Daz 3d Genesis 8 Female
Kenneth Melniczek
During the rabbinic period (lst-7th centuries CE), some of the rabbis resolved the problem of the two creation stories by understanding the first human as a two-sexed being (androgynes), who is then quite literally split into two differently gendered beings (Genesis Rabbah 8:1; Leviticus Rabbah 14:1 and parallels). This interpretation reflects, and simultaneously helped to construct, certain ideals about gender differentiation during the rabbinic period.
As transgender Jews and allies look to our traditions, we can now ask again what becomes of the first human; male and female? Can we read our texts in order to reflect, and simultaneously help construct, new ideals about gender for our own society? Perhaps we can. First, we can note that according to Genesis Rabbah 8:1, even though adam is split into two separate genders, God remains one: both male and female.
As an undergraduate, I was taught that writings about love should be lovely. A philosophy of beauty should itself be beautiful. Writing about truth, goodness, and beauty should involve not only exposition, but also the invocation of that which is written about. A philosophy of the human person should not just be descriptive of, but an invitation to, the human person.
At the center of her text is a distinctly--and committed--Christian vision. In the second chapter, "Cosmos," Favale beautifully outlines the plot of the Enuma Elish as a contrast to the creation stories of Genesis. In discussing Genesis, she brilliantly analogizes the insufficiency of the initial creation to the game of Memory:
"[S]omething unexpected happens. God looks at his creation, and instead of echoing the refrain from Genesis 1, he says the opposite words for the first time: it is not good that this human being is solitary, one of a kind. The human needs a counterpart, a companion. So begins one of my favorite passages: the parade of animals. God gets busy shaping and molding all kinds of creatures and presenting each before the human to 'see what he would call them'. There's something comical about this imagery: here comes God with a monkey, a sheep, a gopher, a parrot; the adam scopes it out, shakes his head, declares a name, and the misfit pageant continues, as if God and the adam are playing a protracted game of Memory, but the cards never match." (38)
Favale presents a view that realigns "sex" and "gender," doing away with the necessity of the distinction altogether. For Favale, to be a "woman" is to have a body "organized around the potential to gestate new life" (120-121). One does not need to actually become pregnant--or even have a uterus--to be a woman. Abigail rejects a view of woman that requires the operability of particular bodily functions. Rather, her view is based in the biological fact that the human species is a species in which bodies are classified into those which produce either large gametes (ova) or small gametes (sperm).
Her view of manhood and womanhood, though framed as "a Christian theory," is distinctly biological. No technical, scientific, or social intervention can change the particular binary described by Favale. "There is no such thing as a third gamete or spectrum of gametes." (124). Favale argues that the alternative view, of placing sex/gender apart from the body, reduces manhood and womanhood to stereotypes in a way that renders the concepts meaningless. She writes:
"If girlness and boyness no longer reside in the body, there is no other ground for these concepts except stereotypes. Remember the definition for 'bigender' above, from Johns Hopkins University? Exhibiting characteristics of male and female roles. My first reaction to this is well, shoot, who is not bigender in twenty-first-century America?" (158)
This focus on stereotypes, she suggests, contributes to trans-overidentification. She connects this partly to the devaluation of women in contemporary society, and especially the devaluation of the diversity of women's bodies. Favale suggests that to find value, many women feel a need to be more like men, which some later confuse as a self-identification as men. Favale also connects trans-overidentification to a contemporary "fantasy of seamless, painless self-invention" (176). And she connects it to the rise of the internet, where bodies "are no longer 'real'" and can be easily changed and remade (178-179). Though Favale writes with greater care and nuance, this line of thought places her views in a similar place to Abigail Shrier, who has argued that girls are being conditioned by society to reject their femininity and are over-encouraged to identify as men.
Favale argues that reducing the concept of sex to one which is focused on biological distinctions actually allows for a more expansive view of men and women. When there is less to worry about, in determining one's sex/gender, then one is allowed greater space to simply be. She argues that this view sets her apart both from many gender theorists and from many Christians who believe that being a good man/woman requires fulfilling certain roles and cultural expectations. Favale argues for the fluidity and diversity of roles, as long as the body is respected, acknowledged, and cared for in its given state.
She also challenges hierarchies between men and women, especially those found in certain Christian communities. She does this in remarkably clever ways. Indeed, her final chapter initially seems to present a God-mirroring hierarchy in which men stand above women, but then she inverts this hierarchy:
"If we take these biological realities as a mirror for God and humankind, the male sex is analogous to God because God endows life from himself but stands apart from it; he transcends. The female sex is representative of humankind because its power lies in receptivity; the human being is created to receive the love of God, be inwardly transformed, and let that love bear fruit.
"Receptivity to God, embodied in the form of woman, is humanity's ultimate purpose. This is the telos of our existence: to say yes to divine grace, to be subsumed by divine love, and to welcome the inner metamorphosis it brings. Woman, then, is the representative human being before God; she carries the image of this receptivity to which all are beckoned, male and female alike." (237)
One can easily miss what is happening here. Favale begins with the common Christian trope of the male body standing analogous to God. But she then challenges the male adoption of this image by following with the declaration that the female body manifests the purpose of humanity. So it is not that men are to lord over women in a God-created hierarchy. Rather, men are to reflect on God through the creation of their bodies, and then look to women as the exemplar of how they are to live their purpose. Men are like God, in a way, but in a deeper way they are called to model themselves after the creation of woman.
But though Favale challenges many common gender binaries, she remains committed to others. For Favale, the body reveals sex/gender. And she ultimately concludes that trans persons do not exist, at least not in the way they claim to exist. She writes: "I disagree with transgender anthropology, namely its denial of the sacramental principle that the body reveals the person" (199). Favale insists that the body must reveal the person, rather than be challenged to conform to a psychological sense of self through "artifice," whether social or medical (199). Indeed, she argues that, gender dysphoria (which she seems to define as an incongruence between one's body and one's sense of sex/gender) should both "be acknowledged and treated as a psychological illness" (196). (I'll come back to this later.)
One might be wondering what Favale makes of intersex persons, or those with "congenital conditions of sexual development" (CCSDs). In her fifth chapter, "Sex," Favale explores these conditions. She notes that sex is readily recognizable at birth for 99.98% of human beings but that, for some, "their developmental pathways of becoming male or female took some unexpected turns" (127). For these persons, multiple factors should be considered to determine a child's sex, particularly when the phenotype (genitalia) or kenotype (chromosomes) are unclear or inconsistent. She emphasizes the need to see gamete production as "the foundation of biological sex," with other sex characteristics being secondary (128). A person cannot change one's sex, according to Favale, because gamete production cannot be changed. To resolve ambiguity for those with CCSDs, Favale recommends "the discernment of sex by looking at the anatomical structures that support either large gamete production or small gamete production" (129).
This commitment to gametes for gender/sex identification arises out of the type of essentialism pursued by Favale. To determine what makes a man a man or a woman a woman, Favale goes out in search of "some distinguishing feature that all women have and all men do not, and vice versa" (117). She rejects the view that gender differences are grounded in stereotypes, are socially constructed, or are created arbitrarily. Because gamete production is the one universally distinguishing factor she is able to locate, she centers the distinction around them, setting aside stereotypes as stereotypes, and decentering other sexual characteristics as "secondary sex characteristics." These "secondary sex characteristics" are "a consequence of sex; they are the effect, rather than the cause" (128). She does not reduce maleness or femaleness to gamete production. Rather, she uses them as a sort of starting point for understanding the organization of the human body as a whole, looking at the ways in which they inform bodily development and integrity to identify what it means to be man or woman.
Favale therefore rejects the "medicalization" of trans persons through hormonal or surgical treatments so that their bodies can match their gender identities, suggesting that this arises from a focus on "cosmetic appearance" in identifying the locus of gender (130). She writes, "If 'man' and 'woman' refer to our generative potentiality, changing one's sex is an impossibility, because a man cannot physically adopt the procreative role of a female, and vice versa" (144).
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