Body and Identity | Abigail Favale & Helen Joyce | New York Encounter 2022

good evening everyone and welcome to this beautiful event here in the metropolitan pavilion my name is holly peterson and i'm really grace to be with these two beautiful women today to share their story and a little bit about body and identity so first i'm going to introduce to you our remote guest who is helen joyce helen joyce is in cambridge england right now she's the author of trans which is a book um published in 2021 and in 2005 she joined the economist where she works presently um she's their british editor but she's also been their editor in sao paulo brazil an international editor finance editor executive editor for events etc previously she's also published in a journal called plus for the university of cambridge and was the founding editor of the royal statistical societies magazine significance so as i said helen joins us from cambridge where she resides with her husband and two children and i also have here abigail favela abigail you got fans out there abigail [Applause] abigail is the dean of humanities with at george fox university where she also teaches seminar in theology philosophy and literature her award-winning writing has appeared in the atlantic first things church life and other literary academic journals her memoir into the deep for cell outside and was published in 2018 her academic background is in both feminist and gender theory and her latest book the genesis of gender a christian theory will be released by ignatius press in about a month or so abigail lives in oregon with her husband and four children so welcome to both of our guests today so first question is for you abigail so let's just start off with some very basic information about what we're going to be discussing this afternoon so gender theory can you help us understand what it is a bit about the history of gender theory and can we also help us understand what is meant when we say sex and when we say gender all right well that's not a simple question right what is gender i think that's the question of the moment and it's difficult to answer because depending on who you ask and maybe what time of day you ask you'll get different answers um so there are a lot of different definitions of gender that are on offer right now and so one of the difficulties of talking about this tricky topic is that people will be using the the words sex and gender but meaning very different things and sometimes even mutually exclusive things by them so uh what might be helpful would be to give just like a quick and dirty historical overview of how the concept of gender developed in the 20th century so i'll hit some of the highlights or low lights depending on how you look at it and then we'll see if that i'm afraid i'll probably add to the confusion but i think we just have to wait into it okay so i'll start with uh feminist philosopher simon de bevoir who wrote the second sex which was published in 1949 and the most famous line from that from that book is one is not born but rather becomes a woman right and so that that statement really is the the seed of gender theory and what simone de bevoir is saying in that um statement is she's making a distinction between woman and female so she's saying there is this biological facticity of femaleness but then there are all kinds of social and cultural interpretations of what human and femaleness should look like that are layered onto it and that she she calls woman so what's interesting however is that she doesn't use the the word gender you'll notice it's called the second sex it's not called the second gender and that's because the word gender was not used in this context yet and it did not enter the scene until john money psychologist john money began using it in the 1950s and he was the the first person to coin the term gender role for example which has now become so common and he had a theory of pretty extreme social constructionism so he thought that there's biological sex but then gender or one's social role and um that the social expressions and role of one sex were completely socially constructed and socially shaped and completely malleable at least in the first three years of life or so and he was the first one to really introduce this idea of gender as something distinct from sex and he had the unfortunately he actually had the opportunity to to test his theory um on two twin boys one of whom was had a botched circumcision as an infant and so his his genitalia was basically obliterated and so his parents brought the twins to john money to say well what do we do and he's like don't worry about it you know sex really doesn't matter um we'll just kind of you know shape this kid up raise him as a girl it'll be fine he won't even know the difference because gender identity is is a complete construct so [Music] this experiment failed pretty catastrophically so the boy eventually rejected his imposed identity as brenda and then tried to to eke out a normal life as an adult before he he killed himself in 2004 actually two years after his twin brother as well committed suicide so both subjects in this in this experiment um died but unfortunately it that tragedy took decades to play out so in the interim and especially in the first decade or so um as he began this experiment he was publishing widely about gender being this success and so the concept of gender then took hold in the humanities and social sciences and feminist theory particularly so it comes from money and then second wave feminists take this concept of gender as a way of critiquing the ways in which um women have been or that womanhood has been expressed culturally and socially right so that's when you get the classic second wave feminist split between sex and gender sex is biology and then gender as again the kind of cultural and social meanings imposed on biology so the next important part of the story would be judith butler who who begins writing in the in the 1980s and it's it's difficult to overestimate the influence of of butler's theories in this con in this discussion about gender so we already had this idea very common taken kind of as dogma that you have sex and then you have gender so gender is a social construct sex is biological well butler was the first person to actually come out and say well yes gender is a social construct and sex is too right so butler's coming from a perspective of anti-realist post-modern philosophy right so she her work is heavily influenced by um foucault michel foucault so for butler there is no such thing as reality any any truth claims we make anything we describe as real is ultimately um not only a construct but it's a it's a it's a social power move right so any categorizations that we make anything that we say is real any claims of knowledge those are ultimately exercises of power and for for butler her whole goal as a theorist was not to reassert some other version of the real but to question the idea of the reel itself and to be just this perennial gadfly to basically poke at categories reveal exceptions and just kind of dismantle norms and categories and so then from the influence of her work is where i think we began to get this latest iteration of what gender is even though i think it actually contradicts what butlerian philosophy looks like because now um we're in a cultural moment where the the reality of sex is denied like sex is kind of seen as a construct right but then gender has become almost the sex of the soul or the psyche that that is asserted as something real right so that gives you a little bit of a sense of kind of how the concept of gender has changed over time and also how relatively young a history that it has you know this this word and this idea but i think because it's not attached to any kind of material reality it's like this it's like this post-modern juggernaut that can really take on almost any kind of meaning that you want to ascribe to it we'll come back to the question of reality and what is real and what is not real in this question but i want to ask you one more before i um go to helen and that is this you mentioned um in one of your talks that there's a reification happening today and um you define that as a sense of making real something that's not real so yeah in this issue what does that look like okay so that's yes so that's actually kind of what i was just describing in a way so we get this idea that gender and sex are both social constructs that they aren't real from judith butler from philosophy that's very anti-realist at its foundation but the problem is like human beings don't think that way right i mean that's what this whole encounter is about like the urge for truth like human beings are always going to reach for what is real they're going to reach for what is true and so i think the way that butler's theories have trickled down through the academy and through the education system through pop culture social media you have now i think especially a lot of young people who are kind of seizing on to the freedom that this idea of sex and gender being a social construct like that's pretty freeing but then there's this pivot that happens and then the new categories of what sex and gender are are very much asserted as real you know so i think if you you know say the the average teenager who's you know coming out as trans like they're probably not thinking there is no such thing as reality and so i can play with all these categories like they they are seizing onto this concept in order to express something that they believe to be very real so i think that's what i mean by this this reification turn that i think is happening on that level but i think there's also a way in which activists are um aware of the fact that they're making linguistic assertions in order to reshape our understanding of reality so there there may be a little more consciously doing kind of the butlerian thing um but so i think both of those things are then making or refining making real what is what is fundamentally based on a denial of reality all right thank you so helen um welcome helen and i want to ask you more or less the same question if um you've often noted in your writing that there's a huge detachment of language from reality so when you think about this and reification is as helen or sorry as abigail just said what do you have to say on that topic more than she's already said i thought it was an absolutely fascinating uh incredibly um brief but comprehensive trot through an incredible history i suppose the things that i'd pick out were are that and i would i would say more about the distinction between what's happening in universities and what's happening in schools and on tumblr and on social media it's exactly as abigail said that what's feeding through into the popular culture isn't this rather sophisticated i mean in my opinion completely fallacious but at least it's sophisticated theory about everything being socially constructed and gender is i think um an imitation without an original was what judith butler said so it's entirely this self-perpetuating thing that didn't start anywhere and that we can shape and we can play with and i mean why bother i want to ask but at least that's a sophisticated sort of thought but what's happening on tumblr or in schools is people are saying you have something like a sexed soul and that sex soul is real but your body is what i've heard called meat lego it's a thing that you can chop bits off you can sew other bits on you can change it and you're something like um a homunculus living behind the eyes of some meat robot and and the real thing is the thing in here and unfortunately we feed this by the way that we have moved into a very virtual world i mean in some ways it's great here i am in cambridge england chatting to you lovely ladies and i wish i was with you but since i can't be at least this is second best but then the kids are sitting in front of screens all the time and they're changing their avatars and you know playing with being male female as you know an animal and you know 10 foot tall 2 foot tall whatever and that feels real to them it feels real to all of us increasingly so they're forgetting what their bodies are and the fact that they were they were created they were you know born they were they were inside their mothers for nine months and and then brought into the world and that they will live and they will die and they will live in only one body this is the only one body that they have and that body has been completely sidelined it's been turned into words and that is about power because the belief the post-modern belief the post-modern turn as they call it is that words create reality and of course words do to some extent create reality when you say iv wed you turn two people into a legal couple you've just performed words that have created some reality but there's something bedrock beneath the words that we use but that's been erased and now the words are everything the words create reality and that's a power play so you must alter the words if you want to alter reality and then the final thing i'd say about that is people may wonder why the viciousness and the vitriol that is poured upon anyone who disagrees with the modern way of looking at things and it's because the words make reality so when you silence people you are stopping them from doing the only harm that's possible namely by naming what they see and bringing into existence a reality that the activists don't want to see and so it's an extraordinary maneuver it's taken some decades but we've arrived at a really strange place where words are real bodies aren't real um where you know words are violence but actual violence is just standing up for oppression or the oppressed people it's it's just surreal yeah thank you on that same note i wanted to go ahead you begin in the book trans you begin by saying this is a book about an idea one that is simple but has far-reaching consequences so my question for you helen is this a cultural phenomenon we're entering into i mean i see it as an american um movement that's something like a neo-religion um you know it's maybe not apparent to people in america how much this is something that's come out of american campuses in particular and it's been exported around the world and it arrives at places that are culturally closest to america first so here in britain we're experiencing it in canada they are australia and new zealand much less so on continental europe hardly anywhere anywhere else um it's the idea is the sort of seemingly simple idea that what makes you a man or a woman or indeed a boy or a girl is what you say you are it's what you say you feel and what you state that you feel it's not your body it's not that you were conceived male or female and you grew up it's that you you feel like you're a woman or a man and you say that so you bring that reality into existence by words and this seems minor because most people who think about it superficially assume that only a few people will do that those people that we call trends but they miss the fact that it's a statement about all of our realities that every one of us is male or female or man or woman solely because of what we feel and what we say that what makes the three of us women is that we say we're women well why would we say we're women presumably because we feel like we're women but we've denied that there's anything real about being a woman so what is it that makes us women we feel feminine womanly i mean am i sitting here talking to you in a womanly fashion i don't know and was i womanly when i was painting a door earlier today was i womanly when i was getting a maths phd you know you don't know so it's just attached it's detached our identities from any referent in our physical selves or indeed in our social selves not even our social selves anymore it's not even that i'm being feminine i'm acting feminine in the way that judith butler talked about it's just what i say and this has profound consequences so profound that i took a whole book to talk about them and it's not the only book talking about them and abigail will say many more things about them thank you so there's a question for both of you and i think you've already led us in that direction but you both know that there is there are far-reaching consequences to this topic um this is not a topic that's a personal topic which it's often considered a personal issue how identify myself and it doesn't belong on the stage certainly doesn't belong in the public square and i've had people even in this room tell me why are we talking about this issue it's a very personal issue so my question for both of you would be um you both mentioned that they're political legislative social implications of this issue today so why should i guess my first question is why should we be talking about this in a room full of people and if it is a personal issue and what are some of the ramifications of this issue on those topics i mentioned so do you want to start with it start first helen sure sure and people don't think about this so much anymore because we don't distinguish between men and women in ordinary everyday life the way that we used to it used to be that women couldn't vote and men could or that men could get mortgages and women couldn't but nowadays all those unnecessary distinctions have vanished and what we're left with is not that many distinctions between men and women but where there are distinctions it's because of our sex we separate the sports we separate sporting competitions for men and women because men and women's bodies are different we have separate changing rooms separate domestic violence refuges separate rape crisis centers separate toilets because both male and female people are more comfortable more dignified in separate facilities and in the case of women safer because most violence and indeed almost all sexual violence is committed by males and women are overwhelmingly victims of the sexual violence in particular so we don't distinguish between men and women except where we really have to and it's sex so if you if you dissolve the idea of what sex is and you replace it by something else well then you change the reason why you separate the two sexes in those sorts of circumstances and it's not about sex anymore it's about what people say they are and then you realize that impacts on other people as well so in the book i say that gender gender self-identification is a misnomer it's actually a demand that other people identify you as the gender that you say you are so that when i go into a changing room where i expect to only see female people i might now see male people as well because those male people say that they're female so that impacts upon me so that's just one example i'm sure abigail would like to add more yeah um yeah that's a really good point so that the sex-segregated spaces that still exist in our society are related to concrete material conditions that differ between the sexes and primarily to the benefit of women right so women's changing rooms are separated not because you know women are a particular threat to men but because vice versa um and i think in in all these spheres the one that concerns me the most is prisons um because the argument here is not that oh trans people are predatory rather you know you'll have some bad actors in prison and if we create a very gameable system where basically say a male sex offender can simply take a box on a form and then be transferred to an all-female facility um presumably you know and this is he might not have to have any sort of physical transition whatsoever because he can he can identify simply by this this statement of language and so and the women then who are in prison with him it's not like they can just leave right so the the prison situation does concern me quite a bit because that's a very vulnerable population and that's a very gameable system um i'll also say that one thing i'm i'm increasingly concerned about is the medicalization of gender non-conforming children because i think that i think one of the beautiful things about humanity is that we're unique individuals i mean each person is a completely unique instantiation of being human right and we're talking about sex differences here but of course there's also a common humanity right and then there's also individual differences so there's kind of these three layers of differences that i think all need to be part of the picture of when we talk about human identity and and i think that because gender and sex differences are are here's my scientific way of expressing a like bimodal graph you know they're kind of like these intersecting humps basically right so you will have individuals here in the middle um so men and women who who are maybe you know like women whose femininity is more analogous to a typical masculinity and that kind of thing but what's happening now because gender is no longer rooted in the body the only real ground for gender now is in stereotypes right so there's this kind of regressive irony that's happening that a lot of the the stereotypes that we'd kind of progressed beyond are now once again being made real or being reified right so now children are you know let's say a a girl who's a tomboy and who loves rough tumble play loves to play sports hates girly things you know no longer is she she just sort of okay yeah sure that's great um just be yourself now like she's she's invited to question her very identity like oh you must really be a boy right or a boy who loves art and my little ponies he's you know he's now under scrutiny like maybe he's really a girl and identity in childhood and adolescence is still so fluid i mean that's that's something that um what's the priest who started cl i'm just learning about this thank you that's something that father jason writes about right like there's something that's so exciting about adolescence because everything's so intense and everything's so passionate and everything's so full of possibility and people young people are discovering who they are right but now we're in a cultural moment where young people are being put on um put on this road to a lifetime of medicalization and basically all kinds of different experiences different kinds of um of of suffering or anguish that young people are experiencing it's kind of being stamped with a very a simple framework like oh you must be trans and here's the way you solve it you scapegoat your body um we'll we'll stop your puberty we'll put you on um puberty blockers then cross-sex hormones and then when you're a little older you know we can amputate your breasts and then you'll be happy and i think though the quickness and enthusiasm with with which this way of of treating um people this kind of of therapy or what what i see is really self-harm kind of repackaged as self-care i think it's very disconcerting because young people are being allowed to make irreversible decisions that they end up sterile for example um and then when you know let's say if they change their mind later then sometimes that's that's impossible to do and i worry about how much money can be made by this because if you if you commit to um a medical transition then you know you you are you know you need to be on say cross-sex hormones for life and there are of course physical very serious physical consequences and risks of that that no one's really articulating i think and no one's really talking about and that to me i think is the the thing that i get the most worked up about [Applause] so i want to ask a question a little bit about i mean just to i guess play doubles advocates so there are many people today scientists included who say that sex is a spectrum right or that um gender dysphoria is a real thing because of sex being a spectrum or the non-binomial that you know i'm not one or the other etc or people being born a sexed right so can help two of you help us understand um first of all where this fits into the question of gender theory i guess that's it yeah yeah do you want to start helen shall i start yes sure thanks so the the sex is a spectrum idea is old too and it runs historically along the same track as the track that abigail talked about and it dates back to about the 1920s and 1930s and maybe even a little earlier and the idea was that it was actually gay people were somewhere on the spectrum the idea was that if you were gay you were a man's brain in a woman's body or a woman's brain in a man's body and you were somewhere on the sex spectrum and then when they started to think about people actually being members of the opposite sex despite what their bodies looked like they sort of cannibalized this this idea this quite false idea and and reused it repurposed it one of the things you notice when you start digging around in the history of the of gender identity and of trans ideas is what a cannibalistic um or magpie movement it is like it picks up ideas from from race from um about sexuality all sorts of things like that and it mixes them all up along with things that it's borrowed from other cultures like the fafafine of samoa or the mushay of oaxaca or whatever and and they don't tend to sit together terribly well so if you if you think that sex isn't real then what are you thinking spectrum for you know these things don't sit together like if sex doesn't exist well it isn't a spectrum anyway i mean so anyway no sexes are not spectrums we are one sex or the other and intersex conditions as they're called are not actually a disproof of that intersex is a rather old-fashioned umbrella term for about 40 conditions that are developmental uh disorders or differences of development of the set of the gonads and genitalia and they happen to male people or female people yeah they don't have they don't make you something in between and most people who have a dsd as they're now known are clearly recognizable as either male or female at birth a few of them have some ambiguity of the genitalia and have to be investigated further by the doctor and in the end the doctor will diagnose the specific dsd that this child has and say whether it's a boy or a girl and what treatment this child needs because some of these conditions are very serious they can be life-threatening so this is just a it's just a bit of obfuscation i don't know if you've ever heard of a gish gallop it's a debating technique where it was named after a particular person whose surname was gish where you just throw all sorts of unrelated facts in very quick succession at the person you're debating and there's no time for them to you know respond to each individually and while they do that they're missing the thread of what you're actually saying so these things like intersex people and sex as a spectrum and all that stuff it's just obfuscation we all know that we all come in two flavors male and female we all know that we all know that what you can tell when you meet people you can tell it by looking at their face you can tell it by looking at their general body shape um so yeah it's just we all know that's nonsense it's odd to me that such nonsense has managed to get such wide traction yeah i would i would echo that and say that so dsds or intersex conditions are best understood as variations within maleness and females not as exemptions from the reality of sex so i think that's really important and in fact i think the way that certain activists have tried to use the existence of these kind of conditions as a way to uproot the reality of sex um does a lot of disservice to people who are born with these conditions um because i i never hear intersex conditions brought up in a discussion except to serve as some kind of validation for the idea of the sex binary not being real it's not really a discussion about okay well what what uniquely do intersex people need and how can we talk about that in a robust way and in fact there are there are really meaningful differences in the history of intersex activism versus trans activism because one of the one of the values um that has been affirmed in intersex activism has been bodily integrity and actually you know stopping and changing the the medical approach of of performing unnecessary cosmetic surgeries on infants who are born with ambiguous genitalia and so that's actually a tension i see between these two movements so i really think conflating the two is not helpful it's obvious gaining like like helen said but i also think it's really dehumanizing to people who have variations in sexual development okay thank you so the next question is for you abigail um as a christian which you have said in many public settings you have a particular view of the person and being as a catholic um you obviously have you know probably have a view of it very similar to that which the catholic church says that body and soul are connected so the present concept of gender has for the most part driven a wedge between you know body and soul so again can you explain what that which would be and maybe help us understand the implications of that sure yeah i think especially coming at this at this topic from a christian perspective especially a catholic christian perspective i mean christianity is very much a system of seeing the world and all that is that affirms the dignity of the body the dignity and the goodness of the body if that's not true if a christian understanding of anthropology of a human being as a unity of body and soul isn't true then all the central mysteries of christianity make no sense the incarnation doesn't make any sense the resurrection doesn't make any sense the ascension doesn't make it like why would jesus take a body back up to heaven if it's just his meat lego suit or whatever right it just doesn't make any sense like why would god even become a body to unite himself with our nature in order to to um be able to have communion with us so we could have communion with the divine right i mean all of that christianity is so deeply incarnational um so i do think that that this i think that this a framework has emerged for explaining a range of different experiences and the people who get caught up in this framework deserve our compassion and attention and respect but i think it's very important that we that we really take a good look at the framework and realize that what's being offered here is a radically different vision of reality of the human person of freedom of the body um than than the christian understanding of reality and i think there's a there's a spiritual dimension here um and that's the sacramentality of the body so in the christian understanding sex doesn't matter just because of its its connection to procreation you know in an earthly sense but there's a way in which you know every body has a sacramental function the body reveals the person right and i actually think that one of the desires that you can see that's good that's that i think is expressed by people who identify as trans is a desire for their body to express their person right like that's a good desire and i think that's something that that we can pay attention to but the problem is there's there's a a lie or a deception about you don't your body doesn't already reveal your personhood rather your body is a project you have to kind of complete it in some way or change it in some way in order for it to reveal your personhood so there's this this distortion of the sacramentality of the body um but if we if we lose if we lose sight of of the importance of the body i think particularly from a christian perspective then then that creates a lot of um that creates a lot of very real problems not just philosophical and theological problems but problems that then you know um have to do with how we live and be in the world so yeah i'm going to step back just a little bit it's a question i've been wanting to ask both of you and donald just ask it here on this stage and that is this theory of gender and sex um gender theory it just seems like it came out of nowhere right i'm an educator i work in a school i have somebody coming from a public school into my school saying hey i want my kid to get into your school because you know she's in fourth grade she's nine years old she's learning that she needs to either be gay lesbian or bi this is a curriculums changed in the school next door to my school i mean it seems like this came out of nowhere ten years ago i didn't even know what gender was right and now it's become you know the thing that's driving people away in many in many cases from the public schools so i guess my question to both of you um it seems troublesome to ask where did this come from today like like you're almost a bigot if you ask a question wow this is this is a very can this is a difficult topic to stock talk about so we don't talk about it so can both of you kind of address that first of all you did do a good job of explaining the history but can you help us understand like we're in front of this very challenging situation and no one wants to talk about it myself included until i read your book i mean shall i start with a bit of it which is the um where it came from and i think a little bit about why no one wants to talk about it too so i think it's been a fringe movement for decades that's been there but it's been something that was only in gender clinics and so on and then when various activist groups which had worked their way through various other activist purposes so you know and women got the vote um the civil civil rights act ended jim crow laws and then we got gay marriage in the 2010s and this pattern was seen very much around the world a lot of groups needed a next cause and that idea that trends was the next cause really fitted in so neatly the next oppressed group that needed our attention and in some ways that's a good impulse but then on the other hand it was also activists looking for a way not to have to disband and to keep very large and very well-funded charities and ngos running so i think that that's one of the reasons that it sort of launched onto the public consciousness it was there but it it fit into a place that we had in our society for um oppression narratives for um liberation narratives for a way of thinking about people that was already popular as identities you know male female what race you are what ethnicity you are what sexuality you are now another aspect of your personality and why are we not meant to talk about it well that's so interesting isn't it i think partly it's because it's such a mess of a theory that if you're allowed to talk about it it all falls apart so they have to try to stop you from talking about it but it's also this thing that it's a very linguistic movement and language is power language creates reality so if you're allowed to talk about it you are actually altering reality in ways that the activists don't want you to so in silencing you they are carrying out a very good act in their eyes i would add too that there's um so since about well maybe around 2014 or so there's been just an exponential rise in the number especially of of young people who are people who present to gender clinics for wanting transition so classically it was a very very small number of in the population would would seek transition and it was almost always men and almost always men in middle age right but then two huge shifts happened in um starting about i don't know eight eight ten years ago and the the demographic shifts in two ways one it shifted to more women presenting and then the age shifted way down and we're talking about like 2 000 increase 2000 percent increase like just exponentially arose um the dead you know gender clinics were flooded and so new gender clinics began popping up all over the united states now planned parenthood offers you know like gender affirming i think that's what they call like giving you cross-sex hormones and so yeah i could just walk into a planned parenthood clinic today tell them you know i think i'm trans and walk out with um a prescription for testosterone immediately without any kind of assessment by a doctor even if i said you know yeah i'm i'm suicidal i have an eating disorder i struggle with depression it wouldn't matter like i would still i would still get to walk out so i think i think that the immersive online digitization especially of youth culture has played a huge part in this for reasons that helen mentioned and then i also think people saw how much money could be made again from medicalizing healthy people for life and so i think those those things are feeding into it um but there there really is kind of a a social contagion element i think that's that's happening thank you thank you both yeah so i have one last question for the two of you which i think is going to take a bit to flush out but we have a lot of parents in this room we have a lot of educators in this room a lot of doctors in this room and teenagers and so considering what both of you have learned in your studies either one of you took this on as a topic of choice you bumped into it through your work at you know at the economist and through your work at the university etc so what kind of advice would you give to parents and educators to respond to a son a daughter a friend a patient who says they have who has gender dysphoria or who wants to transition um yeah how can you help us understand how best to help friends and loved ones to yeah deal with their struggle with their given sex do you want to go and start helen sure i mean it's a huge question and i don't like to give the impression that i could swan into somebody's house and in three minutes sort out what is obviously not that simple but the first thing i'd say i think abigail said this that um everything gets turned into being about trends now so one of the things about those teenage gender er clinics is that the teenagers turning up at gender clinics is they're very very heavily overrepresented and children on the autistic spectrum children who are self-harming depressed or anxious children these kids often are trying both to express their bodily dis-ease the medium of gender through and trans identity but also they're looking for a panacea because it's sold that way i talked when i wrote my book and the girl who i talked to a d transitioner because these are becoming more common sadly now and she said that she had been so ill with an eating disorder that she was hospitalized for the sake of saving her life and when she was 18 she searched online to see if it was possible to get somebody to remove your breasts without you having cancer and she discovered trans um chat boards and a week later she believed that she was a man but the gender clinic said to her that the reason you have an eating disorder is that you were meant to be a man so your curves are making you uncomfortable if you get a mastectomy and you take testosterone and you go through transition your eating disorder will go and her parents believed them because you believe medical professionals and so she had a hysterectomy she had her ovaries removed she took testosterone by the time she was 21 she was sterile she still had an eating disorder and at 23 she identified as a woman so children are looking for a solution to every problem they have and they're told that identifying as trans will solve all their problems and they will probably have researched online for months before they come out to their parents as trends so they produce what's called the script they will tell you a whole pages long thing that they will have rehearsed and they will have been coached possibly to do it online and they will be primed to think that you're a bigot if you don't immediately go wow that's amazing fantastic i'm delighted that you're going to medicalize your beautiful body that i carried for nine months within me and gave birth to and fed and have minded up till now so they're prepared to hear what you say very negatively and so that was a very long preamble to saying you've got to stay calm you've got to bring your parenting a game here and you've got to say oh tell me more you know slow it all down be very low-key and then explore what it is the child is trying to achieve what they're trying to express with this identification and then if you want to be listened to you have to listen yourself there's no point in just telling your child that this is stupid or that don't be ridiculous you're really a girl and there's no point either in pulling out a book like mine and handing it to your child and saying read that and that'll set you straight i mean i wish that would work that'd be great you have to listen you have to say tell me tell me what you think tell me why you're doing this help me to understand and then you can hope that you'll be listened to in return yes i think that's that's absolutely right i think like i mentioned before you know people who who seek out this kind of a very serious change that comes with a lot of risk you know no one who feels sort of at peace and content in their life and with themselves is going to seek this out so there is some kind of anguish or suffering there's some kind of desire for something that's driving it and it could be a number of things right i mean we could be talking about um you know i mean in some for some instances it could be someone who's had pretty severe gender dysphoria since they were a child right and that um and then for someone else it could be you know an autistic kid who never feels like she's fit in she's she's a little more interested in you know computer science than than what the other girls like and so she just assumed she must not really be a girl you know there could be a desire for community a desire for wholeness right so i think i think probably there's some kind of really good desires that are operating underneath it as well as some profound suffering so i think i think being patient and being curious and being calm um and being committed to this kind of ongoing process of discernment and preserving the relationship i mean i think i think hopefully that would go without saying but you know definitely don't you know lay down an ultimatum or or say you know well if if you do this you know then i'm going to cut you off and that kind of thing like i think i think that would be the worst possible thing to do um and i guess i'll also uh speak from kind of a catholic perspective about okay well what do we do maybe in our our parishes or in our schools or in our universities right as how do we respond as catholics i think in america i feel fairly pessimistic i'll be honest about how this is going to play out in america i think i think europe will be okay i think finland and finland will be okay finland and sweden have already started yeah there's like one finnish guy out there i mean i say that because i you know the like sweden and finland are already very much rolling back on on especially childhood transition and you know there's some real amazing pushback happening in the uk which helen is a big part of but the us is a mess the u.s is a mess i worry about a lot of things i worry about how politicized this is how polarized our culture is and now this has just become another kind of sign to plant in your yard another bumper sticker to put on your car another way of kind of affiliating with your tribe um and then of course once you once you've taken the party line you know you just kind of immerse yourself in the echo chamber and i worry too about the the way that we have a decentralized and profit driven health care system um i just think there's a lot of a lot of not so great things about american society that are letting this thing run amok but here's maybe one piece of hope and that is that america also has this it's like kind of a freakishly religious place um and there's there's this value of religious freedom if that's maybe that's even like the one kind of coherent founding value of our nation is that this is always a place where you could come and be a religious freak and that's great you know we won't force you not to be that way and so i think it is absolutely vital for christian and catholic communities and parishes and schools to hold to the catholic vision of reality and the human person we we need to be a place where that truth and that beauty is preserved that we need to be a kind of lighthouse in the culture like shining that that light out into the world and we can't be a bunker right so on the one hand we can't just just immediately say like yes this is awesome you know totally affirm anything you want to be you know i'm on board right um but we also can't be like oh no what's wrong with people these days like like the girls look like boys and well you know like gotta go like hide in our bunker and you know totally trot out you know that's not that's not a solution either right so the truth has to be preserved so that this thing is going to churn up a lot of people there are going to be a lot of people who get churned up by this this ideology and who come out of it pretty destroyed i think and also maybe you know have having certain kinds of a physical appearance that is isn't really going to change so our our parishes also need to be places where you know gender non-conforming people and you know people who maybe have once identified as trans are kind of exploring it or have de-transitioned that they're not going to be scrutinized that they're not going to be rejected that they're not going to be shut out so i think that is the task for um for christians and and catholics i think and catholics are the best prepared to do it because we have a coherent theology of the body and the human person like we have the most resources um on that front um so but you know protestant allies you know that's great too welcome welcome aboard pillage our pillage our treasury um but i do think it's really i do think it's really important um in fact i honestly i don't know i'm just gonna go on a limb and say this i could change my mind later but um i really think that if america has any hope on this front it will be because christians keep their head about this stuff and and have the courage to speak about it what i would love i would love to hear priests give homilies on like maybe the next time that you know genesis 2 rolls around in the lectionary to give this beautiful homily about the sacramentality of the sexed body and then to say you know and you know and if you're someone who really struggles with this and you don't feel at home in your body you know like come talk to me come tell me your story like we want you to be here and we want to understand you and walk with you like that would be a wonderful way to talk about it to present the truth and beauty of the faith but then also this invitation um and then and making good on that promise to accompany people as they as they kind of wander around um seeking truth helen did you want to say anything else on that i saw you nodding your head crazily did you want to add i just thought it was that yeah i thought it was absolutely beautiful as abigail said and you know i'm not someone i was brought up catholic but i'm not someone who still is catholic and yet something that for me i can find no other word to express the way i feel about my children's bodies and how beautiful those bodies are than the word sacred um so a sort of secular sacredness i think is something that um atheists like myself or people who aren't religious or have different religious traditions and catholics can come together on i mean just the idea that my child's body was not born perfect and i would think that if he were ill i would think if he had a disability i would think that if he was i mean i didn't mind what sex i had but you know whether he was a boy or a girl the fact is he was his own unique little self and if i can borrow an incredibly inappropriate word for it from my day job at the economist we use the word fungible for goods that are totally interchangeable so one barrel of oil is as good as another barrel of oil of the same quality so they're fungible goods well humans are non-fungible goods the people that we love are not interchangeable the people that we meet are unique individuals who were born and will die and we will never see them again in this world it's it's just a one-off thing so i think we've forgotten that in our culture very generally and whether that's because of a move away from religion or whether it's the way that we've become very technological or that we're afraid to say things that some people might not agree with but yes this this idea of the sacred and the beauty of the people that we love and the perfection of them the way they are i think that might be a helpful way to talk to a child whether your family is religious or not that they're really lovely the way they are you've loved them since the second you knew you were expecting them and then when you met them you fell in love all over again you know thank you very much helen thank you very much abigail gosh i just my whole mind has been open so by both of you ladies and this will continue to be a topic i'm interested in hopefully all of us [Applause]

Channel: New York Encounter

Views: 16,857

Keywords: body, gender, gender identity, gender identity disorder, gender theory, gender dysphoria, sexual identity, catholic, christian, new york, new york encounter, truth

Id: 8UubVmdppBY

Length: 54min 5sec (3245 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022