.

But you asked me about theology. Theologically speaking, if you research the history of the Catholic Church, gender is an important way of speaking about relationships. It’s not always pleasing to feminists because it is hierarchical, but we can go beyond the hierarchies to recognise that there’s a fluidity of the language about how we position ourselves in society according to gender, and in many ways this can open into creative playfulness. I think gender should be playful, creative and performative, to borrow Judith Butler’s expression. We don’t need gender stereotypes. There are butch women and there are effeminate men (to use that kind of stereotypical language). Today, young people who manifest these kind of characteristics and ways of behaving are likely to be persuaded that they are trans.

Theologically, we need to see that the body is a gift/a given, but gender is a social construct that can be used in creative and oppressive ways. In many ways the body is a dark gift – vulnerable, mortal, prone to suffering and making demands on us that can feel restricting of the spirit. That insight is as old as St Paul!

There are so many people whose bodies are a source of suffering or of social marginalisation or exclusion. That includes people with disabilities and people who are suffering from life-altering diseases and injuries, but it also includes people who are victims of racism, for example. These are forms of exclusion on the basis of bodiliness. We don’t say to such people, you’re born in the wrong body. We say society needs to change. Theologically, bodies are what we are, they’re the material selves we’re given to live as, and they’re never perfect by some idealised concept of perfection.

Also theologically, sex can be beautiful and loving, and it can be violent and abusive. For many of us who don’t experience war or other forms of collective violence, the most likely forms of violence we’ll experience, certainly for women and for many children, will take the form of sexual violence. I’ve experienced it. I know very few women who haven’t.

While I agree with those who say that the doctrine of original sin has been obsessively distorted by a focus on sex at the expense of other wrongs and injustices, that doesn’t mean that sex isn’t implicated as a potential source of abuse and violence. I think we’re seeing the dangers of a Utopian celebration of unleashed sexuality. Child pornographic abuse of the most extreme kind is exploding, thanks partly to the Internet, as is the misogynistic abuse of female bodies. Laura Bates has just published a book with the title, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny. AI now has ways in which you can take any woman’s face and put it on an absolutely realistic body of extreme pornography. You can create yourself a pornographic girlfriend in the virtual world with AI.

When I started out on gender studies I was engaging with liberal theologies, both feminist and gay and lesbian. That was when the sex abuse scandal was breaking in the Catholic Church, and there was this weird dichotomy: on the liberal side we had returned to some Edenic state of joyful, innocent sex so long as you lifted the heavy hand of the bad old Christian tradition and let people express themselves sexually, while on the other side, we had a catastrophic abuse scandal in the Church. In the US, we still see that self-congratulatory Christian liberalism which gives carte blanche to the LGBTQIA+ inclusive movement. Of course I’m not suggesting that anybody in that incoherent conglomeration of sexual and gendered identities is more or less likely to be sexually violent or abusive, but we should not assume that every individual who shelters under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella is benign and should have unfettered access to women and children. Women are right to be wary of men and to caution our children against strange men, and good men understand that. And yes, a determined abuser doesn’t need a gender recognition certificate, but as soon as you allow anatomical males full access to female-only spaces on the basis of gender identity, you might as well do away with all such spaces. Locking my front door won’t deter a determined burglar, but I still lock my door!

Commercial Interests and the Commodification of Identity

You asked how this has such a strong grip on society. In Pride month nearly every High Street chain store has Progress Pride flags on display. Corporations do not line up behind vulnerable minority causes. There is a huge capitalist investment in this, fuelled partly by big pharma. In order to maintain the illusion of sex change (I’m using those words intentionally), you need to be on a lifetime’s regime of hormones. Big Pharma are invested in this. There’s a chilling market research report that shows how promoting trans surgery to young people in the global South is being seen as a potential source of profits for these companies. Jennifer Bilek has a blog called The Eleventh Hour: Transgender, Technology, Capitalism, and she’s recently written a book. She argues persuasively that this is a movement fuelled by corporate billionaires with transhumanist ideologies and investment in Big Pharma.1

Richie Brown of DiplomaticPost

Ep 005: Jennifer Bilek: Transexual Transgender Transhumanism

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Listen now

a year ago · 18 likes · 3 comments · Richie Brown

Mark: And there are all sorts of other big corporates who have been putting money into organizations like Stonewall, and who are proud to be associated with the progress flag. In addition to promoting Pharma, is it also about burnishing their own reputation as progressive forces in society, and opening up new markets? Do we really believe they’re interested in our rights? When Gay and Lesbian people were struggling for their rights in the sixties and seventies, where were the corporate donors?

Tina: And in the US now, the corporations are pulling out very quickly now that Trump has made it no longer fashionable to support this cause. They’re not there in the long run. They’re not there to support human rights. They are the ultimate violators of human rights.

A Call for Discernment and Protection of the Vulnerable

Mark: Is a distorted notion of freedom something at the heart of your concerns? I see in the LGBTQIA+ ideology, in manifestations of gender ideology, a definition of freedom that is all about ‘me’, and it’s about my rights to intrude into other people’s spaces, my rights to be whoever I want to be, and so on. And that is not the freedom of which the Judeo-Christian tradition at its best speaks, and it is not the freedom that’s going to lead us to health and wholeness and salvation. Do you want to say something about notions of freedom?

Tina: Well, I am a liberal insofar as I do agree that an adult’s freedom should only be curtailed by the harm it does to others and the ways it impinges upon the freedom of others. But immediately we’re into a very complex social question, because in a way, everything we do has a social dimension. I’m very aware, as a heterosexual married woman, that society still puts a cordon of security and protection around me that is not afforded to my gay and lesbian friends, even if it’s afforded in law. It’s much easier for me to walk down the road holding hands with my husband than it would be for you to walk down the road holding hands with your partner or lover.

I do want the maximum freedom, and I agree with the Catholic teaching that we have a debt to conscience before anything else. So, even if my conscience is misinformed, even if it leads me to do wrong, I have a right to follow my conscience. I want to protect that belief, and also the Catholic doctrine that says you must not use the law to enforce morality. You must only use the law to protect society, so all that I agree with. But freedom? What we’re seeing is often not an expression of true freedom but an explosion of narcissistic individualism driven by capitalism.

What adults do, so long as they’re not harming anyone else, is up to them. I have no desire to intrude upon the identities, the body modifications, the mutually consented sex lives of adults (though what constitutes consent is also a complex question). I don’t have to understand it, and I don’t have to justify it, to accept that it’s part of what it means to be free in a liberal democracy. And that’s what I want.

With regard to young people, adolescence is a time of experimentation. Let teenagers change their pronouns and play with their identities. That’s what growing up is about. But puberty blockers interrupt a vital process of development, and there are growing concerns about their impact on bone development, brain development, fertility and sexuality, etc. Adolescence is a troubled time, a traumatic time. We’re transitioning from childhood to adulthood. But puberty blockers we now know have long term, unknown effects, and current research such as the Cass Review suggests that they often lead to more radical surgical and hormonal interventions.

I want to use the word social contagion for teenage girls, as I would about anorexia or cutting, or any of the other things they are susceptible to. Some of the teenage girls I meet are not trans but they don’t feel feminine, so they say they’re non-binary. I think the biggest growth in non-binary identity is among young women. And I get it, you know, because it’s an age when the stereotypes of femininity get promoted. The female body at puberty is commodified, objectified, sexualized in ways that I think very few women who have been through puberty would fail to recognize as deeply troubling. Suddenly, men are looking at you, groping you, and your childhood body is morphing in disturbing ways with hormonal flux into the mix. So I think adults need to be more responsible. I want to give teenagers and young people space to experiment and make mistakes while protecting them from puberty blockers and irreversible interventions.

Mark: And we’ve all been there.

Tina: We’ve all been there. We’ve all made mistakes.

Mark: Could we explore the Christian theological ideas and the spiritual practices which we could call on to engage critically with misogyny and the trans contagion? What are those ideas and practices and how could they help us? Let me just throw out a couple and see if you want to seize on them or pick something else.

The idea that God became incarnate in Christ, in a human body, the embodiment of God in the Church and in the world, and in our own bodies; the way in which we encounter the body of Christ in Eucharist and other sacraments: is it useful to bring this out of the cupboard and dust it off? And another one might be Catholic social teaching in which the rights of one group need to be balanced with the rights of another: this is where Leo XIV, in his choice of papal name, might be a very significant voice. Would you like to comment on those or mention some others? ( The previous Pope of that name, Leo XIII, in 1891 authored the encyclical Rerum Novarum, a key founding document in the Catholic church’s teaching on social and economic injustice, balancing rights, and the common good.)

Tina: One problem is, the female body is sacramentally negative in the Catholic Church. Apart from marriage, which requires both sexes to be present, there is no sacrament for which the female body must be present. And before we can talk about the inclusivity of other bodies, why don’t we see this as the plank in the eye of the Church? How can you advocate for the inclusion of trans women when you don’t allow for the inclusion of the sexually gifted female body made in the image of God?

So these things always raise questions. But if we’re talking about how Christians address these issues, then we have to ask how we make the body the gift that it is, and as I’ve already said, it’s a dark gift. The body is finite, it does suffer. I am my body. When my body is suffering, I’m suffering, but the idea that you can be born in the wrong body is an aesthetic of pagan perfectionism. Christianity is called to care for the vulnerable body, the suffering body, the abjected body.

Nina Power wrote a very good book that I recommend. It’s called, What Do Men Want? Her argument is that suffering is part of the human condition, it’s not a competition, but it’s people with the loudest voices who can proclaim their suffering most loudly, who are privileged while the suffering of others is dismissed. It’s a book well worth reading. I recommend it.

Mark: Thank you. Yes, there is certainly an observable phenomenon of competitive victimhood going around at the moment. In all of this, and the people who shout the loudest get the most attention in terms of legislation.

Tina: The most suffering victims don’t have a megaphone. So the Church must be attentive to those with gender dysphoria while resisting its ideological appropriation. This calls for discernment, and for more understanding and research than we currently have available, because so many ideological interests are behind much research funding and reporting.

The theological resources we have are that we are male and female, made in the image of God, and that Christ was fully human in a fully human body that happened to be male. But we also have a liturgical and sacramental tradition that performs gender in ways that liberate us from our day to day roles and release us into erotic and nuptial exchanges of eschatological hope, and that’s where I part company with some liberal theologians who would eradicate all that language. I see gender as the human expressiveness that we derive from the binary sex of our mammalian bodies. We are an animal species that would die out if it weren’t for sexual difference, but that’s not all we are by any means.

So while affirming sexual binaries, I also want to say in gendered terms, we’re all non-binary. That’s why I find this preoccupation with non-binary identities and plural pronouns quite misanthropic, because it’s a form of asserting a way of being superior to or different from the hoi polloi, those of us who are put into a binary box as if we all conform mindlessly to the roles assigned to us. We’re all non-binary, if we’re being true to ourselves. We are all burdened by conformity to gender stereotypes.

Mark: Maybe what you’re talking about is preoccupation with self. And is the abandonment of self another strand of healthy Christian theology? I don’t mean the abandonment of self in ways that women particularly are all too accustomed to, which is the negation of their needs. I don’t mean that. I mean the abandonment of self in a more generalized sense. Stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about relationship and society.

Tina: Yes, I agree. I think the question of the self is a complex and deep one. For Christians, self-discovery is paradoxically a loss of self through a journey into the mystery of the Godhead. That takes a lifetime. Catherine of Siena says you can’t know God unless you know yourself, and I think this is a constant wrestling between losing the self in a good sense and denying the self in a bad sense. Thomas Aquinas says I must love myself as I love my neighbour, because I am my closest neighbour. I love that. It suggests the kind of divided sense of self that the theorists I’ve mentioned such as Kristeva also refer to. But for Thomas neighbourly love isn’t sentimental. It means wanting the best for myself as I do for my neighbour, and that might involve some honesty and correction!

But yes, you refer to the social dimension. We are relational. We can’t just say it’s my right to change who I am, and society has no say in that and must affirm me. I was born into radical dependency, and I will die in radical dependency (unless the current parliamentary debate decides that they’ll kill me off to spare me that indignity which is another issue about body hatred). We live in a society that really hates the body, whether it’s killing off sick people or transing non-ideal bodies. So yes, we are relational. We are always in relationship. What I do to myself almost always creates ripples in the social pool. Because I speak out on these issues, I get private messages from distressed parents and loved ones about young transitioners. I have conversations with young women in universities who are afraid to speak out because they’ll be labelled transphobic by their peers. If you’re a professor parading your LGBTQIA+ credentials and calling everyone who doesn’t agree with you a terf, you are not going to hear the truth from your students who may not agree with you. I follow the stories of trans widows, women whose husbands have transitioned, and often there are stories of quite misogynistic abuse preceding transitions. There are fantasies of domination that are associated with the female body, and wives who speak out sometimes have disturbing stories to tell.

As I say, I respect the freedom of adults to live as they choose, but I respect the freedom of those who are hurt by their actions to speak.

Mark: For the record, Tina, at the time of writing, June 2025, you’ve been on social media about the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery’s public exhibit, Gender Stories, with public images of cutting. Do you want to just give a crisp summary of that, and your objections to it.

Tina: Well, I have no objections to any private art gallery staging art, and I agree art should be sometimes subversive and call things into question. But this is Bristol’s main publicly funded art gallery, and it has an exhibition called Gender Stories, running from May through October, so all through the school holidays, when most children visit.

I haven’t been there yet. I’m going next month, but for those who know that museum, it has a magnificent entrance hall. From all the pictures I’ve seen, there are two vast murals of torsos with double mastectomy scars. They’re repeated all around the walls in the upper galleries. The art is done by a trans man called Mr. Samo. It’s subversive radical art, it has its place, but I don’t think this kind of ideology has a place in a public museum where you cannot make an adult decision about whether or not to take your children into the exhibition, because it’s in the main entrance hall. There’s no room for discretion. I’m getting people saying, Oh, children wouldn’t notice. But of course, children notice. I mean, I’ve spent years taking children into that museum. It’s one of my favourite places, and in school holidays on wet days it’s a refuge for families. The whole point of taking them to a museum is to say, look at this and explain it so you shouldn’t have to walk past in the hopes they won’t notice.

Mark: A final question, which is a bit of an outrider in a way. Do you want to comment on Pope Leo XIV? In relation to the issues we’ve been discussing, how is he going to pan out, do you think?

Tina: It’s too early to tell, I mean, is the Pope a Catholic? We can make certain assumptions about some of the positions he holds, or he wouldn’t be Pope. But God works in mysterious ways. There is no track record yet, but I think of a character like Oscar Romero.

People in high positions in the church can radically change. At the moment Pope Leo is on record as having said he doesn’t agree with women priests or women deacons, but it also seems that he may have left an opening for women deacons. So let’s see, let’s give him time. I think it was an incredibly astute appointment. Probably the Holy Spirit had a little human help! Let’s give them time. I think it’s a wise choice, given global politics at the moment, given the situation of the United States and the Church in the United States. It was really surprising, but on reflection probably the best choice that could be made.

Mark: You’ve told us your thoughts. How does he make you feel?

Tina: Well, we emphasise feelings too much these days. That’s part of the problem. It’s what I think, not what I feel that matters. That’s what we’re talking about. But I feel, well, I feel I’ve lost patience, really, as a woman with the church, so I practise as much as I’m able to. I find I’m just wearied with the androcentrism of it all.

I think the social teaching is wonderful. It’s the best political system we have, and the Pope is the best person to promote it; but if you still regard half the human race as unable to stand in persona Christi because they’ve got female bodies, where does social justice even begin to go? I think there’s a whole elephant in the room that makes me more and more cautious about celebrating too much.

I do believe the Catholic Church is what it says. I wouldn’t be in here otherwise, so in the long term I believe this is the hope for humankind, and I’m thankful for Pope Leo. But feelings wise. Oh, I don’t know.

Mark: Let me say formally, on behalf of LGB Christians and friends, thank you for being our friend, for sharing your thoughts, and also for all your public witness to sanity and compassion, which we know attracts some flack. But let’s be positive, it also attracts a great deal of admiration and respect. So many, many thanks for all of that, and for sharing your thoughts in this conversation.

I lived in Bristol for thirty years, and I still have family there. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery is a world of delights for children. We spent many hours there when our four children were small. It was a place of refuge on wet days during the long summer holidays.

A few weeks ago, I spent a wonderful afternoon there with one of my little granddaughters. Through her eyes, I rediscovered all over again a child’s sense of discovery and curiosity as we gaped at the dinosaurs, the mummies and the painted gypsy caravan, and did the quiz designed for children to find objects in the different galleries.

That is why it’s hard for me to adequately express my dismay at the Museum’s latest exhibition, Gender Stories, designed to run from 31st May to 2nd October—all through the summer holidays when thousands of children visit the museum. I’m not currently in Bristol so I haven’t visited the exhibition, but I have been following the publicity.

The magnificent entrance hall is adorned with two giant murals of female torsos with double mastectomy scars.

Here is some of the blurb from the Museum’s website:

These may be appropriate questions for an adult workshop on gender, but they are utterly inappropriate in the context of a public museum that is one of the city’s main attractions for families with small children. It is one thing to break the shackles of gender stereotyping for children, and I’m all for that, but it’s quite another to impose adult narratives of sexuality and gender on children’s perceptions of bodies, relationships and identities.

There have been complaints, including a demonstration outside the museum when one woman who had had surgery for breast cancer bravely showed her scar:

(I have a similar scar from a lumpectomy, though my lump turned out not to be malignant).

Some of the protestors put a message on the wall under one of the murals:

I complained to the museum, as did many others. In response, they have put a “trigger warning” on their website:

So, folks, if you’re in Bristol with little children during the school holidays, the museum is recommending that you stay away.

To expose young people to images that suggest girls are right to hate their own bodies, they are right to regret being born female, they are right to seek radical surgery as a “cure” for being women, is to perpetuate the same old misogynistic prejudices that have been the scourge of women since Eve ate the apple. Footbinding. Clitoridectomy. Corsets and chastity belts. Double mastectomies. Every culture has its way of destroying the sexual female body and its functions and capacities.

EDITED: I have removed my correspondence with Bristol Museum. I used an expression in my letter to the museum that has offended some people. I have no desire to cause gratuitous offence, and the substance of my objection to this exhibition stands without the correspondence.

(This is a very long post because it includes a transcription of a podcast).

I’m a fan of Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell’s podcast, The Rest is Politics. As a postcolonial African Scot who left school at fifteen, I eventually did a PhD on theology and gender studies and even became a Professor, but I remain woefully ignorant of European politics and history. So I trust their erudition and experience on politics and always look forward to their podcasts. But do I trust them to speak on issues of gender? Hmmm.

I was apprehensive when I saw that they were going to discuss the recent Supreme Court ruling that affirms the sex-based rights of women as defined under the Equality Act 2010. They also discussed Pope Francis’s legacy in the same podcast, but I’m not engaging with that here apart from this correction which is relevant to the subsequent discussion about transgender issues. (I also want to point out somewhat pedantically to Alastair Campbell, linguist extraordinaire, that “dubia” is pronounced with an “ee” as in “dubious”, and not with an “eye” as in “Dubai”. )

But here’s the correction re the discussion about Pope Francis:

Rory Stewart: So people would say, you know, what do you think about, you know, transgender and he would say, “who am I to judge?”, which on the one hand is a very good humble Christian message. On the other hand, they would argue, well actually that is slightly your job because you are the pope, right? You're supposed to give us a bit of a bit of a guidance on this stuff.

This exchange with the Pope was not about transgender. It was a response to a journalist’s question about whether there was a gay lobby in the Vatican. In a radical departure from the language of his predecessors, Pope Francis famously used the word “gay”. “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” He warmly welcomed LGBT+ representatives and emphasised the inclusivity of all in God’s love and mercy, but he clarified several times what he meant when he said “who am I to judge?”, with reference to gay people. Given the previous popes’ reluctance to admit gay men to seminaries for training to the priesthood, Pope Francis’s attitude has significant implications for the priesthood as well as wider society.

Now to that discussion about the Supreme Court ruling. Let me set out my credentials for commenting (and apologies for repetition in what follows for those familiar with my work).

My main academic research interests have focused on the relationship between sacramental theology, sexual embodiment, and gender theory. My support for same-sex marriage earned me censorship from the Vatican, the cancellation of a research fellowship at a Catholic university in the United States, and banishment from speaking in various dioceses around the UK. More recently, I’ve been censored by a liberal Catholic university in the US for my questions about some aspects of transgender activism and women’s rights, and an invitation to run a workshop for a group in Canada was withdrawn because of fears that I would upset their 2SLGBTQ+ members.

I have had trans people credit my work for encouraging and supporting them through the process of transitioning, and more recently some of those same people have felt betrayed by the questions I raise. I have supervised PhDs and taught gender studies in universities and in online courses with students from around the world. Through all this, my position has not changed, though the emphasis has, because the context has changed.

From being a small and vulnerable minority, thanks to trans activism there has been a major social, legal and political shift in attitudes towards trans rights. There has been widespread censorship, hounding and abuse targeted at women such as Kathleen Stock and J.K. Rowling, women like Jo Phoenix, Maya Forstater, Alison Bailey and Roz Adams have had to fight for their jobs through employment tribunals—the list is long. This is why I’ve shifted my emphasis, from promoting trans rights and inclusivity to defending women’s sex-based rights, without denying any of the rights and protections owed to trans people.

Against nominalists such as Judith Butler who would dissolve all distinctions between sex and gender, and sexual essentialists such as the last three popes who would deny any fluidity between the two, I continue to argue that this distinction is important.

The human is a sexually reproductive mammalian species, not a clownfish, and we cannot change sex. Gender is fluid, diverse and potentially creative. The mapping of gender stereotypes onto sexed human bodies is restrictive for both sexes whose personalities do not conform to such stereotypes—for boys and men who are not sufficiently masculine, and for girls and women who are not sufficiently feminine. Effeminate men and butch women both suffer the effects of misogyny, because the dominant, normative human in modern western society was and remains the white, heterosexual, educated male.

I agree with Judith Butler and others who argue that challenging these oppressive stereotypes which sustain the status quo can be a creative and expressive act of political subversion, though if that is how they were actually functioning, I doubt that they would have such extensive corporate sponsorship and publicity! The Trump rampage shows that this was indeed an issue of explosive political significance, but liberal utopianism around sex and gender has cleared the way for a truly dystopian regime to take control.

I also agree with those who argue that some trans women adopt extreme forms of feminised behaviour and presentation which perpetuate rather than challenge these stereotypes in ways that undermine decades of feminist struggles to break free.

There are social trends and pressures that affect young people struggling with adolescence, sometimes with additional mental health issues, especially girls, which have led to trans identities being adopted with little or no basis in a young person’s life story before adolescence. The Cass Review offers analysis of these issues, and the more recently published Sullivan Review makes clear that failing to identify biological sex has detrimental implications for females across a range of medical and safeguarding issues.

I say all this to make clear that what follows is not a media-driven intervention by a bigoted transphobe, it is most certainly not an intervention from a Far Right sympathiser (politically, I’m far to the left of Rory and Alastair), and I hope it will not confirm Alastair’s fears that they are going to get “absolutely sort of lacerated”. This is not a laceration, but it is an informed intervention.

I’d begin by pointing out that, while they are usually so careful with sources and references in their political commentaries, all the evidence Rory and Alastair offered in this podcast was anecdotal.

In what follows, I’m using the transcript from the YouTube video of their podcast, with minor tweaks to edit out mumbles and mutters and to correct some of the spelling in the automated transcript. (Note the “balanced” title of this podcast with the image of two women celebrating the Supreme Court ruling.) More about that later. AC and RS refer to Alastair and Rory respectively, and my interventions are in italics. I’ve highlighted in bold the particular points to which I’m responding.

AC: Welcome to the rest is politics with me Alastair Campbell

RS: and me Rory Stewart.

AC: And Rory, I think in common with virtually every public media organization in the world we should talk about his holiness Pope Francis RIP, funeral to be on Saturday it’s just been announced. I think then we should talk about this Supreme Court ruling in the UK seeking to answer the question what is a woman which it is claimed has brought clarity to the debate. I’m afraid I don't think it’s brought clarity to this debate at all.

The judgement makes clear that the definition of “man” and “woman” pertains to clarification of the Equality Act 2010. It is not a generalised attempt “to answer the question what is a woman”:

From the Supreme Court Ruling (with my added emphasis in bold):

1. This appeal is concerned with establishing the correct interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 (“the EA 2010”) which seeks to give statutory protection to people who are at risk of suffering from unlawful discrimination. The questions raised by this appeal directly affect women and members of the trans community. On the one hand, women have historically suffered from discrimination in our society and since 1975 have been given statutory protection against discrimination on the ground of sex. On the other hand, the trans community is both historically and currently a vulnerable community which Parliament has more recently sought to protect by statutory provision.

2. It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010. It has a more limited role which does not involve making policy. The principal question which the court addresses on this appeal is the meaning of the words which Parliament has used in the EA 2010 in legislating to protect women and members of the trans community against discrimination. Our task is to see if those words can bear a coherent and predictable meaning within the EA 2010 consistently with the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (“the GRA 2004”).

3. As explained more fully below, the EA 2010 seeks to reduce inequality and to protect people with protected characteristics against discrimination. Among the people whom the EA 2010 recognises as having protected characteristics are women, whose protected characteristic is sex, and “transsexual” people, whose protected characteristic is gender reassignment.

Continuing with the Rest Is Politics transcript (after the discussion about Pope Francis):

AC: Now should we turn to the Supreme Court and the judgment last week, essentially saying that in relation to the Equality Act 2010, which was I think the Gordon Brown Government’s last act of Parliament, that when that Act refers to gender and sex [hesitation and fumbling with words here], they're talking biological sex, and Lord Hodge, who is the deputy president of the Court who read out the judgment, and he did it in a very careful, judge-like way, and then, good luck on this one, Lord Hodge, he said this should not be taken as victory for one side against another in this argument and trans people still have rights, etc. etc. But I guess where I come from, well, first of all what what was your initial reaction on hearing that judgment, and what it made you think about the issue.

In what follows, I think it’s Alastair who slants the whole discussion to make it very much one side against another. He says nothing about any legitimate concerns and causes that might have led For Women Scotland to take on the Scottish Government in the courts.

RS: The first thing is that I’m in the States, and interestingly in the States it’s not the same debate. This is very much a debate in the States where most people on the progressive left are on the side of transgender, and most of the opposition to transgender comes from the conservative right. Britain is very unusual because it’s in Britain that you have figures like JK Rowling and others, who are feminists from the left who are strongly opposed to what they see as the excesses of transgender ideology. So this whole dynamic doesn’t exist here, and actually explaining to an American audience why left-wing progressive feminists like JK Rowling or Kathleen Stock are troubled by transgender ideology is actually quite difficult. So I've spent a lot of the last two days trying to explain it.

This is spot on from Rory, and an important distinction to make with regard to socio-political differences between the US and the UK. See the discussion of this in my review of Judith Butler’s book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

AC: Do you understand it because, you know, I get the thing about women feeling they want quote “safe spaces”,

This “feeling” is based on abundant evidence that women and children are at growing risk of abuse, sexual violence and extreme pornography by male perpetrators:

From The Guardian: “An “epidemic of violence against women and girls” in the UK is getting worse despite years of government promises and strategies, a highly critical report from Whitehall’s spending watchdog has said.”

From the Cambridge Rape Crisis Centre:

Note that 98% of adults arrested for sexual offences are men. Statistics obtained under freedom of information requests show that, if anything, trans women are over-represented among those imprisoned for sexual offences compared with cis men. The figures are too small to be taken as firm evidence, but they do show that trans women are also sometimes guilty of sexual violence and therefore pose the same threat as cis men to women inmates in prisons, as borne out by a letter to The Times from former Prison Service Area Manager Nick Pascoe CBE (see below):

Back to AC in the transcript:

AC: and I get that, and I also get, although I think it’s completely blown out of proportion, I get the thing about women in sport and transgender a man becoming a woman and then competing against women.

Sportswomen such as Martina Navratilova, Sharron Davies MBE and Stephanie Turner might disagree that “it’s completely blown out of proportion”. The tide is turning as sporting bodies recognise that trans women have an unfair advantage in sports involving strength.

AC: I can see why there are all sorts of issues that flow from that, but when everybody came out and said this gives clarity, I just don’t think it does give clarity at all. One of the most moving things I was at last year, Fiona and I did an event for a company, we were talking about mental health. And on the same day on the same platform, there was a guy who’s a trans man, so somebody who had been a woman, now a man, working in this place, who gave a presentation. And it was just really moving how everybody accepted it. Nobody saw it really as that big a deal.

There are eloquent trans men and women who are deeply moving advocates for their cause. Few of us would deny their legitimacy or their sincerity. I suspect the event Alastair describes had an elite, liberal-minded audience, so I wonder why he was so moved. Was he expecting somebody to jump to their feet and object? It is not “that big a deal” to have a trans man speaking at an event, and this kind of anecdotal evidence doesn’t constitute a persuasive argument about more complex issues in this debate.

AC: And I was thinking, on the basis of this judgment, if this is now, and this is the problem with this judgment is that it’s being taken as a woman, is only, you know, you cannot change your sex, is essentially what people are saying out of this. But there’s somebody who, this is the Equality Act 2010, there’s somebody who, according to the 2005 Gender Recognition Act, has been allowed to redefine as a man.

You cannot change your sex but I’d argue you can change your gender—see my comments above. The 2004 (not 2005) Gender Recognition Act has been clarified, not changed.

AC: Now, under this ruling, and I’m just putting it out there, because I don't know the answer, if that person is out in a public place, say like a swimming pool, and wants to go to the bathroom, are they going to the Gents or are they going to the Ladies? as I understand it, he now has to go to the Ladies. Is that what was intended?

RS: Yeah, I think what the judges would say is that people who run that establishment have the absolute right to say that only cisgender males can go to the male bathroom. They can make exceptions if they want, but the exception is then with the discretion of the institution. So what’s flipped is the question of who has the rights here and who can get an exception.

Yes to Rory’s response. It’s open to discretion, and there are fair ways round this. What’s flipped is that women’s rights have been defended. There are angry transphobes who will use this judgement to challenge people unfairly, but in all honesty I think very few women would challenge a trans woman using the women’s toilets so long as she wasn’t behaving in exhibitionist ways or making a political statement by being in that space as a very obvious male. On the other hand, there are some men and women who might feel deeply inhibited about using shared public toilets. Since we’re trading anecdotes here, let me tell you about a well-dressed, elderly man I saw hovering outside the gender-neutral toilets in a cinema venue recently, looking confused. He looked dismayed when I pointed out that he should use the same toilets as everybody else. Don’t such people also merit some consideration and kindness? Lack of segregated toilets limits the freedom of access for women who for religious or cultural reasons don’t want to share intimate spaces with men (e.g. Muslim women). It’s not that hard to provide gender neutral as well as male and female toilets. Many institutions already do. And given the long queues in women’s toilets in venues such as opera houses etc., some of us will use the men’s when desperate because the queues tend to be shorter! But why aren’t we talking about male violence and the lack of hygiene in men’s toilets? Why should men drive all vulnerable people out of their spaces into women’s spaces, so that they can remain uncouth and aggressive? If men are such a problem, let’s address that.

AC: I was very struck by Jameela Jamil, who’s a presenter actress, quite a big thing in the States now and and also an activist on all sorts of fronts, but she made the point, you know, are we now going to be sort of checking on what she called, you know, people’s tackle as they present themselves to places like bathrooms. So this is why I just think that this idea, and I saw Keir Starmer today saying I’m very happy this has brought clarity to this debate, I don’t think it’s brought clarity at all. And my big worry, my big worry, is that because of the way, and it's interesting what you say about America but let’s be honest, the British debate around trans is pretty vile, pretty noxious, pretty toxic. And you just had to see. So there’s the judge saying nobody should take this as a victory one side over the other. Cut to shots of lots of women popping champagne corks, pictures of JK Rowling smoking a celebrity cigar.

Shall we cut to shots of trans activists in UK cities at the weekend, protesting against the Supreme Court ruling?

From The Independent about those trans activist demos:

“Police are investigating after seven statues and property were vandalised before tens of thousands of trans rights protesters marched through central London on Saturday.”

AC: And I just worry that, and actually we had loads of abuse, you and I, down, when we last discussed this, and since this judgment, I don't know if you've seen but some of the women columnists who are really, really active on their sort of poking us on social media and what have you and one of them said, please don’t give me any of that stuff about this being a marginalized put upon community. It is, and that doesn’t change.

Did not one of those women columnists say anything at all worth respecting or repeating? Here is Sonia Sodha writing in The Guardian:

Middle-aged women are expected to fade into the background, to be apologetic for their existence, to quietly accept their lot. They’re not supposed to stick up for themselves, to enforce their boundaries, to say no. As a woman, these societal expectations have been drummed into me from day one. But still. The swell of anger and disgust that rose in response to the supreme court judgment last week that made clear women’s rights are not for dismantling – rights already won, that were supposed to be ours all along – has taken my breath away.

And here is that “marginalized put upon community” celebrating its new inclusive flags in Regent Street. Remind you of anything?

RS: Let me try to do the explainer that you were asking for and see if I can do it. My sense is that there are two completely different positions here. There’s the position of the trans community, which is that you are somebody who’s biologically born male but you identify as a woman, or you’re biologically born a woman, you identify as a man. Although that second category doesn't really feature in this debate oddly. Very little of this debate is about people who are born women who identify as men. It’s almost all the other direction is where the controversy is.

It’s not odd at all. Trans men (who are biologically female) are no more threatening than any other woman. They have no significant advantages in women’s sports, they are statistically not implicated in crimes of sexual violence, and they have had different social and cultural conditioning from males. The worrying surge in adolescent girls identifying as trans or non-binary raises huge questions about misogyny, body-shaming, social media, etc. which we should be addressing.

RS: Somebody in that situation, so a trans woman, somebody biologically male who identifies as a woman, would want to have all the rights and access and opportunities that would normally be granted to a woman because they identify as a woman. On the other side, on the JK Rowling, Kathleen Stock side, you have people saying that women’s rights were very very hard fought for, and that the rights, accesses, protections and opportunities for women should not be eroded by creating an ambiguous blur around the edges of who’s a woman and who isn’t, because it might allow men to be able to claim some of the access, opportunities, protection of women without being women.

Yes, this is a fair summary.

RS: And the one thing that those both positions have in common is they don’t like people like you and me either saying this isn’t the most important issue in the world, that really irritates people because it feels very existential to them.

Well, women are very used to men saying that whatever concerns us is less important than other issues!

RS: But secondly, they don’t like a liberal position, which is my position.

That’s a misleading generalisation.

RS: I mean, so to put my cards on the table. My position would be okay, this is a very difficult question of two competing claims of identity and rights, so let’s try to find practical compromises. So, you know, in the Rory Stewart world I would say, trans women should not be able to compete in women’s sports. Seems to me unfair. I would probably be in favour of gender neutral bathrooms in many contexts to get around this issue, right.

I agree with this, so do I get included among liberals?

RS: I would also be in favour of looking at a case-by-case basis on a trans woman wanting to go into the female estate in a prison, because you have to balance the fact that trans women are at a lot of threat. I mean, you just pointed this out, right, if you go into a male bathroom and you’re a trans woman and you’re wearing a skirt, you can be beaten up by a man in that bathroom or you could, in a prison, you could be very badly treated by fellow prisoners.

So why aren’t we all talking about the problem of misogyny and male violence? Women are not the cause of the problem and shouldn’t be expected to provide the solution. Toxic masculinity is the problem, and men are the ones who must address this by challenging aggressive behaviour and protecting vulnerable people who enter their spaces.

RS: You could also theoretically, although there actually aren't that many cases of it, but it has happened, you could pose a threat to women. So I would be trying to argue that you look at this on a case-by-case basis and you try to navigate your way through these very difficult claims of values.

See above. In terms of prisoners and sex crimes, there are many cases of trans women posing a threat to women. I don’t usually share links about sex crimes committed by trans women because I don’t want to fuel phobias and prejudices, but I think you need to take note of how often this happens. These stories tend to be covered by the tabloid press, not because they’re not true but because the liberal media in the UK usually shy away from all but the most notorious, such as Isla Bryson:

I have always told my children when they were small and now my grandchildren that if we get separated and they’re lost, they must find a woman and ask her to help them. I don’t trust strange men with lost children! But now, that advice no longer applies:

I don’t want to fill this post with such stories and images because that becomes sensationalist, but these are not rare cases. How many women and children must be sacrificed before we can have a public debate that acknowledges not all fears are phobias?

RS: But both sides hate that because if you are a trans woman, you might say "Listen I am a woman. These are my rights. These are my entitlements. I don't want to be given a case-by-case treatment.” I mean, we don't say, for example, if an African-American is denied entry to a country club they have to prove that they’re not violent in order to be allowed to come into the country club. They would say, “This is my, this is discrimination, right?”

Wow! I don’t know where to begin with this. It’s a question of power, Rory. African-Americans are historically and still today victims of white supremacy and racist violence, just as women are historically and still today victims of male domination and sexual violence. This is a really problematic example to use. If you want to use comparisons, then you should think about why Black Americans might want to exclude white racists from their clubs and activities (probably not country clubs), not the other way round!

RS: But as you’ve pointed out, all of this affects sport, access to puberty blockers. There’s this amazing slow news Tavistock podcast done by Tortoise Media, if people want to get into that, looking at the use of puberty blockers, single sex spaces, prisons, free speech, how do you talk about this in school, and my goodness it feels polarized. It doesn’t feel like, somebody like me trying to say, well, here’s the kind of liberal compromise on this, is going to get anything other than abuse and hate from both sides.

That contradicts Rory’s earlier differentiation between the debate in this country and the US. There is an informed debate in the UK and many of us do seek compromises when rights conflict.

AC: No, and that’s what I worry about the judgment, and I don’t think that was their intention, but I think that's the consequence, was the danger. That’s the consequence. And I also do feel, I mean, look we’re a political podcast, I still think this should have been resolved by Parliament. This is essentially what’s happened is that there’s been a sort of, not a conflict but if you like a contradiction, between two pieces of legislation and I think that could have been resolved if the politicians had wanted to have the debate, and I think it’s the fact that they don't want really to have the debate. I think that could have been resolved by, you know, a codicil, an explanatory note. You could have thrashed this out, instead of which you have the debate going on in the media, you have the debate going on through campaigners, you have the debate going on, if you like, through the loudest voices within that debate.

But Alastair is only listening to the loudest voices on one side. He’s said nothing about the violent aggression of some trans activists. Parliament didn’t resolve this. That’s why For Women Scotland had to take the Scottish Government to court to force a resolution.

AC: And then a kind of quite subtle 88-page judgment comes out with what is taken rightly, I’m not criticising this, this is that was the most important line was the thing about their definition of of what a woman is, and that has immediately turned into a reason to carry on the fight, a reason not just to say the court has made this judgment and therefore we now proceed on this basis. But more, if you look at some of the rhetoric around this, this is essentially saying there’s no such thing as a trans person. If you’re born a woman you’re a woman for the rest of your life. You’re born a man, you’re a man for the rest of your life.

This is fuelling the rhetoric. Why not just stick to being clear about what the judgement says and arguing about that? The judgement is saying that a trans woman does not become a woman and a trans man does not become a man by virtue of having a paper certificate in terms of the Gender Recognition Act 2004. It’s not saying that trans people don’t exist. It’s very clear that trans people have not lost any rights they previously had, and are fully protected from discrimination and harassment under law:

From the Supreme Court Judgement:

(20) Why this interpretation would not be disadvantageous to or remove protection from trans people with or without a GRC.

248. Finally, we have concluded that a biological sex interpretation would not have the effect of disadvantaging or removing important protection under the EA 2010 from trans people (whether with or without a GRC). Our reasons for this conclusion follow. We consider protection from both direct and indirect discrimination and harassment, and equal pay.

That’s what the judgement is saying, and surely it’s our responsibility if we want an intelligent dialogue to comment on the judgement, not on the ill-informed rhetoric swilling around it on both sides?

RS: So again, this is going to make a lot of people angry but I think that we’ve also got to acknowledge that we are cisgender males, So we’re people who are born biologically men who still identify as being men, and therefore we don't connect with this debate uh as as clearly as some other groups. It’s partly formed for me by a good friend of mine who was biologically a woman but doesn’t identify as a woman. And they find this issue both something that's very personal but also central to their work, because they run a clinic which works to provide puberty blockers for young people, young people who are often suicidal, who feel that they desperately need support in protecting their gender identity, who don’t want to transition into a gender that they feel doesn’t belong to them and feels that they’re doing work which matters deeply to them personally in their own identity, but also to some very vulnerable people. But at the same time that’s balanced with the fact that as the Tavistock report showed, there are many complexities around why people want to transition and how you back the evidence on the risk of suicide against the evidence, the damage that might be done for inappropriately blocking somebody’s development, and how parents play into this and how social media plays into this.

More anecdotal evidence based on one example. I have had many conversations with lesbian friends and with young women who are afraid to speak out about the pressures they’re under, because of peer pressure. They’re afraid of being labelled transphobic. Many lesbians embrace trans inclusivity, but many others express serious concerns about the intrusion of anatomically male trans women into lesbian spaces and relationships, sometimes with middle aged male lesbians preying on young lesbian women, with the claim that “some lesbians have penises”. So if we trade anecdotes we’ll go round in circles.

But more importantly, there is now growing research that questions the link between reduction in suicidality and gender transitioning. Parents have been bullied into accepting puberty blockers with the question, “Would you rather have a trans child or a dead child?” More and more public bodies are warning against careless use of the language of suicide as a justification for gender-affirming care.

AC: One of the things on the media I saw that really wound me up, I think it was on Channel 4, there was a debate between one of the women who’d been involved in the campaign who was celebrating the the Supreme Court judgment and a trans woman up in the Scottish Highlands who had been through the whole thing, and the woman on the, as it were JK Rowling side of the argument, just kept calling her/him/he, and I just felt there was a sort of sneering attached to it that I really found unpleasant.

All the examples Alastair cites are undermining the legitimate concerns of gender critical feminists and implying that all the prejudice is on one side.

RS: I think it’s a classic example of something which has become very, very complicated, which is for many people very niche. I mean, you often get bad policies when you’re dealing with something which I guess probably 85% of the British public doesn’t have much of a view on, doesn’t think about very much.

AC: Well, this is the other thing. During the last election if you looked at the polling on the issues that people felt were important to them, and it wasn’t asking about their voting intentions, just the issues that were important to them. Trans was very, very low down, very low down the the pecking order. I do think we have a media that’s made the most of it. We now have a president in the United States who wants to make the most of it, and who actually even in his acceptance speech did a big thing about, you know, there are only two sexes, You’re either a man or you’re a woman, and let’s get these sports people out and and all that stuff. So weaponizing, if you like.

If most people were unconcerned, then Trump would not have been able to move in to a space vacated by the Democrats by appropriating this issue. His cynical exploitation of people’s concerns about some of these issues is an indictment of so-called progressives for not recognising the extent to which ordinary people do have legitimate concerns. We all have skin in this.

AC: And the other thing, you’re right that of course we you know you and I are not women just the same as we’re not black, and we’re not poor, and we’re not African, and there’s lots of things we’re not, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t have empathy for other people or that we can't study things and try to develop an opinion.

The difference between the sexes is of a different order to these other differences. There are black women, poor women, African women. Sexual difference transcends all other differences in its universality. Gender is a cultural variable, but sex is a biological given.

AC: And I get, you know, I actually had a real falling out with somebody at an event not long ago because basically said that, you know, she said you’ve just been brainwashed, you’ve been brainwashed, and what do you mean I’ve been brainwashed, and then said, and you know, what do you know about it anyway, you're not a woman, and I said, and it’s true, my opinions on this have largely been formed by first of all understanding this is a debate that's being weaponized, so therefore don't rely too much on the media debate, try to dig into it a bit deeper, but then in terms of my opinions.

So why doesn’t Alastair dig a bit deeper? He’s weaponized this debate throughout this podcast, by being completely one-sided and prejudiced against the women who fought this case and their relief at the outcome.

AC: I would say I've been, they've been informed by Grace my daughter and her friends, almost all of whom I think just found this judgment really quite alarming and dangerous.

Do you know how often, when giving academic talks on sex and gender, I’ve been put right by a man appealing to his daughter as the ultimate authority on this issue?! I do look forward to hearing what Grace thinks about tariffs and the global trade war, the Australian election, China, etc. Just out of interest, I wonder how Alastair would feel about Grace being in communal showers with a middle-aged trans woman with a penis? That is the kind of situation about which the Supreme Court judgement has offered clarification by affirming women’s rights to single sex spaces.

AC: Fiona my partner, and also a very good friend of ours, Hela Thorning Schmidt who we had on on the podcast and her family, because they have somebody that we knew going on holiday when when she was a kid as Camilla is now a male, he, Milo, and it’s worked for them. And it’s worked for them I think in part because they've had support, understanding and a legal framework that kind of is a bit clearer.

As I’ve said before, this is all anecdotal evidence and I could match every one of these anecdotes with an opposing story. What is the point in that? As Alastair says, we need to dig into it deeper than that.

AC: So when I see Keir Starmer today saying I think this is great, this has all been cleared up, I’m sorry, I don't think it has been cleared up and I think ultimately Parliament is going to have to another look at this at some point.

Oh, the women won so let’s go back to Parliament and make sure the men win next time? Both parliaments were in a mess about this, and Keir Starmer has contradicted himself, as have several others. Just to be clear, I’m a Labour voter and I’d never vote Tory, though I’d have more respect for them if the likes of Rory hadn’t been sidelined.

AC: Now I know we’re both going to get, from various angles we’re going to get absolutely sort of lacerated, but I do feel strongly. We’re talking about—there we are talking about the Pope who liked sort of reaching out to marginalized people—and I think trans people have enough on their plate without also constantly being thrown into the middle of a political debate, the heat of which does not necessarily get us to the right place.

Oh well, I hope I haven’t lacerated them, but this really was far below what we’ve come to expect from The Rest is Politics. I’ve included links for nearly all my claims, so that if Rory and Alastair want to dig deeper and be more informed, they can do so. That might not change their minds, but it would strengthen their arguments.

Bodies are messy, intrusive and obstinate. The corporeal resists the corporate. The body speaks its vulnerability and desire, its yearning and pain, beyond all that we can say and beyond much that we can control.

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My relatively brief academic career spanned twenty-six of my seventy years of life, from starting my PhD at the University of Bristol in 1994 (I was a mature undergraduate student in Theology and Religious Studies at Bristol from 1991-1994), to accepting voluntary severance from my role as Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton during the pandemic in 2020. Most of my academic research during that time focused on gender theory and sacramental theology, using a Lacanian psychoanalytic lens through which to reflect on questions of desire and fear, love and violence, in relation to sexuality, embodiment, language and our human yearning for the divine.

Contested ideas about gender and sexuality now occupy the frontline in the culture wars, having morphed into a toxic confrontation between extremists on both sides. Female bodies, identities, spaces and activities have been colonised by trans women demanding unconditional access. Puberty blockers have been used to halt the normal processes of healthy adolescent development, giving rise to growing concerns over their long-term impact. There has been a dramatic surge in cases of gender dysphoria among children and young people, especially among girls. Misogyny has been driven underground by a liberalising gloss but it remains deeply rooted in western culture and is re-emerging in violent and dangerous new forms. It’s little wonder that girls struggling to adjust to the sexual pressures and hormonal turbulence of emergent womanhood decide life would be less complicated if they abandoned any attempt to become women and declared themselves male or non-binary instead. At the same time, trans women like Dylan Mulvaney and Jordan Gray indulge in performative stereotypes of idealised femininity which bring fame, wealth and adulation, while real women and girls languish on the sidelines in all our lumpen, beautiful imperfection. I could go on and on.

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These unintended consequences and unexpected developments in gendered ideas and identities have led me to look back and ask myself how far I colluded in the ideological appropriation of gender theory before I woke up to what was happening. I’ve been revisiting some of my writings with that question in mind. Having been banned by Catholic authorities and now by some progressive academics on account of my writings, I continue to try to navigate a creative but challenging path between two conflicting ideologies, and it’s not surprising that ideologues on both sides want me to shut up!

Some who formerly appreciated my work on gender now tell me they feel betrayed and disappointed because they think I’ve changed my position. They expected me to be an enthusiastic advocate for the LGBTQIA+ movement, instead of aligning myself as I have done with gender-critical feminists on the far left. One US feminist professor tells me that she used to recommend my publications to her students, but they now refuse to read anything I’ve written. That says more about the closed minds of those on the liberal side of academia than about my writings. Meanwhile, conservative Catholic vigilantes continue to bleat on about my corrupting the youth of the Church with my wicked ideas.

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Looking back, there is little I would change in my published research, though today I might express some of it with a different emphasis. I have never agreed to the collapse of what I regard as the important distinction between sex and gender. On the contrary, I’ve always defended the sexed body against its dissolution into gendered social constructs, while not denying the oppressive power of the latter. I was and am influenced by Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, but I should have recognised and resisted the extremism of “their” (sic) denial of bodily realities.

Butler presents LGBTQIA+ activism as a revolutionary anti-capitalist movement opposed by fascists on all sides, but the proliferation of identities beyond the legitimate struggle for lesbian and gay rights is the ultimate manifestation of a postliberal capitalist ideology. It is driven by narcissistic individualism, feeds on the commodification of insatiable desire and, in the medicalisation of trans bodies, is one more manifestation of the corporate power of big pharma and the technological domination of nature.

Yes, nature is a complex and elusive concept, but we humans are not above and beyond the sexually reproductive mammalian species to which we belong. I ask myself what drives the desire to resort to extreme medical and surgical measures to sustain the illusion of sexual metamorphosis. Is it not the ultimate in the commercialised fantasies of capitalism to advocate, as Butler does, for the repeated modification of the body by hugely expensive medical and surgical manipulations and lifelong dependency on costly drugs regimes to indulge delusions of limitless sexual transfigurations?

There is everything to condemn in Trump’s cynical appropriation of gender to justify a harsh authoritarian regime of banishment and censorship under the bogus claim that he is protecting women. Butler has written a long critical analysis of Executive Order 14168 in the London Review of Books, but in mirroring his polarising absolutism they risks becoming as much an extremist as he is. (Sorry about the grammar, but that’s what Butler has told us they prefer, and preference is all in this world of limitless choice for those who can afford it).

Butler is a philosopher. Surely, the role of philosophy is to bring deep and searching reflection to bear on issues of such ethical and social complexity that push us to the limits of our conceptual resources? The conflation of sex and gender leads to an impasse for those of us who want to defend the socially constructed dynamics of gender over and against religious and political essentialism, and to promote performativity and fluidity in the genders people choose to adopt, while respecting bodily finitude, vulnerability and integrity. Butler writes:

The decree claims to protect women by opposing gender ideology, relying on the trans-exclusionary argument that trans women are not women or constitute a threat to women, where a ‘woman’ is understood as an individual assigned female at birth. The accusation that gender or gender theorists are a threat to women forgets that the issue of ‘gender’ has been central to feminist thought at least as far back as the work of Simone de Beauvoir in the late 1940s. Biology, she argued, is part of a person’s situation, but does not determine the kind of work one will do, the person one will love, or the ‘destiny’ of one’s life. Trans people undergo surgery or take hormones, when they do, because they seek to alter anatomy: they certainly understand that there is an anatomy they seek to alter.

Note the segue from comments about gender to the medicalisation of the body to bring it into conformity with a socio-linguistic construct. Well, if that’s what consenting adults decide they want, who am I to judge, so long as young people are protected from irreversible and high-risk interventions? But anatomical alteration does not constitute changing sex. It is an extreme form of cosmetic surgery performed on healthy bodies, and it does not change the socio-sexual dynamics of women and children being at significant risk of sexual abuse, predation and violence, whether that violence takes the form of war, rape, pornography or domestic abuse, and whether it is the result of social conditioning or biological drives (and how could it be anything other than a combination of the two?) There is clear evidence that neither social nor anatomical transitioning significantly changes the relationship between the male sex drives and crimes involving sexual violence.

There is nothing revolutionary about a movement supported and funded by corporate powers and no doubt soon to be opposed by those same powers, for greed is fickle and faithless. When Trump is paying the piper, corporations will dance to whatever tune he chooses to ensure their shareholders continue to have their snouts in the trough. Those rainbow badges will soon disappear from the logos and banners of corporate branding.

Bodies are messy, intrusive and obstinate. The corporeal resists the corporate. The body speaks its vulnerability and desire, its yearning and pain, beyond all that we can say and beyond much that we can control. We are creatures of starlight and earth, sunlight and ocean, blood and air, culture and animality. Our sexed bodies produce and reproduce us, they delight and resist us, but they are what we are. We might launch ourselves from them into imaginative parodies of gender and long may we continue to do so, but ultimately our bodies lay claim to us in their living and loving, birthing and bleeding, suffering and dying.

Conclusion

All this is the preamble to sharing a dialogue that played out several years ago. Marika Rose and I have had some robust and not always courteous public exchanges in social media about the very different positions we now occupy around questions of gender, embodiment and identity. There have been glimmers of insight in those exchanges, but also barely masked feelings of mutual misunderstanding, hurt and anger between two thinkers who once sparked off one another in creative ways. I regret some of those barbed confrontations, but I’m trying to learn from them. I want to understand these differences that now create estrangements and alienations where once there was respect and friendship among academic colleagues, and I mourn the loss of solidarity that this entails. Perhaps it attests to the seriousness of the issues that concern us, that we are willing to sacrifice relationships to principles. Is that the price we pay for intellectual and ethical integrity, for I have no doubt that we are all sincere in our motives and commitments? These debates are important even if, or perhaps especially when, they are difficult and mired in passion. There is no blanket inclusivity. In listening to some victims, we necessarily silence others. In taking sides, we cannot help but tip the scales of justice because we are imperfect creatures in a wounded and violent world. All we can do is to hope that the weight of one side helps to balance the other, and the dizzying turbulence of our encounters is part of that balancing act and our academic responsibility.

This was originally a single post but I’m dividing it into two because it was too long. My next post is pasted from the Syndicate online forum, which early in 2015 published a series of comments and conversations about my book, Theology After Postmodernity. This includes an exchange between Marika and I, which gives some insight into the ways in which our positions were beginning to diverge, as my engagement with gender theory was becoming more critical. I share it not only as an expression of my own emergent position nearly ten years ago, but also out of respect for a colleague and friend with whom I have risked much as we do that precarious dance on the scales of justice while trying to keep our balance.

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Don’t we always already discover ourselves within that condition of bodily dependence and vulnerability that is the inescapable shadow cast by the human flesh on the brightness of the soul, a shadow that men of God and men of reason have spent much of history trying to eliminate? Do ‘I’ (my will, my reason, my moral power), control this messy stuff of which I am made, so that I seek to determine its birthing and its dying, its conceiving and its aborting, its suffering and its delight? Or do I somehow struggle to keep up with where my body leads me, in the strangeness of its affections and desires (and its affectations too), in the rebelliousness of its illnesses and sufferings and slow decline into ageing and death?

This exchange from early 2015 is a continuation of my previous post. It’s an extract from the Syndicate online forum, which published a series of comments and conversations about my book, Theology After Postmodernity.

My response to Marika Rose is a foreshadowing of my current concerns and my experiments in writing theology in a different style. I was saying then what I still say today, that “Lacanian Butleresque parodies of gender run into the buffers of the body”.

You can read the dialogue at this link. It’s a fascinating theological discussion with contributions from Hannah Hofheinz, Gerard Loughlin and Sean Larsen, as well as Marika. Here, I’m copying the last exchange between Marika and myself, though I’d urge you to read the whole conversation if you’re interested. The texts below are copied verbatim, but I’ve inserted some links, references and images.

Marika Rose replying to Tina Beattie

12th January 2015

On Bodily Mortification and Revolutionary Violence

There’s so much in here that I don’t have much hope of making an adequate response. But I want to respond to two things, which seem to me to touch on two key points: first the question of bodily modification, and second the question of revolutionary violence.

In response to the question of bodily modification, I want to strengthen my argument and say that it is not simply fallenness which means that we struggle with and against our bodies to transform them, but something in the nature of material being itself. Nature has never been a static, solid ground on which to build. Everything natural, everything that is, is always in the process of changing, transforming itself. To be human is, by extension, to likewise engage in a process of self-transformation. I don’t deny that some of that transformation is motivated by a hatred for the body, and clearly all of it is entangled in both patriarchy and the capitalistic commodification of human life. But I love my piercings, the most straightforwardly violent thing I have done to my body, in a way that doesn’t seem to me to be reducible to an internalisation of the male gaze or a hatred of my body. There is a curious sort of eroticism to the fresh wound that results from forcing steel through skin (Lacan would have plenty to say about that, no doubt). I find pleasure in the things I do to my body, the things I do with my body, the ways I am able to transform myself. I don’t know that it has much to do with transcendence (but then isn’t transcendence part of the problem, when it comes to bodily hatred?). It doesn’t even have that much to do with the desire to be pleasing to the gaze of others. What do we do, theologically, with the desire to be tattooed, to be pierced, to colour our hair, to paint our faces, to be strong, to acquire physical skills, to work on our bodies to transform them? How much is really new and how much is a reflection of new technological possibilities made available to a very old and very human desire? Is there a way of valuing what is good and beautiful here even when it is not—explicitly—related to the desire for God?

And then, the question of revolutionary violence. What I was trying to say, I think, was that it seems to me that we cannot love what is good and what is beautiful in our lives and in the bodies which constitute the world around us without hating that which would destroy them and committing ourselves to fight for their destruction in the name of something better. I don’t know how helpful the category of violence is here for deciding what tools are appropriate in the fight. We so easily focus on the wrong things and see violence where it is not, and miss it where it is (Angela Davis and Assata Shakur spring to mind here, as women who thought that new life would come forth precisely out of revolutionary transformation, and whose radical opposition to the existing order was seen as physical violence even where there was none). The question is this: do we accept the horizons of the existing order as those we are compelled to work within, so that we believe what we are told, that there is no alternative, that all we can do is work within the constraints of the existing order; or do we enact a more radical refusal in the name of those bodies we love, and insist that another world is possible.

Tina Beattie replying to Marika Rose

24th January 2015

Some Piercing Insights

Marika, now we’re doing theology! Piercings and revolutions—oh yes. After all, piercings once redeemed us (‘he was pierced for our transgressions’), and that was some revolution—though actually, I think the revolution really happened with the virginal conception of God incarnate which involved no piercing at all, though later a sword would pierce her maternal soul. And haven’t we seen, in that golden moment between the near-simultaneous ending of apartheid and communism, and the rise of Marketolatry, that velvet revolutions do not always involve violence? One can after all end opposing regimes defended by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction with nothing more than people holding candles through the night—though many died or were imprisoned to keep those candles of hope alive in the long, long night. Today it seems that we would prefer to curse the darkness than light the candle of hope. If you ask me, it’s better to light a candle than to draw a cartoon.

(I’ve already confessed I do theology by daydreaming and association, which is why I’m not a systematic theologian. So let me get back to the point—piercings—because that set up so many penetrating insights that I don’t know where to begin.)

I do have two piercings—one in each earlobe—but that’s it I’m afraid. However, having once had an episiotomy, I’m familiar with the feeling of ‘the fresh wound that results from forcing steel through skin’. In fact, when I attended my first philosophy lecture at the age of thirty six, I was amazed to find a module on ‘episiotomy’. When I looked more closely, it was ‘epistemology’. My epistemological credentials are better now than they were then (though some people reading this might dispute that), but I still think that people who have had episiotomies have something vital to contribute to epistemologies. So what follows are some episiotomical wanderings in theological epistemologies. This is not very radical—in fact, it’s quite orthodox—but those who don’t know their orthodoxy might think it’s radical.

I realise this is getting a bit near the bone, (bad pun), but this is where Lacanian Butleresque parodies of gender run into the buffers of the body. There are some things one can’t do or be made to endure with the symbolic phallus and the lack thereof. I wonder if the eroticism of slicing through skin is a way of cutting through all those vacuous postmodern parodies to get to the real stuff, in order to feel more real, to reconnect word and flesh, to carve the will’s command into the obstinate resistance of the flesh.

I ask this because the next association I made was to wonder what it would feel like to experience the kind of power over one’s own body that your response implies. Is it a desire to resist the power of nature, to tame the animal flesh by harnessing its eroticism and indeed its violence? Is it about autonomy—this desire to do things to one’s body that are ‘not about the gaze of others’ and ‘not—explicitly related to the desire for God’? (Thomas Aquinas said we shouldn’t get too hung up about these things—sometimes enjoyment is just enjoyment, or words to that effect.)

Is it the ultimate masturbatory experience, with the knife taking the place of the phallus or the vibrator? Does a woman’s self-pleasuring always require penetration? The first academic essay I ever published was about why God created the clitoris. I like to think it’s the laughter of God in the face of the power of the phallus. A virgin can conceive a child and even have an orgasm without penetration in the Kingdom of God. Maybe that’s what Augustine is getting at when he says of the risen female body that

A woman’s sex is not a defect; it is natural. And in the resurrection it will be free of the necessity of intercourse and childbirth. However, the female organs will not subserve their former use; they will be part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder—there will be no lust in that life—but will arouse the praises of God for his wisdom and compassion, in that he not only created out of nothing but freed from corruption that which he had created. (City of God, Book 22, Ch. 17)

The truth is, I never thought to ask questions about autonomy and bodiliness until it was too late. I had bonked away my virginity before I discovered that, like money in the bank, it might have gained interest with keeping. (I had a Presbyterian upbringing so I hadn’t been raised on a spiritual diet of Catholic virginal purity. I’m not sure Presbyterians do virginal purity, figuratively speaking). By the time I began to read feminist theories about embodiment, autonomy, ‘my body my self’ etc., I had been married for close on fifteen years and had four little children, who one way and another were rather dependent on my body. So in some way I’ve always experienced my body as ‘for’ others, and the idea of doing quite radical things to my own body for pleasure—I’m talking out of the ordinary things here, not to go into too much detail—makes me question my assumptions and my boundaries.

But is any body truly one’s own? Don’t we always already discover ourselves within that condition of bodily dependence and vulnerability that is the inescapable shadow cast by the human flesh on the brightness of the soul, a shadow that men of God and men of reason have spent much of history trying to eliminate? Do ‘I’ (my will, my reason, my moral power), control this messy stuff of which I am made, so that I seek to determine its birthing and its dying, its conceiving and its aborting, its suffering and its delight? Or do I somehow struggle to keep up with where my body leads me, in the strangeness of its affections and desires (and its affectations too), in the rebelliousness of its illnesses and sufferings and slow decline into ageing and death? Am I always embodied with and for others, and must my will always seek to extricate itself from this entanglement of the flesh by doing its own thing, dragging the reluctant body along? Do I need to live and live again the primal alienation of the human condition that severs flesh from word, castrating myself over and over again by cutting myself off from that primordial union that I imagine to have been my first and ultimate place of rest, setting in motion an abysmal desire that I veil with the purpose and meaning of God? Can it be true that all our human longing—all spirituality, all mysticism, all our liturgical grandeur, all art, music and poetry—flow from that wound of separation and the body’s insatiable hunger for return and consolation? In her novel Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson describes this better than any Lacanian theorist:

The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory—there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.

Theologians have forgotten how to play with time, but without such playfulness we have nothing much to say. That’s why we must abandon the systematic project and turn to literature, art, music and popular culture if we are to speak of God anew. The story of creation is, after all, far more about finding words to express the play of memory, desire and imagination upon the human soul than it is about scientific or temporal origins or debates about ontology and God. Lacan knows that, but so did Thomas:

The activity by which God maintains things is no new activity, but the continued act of giving them existence, an act which is not a process in time. . . . Before things existed God had the power not to give them existence, and thus not to make them. So, in the same way, after they have been made, he has the power to cut off the inflow of existence, so that they cease existing; that is, he has the power to annihilate them. But there is no point in him doing it. For his goodness and power are shown better by eternally maintaining both spirits and matter in existence. (ST 1, 104).

Cutting off the inflow of existence: is that not what falling and birthing are both about? Are we not always falling forward into that just created moment when curiosity slices us from the raw animality of innocence into the divided condition of human consciousness that recognises good only when it is lost? Do we not meander through time in constant elliptical movements of association, digression, memory, hope and forgetfulness? Isn’t that time-travelling capacity of the human soul what truly separates us from all other animals: not rationality, but freedom from the time-bound moment that we experience as imagination and memory (which is why this response to you comes when our conversation has already been relegated to the backlist).

Does this cutting into the self constitute an act of resistance to that first unavoidable cut that births us into language—and, as I’ve already suggested, the mother’s body too is cut and wounded along with the cutting away of the child (except in the case of Christ, who never wounded any body—which is why the virgin birth is eschatologically significant)? Or is it rather the way in which we women cry out against that continual attempt to merge us, to fuse us back into the maternal so that the erotic yearning of the flesh is tamed to serve the purpose of procreation, the engendering of the human? Is it better to experience the delight of being cut free over and over again, than to feel the dark inward pull of that maternal body who has never learned to let us go, who has taught us never to trust our own erotic desire, for we have only ourselves to blame if we are impregnated, seduced, raped. That’s what mothers used to teach their daughters. Maybe we still do, unwittingly and unknowingly, because we are too eager to protect them. When a woman cuts her own flesh, is she re-enacting over and over again the ecstatic anguish of curse and expulsion from Eden? But then, how are we to return, how are we to imagine that glorious redemption of our bodies when we arouse nobody but God—and how can we arouse God if we are not ourselves aroused from Eve’s long historical slumber of desire beneath the curse of domination and childbirth? Who told us that God would ever ask that we cut ourselves off from ‘the inflow of existence’, when even Thomas tells us that it would be pointless to do so?

There are also those piercings that go beyond the erotic—puncturing through the veils of imagination and desire to the sublime and awesome lure of the tomb—that other womb that is the mortal enemy of every mother’s love, the enemy that makes her want to suck her children back inside and keep them safe. Don’t let anybody tell you that mother earth and human mothers walk hand in hand. We are in constant battle for our children’s lives. A mother is not a force of nature but a force against nature. What freedom, what faith, must a woman have to set her child free along the path to Calvary? What dedication must she have to walk there with him, to watch as mother nature triumphs over the complex fragility of maternal love, as the virgin earth swallows the body of the virgin birth? No wonder Rilke has Mary cry out from the foot of the cross, ‘you suddenly reversed all nature’s course’. (‘Before the Passion’).

Yet in death, Christ’s body morphs—the tortured corpse becomes the maternal body, reversing nature’s course again. A double reversal, a reuniting of the maternal body with the earth after the wrenching of separation. In John’s Gospel, the wound in Christ’s side gushes blood and water—not something that dead bodies do, but this is a body in childbirth. That’s why medieval artists made the wound look like a bleeding vagina. One of my current intellectual curiosities is whether the phallic torso and the bloodied wound together are a kind of fertility symbol inscribed on the body of the crucified, with Mary at the foot of the cross symbolising the maternal Church—the crucified body metamorphosing into the maternal body of the Church—giving birth to the faithful, healing the wound that cut us off from the umbilical cord, ‘the inflow of existence’? Extra ecclesiam, nulla salis. No salvation outside the body of the mother.

But if we women are to become human, creatures of language set free from the suffocating silence of the maternal womb, must we always follow that crucified body, reversing nature’s course lest our mothers consume us, and resisting the healing that follows lest we too become consuming mothers? Is that what Holy Mother Church does to men—consume them with her voluptuous sensuality, so that the fragile penis must forego its tender pleasures and become instead the phallus that masks the site of castration and erects itself as the sword of banishment before the sacramental priesthood? For what symbolic loss would occur if it ceased to be the sword of division and became instead the organ of fecundity, union and desire? If it became for us ‘the inflow of existence’ rather than the barrier of prohibition? Better to keep cutting and cutting and cutting than to ask such questions.

Ultimately, the mortal mother always loses to mother earth, and our human will loses its fight against nature.We die, whether by an act of wilful defiance—like Antigone or Lucretia, or like every violent revolutionary propelled by the death wish?—or whether we simply surrender our sick and ageing flesh to the voracious earth, in the realization that‘Nature has never been a static, solid ground on which to build. Everything natural, everything that is, is always in the process of changing, transforming itself.’

Whew, Marika, time to come up for air. Yes, you’re right: ‘To be human is, by extension, to likewise engage in a process of self-transformation.’ I dye my hair, I paint my toenails, I even wax my chin (see below), but I don’t willingly do anything that forces steel through skin. But as you can see, I’m trying to imagine why I might. So let me dwell on this for a while by another association, which also has to do with changing and piercing.

I managed to catch the last day of the “Late Rembrandt” exhibition at the National Gallery in London. I had to hang around for four hours for my timed entry, so I went and sat in a nearby café. I overheard a snatch of conversation between two young men sitting nearby. I have no idea what they were talking about, but one said to the other, ‘It was quite an experience. You would have hated it. All those naked women—they were old. It was disgusting.’ They fell about laughing. I wanted to hit him. Not really. I wanted to take all my clothes off and dance on the table, but as I’ve already implied, I’m not that free with my body (yet).

I know all about that mutability of nature you talk about. All that is solid melts into jelly (apologies to Marx). Everything wobbles, sags, droops, flops. Hairy places go sparse and smooth places grow hair (see above). The male body is not resistant to these processes, yet I never hear young women snorting with laughter in cafés, talking about disgusting old men with their dewlaps, farts and pot bellies. Anyway, I’m digressing again. Let’s talk about art.

When I went to the Rembrandt exhibition, I discovered female bodies painted from the inside out, so to speak. Not the male gaze, but a tender, wounded eroticism that saw the vulnerability in beauty and the beauty in vulnerability. Rembrandt was an old man by then. His self-portraits show us how he ages, year on year.

One has to befriend the ageing flesh, in order to depict it in such visionary and translucent detail. And this is where I want to reflect on another question you pose, when you say, “it seems to me that we cannot love what is good and what is beautiful in our lives and in the bodies which constitute the world around us without hating that which would destroy them and committing ourselves to fight for their destruction in the name of something better. I don’t know how helpful the category of violence is here for deciding what tools are appropriate in the fight.”

As I’ve already suggested, to be a mother is to move to the frontline of that primordial battle against all that would destroy the bodies we love, though let’s not romanticise. A mother can fear the voracious need of the child as much as the child resists the voracious love of the mother. Psychoanalysis never has understood that side of things. Sometimes, it’s better to nip it in the bud than to live one’s whole life with the altered ego that comes about when the autonomous self splits by way of a cutting that never goes far enough, a cutting that never manages to sever the umbilical cord that attaches the maternal heart to the wandering child. Better to end it before it begins, in this culture of ours that no longer accepts that suffering is the other side of love, and if one refuses to suffer one must ultimately refuse to love. Even so, maternal love, like martyrdom, must be freely chosen. There is no law in love, no law that can force love, no love that is subject to law. Love is free, or it is not love.

So what god will free us to love, unless that god also reconciles us to death? How can we relinquish our terror, unless we also relinquish our mastery, unless we discover that between the iron chain and the severed cord there is a pulsing channel of life that flows between the placental god and the gestating world, and its name is ‘grace’—the ‘inflow of existence’ that creates us and sustains us in being? This transforms the wilderness of history into the gestation of eternity, the anguish of creation into the groanings of childbirth, the exile from Paradise into the homeward journey. How will we love unless we allow the umbilical cord to reach across the phallic wound? If Christ reconciles us only to death and not to birth, he has capitulated to the phallic god. That is why we must learn how to worship the newborn Christ before we can contemplate the crucified. We must learn how to be born, if we are to learn how to die. We must be reborn.

How would a reborn self recognise the world as the creation of the newborn and crucified God? Might it be a process of learning to recognise that ‘what is good and what is beautiful in our lives and in the bodies which constitute the world around us’ is what others see as bad and ugly? It is easy to hate that which destroys the beautiful and the good, it is harder to protect the bad and the ugly from those who commit themselves to fighting for their destruction in the name of the good. That’s where all crucifixion begins, all genocide. John Gray’s book, Black Mass, argues that every modern utopian revolution has ended in genocide. One cannot destroy the bad and the ugly unless one destroys the people one believes to be ugly and bad. That is why the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were slaughtered—not by mad men driven to bloodlust by an ancient religion, but by the most rational and sane of modern men who knew, as all modern tyrants know, that the rational end justifies the bloody means. The return to purity entails the elimination of the impure. If you want a transcendent God of beauty, truth and goodness, you must always pierce through and destroy the fleshy body of the incarnate divine.

Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena both said that love of neighbour entails love of self, because I am my own neighbour. That is why Lacan helps us to unmask the formless void that threatens to consume the empty formalism of Kantian ethics. If my capacity to do good entails waging war on my own desire and bodily pleasures, then to love my neighbour as myself is a deadly command. Freud saw this, but Freud remained too much on the near-side of the Kantian horizon. I cannot love all that is bad and ugly and desiring and confusing in my neighbour, unless I learn to love my own desiring, confusing and ugly self. I cannot live at peace with nature, unless I learn to live at peace with all that nature takes away from my beautiful, independent, autonomous self with the passing of time. Enough violent revolutions. When resistance demands violence, it has arrived at its limits—though Girard would remind us that to arrive at such limits entails a choice between becoming a victim or becoming a perpetrator.

The ageing Rembrandt sketched the sagging breasts and wrinkled midriffs of elderly women with the same compassionate eroticism that he used to paint the luscious thighs and rounded belly of Bathsheba.

When we look at his painting of “A Woman Bathing in a Stream”, shift held high, legs apart, looking down at her reflection in the water, he invites us to contemplate the pleasure of a woman lost in the pleasure of watching herself, without a knife or a phallus in sight.

The artist delights in but does not violate that private moment of the self-pleasuring of a woman’s gaze. This is indeed a woman whose “sex is not a defect”, a woman whose female organs are ‘part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder … but will arouse the praises of God for his wisdom and compassion’. This is a gentle self-pleasuring, a love of self that needs no wounding, no piercing. It is, dare I say, a virginal pleasure, which has nothing to do with whether or not the woman has had sex (she was probably one of the artist’s several mistresses, who caused him no end of trouble); it has everything to do with her capacity to surrender herself to a primordial nature in an imagined Eden. The eternal virgin occupies the sphere of liminality and mediation between heaven and earth, the undecidability which constitutes the fullness of grace in that in-between no-time of standing legs apart within the inward flow of grace in order to conceive (of) that which is beyond all human conception.

But of course this is an imagined Eden, a painted Eden. It’s not real. It’s not, and never can be, the “real” for ours is a world of images and representations, or—to shift from that Platonic separation to the more umbilical relationship offered by Aristotle, Thomas and Lacan—ours is a world of graced echoes and intimations pulsing within the materiality of being.

If this painting of the woman in the stream is, as some interpreters suggest, an allusion to Susanna and the elders, then the artist offers us a moment of innocence before the impending threat of rape. The serpent is always already lurking in the shrubbery. The lusting beholder is always already there. The elders are watching. The male gaze is implied even as it is resisted, and the moment of solitary delight will soon become the moment of terror. What revolution must women bring about to change this story with its non-identical repetitions reverberating through our not-yet finished histories? Must it always be a history of violence? Must we always penetrate our own flesh, rob ourselves of our virginity, before it is taken from us?

How do we return to that primordial moment of rapture, lost in the goodness of the gaze that knows eroticism without violence, pleasure without pain? Must we always look back on it from the moment of violation, in order to know what we have lost, in order to recognise the cost of becoming human? And must we continue to slice, to cut, to wound, to separate, lest we begin to slide backwards into that state of nature, where we know neither good nor evil, neither past nor future? The difference between the human and the animal is freedom, they tell us, but is it not also the vocation to fall and fall again into the knowledge that must break us in order to make us? And with such knowledge always comes the memory of what was lost before we knew the pain of remembering and the solace of imagining.

Only when Susanna saw the elders and heard their threat, did she discover the rapture of that timeless moment of virginal pleasure in the river. Only when we have fallen can we recognise Paradise as our past and future imaginings, for imagination is the shuttle by way of which the soul weaves meaning upon the loom of time. Kant and his heirs take a dim view of the imagination, but for Thomas it is the necessary condition within which the dynamics of desire can operate, shuttling backwards and forwards between the object of experience and its conceptual interpretation. Thomas also ontologised memory, for without memory there is no ‘me’, there is no immortal self. But Lacan reminds us that the body too knows and remembers. Indeed, before the soul can know, the body must experience and remember. That’s why Lacan opens the door to a more radical Thomism.

I’m reading Giorgio Agamben’s The Open, and here is a paragraph that has transfixed me:

What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way—within man—has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values. And perhaps even the most luminous sphere of our relationships with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal.

Is that what cutting one’s own flesh amounts to—woman’s desire to be man by slicing away the darkness of the animal flesh, the matter that is always maternal, always ‘she’, the mother whose soul is always pierced by the sword of love, knowing that the child too must be pierced by love, if he or she is to know God?

In ancient Rome, they would stab a virgin before they raped her, for fear of the awesome forces that would be unleashed by the sexual penetration of her virgin flesh. Is that what we do when we slice through our own flesh—master the powers of violence by inflicting upon ourselves what we fear others might inflict upon us, even if at its furthest extreme that is the power of commanding our own moment of death—like Antigone? Lacan is mesmerised by the thunderous silence of Antigone’s entry into the real, that liminal moment of the imaginary when, crossing over from the symbolic to the real, she steps across the threshold of mortality to join Schrodinger’s cat in the in-between. And why is Lacan’s real and Thomas’s God always silent, always separate? Catherine of Siena’s soul knew the union that Thomas would not allow or acknowledge, except in the rare case of rapture. Perhaps that’s because Catherine’s visceral plunging into the body of the risen Christ through the bodies of the poor and the suffering reconnected her to that source of life which flows from God’s body to my own through the body of my suffering neighbour, my hungry child, my desiring lover.

But really, Lacan needs to get real. Antigone does not mesmerise me. Somebody needs to tell her, ‘let the dead bury the dead’. What is mesmerising about a young woman forced to choose between law and love, and choosing to die for love of that which the law has already put to death? Better to love life, Antigone. Let go. Don’t cling to him, like some not yet ascended phantasm who might yet morph into a body you can take hold of. The earth has taken him, along with your mother. Go get a life, silly girl. Antigone is a religious fanatic, and we have no need of any more of those. We all have quite enough in our different traditions.

Unlike Susanna, Lucretia is not spared from rape. Rembrandt shows us two different interpretations of Lucretia, painted in 1664 and in 1666—a period during which his own life was spiralling out of control so that in the difference between these two interpretations of Lucretia it is tempting to see the artist’s inner world plunging into despair—though the very last self-portrait is not that of an artist in despair. Despair does not create art. Despair is the abject, the hopeless silence of the abyss. Art is always a reaching out to the other side, the determination to wrest meaning from futility and give it the kiss of eternal life.

In the earlier Lucretia, there is still a moment of defiant possibility. Perhaps she is Kierkegaard’s knight of faith at this point, though the association is, strictly speaking, anachronistic—but, as I’ve said, theologians should not be too bound by the rigours of time. Lucretia gazes into the distance, dagger in her right hand, her left hand raised in a moment of hesitation. Her hand is bruised and her sleeve is torn open. She has fought a mighty struggle against her rapist, and maybe she will still decide that life is worth living. Augustine insisted that it was. Writing about Lucretia, he argues at great length in defence of her innocence. (Anybody who says Christianity is misogynistic should read this passage. Rape trials might be more just today if they were informed by Augustine’s argument about Lucretia). Her suicide is a guilty act because she puts an innocent and chaste woman to death. (I don’t know what he’d say about your piercings, Marika, specially since you say they aren’t about desire for God. But maybe that was true for all those self-piercing, self-starving, self-mutilating medieval mystics too, though they belonged to an interpretative community when God was a more legitimate reason for doing something than the self. Today, they’ve changed places. You say that very lucidly in your doctoral thesis—which was an epiphany for me.)

By the time he painted the second Lucretia, Rembrandt’s life had spiralled out of control. Lucretia has become the knight of resignation. Her body has become her torn and bloodied vagina. A glistening smear of wet blood streaks the front of her virginal white gown. Is this the self-inflicted wound of suicide, or is it the consequence of the rape that has just happened? Her cloak gapes open, and the girdle round her waist draws attention to the wound and suggests the ruptured hymen. Her lips are swollen and bruised, her eyes gaze into the darkness, unfocused and brimming with tears. This Lucretia has been violently pierced, and she is about to slice through her own wounded flesh with the steel of the dagger she holds in her hand. She holds a cord in her other hand—the cord that will open the curtains around the bed when she falls, revealing the site of her violation. Like Susanna, eventually she will be made to succumb to the male gaze.

Penetration. Piercing. Wounding. Killing. Enough, surely? How much more steel must slice through flesh before we learn to inhabit our animality, to relinquish our drive towards mastery, and to be reconciled with the dependent and vulnerable creatures that we are?

So here’s another association—and now we’re getting to the meat of the question. My Presbyterian background didn’t have much to say about virginal birth, but it had a lot to say about the cross and vicarious suffering. Here’s the verse I’ve been thinking of since reading your response: ‘But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.’ (Isaiah 53:5)

What is the nature of this peace and this healing? How can we live ‘as if’ it were true—because surely, the Christian life is nothing more and nothing less than that ‘as if’? We are told that Christ still has the scars of his piercings in heaven. Maybe in heaven there will still be the necessary piercings of love, as part of the mystery of what it means to be made in the image of God. Does God ever stop suffering for love? Do we? Isn’t that more than enough suffering to be getting on with?

No more pierced bodies. Until we make peace with our own bodies, we will never understand the peace and healing that the prophet speaks of.

P.S. I think the foregoing is a response to Hannah Hofheinz, who wonders ‘what theological knowledge will become possible if Beattie’s writing incarnates that about which she writes.’ I wonder if it will catch on. I doubt it somehow.

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American Progressives have a new hero, and the MAGA mob have a new hate figure: out with Kamala, in with Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde.

Bishop Budde’s gentle rebuke to Donald Trump at the end of her sermon during a prayer service in Washington’s National Cathedral on 21st January has made headline news around the world. My social media feeds are full of images and ecstatic declarations of admiration and praise for the Bishop’s courage. (I tend to hang out with those towards the liberal/progressive end of the spectrum). I too admired her courage, but I held back from joining in the jubilation. Here is what was bothering me.

Some early reports referred to the Bishop’s appeal for LGBTQ+ children. The Guardian reports it under a headline that reads, “Trump criticizes ‘nasty’ bishop who made pro-immigrant and LGBTQ+ plea”:

After a bishop at the National Cathedral prayer service for the inauguration on Tuesday implored Donald Trump to “have mercy upon” immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, many have spoken out about the remarks—including Trump himself.

NBC News reported, “Bishop at inaugural prayer service urges Trump to ‘have mercy’ on LGBTQ children, immigrants”. Sky News reported, “Bishop pleads with Trump over LGBT children”. The BBC headline read, “Bishop asks Trump to show mercy to LGBT people and migrants”. Forbes magazine published a transcript, under these words:

Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, urged President Donald Trump to “have mercy” on people who are “scared now” during the inaugural prayer service at Washington's National Cathedral Tuesday, including families with LGBTQ+ members and immigrants.

Anyone who has read my posts here will know of my exasperation over the empty rhetoric that takes the place of serious and informed political and ethical dialogue when people declare themselves for or against the LGBTQIA+ “community”, as if that jumble of letters means anything (and it keeps getting added to).

We know what we mean when we use the words lesbian and gay. We also know what the word “trans” means, even if we are not fully signed up members of the trans activist movement. The letter “I” is being dropped, as people with differences in sexual development ask not to be labelled “intersex” and co-opted in the name of identity politics. “Queer” was a way of gay men reclaiming the language of denigration, in much the same way that Black people took that word away from the language of racist abusers and made it a mark of pride in their identities. But when queer sits alongside gay and lesbian, it becomes more difficult to say what it signifies. One young person told me that it just means people who are still searching for an identity, but surely that means we’re all queer, if we’re honest? And that “+”? What does it mean? Who does it include, and more importantly, who does it exclude? I could go on, but let me move on.

Reading the headlines, all I saw was yet another example of the culture wars in Bishop Budde’s sermon, with empty rhetoric being flung across a great divide by both sides. To talk about LGBTQ+ children is to stray into deeply problematic linguistic and ethical territory. It risks the adult sexualisation of children in an inappropriate and potentially dangerous way. What is a bisexual child? What is a queer child? All children are queer, insofar as they are wild fledglings still largely unconstrained by our adult rules, conventions and taboos, except when we impose these on them for their own good or, more often, because their lack of inhibitions makes us uncomfortable. All children are surely also “+” for the same reason. Their desires and fears are abundant, excessive, fertile, imaginative, and curious, but they have nothing to do with identity politics or sexual rights.

So reading the headlines, I was sorry that Bishop Budde had used language that is more ideological rhetoric than Christian theology. The language of LGBTQIA+ inclusivity puts any speaker firmly in the camp of progressive politics, and I regretted that she chose to focus so specifically on that controversial topic.

Then I listened to her whole sermon. Here it is:

It lasted for just under fifteen minutes. She was gentle, intelligent, and clear in her presentation. She spoke of loving our enemies, of being merciful and praying for those who persecute us. She quoted Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Her key theme was unity, which she said has at least three foundations:

• Honouring the dignity of every human being

• Honesty in both public conversations and private discourse

• Humility—because we are all fallible

It was a beautifully crafted homily, in both its theology and its delivery. I urge you to listen to it.

At 12 minutes 30 seconds in, she made “one final plea” to “Mr President”. Yes, it was a dramatic moment—perhaps the most dramatic moment of a dramatic week in American politics—but it was not the substance of her sermon. Yet searching for a transcript online, the only transcripts I could find (apart from the clunking automatic version on YouTube) were that last brief part of her sermon. Here it is from that report in Forbes magazine which I referred to above:

Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen”

The bishop chose her words carefully. She referred to “gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some of whom fear for their lives.” Each of these words means something. It refers to real children living in society as we speak of it today—children who will in all likelihood be bullied and punished by people incited to hatred by Trump. She did not use any version of that vacuous slogan, LGBTQ+. She included immigrants and people fleeing war zones and persecution in her appeal to “be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.”

The false reporting of this sermon, the misrepresentation of her words in even the most seemingly trustworthy media outlets, the attribution to her of a term she did not use, all show how far this ideology has gone in obscuring facts and skewering truth. It may be that elsewhere the bishop would use the rhetoric of LGBTQ+, but she would have been fully aware that every word, every pause, every facial expression in that sermon would be scrutinised by the world’s media. She would have chosen her words very, very carefully, and the media has a fundamental duty to report exactly what she said—not a word more.

To speak of lesbian, gay and trans children is to speak up for identifiable groups of people who are now at risk in American society. The words have acquired social currency by having shared meanings, even if those meanings are disputed. But to speak of LGBTQ+ children is to promulgate an ideology that has little purchase on reality. It’s Humpty Dumpty talk. Where can I find a persecuted “+” child so that I can speak up for him, her, they/them, whatever? And let’s be clear, that “+” is a sexual term, whatever it means. We are not speaking about disabled children, homeless children, sick children whose parents can’t afford healthcare. We are speaking about some vaguely inclusive form of adult sexuality that is additional or surplus to all the others in that list. And Bishop Budde did not make such a fundamental ethical and theological blunder as to refer to children in those terms.

So yes, I have great admiration for her courage, integrity and honesty, as well as for her theology, which is about as mainstream Christian as it gets. I hope our beloved Pope Francis listens to her and counts the cost of excluding women from ordination. But no, she did not use any version of LGBTQIA+ rhetoric, and those who tell you she did are misrepresenting what she said. They are manipulating the truth, which is another way of saying they are lying.

We don’t always know where the truth lies, and there is a lot working against the truth now. But when we do know, when we know what is true, it’s incumbent upon us to speak the truth, even when, especially when, it costs us. (Bishop Budde)

When the US goes mad, the whole world becomes a little crazy by association.

There are vast challenges spiralling out of control around us, but some of the crazies out there seem to think that one single issue redeems all the rest. Here is one of them on Twitter. (It’s a small, futile act of resistance to keep calling it Twitter):

I saw this because I follow some gender critical feminists on Twitter, and the algorithms don’t distinguish between Far Right fanatics and those of us twittering in the margins and being shouted down by the zealots at either extreme of the gender wars.

Trump’s Executive Orders at the end of his first twenty four hours in office include:

• A move to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants

• Withdrawal from the World Health Organization

• Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement

• Declaring a national emergency to override environmental protection laws

• Renaming the Gulf of Mexico

• Committing to ensure that states carrying out the death penalty have enough legal drugs to do so
  

He has pardoned nearly all the insurrectionists of 6th January 2021.

To those who think he is absolved from all this because he affirms the most fundamental fact of human existence which even an idiot like him can grasp (there are only two human sexes), let me remind you that your little darlings with their gonads and boobs in tact will drown along with their hormonally neutered, surgically mutilated peers when the ice caps melt. And if you think Trump’s anti-LGBTQIA+ fanaticism is about saving children, I can only presume that you regard those about to be deported as some kind of sub-human species not worth saving, not to mention the millions of children who will suffer as a result of the US withdrawing support from the World Health Organisation.

I hope it’s clear by now that I’m repelled by those Stepford Wives cooing over Donald Trump because hey, he might be a fascist but he knows the difference between guys and gals. Of course he does. I don’t think any men have accused him of sexual abuse and rape.

But hand-wringing US progressives bear significant responsibility for the election of Trump, in their stubborn resistance to any argument, however reasonable or informed, that calls into question aspects of the LGBTQIA+ movement.

There are legitimate reasons to resist the onslaught of gender ideology, including its brainwashing of children in age-inappropriate ways, often with masked allusions to sexualised fetishes:

Women who express concerns about anatomical males in women’s prisons and changing rooms, lesbians who resist the intrusion of anatomically male trans women into their events and relationships, are not terfs or bigots. Women who are defeated by trans women and males with DSDs in sporting events have a right to be distressed.

It’s interesting that these controversies all play out on one side. There are few campaigns for trans men to be allowed access to gay men’s activities and relationships. Trans men compete in women’s sports without any problems. Trans men are not clamouring to use men’s toilets and changing rooms. The problem of prisons is not an issue, because it is very rare for females (including trans men) to be imprisoned for violent and/or sexual crimes, whereas there is no significant statistical difference between trans women and men with regard to those imprisoned for sex offences. The vast majority of such offences are committed by men against women, children, and vulnerable men.

To refuse to acknowledge any of this, to label everyone who disagrees with you as a terf and a fascist, is to alienate the vast majority of ordinary people struggling to live meaningful lives outside the echo chamber of progressive politics. The captivity of liberal and progressive politics by the LGBTQIA+ movement leaves a wide open political space for populists like Trump to move into.

Trump is the ultimate postmodernist, the ultimate anarchist. Here is where all our deconstructive, parodic, gender-bending strategies have led us. Populism is the political progeny of the postmodern academy with its elitist rhetoric and disembodied language games. If you eviscerate language of all objective material realities and all ethical significance, if you insist that there is no truth, if you see all laws and social norms as violent and oppressive, if you look to the future with a steely bright vision of progress that seeks to break free of all traditional, religious and historical claims upon us, you should recognise that Trump and his followers subscribe to the same anarchic futurism. What values of truth and meaning do you have left to judge him by? To what objective reality do you hold him accountable?

Questions of sex and gender affect us individually and collectively. We’re experiencing experiments in language, meaning and identity that push us to the far frontiers of what it means to be a person in our social and cultural contexts as well as our personal relationships, at a time when we face escalating global crises and threats. The science is uncertain, the ethical issues are complex, the confusion is intense, and the suffering is real. The chaos that has consumed society’s gendered norms and constructs calls for attentiveness to all who are suffering and vulnerable, especially those who have been rendered voiceless by vocal and powerful ideologies on both sides. This means negotiating conflicting and threatened rights on all sides and learning to live with perhaps insurmountable complexity and doubt. But how did we get here?

I’m revisiting my writings on gender theory and questioning some of my ideas, but I remain convinced that our ability to think through issues of sex and gender with the best insights offered by science, theology and theory must be protected from the absolutists and ideologues at both ends of the spectrum. This leads me to a more radical feminism, a more exploratory theology, and a more critical approach to gender theory than I had before, with an insistence that they must not be separated. Gender theorists and activists have been allowed to obscure the fact that in every culture and era, women and girls have been and are subordinated at best and killed at worst solely on account of their female bodies. Feminism must reclaim its radical vision, without losing sight of the ways in which gender theory can inform its principles.

When feminism sacrificed female bodily lives on the high altar of gender theory, it opened the door to every kind of male desire and corporate power. Big pharma, like the arms trade, will seize any opportunity to make a killing. We should not be surprised that the pharmaceutical captivity of the gender-fluid body followed hot on the heels of the disembodied language games of postmodern theorists. Nor should we be surprised that those same theorists subscribe to the idea that sexed bodies should be conformed to phantasms of gender by any means possible, for they long ago evicted the materially significant body from the house of language. The female body becomes the ultimate challenge in this triumph of gender over sexual embodiment, for male desire no longer has to settle for possession by penetration. It can become an act of total conquest and colonisation.

I first realized that gender theory was becoming an anti-feminist ideology when I read a review of my book published in 2007, New Catholic Feminism: Theory and Theology. The book is a feminist critique of both Catholic teaching on sexuality and gender, and of feminist theology’s progressive optimism. It would have benefitted from a rigorous editor, and if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some of it. But this I know—it was original. Nobody before or since has scrutinised Catholic gender ideology and liberal feminist theology through the lens of psychoanalytic theories of gender and found both wanting. Yet one reviewer complained:

Move on, feminists. You’ve had your say. It’s all about queer theory now. That theoretical language game has become the Trojan horse which allowed feminism to be appropriated and controlled through the socially and historically sanctioned dominance of men’s desires and demands.

But gender theory is too important to be left to ideologues. The teasing apart of sex and gender gave women a small space in which to navigate possible paths to freedom, liberating our sexed bodies from the tyranny of shame, repression and self-loathing, and allowing us to become social subjects free from the shackles of conformity to oppressive gendered stereotypes. This Twitter thread by Victoria Smith gives a good account of why this matters:

The dissolution of the distinction between sex and gender reinforced the old regime—through the essentialisation of sexual difference by religious and political conservatives, and through the promotion of mimetic femininity evidenced in the ascendant status of beautiful trans misogynists and the transformation of drag queens from pantomime dames into sexual fetishists.

Dylan Mulvaney - the ultimate “woman”:

Jess l’whor: “I like a good slap or a choke every now and then, okay, who doesn’t?”

“I Google a lot of uh throat [ __ ] … um a lot of bisexual porn. I’m a lover of the body, I love titties, I love badge, I love everything.”

The realisation that gender is fluid, creative and performative, that our sexed bodies do not determine who we are and how we must live, created an opportunity for both sexes to break free of binary opposites. Instead, it has reinforced them in multiple destructive and misogynistic ways.

Every time somebody declares themselves non-binary, they collude in reinforcing that dualistic binary, posturing as the interesting and exotic exception to the conformist binaried norm with which they presumably associate the rest of us. Meanwhile, the sleeping monster of gendered dualism awakes with all its oppressive consequences for women. Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson represent different versions of the same old toxic masculinity, which finds its pathetic and deadly embodiment in men like Putin and Trump.

The defeat of feminism is evident not just in some forms of gender theory and in the obvious and violent examples of populist politicians and their followers, but more subtly in the corporate conditioning of children through the advertising and entertainment industries. I took these images from The Entertainer website, where I searched for “toys for boys” and “toys for girls”:

In this brave new world now emerging, women are literally and metaphorically being made to serve men’s demands, from the imprisoning torment of women in Afghanistan to the legalised eradication of lesbian rights and women-only groups in Australia. In that context, the popular all-American fantasy of a feminist Barbie in the film of that name is nothing other than the corporate commodification of women’s struggles for justice. That glamorous Barbie sashaying in to a high rise office block see her gynaecologist is a world away from the gynaecological and obstetric realities of health care for the vast majority of women, including women in the US without adequate health insurance:

So yes to radical feminism, yes to gender theory, but no to all gender ideologies and dogmas, whether on the political and religious right, or on the political and religious left.

I have never been mainstream in my politics, but I’ve never felt as politically isolated as I do today. Why don’t more people speak out? If you recognise that lesbians don’t have penises, adolescent girls do not become boys by amputating their beautiful budding breasts, gay teenage boys do not become heterosexual by pretending to be girls, blocking puberty in adolescents with complex mental health needs with drugs peddled by big pharma is child abuse, and anatomically male adult “women” demanding access to women’s spaces, bodies and sporting events are voyeurs at best and sexual predators at worst, then please, speak out. If you are a gay man who has allowed the continuing struggle for homosexual rights to be appropriated by the amorphous drift of rights for every sexual proclivity and narcissistic identity, it’s not too late to stand up and stand apart. If you recognise that the fragile rights of women, including lesbians, are being sacrificed to demands for unconditional trans inclusivity, say so. Otherwise, when Trump sweeps away the whole LGBTQIA+ movement, these fragile newborn rights for gay men and lesbians will be thrown out with the bathwater. And if non-binary, bisexual and trans-identifying persons seek allies in the struggle, then we must all find a better way of differentiating between legitimate and defensible rights and unreasonable demands that violate the rights of others, especially women and children.

Gay and lesbian rights must be protected against the draconian onslaught of Trump’s hatred, which has global implications for all homophobic cultures, without having to sign up to the vacuous rhetoric of whatever is meant by the LGBTQIA+ “community”. Every one of the letters in that alphabet soup must be separated out, interrogated, made to give an account of itself, and supported or rejected on the basis of its ethical coherence and its integrity. To do otherwise is to reduce the political forum to a hall of mirrors, with our bodies bent out of shape by whichever distorting mirror image we choose to look in.

I wrote this last night after a couple of glasses of wine, to help me to cope with the television news. I decided not to post it immediately, but have spent time editing it this morning. It is still a somewhat wine-induced polemic!

We are home to all races, ages, sizes, abilities, ethnicities, religions, languages, gender identities, sexual orientations, political affiliations, countries of origin and economic backgrounds.

I’m publishing the piece here, and I have asked the university in question to remove me from their list of contributors. I am not naming the university, because this is by no means a singular or unique example of the ideological captivity of the Humanities in English-speaking academia.

This is I believe a betrayal of the fundamental responsibility and raison d’être of any university, which is to educate its students in the skills of reasoned and informed debate in the quest for knowledge. The willingness to silence legitimate questions in order to protect students from exposure to ideas that might challenge their beliefs or upset their feelings is a form of anti-intellectualism as bigoted and dangerous as any on the Far Right.

I cannot collude in this widening suppression of legitimate debate around one of the most important and conflicted issues in modern culture, ethics and politics. I fear a generation of graduates who have been taught to believe that they are entitled to silence any idea that asks them to question their identities and beliefs, for this makes extremists of them all, whatever their political or religious affiliation.

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NOTES FROM TERF ISLAND
My (rejected) contribution to an academic blog:

I have repeatedly argued that modern church teaching on sexuality and gender is ideological rather than theological. It is not a quest to discern how to live faithfully, with dignity and generosity, amidst the complex entanglements of human sexuality and identity, but masks a thinly-veiled hostility to feminism and same-sex desire. This hostility provides ripe pickings for far-right politicians whose dogmas are well-served by Catholic teachings on sexuality and reproduction, including the denial of women’s reproductive rights, even if their social and economic policies are in contradiction with Catholic social teaching.

But in the complexities surrounding issues of gender and sexuality, I find myself increasingly alienated by the ways in which the language of gender is being appropriated in the service of hostile and combative gender politics on both sides. I have never supported a cause without being able to argue my reasons for doing so, and I cannot commit to advocacy for a vaguely defined cluster of sexual rights and gendered identities simply on the basis of tribal loyalty.

While I remain deeply committed to the struggle for lesbian and gay rights, including same-sex marriage, I am less certain of what kind of rights are being defended and what kind of freedoms are being demanded under the ever-widening umbrella of LGBTQIA+ activism. One person recently withdrew an invitation for me to give a workshop, explaining that

my parish has been on the front lines of 2SLGBTQIA+ issues for a number of years. … I realized that if people checked you out online, this would raise issues for my activists and for parishioners with trans family members, and that it could derail the workshop.

I had to look up that string of letters to know what it meant, and it left me profoundly sceptical.

These activists may share little common ground with the sexual ideologues in the Vatican, but many use the same methods of control and exclusion: silencing and condemning everyone who fails to conform to their doctrinal absolutes, with no attempt at engagement or dialogue.

Progressive Americans have labelled Britain “Terf island” (Terf stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist), because we have well-organised groups of feminist and lesbian activists, and some gay men, who defend sex-based rights and advocate for child protection. Many of these are on the left politically. While we are a less polarised society than the US, we still experience culture wars around these issues, with gender critical feminists and trans activists often taking up opposing positions.

My concerns are primarily focused on the treatment of gender dysphoric youngsters, many of whom have complex mental health needs, and on situations in which trans inclusivity compromises women’s sex-based rights, for example, in the protection of female-only spaces and activities, and in the desire by lesbians to exclude anatomically male trans women from their venues and sexual relationships. Being honest about these concerns does not make me a Terf. I want as much inclusivity and diversity as is humanly possible in our suffering and violent world, and as few segregated spaces as we can negotiate. But as rights multiply they become more complex and contested, and we have to navigate difficult conflicts of rights-based claims. From the holistic perspective of Catholic theological ethics, priority should always be given to the most vulnerable and excluded, not to those with the loudest voices and most powerful lobbies. In listening to the concerns of my lesbian friends, in following the stories of trans widows (women whose husbands have transitioned), and in seeking to understand those for whom the gender reassignment process has gone catastrophically wrong, or detransitioners who must live with the irreversible consequences of their treatment, I become increasingly aware that the slogan “be kind” can sometimes mask quite vicious attitudes of bullying, abuse and denial.

To give one example, an employment tribunal concerning the dismissal of Roz Adams, an employee of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre in Scotland, was excoriating in its criticisms. Here is how it was reported in The Guardian newspaper:

Roz Adams was subjected to a “Kafkaesque” internal disciplinary process by managers at Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) after she questioned rules about trans female counsellors working with female survivors.

The tribunal said there was “ample evidence” Adams had been unfairly treated by her employers because they believed she was a transphobe.

The investigations into Adams amounted to a “heresy hunt” because “she did not fully subscribe to the gender ideology which they did and which they wished to promote in the organisation. This was an act of harassment on the basis of her belief.”

Britain’s Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has announced an indefinite ban on puberty blockers for under-18s. This follows publication of The Cass Review, which investigated the care of young people (under-18s) with gender dysphoria in England. Dr Cass raises serious questions about the treatment and support offered to these youngsters. In the United States, detransitioner Clementine Breen is suing America’s best-known practitioner of youth gender medicine, Dr Johanna Olson-Kennedy, for negligence. Breen’s treatment involved puberty blockers at age 12, hormones at 13 and a double mastectomy at 14.

The Far Right is laying claim to people’s anxieties and fears around these issues, because the progressive/liberal left has failed to attend to their legitimate questions and concerns. Accusing those of us who express such concerns of bigotry and fascism, and demonizing people like J.K. Rowling for standing up for women’s rights, drives people towards populist politicians who cynically appropriate their concerns.

If we are to safeguard the fragile and threatened rights of gay people, of women, of those whose gendered identities make them vulnerable to marginalisation and prejudice, we must find better ways of exploring the complex questions confronting us around the rights, freedoms and responsibilities associated with sexuality and gender, without name-calling, silencing and censorship.

This is an expanded and modified version of my contribution to the latest forum discussion on the website of Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC). This stimulating and diverse forum encourages an exchange of ideas and insights from different language groups and cultural perspectives in the vastly diverse communities that make up the worldwide Catholic Church.

I am sixty-nine years old, and never in my life have women’s struggles for dignity, equality and rights felt so threatened or so precarious. I believe it has become imperative to speak out on behalf of the female person. By this, I mean a person gestated, birthed and nurtured through childhood as female on account of her biological characteristics and capacities, who will, in nearly all circumstances, begin menstruating, develop breasts and acquire a capacity for biological motherhood in early adolescence. All these biological realities will influence and even determine whom she is permitted to become, what level of education she is offered, what impact poverty and violence will have on her life, and what domestic and social roles she is allowed to occupy. The fact that some western women have broken free of these restrictions does not negate their pervasive hold on the world’s cultures and religions, nor does it secure these fragile and hardwon freedoms against growing threats from different directions.

There are complex situations associated with Differences in Sexual Development (DSDs), which sometimes lead to ambiguous sexual characteristics. People with these conditions are becoming outspoken in their resistance to being coopted as “intersex” in the name of identity politics. It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore these issues, but such conditions are rare and should not be used as a get-out clause to deny the fundamental rights and protections to which women and girls are entitled on account of their sex.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that feminism has failed, even if its failures take diverse forms in different contexts. The most extreme example is Afghanistan, where the Taliban have published a new set of rules for enforcing moral behaviour that they say is in keeping with Sharia law. These rules affect men and women, but they are draconian for women.  They reinforce already strict laws requiring women to cover their bodies and faces in public. Women are forbidden from speaking loudly, singing, reciting or reading aloud in public, and they must not even look at any males who are not relatives. Shabnam Nasimi, a former Afghan policy adviser now living in London, tweeted that “Women in Afghanistan are being obliterated—no voice, no face, no existence.”

Other recent stories may be less institutionalised in law and culture but are no less shocking. Iranian mother of two Arezoo Badri was reportedly left paralysed when Iranian police shot her after trying to stop her from driving without covering her hair. The rape and murder of a young Indian woman trainee doctor who was resting in a hospital room after a 36-hour shift has shocked the world, but it is part of a pattern of rape and violence against women in that country. In situations of war and conflict, rape forms a swathe of violence around the globe, from the brutal rape and murder of Israeli women during the Hamas attack of October 7^th  2023, to reports of Palestinian women being sexually abused and raped while in Israeli detention, from the sexual torment of women and girls in Sudan to the raped women and girls of Ukraine.

While all humans, irrespective of sex, are threatened by violence, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators when it comes to sexual violence. In Britain, The Guardian newspaper has started a regular feature on femicide. An editorial explains:

It is around half a century since the idea of femicide was introduced by feminists. It is, wrote the activist and scholar Diana Russell, who was key in its development, “a term that specifically points to and politicises the sexist, patriarchal, misogynistic killing of women and girls by men”. … The concept was rapidly taken up by campaigners globally. Although men are the most common victims of homicide, women are far more likely to be killed by men than by other women. … The persistence of these crimes reflects not only their deep social and cultural roots, but also the failure to fully take heed of them and work harder to tackle them.

The acknowledgement that women are sometimes guilty of violence is too often used as an excuse to deflect attention away from the fact that probably every woman and girl on the planet knows that the greatest threat she faces comes from male aggression, from the institutionalised violence of war and misogynistic policing, to the casual violence of sexist rhetoric, and the anarchic violence of domestic abuse, rape, and murder. Even those of us who live in relative security take precautions that are almost second nature: avoid lonely places at night; make sure the windows and doors are secure before you sleep alone; be vigilant if you find yourself alone with a male stranger; cross the street if you sense someone following you; warn your children not to talk to strange men; text your friends when you get home after a night out so that they know you’re safe, etc. etc. The list is long.

But a new and more insidious attack is being played out within the much-vaunted liberalism of western societies, with women being obliterated by stealth rather than by physical violence or social annihilation. A court case in Australia has acquired notoriety among groups campaigning for women’s rights since transgender woman Roxanne Tickle won a discrimination case against the women-only app Giggle for Girls (the name is intentionally humorous). Sall Grover started the app as an online safe space for women. Members had to upload a selfie to gain access, and gender recognition software used by the app initially approved Tickle. Grover subsequently revoked Tickle’s membership, insisting that Giggle was only for biological women. Tickle fought a three-year court battle against Grover, claiming that “persistent misgendering” had led to “constant anxiety and occasional suicidal thoughts”. Contrary to Grover’s insistence that Tickle is a biological male, the judge said that case law had established that sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary”. Grover shut down the Giggle app in July 2022, after receiving death threats and rape threats.

It is significant that Grover’s defence appealed to Australia’s ratification of the UN’s 1979 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to argue that the State has a duty to protect women’s rights, including the right to single-sex spaces. BBC journalist Sofia Bettiza observes that the

ruling in favour of Tickle will be significant for all the 189 countries where CEDAW has been ratified—from Brazil to India to South Africa. When it comes to interpreting international treaties, national courts often look at how other countries have done it.

This means that women may no longer have the right to exclude biological males if those men claim to be women under whatever gender identity laws prevail in their countries.

When, in the early 1990s, the language of feminism yielded to the terminology of gender studies, I felt uneasy. Having spent most of my early life in sub-Saharan Africa (Zambia, Kenya and Zimbabwe), I knew that the work of feminism and the struggle for women’s rights had hardly begun. Women and girls were still oppressed and excluded in multiple ways in different cultures. Could gender studies take over the work of feminism without the latter gradually dissolving into the more amorphous category of gender? Given that at no time in history nor in any culture have women truly broken free of male domination and power, I feared that gender studies would become colonised by male aspirations, desires and demands until women’s voices would once again be confined to whispers in the margins.

I was right to be cautious. Gender has become a Trojan horse. It has eclipsed women’s struggles for justice and silenced the voices of women who refuse to comply with the non-negotiable demands of an ever-expanding movement of gendered identities and sexual rights clustering under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. I have written a Substack post expressing some of these concerns.

Let me be clear. I believe that adults should be free to adopt whatever sexual and gendered identities, orientations and relationships they desire, so long as they are not causing harm to others or violating the rights of vulnerable individuals and groups. It is a fundamental principle of the Catholic theological tradition that the law should be used to protect the common good of society and not to police individual morality. I believe gays and lesbians are entitled to all the respect, rights, and legal protections enjoyed by heterosexual people, including the right to marry—a position that has earned me condemnation from the Vatican. But even in situations which some might believe to be immoral, in a free society we must respect other people’s rights to choose how to live and how to behave, as long as they are not harming others.

Still, at a time of dramatic change around western society’s values regarding gender, sexuality and identity, respecting people’s freedom cannot mean silencing debate. Any criticism or questioning of the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ movement risks being branded as Far Right, and a wave of misogyny has been unleashed. The vitriol targeted at gender-critical feminists such as J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock goes far beyond the kind of informed and intelligent debate that one might expect over controversial social issues. The labelling of women as “terfs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) is often accompanied by venomous abuse in social media and activist slogans.

The fact that advocates of right-wing extremism can superficially appear to be in sympathy with gender-critical feminists is a cynical exercise in populism, for nothing reduces women to the status of broodmares, handmaids and sex objects more effectively than the politics of the Far Right. US culture wars offer abundant evidence of this, and I passionately believe that gender-critical feminists must resist any such alignment. Women’s dignity and rights are not well-served by the politics of populism, nationalism and religious conservatism. The Taliban is only the furthest extreme of an insidious movement that is a pervasive presence in right-wing politics. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale seems more prophetic with every passing year. But to polarise such complex issues exacerbates the problem. It eliminates the middle ground—what philosopher Gillian Rose called “the broken middle”—where we navigate conflicting rights, and struggle to reconcile the principles of law, universality and metaphysics with the ethical challenges of particularity, subjectivity, and fragmentation.

Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, is an example of this polarisation, which brooks no negotiation or dialogue. They (sic) risk dividing the world into LGBTQIA+ advocates and authoritarian fascists. They dismiss all arguments against allowing biological males who identify as women (including lesbians with penises) full and equal access to all women’s spaces, activities and relationships. This is because the problem is not biological sex but “the social organisation of patriarchy and masculine domination”. Our aim, writes Butler, should be “to keep everyone safe”. Well, yes, that would be wonderful, but as I point out in my review of Butler’s book, “not everyone is safe”:

Butler fails to acknowledge that, whether we argue from biology or social conditioning, women and girls around the world are at risk from male violence and sexual domination. Trans women are often victims of these misogynistic and violent realities, but the solution is to address the problem of male sexual aggression, not to insist that women abandon any attempt to maintain protective boundaries.

There need be no contradiction between respecting the human dignity and rights of trans persons and the sex-based rights of women and girls, so long as both sides are willing to engage in a spirit of dialogue and compromise, sensitive to each other’s fears and vulnerabilities. Right now, it seems that from Olympic sports to female-only spaces, women are expected to give in every time. Plus ça change, plus est la même chose.

Far from offering support and solidarity for women around these issues, church teaching is part of the problem. When Pope Francis uses his frequently repeated mantra that “the Church is a woman”, he is affirming that the female body has no significance, for the Church is in no meaningful sense a materially embodied woman. The fact that the female body only has particular significance in the negative—it excludes women from ordination—means that the Catholic Church is a global pioneer in men’s colonisation of the house of language (Heidegger) when it comes to the linguistic significance of “woman”. When woman functions as an abstract ecclesiological concept it is a vacant signifier for all to occupy, but when it functions as a marker of female bodiliness, it is a sign of exclusion. All this contradicts the sexual essentialism that is a foundational aspect of modern church teaching on sexuality and procreation, which insists that male and female constitute an insurmountable difference written into the order of creation by God. I’ve written extensively on this elsewhere.

In all my writings on gender, I’ve tried to be as inclusive as possible. I’ve now decided that I must use my voice to speak out for women and children. That does not violate the rights of other groups, nor does it qualify my respect for human rights for all. But when rights conflict, women and children come first for all the reasons I’ve outlined above.

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I have next to no interest in sport, and I find it barbaric that people would enjoy seeing boxers punch the hell out of each other for entertainment. Nevertheless, the Olympic women’s boxing controversy raises questions far beyond one sporting event, for it goes to the heart of many bitter ideological conflicts raging around questions of sex, gender, and identity.

Gender and sexual difference form the focus of most of my academic research and publications. Having spent my first thirty three years in Africa (Zambia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe), I have a passion for the dignity and rights of women and children, especially those who are poor, marginalised, subjugated and exploited. The questions raised by the Olympic controversy impact upon the most intimate aspects of our lives, with vast ethical and social ramifications. So we all have skin in this.

I’ve already written one Substack post reflecting on the challenges posed by Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting’s participation in the women’s boxing competition. Both have now won gold medals. The controversy shows no sign of dying down, and more information and speculation are produced every day. While much of it has generated more heat than light, it has also brought into public debate scientific research and theories about the relationship between chromosomal combinations, sexual biology and gendered identities. I’ve been following all this closely because it is a subject of fundamental interest to me, and I’ve decided to share more of my reflections and questions.

Here is a link to my previous post:

Here are my new reflections:

The fact that both boxers failed previous sex tests and were disqualified from competing in the Olympics as women suggests that they have a DSD (difference in sex development). This can mean that a seemingly female body is discovered to have a male chromosomal combination (XY), rather than the normal XX female combination. Often the condition is not discovered until puberty or even later in life when problems emerge with fertility and sexual intercourse. The simple cheek swab used in sex testing reveals whether an athlete is XY or XX.

DSDs are relatively rare, estimated to affect about one in 5,000 to 6,000 of the general population, though there is some evidence that they are more common in parts of Africa. I find this interesting, because having taught courses on gender and theology to students from the African diaspora living in London as well as online to students living in Africa, I found them highly receptive to and interested in the study of DSDs or, as we called it then, “intersex”. Some had direct experience of people with these conditions. This contrasted with strong expressions of homophobia and resistance to trans identities. The lectures were lively and the banter was good-humoured as “Ma Prof” tried to persuade them that racism would have given rise to similar reactions in a British lecture room not so long ago, if issues of racial inclusivity, dignity and respect were being discussed.

The question of the significance of DSDs for women’s sports became a topic of intense debate when South African athlete Caster Semenya was diagnosed with a DSD known as 5-ARD, a condition that often leads to infants being identified as female at birth on account of under-developed or internalised male sex organs, but they then go through male puberty which results in testosterone levels higher than those found in women. Even when testosterone levels are medically reduced, this may not significantly reduce muscle mass and bone density which develop during male puberty. People with 5-ARD are over-represented in women’s sports.

Even among scientists, there are disagreements about the extent to which biological sex is determined by XX (female) or XY (male) chromosomes. The few examples of responsible reporting have acknowledged how many challenges the Olympics controversy has posed to sporting categories, and indeed to our whole understanding of how sexual difference affects our human characteristics and capabilities. Many new facts and theories are likely to emerge as research continues into the vastly complex and diverse phenomenon of DSDs, so anything we say at this stage must to some extent be provisional and subject to change.

Yet some facts are undeniable. There are different sporting categories for men and women because in some sports in which strength is a factor, biology gives males a significant advantage over females. When we combine that with a sport that involves physically beating up one’s opponent, we should be profoundly disturbed at the possibility of men hitting women for sport.

Boxing is a brutal sport, but given that women do engage in competitive boxing, and given that male bodies are naturally stronger and more powerful than female bodies, sex tests can help to establish whether or not bodies that possess unusual strength and muscular development have high testosterone levels associated with male puberty. If XY chromosomes and/or high levels of testosterone are present and an athlete wants to challenge the initial findings, further tests can be carried out.

Women athletes are generally in favour of sex testing involving a cheek swab. Writing in The Times, Janice Turner observes that:

at the 1996 Atlanta Games an IOC questionnaire asked female athletes if the cheek swab should continue (82 per cent said yes) and whether it made them “anxious” (94 per cent said no). Nonetheless the IOC ignored almost 1,000 elite women who replied and abolished cheek swabs for Sydney in 2000.

A more recent large-scale research project suggests that most elite women athletes favour biological sex categorisation in sport, though the level of support varies according to which sport they’re referring to. They are also strongly in favour of more inclusivity for transgender athletes, but with limits on eligibility to participate in women’s sporting events.

Conflict and Compassion

I’m reluctant to rehash the whole sorry saga of the Olympics, but I’m astounded by how vehement so-called “liberals” have been in celebrating the victories of two possibly biological males over their indubitably female competitors, without even a glimmer of consideration for those women who saw all their training and dedication wasted.

Those who have taken up dogmatic positions on either side of this complex debate have made no attempt to show compassion to the victims on the other side—for in some sense all the competitors have become victims in this controversy. It has also exposed the closed-minded absolutism of many gender ideologues, who will latch onto every opportunity to condemn those who stand unambiguously for women’s rights when these are sidelined by emerging debates and demands relating to sexuality, gender and identity. As Helen Lewis observes in an excellent article in The Atlantic:

[O]ne can argue that the benefits of male puberty are overstated: The sports scientist Joanna Harper, who is herself a runner and a trans woman, has queried just how big an advantage biologically male athletes who suppress their testosterone really have. That’s a question that can be investigated and answered empirically. But too many people who have sprung to Khelif’s and Lin’s defense have assumed that bigotry is the only possible motivation for their opponents. “Challenge: find a single person whining about trans people in women’s sports who has done or said anything supportive of women’s sports previously,” David Roberts, a popular science influencer, posted on X. Okay then, challenge accepted: the tennis legend Martina Navratilova. The boxing champion Nicola Adams. The former swimmer Sharron Davies. Shall I go on?

This Facebook post is an excellent example of what Lewis is describing:

This defiant celebration of a defeated woman embracing her opponent worries me, for it suggests a refusal even to acknowledge that this is not a simple matter of honest victory and gracious defeat. Angela Carini withdrew from her fight with Khelif in tears after less than a minute, saying “I have never been hit so hard in my life.” She has subsequently apologised and said she feels sorry about the controversy and regrets not shaking Khelif’s hand because she was angry: “my games had already gone up in smoke.” A growing number of women athletes are expressing concern, including the adoption of a gesture in the shape of an X that is gaining traction as a sign of protest. When women refuse to submit, comply, smile, and admit defeat (the kind of behaviour expected from “good” women), they are silenced or condemned by self-righteous liberals.

It’s important to keep repeating that this controversy has nothing to do with trans rights. As I point out in my previous post:

Filipino boxer Hergie Bacyadan is a trans man competing in the Olympics women’s section. He makes clear he has not taken hormones or transitioned surgically, so there’s no case to answer. There are reports that Bacyadan has said that people with XY chromosomes should not be allowed to compete in women’s Olympic sports, which surely calls for caution about branding people transphobic for expressing such views.

Neither is this about race. The glorious triumphs of Black athletes in many Olympic sports attest to the fact that the celebration of sporting excellence is a rare example of when race ceases to be a dividing issue with regard to participation and inclusion.

Controversy and Misogyny?

It’s hard not to see some of this as latent misogyny, even among women who declare themselves feminists. I’m surprised by how many feminists are willing to accept any theory about males with DSDs really being women in order to keep in with the in-crowd on gender activism, even when it violates fundamental feminist principles. In the end, the benefit of the doubt was given to two boxers who at no time offered to settle the question by making public the results of their sex tests. To quote Lewis again:

Both sides have demonstrated a lack of interest in women’s sports, and the well-being of all its competitors, that is tantamount to contempt. A simple cheek swab could clear this up, revealing the presence (or not) of a second X chromosome. If either athlete was XY instead, she could have further genetic testing to get a precise diagnosis and determine if it affected her ability to participate fairly. If Lin and Khelif are straightforwardly female athletes with XX chromosomes, they could have appealed their IBA bans to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an independent body based in Switzerland. (Lin did not do so, according to the IBA, while Khelif withdrew her appeal. The process can be costly for athletes.)

Khelif’s trainer Georges Cazorla has confirmed in an interview with French journal Le Point that Khelif was devastated to discover that “she could not be a girl”:

Indépendamment des résultats de ces tests biologiques et, sans entrer dans leurs détails – c'est une affaire de biologistes et de médecins, cette pauvre jeune fille a été catastrophée, anéantie de découvrir d'un seul coup qu'elle pourrait ne pas être une fille !

Independently of the results and these biological tests, and without going into details—it’s a matter for biologists and doctors, this poor young girl was traumatised, devastated to suddenly discover that she could not be a girl!

According to Cazorla, Khelif has been on testosterone suppressants, which suggests that her testosterone levels were found to be consistent with those produced during male puberty. In spite of these revelations, Cazorla insists that Khelif has a “girl’s sensitivity” and must be regarded as a woman:

Après les championnats du monde 2023, où elle a été disqualifiée, j'ai pris les devants en contactant un endocrinologue de renom du CHU parisien, Kremlin-Bicêtre, qui l'a examinée. Celui-ci a confirmé qu'Imane est bien une femme, malgré son caryotype et son taux de testostérone. Il a dit : « Il y a un problème avec ses hormones, avec ses chromosomes, mais c'est une femme. » C'est tout ce qui nous importait. Nous avons ensuite travaillé avec une médecin basée en Algérie pour contrôler et réguler le taux de testostérone d'Imane, qui est actuellement dans la norme féminine. Des tests montrent très bien que toutes ses qualités musculaires et autres s'amoindrissent depuis. Actuellement, elle peut être comparée au niveau musculaire et au niveau biologique à une femme-femme-femme.

After the 2023 world championships, where she was disqualified, I took the initiative by contacting a renowned endocrinologist at the Paris CHU, Kremlin-Bicêtre, who examined her. The doctor confirmed that Imane is a woman, despite her karyotype and testosterone levels. He said, “There’s a problem with her hormones, with her chromosomes, but she is a woman.” That’s all we cared about. We then worked with a doctor based in Algeria to monitor and regulate Imane’s testosterone level, which is currently in the female norm. Tests show very well that all her muscular and other qualities have diminished since then. Currently, she can be compared at the muscular level and at the biological level to a woman-woman-woman.

If Cazorla is correct about testosterone suppressants, there can be no way of knowing if that brought levels down sufficiently to allow Khelif to compete in the women’s category, because such information was not sought by the IOC. Meanwhile, women boxers who have in the past fought against Khelif have come out on both sides of the debate. Bulgarian Nigerian Joana Nwamerue insists that Khelif is a man. When she expressed doubts during a sparring match, she was told that Khelif was a woman who had been “biologically altered by living in the mountains”. Former Olympian boxer and Olympic boxing coach Rafael Lozano has spoken in an interview with a Spanish radio station of how, during a training retreat in Madrid ahead of the Olympics, Khelif was deemed too dangerous to fight against women after some were injured. On the other hand, some women boxers have spoken out in defence of Khelif, including Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst who beat Khelif in the 2022 World Championships.

Culture and Gender

I call Khelif “she” because culture, upbringing and early socialisation influence our sense of self, even if there is considerable evidence that our gendered identities are shaped if not determined by biological sexual characteristics and capacities. Much has been written about Khelif’s culture, and it does indeed seem likely that the discovery of her male chromosomal combination would have been a traumatising event for somebody brought up to believe she was female. On the other hand, it’s interesting that she had to overcome huge social obstacles as a child to be permitted to participate in traditionally male sports (football and boxing), that were forbidden to girls in her culture. Eyebrows have also been raised by a photograph showing Khelif sitting on the shoulders of her male trainer, her legs straddling his neck. If, as we are asked to believe, Algerian culture has very clear rules for sexual propriety and behaviour, this is an improbable way to celebrate a woman’s sporting victory!

Still, I don’t want to under-estimate the struggles faced by Khelif, nor to deny the trauma caused by discovering that she was chromosomally male, if what her trainer says is true. I’d rather consider the larger issues than make this one individual the focus, but the fact remains that there are unresolved questions about how far this situation constitutes a violation of justice for female boxers. Olympic gold medallists must expect to be in the news, and if they have knowingly hidden behind secrecy, denial and deception about their sex tests, they should be prepared for controversy. To quote Lewis again:

Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting have been through hell over the past week, and the determination and discipline they have shown are admirable. But if the questions around their eligibility remain unresolved, the medals they win will always have an asterisk next to them. That isn’t fair to them, or to their opponents.

An Inconclusive Conclusion

The more we know, the less we understand. Eventually, it may be that additional sporting categories will have to be created to accommodate athletes with conditions that elude clear categorisation on the basis of sex. But in the meantime, it cannot be right that women are expected to yield every time such controversies arise. Former Olympic rowing gold medallist and sports commentator Matthew Pinsent was one of the few reporters to tell it as it is when, in a scathing criticism of the IOC, he told BBC Sports: “It’s exploded on them, it’s been really unfortunate. They can’t have both equity and inclusion. … It’s so weird that they allowed it to happen.”

In the meantime, Khelif has named J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk in a lawsuit she has filed in Paris, alleging “aggravated cyber-harassment”. So this issue is unlikely to die down any time soon, but one way or the other the lawsuit will mean greater transparency and honesty about Khelif’s condition and its impact on her boxing abilities.

None of this is conclusive. I admit that the more I research and reflect, the more aware I become of how important, confusing and complex these questions are. There is no room for ideological absolutes, and the fact that gender ideologies now infect both ends of the political spectrum, from the Vatican to postmodern theorists, should be a cause for concern to anybody who values informed, ethically responsible and intellectually accountable philosophical debate over issues of vital importance for social justice and human wellbeing.

The last week has left me reflecting on the power of social media, not just over society but over my own life. I value Facebook and X as a source of dialogue with a much wider circle of people than I encounter physically in my everyday life and as a way of keeping up with extended family and friends across the world. I like being exposed to different ideas and intelligent debates. I’ve discovered wonderful insights into many aspects of culture, politics, history and the arts through being highly selective about who I follow and why.

But last week, the negative side of social media was on show, with the controversy over women’s boxing in the Olympics and the horrors unfolding as British cities have been burning – literally and metaphorically – with racist hatred fuelled by false social media posts. It’s hard to imagine how much these riots have added to the vast burden of sorrow and loss carried by the families and communities in Southport after the attack on little girls and their teacher at a dance class. Last Thursday, I touched on some of these questions in my Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Like many others, I was quick to comment on the case of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif by unequivocally supporting those who identified her as male. I now realise that this requires more informed reflection and grappling with what seem like insurmountable problems around sexual difference, women’s rights and identity politics, and I regret playing some part in over-simplifying an immensely complex dilemma. I should also say that I find boxing to be a barbaric sport and last week’s ugly confrontations have reinforced that, but the issues go beyond this one sporting controversy.

The controversy around Khelif has brought into focus how gender politics sometimes generates more heat than light. It has exposed the extent to which that incoherent alphabet soup—LGBTQIA+—does not provide a catch-all umbrella for everybody who is marginalised and made to suffer on account of their sex or gender. Persons who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, “intersex”, asexual and + (whatever that means) are not a community bound together either by gendered identity or by sexual orientation and desires.

If we are going to reconcile these different and sometimes conflicting cases for inclusion and representation, we need much greater nuance and courage to acknowledge and deal with conflicts without name-calling and rage. We should also surely understand what we are defending and why when we align ourselves with different causes. It has become apparent that many of those who decorate their social media profiles with pronouns and wave their multi-coloured flags of inclusivity have little knowledge of what it all means.

There was an immediate assumption that Khelif was a trans woman, even though it was clear from the start that this was not the case. People with DSDs, only some of whom accept the label “intersex”, have appealed for a better understanding of their conditions. Their appeals have been largely ignored, apart from the fact that the offending “I” is being discreetly dropped, with no public apology or acknowledgement of this misappropriation. When suffering individuals stop being useful pawns in what has become the highly politicised and commodified marketplace of sex-gender activism, their suffering ceases to be of interest to those inclusive “be kind” campaigners. Detrans people are rarely allowed to ruffle the smooth assurances of trans activists, and the disquiet expressed by many lesbians over some trans women’s demands for full inclusion in all social and sexual activities is simply ignored.

I wish I had been more careful in the language of one or two of my tweets about Khelif. However, I still think that women are being asked to bear a disproportionate burden when their sex-based rights, capabilities and vulnerabilities collide with the demands of biological males to be treated as women in all aspects of life. Having said that, the cases of Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting are more complex and I accept that there are legitimate grounds for taking a more nuanced position based on what we know so far, which is very little and unreliable. These cases could have been resolved by a simple cheek swab which would have established whether or not the two boxers are chromosomally male, but that hasn’t happened.

I’ll focus on Khelif because she has been the main topic of debate. To those who say we have no right to debate about a person’s private life, I’d respond that the Olympics are a public competition. There are broader principles at stake when competitors knowingly participate in events where the legitimacy of their participation is contested and controversial, regrettable though this situation is.

There are no winners here. Khelif’s personal history has been thrust into the foreground as someone who comes from a culture that has very different codes of gender and sexuality than progressive liberal westerners. Women in previous competitions have defeated her, so it’s not a clear case of male advantage over a female competitor. On the other hand, if reports that Khelif has XY chromosomes are true, sports scientists seem to agree that this is a case of a difference in sexual development in which a child with seemingly female anatomy goes through male puberty, with all the implications of this in terms of testosterone levels and strength. XY chromosomes are only found in males.

These developments at puberty do not mean that a female child becomes male or that there are multiple sexes. Such cases are rare and cover a wide range of different conditions, but these are situations where it is appropriate to refer to a sex assigned at birth. For the vast majority of us, no such dilemma arises because our visible sexual characteristics conform to our biological sex. Relatively few people with DSDs are trans, suggesting that sexual difference may be hard-wired into many people from birth. So there are significant reasons not to confuse trans identities with DSDs. To express concern over the latter in women’s sports is not transphobic. Neither is it transphobic to exclude trans women like Lia Thomas from sports in which they clearly have a significant competitive advantage because they have been through male puberty and are anatomically male.

There may currently be no satisfactory solution to the dilemma of what to do when a biologically male woman with a DSD is also a talented athlete, as indeed many are. Khelif has undoubtedly struggled against many social and psychological obstacles to get to the Olympics. Still, anyone who watched the fight against Italian Angela Carini must surely have felt some discomfort at such an ill-matched contest? Carini has been gracious in defeat, but the uneasy questions remain, and responsibility rests with the IOC and other sporting regulatory bodies to find a better solution to such situations.

I regret being too quick to judge with some of my social media posts. Still, I remain profoundly concerned about the extent to which, once again, the resolution of a challenging situation around the significance of sexual difference entails women giving way. There may be no clear winners in this deeply troubling situation, but the female boxers are the clear losers.

The inclusivity that parades under the ever-more meaningless LGBTQA+ flag is hostile to all who question its claims. Indiscriminate claims to inclusivity tend to produce vigorously policed boundaries of exclusion, for inclusivity needs insiders and outsiders, with no grey areas. Everyone is either good or bad, with us or against us. Complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt would require living in a world of pragmatism, compromise, and a mutual willingness to navigate the sometimes conflicting spaces where rights collide and one person’s freedom becomes another person’s exclusion. Many who claim to be LGBTQA+ inclusive end up labelling all who dare to challenge them as cis heterosexist bigots in league with fascism and the Far Right. For those whose identities and lifestyles fit comfortably within the conservative status quo, and for populist politicians and religious conformists, there’s a corresponding tendency to demonise and vilify feminists, lesbians, gays, and trans people. The two ideological extremes are locked into a mutually parasitic relationship that excludes the vast majority of ordinary people of all orientations, identities and cultures struggling with life’s daily realities.

All this has been much on display this past week, and I repeat that I too made some comments that suggested greater certainty than I now feel—though I try never to name-call and slander those I disagree with. The word “terf” belongs within the same misogynistic lexicon as all the other words men use to show their contempt for women. And yes, there are and always have been women who would rather be dedicated followers of cultural fashion dictated by men’s demands than own up to doubts and struggles. Every woman who signs up uncritically to whatever is required to be part of the LGBTQA+ in-crowd is colluding in the mockery and silencing of many other women’s voices, including many lesbians and mothers concerned for the well-being of their gender-dysphoric children. There is a surge in adolescent girls identifying as trans. In a world in which murder, rape, sexual exploitation and abuse don’t even count as hate crimes so long as the victim is female, it’s hardly surprising that teenage girls are horrified when their bodies begin to change into objects of sexual commodification. Nor is it surprising that some of us get angry when women like J.K. Rowling are vilified for standing up for women’s rights. We’re at the beginning of exploring scientifically, psychologically and philosophically/theologically what it means to be a sexually embodied, gendered person without dominant men in patriarchal traditions having already decided that in advance. For the first time, women have found a voice in this quest for understanding. Perhaps it's not surprising that our fragile space of emergence has been colonised once again by men who know better than we do what it means to be a woman, while many women, including me, have yet to understand the question.

Two generations of feminism cannot undo thousands of years of cultural conditioning and institutionalised hierarchies by way of which women and girls have been universally subjected to male authority figures domestically, religiously and socially. From the Vatican to Afghanistan and Iran, the female body is still abjected and silenced in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. As Luce Irigaray and many feminist theorists including myself argue, “woman” signifies lack, absence and negation, so no wonder the female body functions as virgin territory to be colonised and owned by others. We must ask how much these underlying assumptions about the insignificance and inferiority of the female body feed into the idea that men’s demands for inclusion take precedence over women’s sex-based rights whenever the two collide. The demand that women simply capitulate when conflicts over identity and gender arise has deeply problematic misogynistic roots which fester beneath the inclusive rhetoric of equality and rights.

This is all work in progress for me. I'll continue to try to occupy a space of reflective ambivalence and be honest when I get it wrong, as I may have done on this occasion. I believe these are vitally important issues, and I remain committed to the relevance of gender theory. I agree with Sarah Coakley that theology and gender theory are—or should be—co-dependent. The fact that gender has become a Trojan horse as far as women’s rights are concerned does not make me hostile to gender theory, but rather reinforces my commitment to research that struggles not to be taken captive by the ideologies of either the Vatican or Stonewall.

In years to come, we may hopefully have much greater insight and understanding into the fluid, shifting realm of gender and the ways in which our sexed bodies and desires are or are not shaped by conformity to changing cultural norms. We may also have rediscovered the wisdom in Christianity’s emphasis on mutual respect, fidelity and love, as well as shared responsibility for the children we bear, as inseparable from our questions above sexuality and desire, even as we challenge the heterosexual essentialism that informs those teachings. As we navigate these troubled waters, I want as much dialogue, difference, inclusivity and respect as it’s humanly possible to achieve, but that means all of us having to make difficult compromises and uneasy accommodations. It means not shouting down, name-calling and demonising those we disagree with, and it means being willing to make mistakes, to be corrected, and to change one’s mind.

If we care about minimising avoidable suffering and creating societies where all can flourish, all voices must be heard except those that intend only to spread hatred and violence. If you call gender critical feminists “fascists” just because you disagree with them, what would you call the white racist thugs on Britain’s streets? If you can’t tell the difference, do you really have anything to say that’s worth listening to? Social justice calls for attentiveness to power, including the power to amplify some voices and silence others.

True inclusivity means being honest and transparent about who we exclude, and why. I know what my boundaries are. I draw the line at the claim that lesbians have penises, that anatomical males should be treated as women in situations of intimacy and vulnerability for women and girls, and at the promotion of life-changing medical and surgical interventions for young people struggling with the complex hormonal and psychological fluctuations that are part of healthy adolescent development. I’m appalled by those who have been quick to condemn the Cass Review because it doesn’t shore up their ideological convictions.

I do not believe that gender nominalism should prevail in areas like medical science and law where sexual difference matters, and I am glad that the law still protects those who question the spread and influence of gender ideology which, whether from the conservative or liberal end of the spectrum, would silence debate and exercise Orwellian control over language.

There are clear situations in which trans women have an unfair advantage over women in some sports, though it’s important to recognise that persons with DSDs might pose a different challenge. Filipino boxer Hergie Bacyadan is a trans man competing in the Olympics women’s section. He makes clear he has not taken hormones or transitioned surgically, so there’s no case to answer. There are reports that Bacyadan has said that people with XY chromosomes should not be allowed to compete in women’s Olympic sports, which surely calls for caution about branding people transphobic for expressing such views.

I differentiate between trans women and trans men. I have no inhibitions or concerns about trans men, because I don’t believe the two are equivalent. There are no controversies about trans men demanding access to male sports, male changing rooms, male prisons, etc. Gay men do not by and large seem to feel threatened by trans men demanding sex. I wonder how many men who struggled for acceptance of their sexuality would agree that some gay men have vaginas, and it’s transphobic to refuse to have sex with them. Maybe we should ask why these demands are all so skewed in only one direction.

Enough – for now.

Here are two letters published in the Catholic weekly, The Tablet. Maureen Devine’s was published in the issue dated 25th May, and my response is in this week’s issue dated 1st June:

My letter refers to depictions of Jesus giving birth on the cross in medieval art and devotion. I thought some readers might like to know more about this tradition, so here are some links and sources.

This is an extract from my essay “Gendering Genesis, Engendering Difference”, Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift. Årg. 92 (2017): 102-117—available to download (open access) at this link.

The Polymorphous Body of the Crucified Christ

There is a strange era in the art of the crucifixion between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, in which Christ’s torso appears in the form of a phallus. Leo Steinberg has written about the exposed or thinly veiled genitals of Christ in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, a phenomenon that he attributes in part to the rise of the Franciscan order in the thirteenth century with its injunction “naked to follow the naked Christ”. Steinberg suggests that “Nakedness becomes the badge of the human condition which the Incarnation espoused.”1

While many of the images to which Steinberg refers are realistic in their representation of Christ’s body, I am referring to an effect that comes about through the exaggeration of Christ’s abdominal muscles and ribcage on the cross. While the ribcage can be a way of expressing Christ’s suffering, in these images the phallic symbolism is clearly visible. If we look more closely, we see that in some such images, the wound in Christ’s side is spurting the body fluids of blood and water in the direction of his mother at the foot of the cross. The fluids that flow from Christ’s wound are birth fluids — water and blood flow from bodies in childbirth, not in death. These are baptismal fluids — the fluids of rebirth into eternal life. “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God”, Jesus tells Nicodemus.  (Jn. 3:3)

The wound in Christ’s side was commonly described in terms of the birthing maternal body in patristic and medieval theology, with Christ giving birth to the Church in the same way that Eve was ‘birthed’ from the side of Adam.2 Together, I would suggest that the bleeding wound and the phallic torso in images such as these symbolise impregnation and birth. On the cross, Christ impregnates his own body through the vaginal wound in his side, in order to give birth to the maternal Church in whose sacraments his body will henceforth become food for the life of the world.

To speak of the transgendered, polymorphous body of Christ in the Church is not to advocate a postmodern parody of embodiment in which the finite body with all its markers of sexuality and difference, limitation and fragility, is eliminated by the symbolic and the performative. It is to affirm the sacramental mystery wherein bodies are birthed anew in a unity that is neither one nor two, in a maternal body that is neither one nor two, in a Trinitarian undoing of the self through ecstatic union with God and fleshy communion with the desiring, suffering other.

There are many other sources that explore this maternal tradition.

See this short reflection by Teresa Berger: “Good Friday: Jesus’ Death on the Cross as Birthing?” Berger quotes the Carthusian writer, Marguerite d’Oingt (d. 1310), comparing the crucifixion to childbirth:

“Are you not my mother and more than mother? … Oh, Sweet Lord Jesus Christ, who ever saw any mother suffer such a birth! But when the hour of the birth came you were placed on the hard bed of the cross where you could not move or turn around or stretch your limbs as someone who suffers such great pain should be able to do; … And surely it was no wonder that your veins were broken when you gave birth to the world all in one day.”

When reading such vivid descriptions of childbirth, it might be helpful to remember that, before developments in obstetric care, dying in childbirth was a very real risk for women. Still today, nearly 300,000 of the world’s poorest women die in childbirth every year. This is one of the most avoidable and traumatising effects of poverty but it has yet to find any acknowledgement in church teaching documents, perhaps because it would require a new approach to questions of women’s reproductive health and rights.

In a review of Grace Hamman’s book, Jesus through Medieval Eyes,3 Amy Mantravadi writes of “one of the strangest ways that medieval Christians understood Christ”. She goes on to quote Hamman:

“The side-wound themes and imagery invert the traditional roles of Christ as bridegroom and the Soul as bride by portraying Jesus as the one who is inviting his beloved into his body. Christ’s side wound was often drawn shaped like a vulva … In some illustrations, Christ even gives birth from his side wound. He is the mother of the church, his wounds the womb through which we are born again. As our lover, he is profoundly fruitful. He forms us in blooming beauty through his tender desire”4

Mantravadi continues:

Hamman observes that not only Julian of Norwich, but even such esteemed doctors of the church as Bernard of Clairvaux, Anselm of Canterbury, and Aelred of Rievaulx spoke of Jesus in maternal terms. Indeed, this was one of the chief ways that medieval Christians understood their Savior. “They wrote Jesus as a pregnant, laboring, and postpartum mother: lactating, bleeding, meant to be adored and imitated in his long-suffering mercy and compassion. The crucifixion and childbirth meet at a strange point of willing love and willing suffering in the service of abundant life.”5

Emma Cieslik’s “‘Our true Mother' — interpreting a genderqueer Jesus” also draws on this tradition. She writes:

Scholars today have explored how this wound, as central to Christ's suffering and death, connects to menstruation, lactation and giving birth. Caroline Walker Bynum explains that Christ's body suffers and releases liquids like blood in line with menstruation, a process traditionally experienced by women. In her monograph Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Bynum emphasises that Christ giving his body for his disciples to eat at the Last Supper is also a traditionally maternal-coded ability. Theologian Julian of Norwich is one of many who described Jesus in the 1300s as 'our true Mother', citing Jesus's ability to feed us with himself as a lactating person feeds a child with their own milk and enlivens them with this nourishment.

Cieslik points out how often the paint in such images has been worn away by the repeated stroking and kissing of devotees. I’m reminded of when I was recording a BBC radio programme about such images in the National Gallery in London. I showed the presenter a 13th century crucifix in which this fertility symbolism is clearly evident. She spontaneously stepped forward and ran her hand down the body of Christ in this priceless work of art! The security guard leapt to his feet, by which time she’d already withdrawn her hand in shock at what she’d done.

To see how irrepressibly people are drawn to touch these devotional images, I recommend standing outside the vast bronze doors of the Duomo in Milan. The depiction of Mary Magdalene stroking the hand of the risen Christ has been polished to a gleaming patina by hundreds of thousands of people who cannot resist touching the forbidden touch. I wrote an earlier post about this, which you can read here.

These are just tastes and glimpses of a brief but fascinating era in the Christian story. Today, as questions of women’s ordination continue to rise to the surface no matter how hard the Catholic hierarchy tries to suppress them, might there yet be insights and revelations in the tradition that would support the case for the female body as priest, standing in persona Christae?

When I had the privilege of supervising Revd Dr Ali Green’s PhD, she explored the symbolic significance of the female priesthood through the liturgical language of the Eucharistic prayers. When these prayers were read through a feminist lens, she discovered rich themes of fecundity and birth. A coherent theology of women’s priesthood is ready and waiting to be incorporated into the Church’s sacramental theology.

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How did I get here from there?

My relatively brief, late-life academic career began with my doctoral research at the University of Bristol in the early 1990s when feminism was rapidly yielding ground to gender theory. My thesis was later published as God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate: A Marian Narrative of Women’s Salvation.

My background—a married woman, mother of four young children, recent convert to Catholicism, who had spent most of her life in sub-Saharan Africa—meant that my main academic interest was and remains the incarnate realities of female life. This includes not just the incarnational significance of theology for the sacramentally abjected female body but also the sexual and reproductive rights of women and the promotion of the dignity and equality of women and girls, especially those in poor African communities.

This has been my focus, but my research and teaching extended to cover broader issues. I became (and remain) an advocate for same-sex marriage and gay rights. I was delighted to be invited as a keynote speaker at two Quest conferences. Quest was then a Catholic lesbian and gay network. When one delegate joked that he wanted to have my babies after hearing me speak, I was flattered beyond words! All this was before the Johnnie/Jilly-come-lately bisexual, trans, intersex, queer, asexual, asterisks and plus signs appeared on the scene. (The “I” is gradually being dropped, as many people with DSDs [differences in sexual development] have made clear their objection to being labelled as “intersex” and being appropriated by gender activists.)

Conflicting Ideologies

I have repeatedly argued that church teaching on sexuality and gender has become ideological. Since the 1980s, it has been driven not by study and reflection that seeks to discern how to live faithfully, with dignity and generosity, amidst the complex entanglements of human sexuality and identity but by a thinly-veiled hostility to feminism and same-sex desire. This hostility is rooted in the fears and prejudices of the clerics who make the rules, and it provides ripe cherry pickings for the far-right politicians whose dogmas are well-served by Catholic teachings on sexuality and reproduction, even if their politics would be untenable if they followed Catholic social teaching.

These publicly expressed views have involved me in many ideological struggles over the last twenty years or so. Catholic bishops have banned me from speaking in their dioceses on orders from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF); a Catholic university in the US withdrew an invitation to a research fellowship; I’ve been publicly vilified and trolled by conservative Catholics for my research and publications, and I withdrew from my voluntary role as a member of the theological advisory group for CAFOD (the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) because of an organised campaign to have me dismissed. My “offences” include support for same-sex marriage, ditto for women priests, challenging the Vatican’s prohibition against artificial birth control, and appealing for a more nuanced and pastorally sensitive approach to abortion.

But in the rapidly evolving and expanding complexities surrounding issues of gender and sexuality, I’ve now become persona non grata at the other end of the gender spectrum. I don’t lend unquestioning support to all that falls within the ever-expanding umbrella of LGBTQ(I)A+ activism, and this is a problem for many of those who once supported me. Here is an extract from one recent email:

The challenge is that my parish has been on the front lines of 2SLGBTQIA+ issues for a number of years. … When I looked at your recent work on gender and trans ideology, and your recent twitter posts, I realized that if people checked you out online, this would raise issues for my activists and for parishioners with trans family members, and that it could derail the workshop. I sat on the decision, and consulted with others, and finally concluded that for pastoral reasons it was not going to work.

This was a courteous exchange, expressed more in sorrow than in anger. Still, it confirmed what I was beginning to suspect: I risked losing many of my former supporters and friends by publicly sharing my questions and doubts, albeit mainly through the opinionated medium of the Black Cross (still Twitter to most of us). One of my dearest friends lamented that I had become a terf. I knew I might be forfeiting opportunities for academic collaboration and engagement. For example, I would usually be included in any networks and invitations to participate in a Catholic conference in the UK on gender organised by those towards the more liberal/inclusive end of the Catholic spectrum. I only discovered that such an event was happening because a friend drew my attention to it. I don’t want to appear paranoid, but I can’t help but wonder why I was kept in the dark.

So, I’ve found myself in a wilderness between two conflicting ideologies, unable to meet the demands of either for full and unconditional support. With some hesitation, I agreed to lend my name to a new initiative—LGB Christians—started by gay and lesbian Christians whose concerns I share. Their website hosts a number of blogs and reflections that explore the issues.

Gender activists may share little common ground with the sexual ideologues in the Vatican, but many use the same methods of control and exclusion: silencing, condemning and treating as heretics everyone who fails to conform to their doctrinal absolutes. A recently published report of an employment tribunal concerning the dismissal of Roz Adams, an employee of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, was excoriating in its criticisms:

You can read that report from The Guardian here. The tribunal report is at this link.

Censorship and silencing are the hallmarks of all ideologies: their claims would disintegrate in the face of too much reality, so their castles in the air must become impregnable fortresses that allow no reasoned and informed critics to challenge their sanctified absolutes.

It’s becoming clear that whatever drives adults to impose these dangerous ideologies on children, these are the most vulnerable victims of a movement that has lost its moral compass. Here is a piece I wrote about my concerns:

The Exclusivity of the Inclusive

The LGBTQA+ movement has become so vague and all-encompassing that it’s easier to say who is excluded than who is included. I’ve never supported a cause without being able to explain my reasons for doing so, and I cannot commit to supporting an alphabet soup of sexual rights and gendered identities simply on the basis of tribal loyalty.

There are still many parts of the world and many communities in which lesbians and gays are persecuted, criminalised, or marginalised. There are also vastly complex questions about gender dysphoria and trans identities and rights. These, I believe, make claims upon us in terms of understanding and engagement. But as for the rest, in all honesty, so long as they leave children, vulnerable adults and animals alone, I’m happy to remain ignorant but accepting of the multitudinous ways in which red-blooded adults get their kicks. Legislation around these areas should be about protecting the vulnerable, not about policing adults’ private lives.

I enjoy the colourful displays that queer people bring to the grey monotony of the average British crowd. Beyond that, I feel mild irritation about those queer, non-binary, and “+” others who seek to avoid contamination by association with the sexed and gendered hoi poloi by inventing ever more elaborate identities of exclusivity. As for “Asexual”, since when did that constitute a persecuted and marginalised community? The Catholic Church has been trying to desexualise women for two thousand years. Most of the female saints are remembered primarily for being virgins, though I doubt this was quite as ubiquitous as their devotees would like to believe. There’s no law against asexuality, and only in a society defined and dominated by sexual activity would this be a form of exclusion.

What interests me is how we accommodate our basic sexual needs and desires, which are expressive of our most profound emotions and attachments but which are often unruly and sometimes dangerous and self-destructive, into our gendered identities, relationships, and commitments. I ask how these are filtered through the lens of Catholicism’s plurivocal theological, cultural and ethical traditions in ways that can be both nurturing of and damaging to our fragile human capacity for flourishing. This also involves our procreative capacities and how we care for and protect the children we conceive and bring to birth.

Pandora, Eve and Sexual Chaos

The Catholic tradition has consistently recognised the potential of sexual desire to unleash violent and chaotic forces that disrupt our personal and social relationships, but the celibate men at its heart have projected all their fears and lusts onto the sexual female body. Eve stalks the world of men in many guises with her sly come-hither glances and her serpentine wiles, and she trails death in her sexual wake. She must be robed and cloistered, controlled and contained, socially lobotomised and sexually anaesthetised, lest the chaos she represents is unleashed upon the world.

No wonder feminism turned out to be one of the greatest threats the Church has ever faced. Here’s how Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar described it in the 1970s:

The worldwide offensive of ‘feminism,’ which is battling for the equality of women with men, takes effect within the Church as the women’s claim to the ministerial priesthood. As a whole, the battlefront presents a confusing picture, and this in turn affects the ecclesial arena, which in addition has its own special problems.1

You can find a wider context for that quote and my views on theology and the sex abuse crisis here.

Homosexuality posed a more complex problem. While it was a relatively simple task to keep female bodies out of those sanctified communities of celibate male clerics, homosexual male bodies were less immediately identifiable and, for many, more difficult to resist. While senior clerics huffed and puffed about homosexuality being “intrinsically disordered”, many were seeking rest and recreation in the arms of their young male lovers at the end of their hardworking days of keeping God’s libidinal household in order.

As if our poor leaders didn’t have enough on their hands already, along came trans activists. Pandora’s box had been opened. They always knew it. Let one wild woman have her way, and the whole world falls prey to the deadly threat of sex in all its forms. Feminists. Lesbians. Gays. And now—gender ideology! Pope Francis has called this “the ugliest danger of our time” and has likened it to nuclear arms and genetic manipulation for its failure “to recognize the order of creation”.

Like-minded Catholic liberals/progressives were both appalled and vindicated when the extent of the sex abuse crisis was exposed (and it’s not over yet folks). The dividing lines were drawn. On one side were the clerical predators, abusers and rapists; on the other side were the children of innocence, wide-eyed with wonder as they gathered together in the Elysian fields of all-inclusive love free from abuse, predation, rape, misogyny, phobias of every kind. I admit I was only a spectator at this lovefest, but I was a willing ally.

James Keenan SJ writes eloquently and movingly about how this community emerged from grief, struggle and alienation:

From Stonewall onwards, the radically inclusive model of friendship lived and practiced in the LGBTQ+ community grew as the primary form of relationship  within our community. … Rejected by family and others, the LGBTQ+ community was born and built on a no-nonsense acceptance of everyone. Each newcomer was accepted as he, she, or they presented themselves. This dynamic was and remains the radically inclusive friendship practiced and lived in the LGBTQ+ community as we recognize, welcome, and welcome back one another.

Keenan likens this LGBTQ+ community to the disciples of Jesus gathered in the Upper Room at Pentecost. It’s a short, inspiring and thought-provoking reflection on how we find healing, forgiveness and reconciliation after bitter experiences of loss, betrayal, abandonment, and grief. Reading his piece made me yearn for those days when I was briefly welcomed into that community in the Upper Room. I know from the conversations we had there that such a community exists, made up of those who have indeed found healing and solace from the deep wounds inflicted by growing up in a Church and a culture infected by hatred and prejudice towards who they are.

On the Outside Looking In

So why did I leave the room? How did I find myself in that mob of party poopers known as cis white heterosexist terfs, though Robert Jensen also speaks for me when he says that he is “neither cis nor TERF”. He writes:

I am routinely described as cisgender (defined as people whose internal sense of gender identity matches their biological sex). Because I have critiqued the ideology of the transgender movement, I also am often labeled a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). But neither term is accurate — I don’t self-identify as cisgender or as exclusionary. …

The feminist critique I embrace is not an attack on, nor an exclusion of, anyone who suffers from gender dysphoria or identifies as transgender, but rather offers an alternative framework for understanding patriarchy’s sex/gender system and challenging those patriarchal gender norms. …

There has been uncivil conduct on all sides of this debate, but it is only radical feminists who are routinely told that their position is hateful and that they should be excluded from the conversation.

When I look around at those who have voluntarily left or have been evicted from that Upper Room, I see many lesbians; grieving parents and trans widows; suffering and confused adolescents; silenced women and girls; regretful detransitioners, and even some of my gay male friends, all on the outside looking in, shouting a warning that nobody is listening to.

One of the founders of Stonewall, Simon Fanshawe, has become an outspoken critic:

At best, I now see the use of the rainbow colours as little more than flabby virtue signalling which has no real effect on the lives of gay people. …

While Stonewall started out as a well-meaning organisation that championed gay rights, it has, in recent years, morphed into a propaganda machine that preaches extreme and divisive gender ideology under the guise of “factual” information. It is dogma that is far from universally accepted seeing your sex at birth not as an immutable fact but as open to personal choice.

And it is one that is fast eroding women's rights and their protection in female-only spaces, as well as posing a potential risk to children, who might be led to believe that irreversible medical intervention is the solution to common adolescent insecurities about identity.

In the last few months, the publication of The Cass Review, which investigated the care of young people (under-18s) with gender dysphoria in England, has opened up more cracks in the edifice. Dr Cass raises serious questions about treatment and support offered to these youngsters, with devastating findings around issues such as the lack of reliable research into the effectiveness of treatments for gender dysphoria; questions about the long-term effects of medical and surgical interventions; the failure of any follow-up that might offer information about detransitioners, and the impact of social transitioning on young people. She also points to a dramatic rise in the number of adolescent girls experiencing gender dysphoria and raises questions as to how often boys identifying as trans are trying to mask their homosexuality.

Rights in Conflict

I left the Upper Room because I was becoming aware that the more widely the LGBTQA+ “community” spread its influence, the more of a Trojan horse it became. Yet there is still a widespread assumption that this is a self-policing community made up of tender-hearted folk incapable of acts of sexual violence, misogyny or abuse. As one person informed me when I expressed some of my doubts and reservations: “As a cis, hetero woman I'm reluctant to speak for the LGBTQ+ community but I think people of this community would be horrified if someone thought the + can be used by abusers or that they would support abusive relationships.”

We Catholics have heard that before, haven’t we? Didn’t all those parents believe the same of the priests to whom they entrusted their sons and daughters? The Catholic tradition has been wrong in so many ways about the creative and abundant ways in which human sexuality can express our deepest and most ardent yearnings and capacities for love, but it has not been wrong in the fundamental insight that the sex drives can lead us down dangerous and violent paths.

I am not a terf insofar as I want as much inclusivity, compassion and solidarity as is humanly possible in our suffering and violent world, and as few segregated spaces as we can negotiate. I believe in the inviolable dignity of every human being of whatever gender or sexuality. Every person is entitled to all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which entails corresponding responsibilities. But as rights multiply they become more complex and contested. Human rights is not a jigsaw in which we only need to fit all the pieces together to see the whole picture. It’s a jumble of pieces from different puzzles, and the task of sorting through them to begin to discern how these many fragmented pictures might fit into one worldview will continue as long as human life continues. Our cultures, values, privileges and prejudices are infinitely diverse, dynamic, and volatile. We are repeatedly broken open, challenged, exposed, called to risk and confusion, anxiety and distress. These are the growing pains of the human condition, and the more we build our defences to resist them, the more we shrink into ourselves.

Doubt and Love

I lay in bed with a pounding heart this morning as I contemplated writing this, unsure whether I’m a Jeremiah or a Jezebel. I decided to listen to one of my favourite podcasts and sources of wisdom—Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound. “Serendipity” is another word for grace. This morning, the poem and reflection were a serendipitous gift. Here is the poem:

“The Place Where We Are Right” by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Stephen Mitchell

“From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.

“The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

“But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.”

Here is an extract from the transcript of Pádraig’s reflection:

How willing am I to allow both doubt and love to dig up the place where I’m right? Because to speak about the place where I’m right is to imply the place where other people are wrong. And there are things that I don’t want to be wrong about, hard-won things … [D]oubt and love are two things that can hold you. Love, alone, I don’t think is enough because it’s easy to love something and nonetheless be violent in its name. This is about saying “doubt and love.” The doubt that says, What if I need to pay attention to another point of view? How willing am I to ask myself a question that might mean that I have to stand on new ground, that I have to go a bit deeper, that I have to employ doubt and love and maybe even bring some of my loyalties into question in order to ask something that has a deeper integrity.

Doubt and love. That’s where I find myself in this time of confusion, alienation and concern. I grieve that some of the trans people who valued my friendship and support may feel I’ve betrayed them, though I do not forget the insights they gave me into their struggles and sorrows. I am more grateful than I can say for the one or two who understand my concerns and give me the courage to speak. I mourn the loss of respected academic colleagues who no longer see me as an ally. Still, I forfeited so many opportunities when I offended the Vatican that I can’t now bring myself to be cowed into silence because the discourse has changed. I may be wrong. I’m open to arguments that might persuade me to change my mind. But I cannot keep quiet for fear of being unpopular.

So, here’s me holding out my hand and asking if we can talk. I’ve tried that with the Vatican. It didn’t work. I wonder if it will work this time. Is there room in that Upper Room for me, if I’m honest about my questions and doubts: if I can’t say hand on heart that a trans woman is a woman; if I reject the claim that some lesbians have penises; if I think it’s not possible to be born in the wrong body; if I say that trans women should not compete in women’s sports; if I say that young people with gender dysphoria need psychological support, not “affirmation”; if I ask for female-only spaces in hospitals, prisons, changing rooms, toilets; if I ask why women are being pushed aside in the name of inclusivity; if I choose to listen to those on the outside because I agree with so much of what they say? Is there space for me?

Next time: to be decided. (I’m nervous enough about publishing this. I have to gather my confidence to say more).

This is my letter to The Tablet (10th April 2024), on the Vatican document Dignitas Infinita. What follows is a longer reflection on that document.

On Monday, 8th April, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — CDF), published its Declaration on Human Dignity, Dignitas Infinita. The document, which took five years to prepare and was redrafted several times before being approved by Pope Francis, is published under the names of Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, Prefect of the Dicastery, and Msgr. Armando Matteo, Secretary for the Doctrinal Section.

Cardinal Fernández was appointed by Pope Francis in 2023 with a clear brief to change how those charged with protecting and promoting church doctrine operated, away from a “desk-bound theology” towards one that was more rooted in and responsive to the complex realities of people’s lives. In his motu proprio, “Ad theologiam promovendam”, published on 1st November 2023, Francis makes clear the kind of theological transformation he seeks. He writes that theology is being

called to a turning point, to a paradigm shift … that commits it, first and foremost, to be a fundamentally contextual theology, capable of reading and interpreting the Gospel in the conditions in which men and women daily live, in different geographical, social and cultural environments, and having as its archetype the Incarnation of the eternal Logos, its entering into the culture, worldview and religious tradition of a people. From here, theology cannot but develop into a culture of dialogue and encounter between different traditions and different knowledge, between different Christian denominations and different religions, openly confronting everyone, believers and non-believers alike. Indeed, the need for dialogue is intrinsic to the human being and to the whole of creation …

So how far does Dignitas Infinita reflect these changes in the style and ethos of the Church’s official theology? The answer is that it does and it doesn’t. It’s a curate’s egg.

Defending Dignity

The Catholic Church is perhaps the only global institution with the reach and the influence to uphold human dignity and rights in the face of the growing threats posed by various forms of political and religious extremism, the widening injustices of global economics, the destruction of environments and habitats upon which poor communities and non-human species depend, and the escalation of war and violence in many regions.

The document clearly and unambiguously defends the inviolable dignity of each and every human irrespective of age, physical or mental capacities or any other factor, including criminality and wrongdoing. It reiterates the rejection of the death penalty, “regardless of the circumstances”, (#34) and of the practice of torture. The section on war affirms “the inalienable right to self-defence and the responsibility to protect those whose lives are threatened” (#38), while being eloquent in its condemnation of the misery and destruction and the contradiction of human dignity that are a consequence of all wars. So unlike capital punishment, where the prohibition has become absolute, there is still limited acceptance of some possible justification for war, but a strong orientation towards total condemnation, and no acceptance at all of war fought in the name of religion.

Poverty and the plight of migrants are now clarion calls to humanity in all church teaching documents, and this document is no exception. Dignitas Infinita quotes Pope Francis:

Some people are born into economically stable families, receive a fine education, grow up well nourished, or naturally possess great talent. They will certainly not need a proactive state; they need only claim their freedom. Yet, the same rule clearly does not apply to a disabled person, to someone born in dire poverty, to those lacking a good education and with little access to adequate health care. If a society is governed primarily by the criteria of market freedom and efficiency, there is no place for such persons, and fraternity will remain just another vague ideal. [Fratelli Tutti #109]

This should be compulsory reading for all Catholics seeking political office and indeed for all Catholic voters.

Ecological issues feature less prominently than they have in other documents issued during Francis’s papacy. I wonder about the claim that, while other creatures should be respected and valued, “the concept of dignity is reserved for the human being”. (#28). This contradicts Pope Francis’s reference in Laudato Si’ to “the intrinsic dignity of the world”. (#115)

Overall, there is much to affirm and inspire the urgent need to defend human dignity against many encroaching threats, including the threats posed by Digital Violence addressed in the last section of the document (#61 and 62). The section on The Marginalization of People with Disabilities (#53) is excellent, and I also agree with the sections on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide (#51 and 52), including the caveat: “Certainly, the dignity of those who are critically or terminally ill calls for all suitable and necessary efforts to alleviate their suffering through appropriate palliative care and by avoiding aggressive treatments or disproportionate medical procedures.” (#52) This principle is too often neglected by those who would fetishise the lives of the dying by extreme and futile attempts to prolong lives mired in terminal anguish. Despite its lack of engagement with women’s voices, I’m broadly in agreement with the section on Surrogacy (#48), though it could demonstrate a deeper understanding of the mother-child relationship in pregnancy, childbirth and neonatal life. It addresses at some length the dignity of the child and tags on a short paragraph about the dignity of the surrogate mother.

Violating Dialogue

The document’s major failure, amounting to a violation of the dignity of those whom it speaks for and about, but never with, is the lack of any dialogue with or meaningful representation of women.1 Mother Teresa (St Teresa of Calcutta) is invoked in passing for her opposition to abortion, but not a single woman is referenced in 116 endnotes. Most of these are admittedly references to popes (the endless self-referentiality of papal citations is a tedious aspect of documents like this), but there are also several references to male theologians and philosophers.

The slogan “Nothing about us without us” should be shouted from the rooftops of the Vatican by women, especially those who dedicate their lives to scholarship that seeks to inform and enrich Catholic teaching (theologians, ethicists, biblical scholars, philosophers, and gender theorists). Calls to respect women’s dignity ring hollow when the men writing these documents think women have said nothing of consequence worth quoting or engaging with, particularly on issues that impact upon the most intimate areas of women’s lives.

If Pope Francis is serious about promoting the participation, representation, and visibility of women at all levels of church life, then he should tell his doctrinal henchmen never to produce another official document that doesn’t demonstrate dialogue with women. This would not mean only women who parrot everything the magisterium permits them to say. It would involve taking with the utmost seriousness the complex and sometimes intractable dilemmas that hove into view if one understands how the lives of women and girls are significantly shaped around sexual and maternal relationships — those which nourish female dignity and its flourishing, and those which abuse and violate that dignity.

To engage in dialogue with women scholars would mean taking seriously Pope Francis’s repeated calls for dialogue. It would mean following the wise guidance for dialogue that he issued to married couples in Amoris Laetitia (#136-141), which can be applied more widely to all situations of seeking understanding and mutual respect in the face of obstacles and difficulties.

I ask myself what Dignitas Infinita might be like if it had taken seriously these guidelines by engaging with women:

138. Develop the habit of giving real importance to the other person. … Never downplay what they say or think, even if you need to express your own point of view. Everyone has something to contribute, because they have their life experiences, they look at things from a different standpoint and they have their own concerns, abilities and insights. We ought to be able to acknowledge the other person’s truth, the value of his or her deepest concerns, and what it is that they are trying to communicate, however aggressively. We have to put ourselves in their shoes and try to peer into their hearts, to perceive their deepest concerns and to take them as a point of departure for further dialogue.

139. Keep an open mind. Don’t get bogged down in your own limited ideas and opinions, but be prepared to change or expand them. The combination of two different ways of thinking can lead to a synthesis that enriches both. The unity that we seek is not uniformity, but a “unity in diversity”, or “reconciled diversity”. … A patronizing tone only serves to hurt, ridicule, accuse and offend others.

If such wisdom is true for married couples, should it not be just as true for men and women who together dedicate themselves to theological and philosophical scholarship? If there is no dialogue in the community of scholars, there is neither wisdom nor truth for these do not emerge through silencing, exclusion, and androcentric intellectual domination.

So, with those comments in mind, here are my criticisms of Dignitas Infinitas. Predictably perhaps, my reservations and criticisms are to do with the lengthy section on Abortion (#47), the section on Gender Theory (#55-59), and the section on Sex Change (#60).

Abortion:

The authors of this document will never face the anguished reality of abortion dilemmas. There is now a vast body of scholarship by women ethicists, philosophers, and theologians, including Catholics, which could inform a more nuanced, pastorally sensitive, and ethically responsible approach to this complex issue, based on an honest dialogue about the existential challenges women face.2

This would mean recognising the extent to which a woman’s fears for her ability to raise a child in situations of desperate poverty makes this a social and economic issue, and not just one of personal moral responsibility. It would entail shifting the focus to men’s responsibility for their sexuality, taking into account the ways in which male violence, sexual coercion, and irresponsibility about the consequences of casual sexual encounters constitute a major factor in unwanted pregnancies. As Gabrielle Stanley Blair argues in her book Ejaculate Responsibly:

At any point, men could have eliminated elective abortions in a very short amount of time— a matter of weeks — without ever touching an abortion law, without legislating about women’s bodies, without even mentioning women. All men had to do was ejaculate responsibly. They chose not to. Today, they continue to choose not to.

Respecting women’s dignity would mean respecting women’s freedom of conscience and their right to make their own moral decisions about whether and when to have children, which includes access to safe, reliable contraception. This is especially important in situations in which women have little control over sexual relationships, and no power to resist demands for sex by their husbands or others. And it would entail recognising that there are situations in which, with great anguish and regret, some women terminate pregnancies for the protection and defence of their own lives, or because of their altruistic concerns to provide adequate care for the children they already have.

Moreover, we have seen in the US and in other Far Right political situations around the world that the criminalisation of abortion has little to do with the promotion of human dignity, justice, and rights, especially for the poorest and most marginalised women. It is the ultimate weapon of a certain kind of machismo politics that seeks total control over women’s lives.

Gender Theory:

Some might welcome the shift from references to “gender ideology” to “gender theory”, but this is a cosmetic change. There is a woeful lack of scholarly engagement and respect for gender theorists in this sweeping polemic against gender theory. I suspect that sound bites condemning Judith Butler constitute the sum total of the authors’ engagement with the complex, multi-facetted and contested ideas that constitute academic debates and theories about gender.

I share the reservations of many others about the dramatic turn in recent years, from gender theory to increasingly radicalised gender politics. Particularly in light of the publication in the UK of “The Cass Report”, which expresses grave concerns about the NHS’s use of puberty blockers and other medical and surgical treatments of children and young people with gender dysphoria, it’s clear that something has gone badly wrong in the field of gender and ethics in western societies. The Catholic Church could have an important ethical contribution to make, if the magisterium didn’t indulge in such dogmatic caricaturisations of complex theoretical and ethical issues.

If the Vatican wants to challenge gender ideology (which is a much narrower concept than gender theory), then it should pay heed to those guidelines for dialogue I mentioned earlier. Listen, understand, engage, and then you might be able to offer a response that respects the dignity of the other by manifesting your own dignity in the way you respond.

Here is a quote:

Another prominent aspect of gender theory is that it intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference. This foundational difference is not only the greatest imaginable difference but is also the most beautiful and most powerful of them. In the male-female couple, this difference achieves the most marvelous of reciprocities. It thus becomes the source of that miracle that never ceases to surprise us: the arrival of new human beings in the world. (#58)

Oh dear. Where to begin? As Dorothy Sayers wrote in her 1946 essay, “The-Human Not-Quite-Human”, women are “‘the opposite sex’—(though why ‘opposite’ I do not know; what is the ‘neighbouring sex’?)”3

If the men of the Vatican believe that sexual difference is the greatest possible difference between humans, we women face a hopeless task. How can they hear us, how can they respect us, how can they even include us in their understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to live a life of dignity, if we are so radically other that there is no greater difference in creation? Yet they speak for us and about us without us, formulate rules as to how we should live, how we should love, how we should conceive and bear children. There are countless ways in which humans differ from one another, and sexual difference alone cannot bear the weight that it carries in modern church teaching.

But there’s another problem. Consider Pope Francis’s understanding of gender and ecclesiology, repeated time and time again like a mantra every time he is asked to address a question about women’s roles, especially regarding the priesthood:

In Catholic ecclesiology there are two dimensions to consider: the Petrine dimension, from the apostle Peter, and the apostolic college, which is the pastoral activity of the bishops; and the Marian dimension, which is the feminine dimension of the Church … The Church is a woman. … It is a spousal mystery. And in light of this mystery you will understand the reason for these two dimensions. The Petrine dimension, which is the bishops, and the Marian dimension, which is the maternity of the Church ... A Church does not exist without this feminine dimension, because she herself is feminine (Holy See Press Office: 2016).4

More recently, here is how Vatican News reported his remarks to members of the International Theological Commission in November 2023:

Pope Francis highlighted the feminine dimension of the Church on Thursday, emphasizing the need for women’s perspective in theology. “Women have a different capacity for theological reflection than we men do,” the Pope said. …

“The Church is woman,” he said, continuing his reflection. “And if we do not understand what woman is or what the theology of womanhood is, we will never understand what the Church is.” He described the “masculinizing” of the Church as a “great sin,” which has yet to be resolved.

The Pope appealed to a distinction proposed by Jesuit theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who described a “Petrine” or ministerial principle, and a “Marian” or mystical principle. “The Marian is more important than the Petrine,” Pope Francis said, “because there is the bride Church, the woman Church, without being masculine.”

This should lead not only to more women represented in the ITC, but also to greater reflection on the Church as woman and as bride. “This is a task I ask of you, please. ‘Demasculinize’ the Church.”

Well, as I’ve suggested, if women have so much to contribute, where is evidence of dialogue with women theologians in Dignitas Infinita?

But if the Church is a woman, there are no women, for the idea of “Woman” encompasses everybody and every body. In this account, incarnate sexual difference is dissolved into gendered symbolism in which ultimately, only the male body signifies. He is woman and bride, priest and bridegroom. Here, papal theology and trans ideology join hands. In both cases, an abstract concept of femininity is colonised by sexual male bodies, and any possible language of incarnate female life is erased. The Church is a woman. A trans woman is a woman. So what is a female person other than a procreative mammal and an idea in the minds of men?

Sex Change:

There is a welcome acknowledgment that “a person with genital abnormalities that are already evident at birth or that develop later may choose to receive the assistance of healthcare professionals to resolve these abnormalities. However, in this case, such a medical procedure would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here.” (#60) A growing number of people with various forms of DSDs (Differences in Sex Development) have objected to the appropriation of “intersex” in the politicisation of gender and identity, which is why there is now a tendency to omit the “I” from LGBTQ+. Many people with DSDs do not experience gender dysphoria.

But if we bear in mind the omission of women from this document, and the claim that the Church is a woman, then it makes no sense for this document to claim that:

Constituting the person’s being, the soul and the body both participate in the dignity that characterizes every human. Moreover, the body participates in that dignity as it is endowed with personal meanings, particularly in its sexed condition. It is in the body that each person recognizes himself or herself as generated by others, and it is through their bodies that men and women can establish a loving relationship capable of generating other persons. (#60)

I think I’ve made clear why these are meaningless platitudes. In church teaching, “Woman” is nothing but a mute and radically othered sex. She is a romantic fantasy and an idealised concept that can be plundered and appropriated in the service of a theology that perpetuates the violation of the dignity and respect owed to the incarnate female person, by rendering her absent from the site of her own linguistic and bodily presence.

Conclusion

This is a long commentary that needs further development. I offer it here as some preliminary thoughts, written in a spirit of frustration verging on desolation, for this magnificent vision of justice rooted in the intrinsic dignity of the human person is undermined by a fundamental violation of the principles it claims to uphold.

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I’ve spent weeks thinking about how to express my concerns over Harry Woodgate’s award-winning book, Grandad’s Pride, written for children with a reading age of 3+ (Amazon US) or 4+ (Amazon UK). I’ve pored over it, trying to see it through different eyes, asking myself why I think it’s so inappropriate for the advertised age groups. Every time, my anxieties proliferate. What has happened to our culture that this book has been welcomed with such enthusiasm by the literary establishment—though less so from some of the reviewers on Amazon, Mumsnet and elsewhere?

I’ve already posted a one-star review on Amazon, as has pioneering gay activist Brendan Mooney, who shares these concerns. I’ve also been interested to note that members of the trans community are circulating a petition asking Peter Tatchell to stop speaking in their name, and citing concerns about him being on record as an apologist for sexual relationships between under-age youngsters and adults. My concern here is the appropriation of LGBT activism to give respectability to a book that sexualises children and acts as a form of ideological indoctrination of pre-school children in ways that I regard as utterly inappropriate and indeed dangerous.

I have more to say, but for now I’m posting here a lengthy comment I tried to post on Facebook, in response to someone who accused me of homophobia. The comment was removed:

Here is the comment in full. Thankfully, I had cut and pasted it before it was removed, because I could see it was taking time to post. I’ve also added some images and links here that were not in the Facebook post, but I haven’t edited the wording. That means it’s written spontaneously without the care I would normally take when posting in Substack, so yes, I risk causing further offence by not filtering this post through the many readings I would normally do before sharing. But here goes:

Facebook comment:

For those who defend this book without having read it and thought about the content, my criticisms have nothing to do with sexual orientation. I would be equally critical if the snogging couple in bondage gear were a heterosexual couple. (And interestingly, this image in the US edition has been sanitised for the UK edition, which suggests the editors are well aware of the risk of offence).

Good parents don't behave that way in front of their children for good reason. So here is what you might not notice if you prefer to keep your adult blindfold on while you read, or if you’re genuinely unaware of what’s going on in the realm of trans activism—and a lot of people are unaware.

This book does little to promote healthy attitudes of respect for same-sex relationships as an expression of love. It’s a bandwagon for trans ideology that shows pre-school children with signs saying “trans kids are magic” and “trans is beautiful”, and a young person with double mastectomy scars holding a banner saying “out and proud”.

No feminist should be okay with the erasure of the female body implicit in all these images, and especially not with the suggestion that pre-school girls might be encouraged to see their breasts as ugly appendages to be removed when they start to grow, if they decide they were assigned the wrong sex at birth. What happened to our struggles to have the female body liberated from its bondage to abuse and misogyny? I suspect every woman in western culture has gone through a phase of feeling she was assigned the wrong body at birth.

Why should a lovely old gay grandad reminiscing about the early Pride movement and mourning the death of his partner (both of which I regard as healthy themes for a pre-school children’s book if handled appropriately), have a pair of Lolita sunglasses and a Polaroid camera in his chest of memories and souvenirs, with a sign saying “Love is love is love”? In that context, the symbolic significance of a “MAP” propped up against the trunk is profoundly worrying. I think it’s a behind-the-hand snigger by the author for those in the know, and if you’re not in the know, I recommend you visit this website.

Am I being paranoid or buying into conspiracy theories peddled by the Daily Mail—as I've recently been accused of? Don't take my word for it. Here are two somewhat contradictory statements—one by Harry Woodgate and one by the publisher of Grandad’s Pride.

Woodgate referring to his magnificent illustrations (yes, he is a brilliant illustrator), inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities: “It allowed me to add a lot of intricate detail and hidden symbolism, which is something I’ve always been drawn to anyway, but it’s reaaaally exaggerated here.”

Here, the BBC reports on the publishers’ response to criticisms similar to mine: “Grandad's Pride faithfully depicts Pride parades from the past and present, many of which are attended by children. We consider accusations of ‘hidden messages’ to be baseless, deeply offensive and homophobic.”

There is a contradiction going on here.

Wake up people. Of course not all men are groomers or predators, but nearly all groomers and predators are men. The sexual abuse of children has to do with male sexuality, not with whether men are straight or gay. I presume that the old men who groped me when I wasn’t much older than the children in this book were heterosexual. They too used sweet words of love while they were feeling me up. I guess I should just be thankful I wasn't asked to wear Lolita sunglasses and pose for Polaroid camera shots—though later there was a man with a camera, but by then I was fourteen, so a genuine Lolita.

In posting this, I know that some of my trans friends who have shared their vulnerability and their journey with me might feel hurt, and for that I’m truly sorry. But many of the trans people I know and respect either as personal friends or through social media struggle with what’s being done in their name. Blanket inclusivity cannot cover every adult sexual peccadillo, and the language of love should not be used to mask abusive power and indoctrination of children.

I also want to add an important caveat. Harry Woodgate (they/them) is a brilliant young illustrator with great talent. I am not implying anything about him personally in posting this, but as a reader I offer it as a review of a book authored by him that may or may not intend what I see in it. That is for you, as other readers, to decide.