Month: August 2013

by Chris Bodenner

A knowledgeable reader of the Bible counters the conservative Christian trying to argue away the existence of trans people:

Moore’s deflection about epistemology vs. ontology is disingenuous; the trans question is inherently epidemiological. This isn’t about whether “man” and “woman” exist, but how you categorize someone as man or woman. Do you use genitals, genetics, brain structure (which science is finding is also sexed)? And what do you do with ambiguous characteristics? And people with both male and female characteristics?

What science is finding is that brain structure is the strongest, most resilient marker of sex. That makes sense, when you think about it. A man who loses his penis and testes doesn’t become a woman. A woman who has a mastectomy and hysterectomy doesn’t become a man. And people with ambiguous bodily characteristics still have brain structures that correlate with other men and women, and identify as such. The conclusion is that the strongest way to categorize a person’s sex is through neural analysis. Or, conversely, simply ask them what their sex is. That’s what trans activism is about. Medical transition, anti-discrimination laws – all that is aimed at correcting cases where sex was wrongly categorized. This isn’t “changing” someone’s sex, it’s confirming it.

None of this contradicts Mathew, Mark, Genesis, or Genesis. The Bible argues that the sexes exist, and are created by God, but gives no indication of how to categorize them.

In fact, in Genesis 2.19, God tells Adam “whatever [he] called each living creature, that was its name”. (Tantalizingly, the next verse is the Bible’s first reference to ‘Adam’, implying that he also ‘named’ himself.) And, as Jonathan Merritt pointed out, the brain is just as natural and God given as the rest of the body. Other than that, its condemned by neither Leviticus or Lot, and in Isaiah 56, God promises ‘eunuchs’ who keep the Sabbath and the covenant:

to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.

Incidentally, Isaiah 56 is called “Salvation for Others”. There is simply no Biblical case to be made against trans rights. Both Orthodox and Conservative Jewish leaders, who also follow Genesis regard homosexuality as a “transgression”, have ruled in favor of medical transition, and changing sex designation. For the trans question, while foreign to many, the theology is cut and dry about its status as sin.

The shame is that trans issues do raise a lot of interesting theological questions. (For example, what does this say about the relationship between brain, mind, and soul?) But that’s by comparing trans people to Legion, or by saying that trans people inherently disrupt the categories of male and female.

Ironically, Russell Moore is right; someone’s sex “can’t be eradicated by a change of clothes or chemical tinkering or a surgeon’s knife.” He’s just wrong about what side of the issue that puts him on.

Update from a reader on another version of the Bible:

Your knowledgeable reader writes “In fact, in Genesis 2.19, God tells Adam “whatever [he] called each living creature, that was its name”. (Tantalizingly, the next verse is the Bible’s first reference to ‘Adam’, implying that he also ‘named’ himself.)” Not true. Adam is named earlier; or rather, he is never named. In the Hebrew text he is always referred to simply as “the man” (Ha-adam). For some reason (perhaps the reason suggested by your reader) the King James Version starts calling him Adam at this point. What is interesting is that it is right after he runs out and names all the animals that he realises he needs a wife – and the first thing he does is to give her a name. (And, pace the KJ version, he doesn’t name her after himself.)

Another reader:

On the discussion of gendering and Christianity, I wonder if the following might not be a helpful tool for (or against) the conservative. In his essay “For You May Touch Them Not: Misogyny, Homosexuality, and the Ethics of Passivity in First World War Poetry,” James S. Campbell uses a quote by Emmanuel Levinas as an epigraph:

Perhaps … all these allusions to the ontological differences between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and the feminine were the attribute of every human being. Could this be the meaning of the enigmatic verse of Genesis 1:27: “male and female created He them”?

by Matt Sitman

NPR interviews Patrick Flanery about the backdrop to his new novel, Fallen Land, a thriller that “plays out in a half-built subdivision where construction ground to a halt during the housing crisis”:

I came to thinking about the housing crisis as the natural setting for the story that I wanted to tell. Because I had this vision of somebody who was in a house that was no longer theirs. And it seemed logical to set it against the backdrop of the housing crisis and think about how that was affecting very different kinds of people and the very different situations they find themselves in after foreclosure auctions and things like that…

I wanted the book to speak to a kind of crisis in neighborliness, and thinking about the ways in which people are becoming so inward-looking, and the ways in which it’s incredibly easy — I think in part because of technology — not to think about what’s happening around us. And that’s not just thinking about security but thinking about who needs help. So it’s almost about a crisis of empathy with the people that we should be looking out for but who we fail to look out for in fairly fundamental ways.

Matt Hartman finds the political and social context of the novel an occasional liability. He observes that, in the first couple pages, the book touches upon “the prison-industrial complex, suburban sprawl, strip malls, the prevalence of fast food, industrial farming, and obesity”:

Fallen Land is a sprawling novel about a sprawling house, built in an unnamed state in America’s heartland, and the three generations who owned the land the house sits upon. The novel is unquestionably a novel of the housing crisis, intently focused on the places we make our homes, the machinations that keep us there or force us out against our will, and the connections to the land we’ve gained and lost in the process.

The problem with Fallen Land is that Flanery takes these issues to be novel, as though by speaking of them at all he is “revealing new surfaces for growth.” His everyman character, Nathaniel Noailles, works for a private security firm that concocts ways to increase the profits from their prison labor system. Though this is certainly a crucial issue for America, Flanery approaches the topic without the irony someone like Don DeLillo has used to such great effect, and as a result his earnestness becomes heavy-handed, especially early in the work.

by Matt Sitman

In an interview, Paul Provenza, a standup comedian and atheist, reflects on the figures who influenced his approach to both religion and his routine:

Even though George Carlin never self-identified as an Atheist, his perceptions on critical thinking had a profound influence [on] me. When I was a young comic just starting out, I was very cautious, as I didn’t want to alienate people. George Carlin’s bravery became a benchmark. I became perfectly fine with alienating some people in the audience. That just comes with the territory. I had a conversation once with George Wallace after a show where, as usual, he won everyone over in the room with such fervor. I wondered how he was always able to create such a love in the room and asked him what his motivation was in doing comedy in the first place. He said, “I just want to make them happy that they were in the room that night.” That’s when I realized what I really wanted for the audience was for them to get into arguments on the car ride home. I’m not sure why, but that just makes it more interesting for me.

His take on how comedy can upend conventional beliefs:

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we’re dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning. Andy Kaufman was a great example of this dynamic. What made him the Picasso of stand-up comedy is that he played with two- and three-dimensionality, in a way. Part of what made Andy so funny is that half the audience didn’t understand what was going on, which was the “punch line” for the other half of the audience. He moved the joke from being onstage to being the experience of it in the audience.