Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics Volume 4 | Issue 1 Article 1 2014 Gender Reality Sr. Mary Prudence Allen Sister.Allen@archden.org Follow this and additional works at: http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity ISSN: 1839-0366 COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 WARNING This material has been copied and communicated to you by or on behalf of the University of Notre Dame Australia pursuant to part VB of the Copyright Act 1969 (the Act). The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further copying or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice. This Article is brought to you by ResearchOnline@ND. It has been accepted for inclusion in Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics by an authorized administrator of ResearchOnline@ND. For more information, please contact researchonline@nd.edu.au. Recommended Citation Allen, Sr. Mary Prudence (2014) "Gender Reality," Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics: Vol. 4: Iss. 1, Article 1. Available at: http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 Gender Reality Abstract This paper seeks to answer to following questions from a Philosophical Methodology: What is the conflict between Gender Reality and Gender Ideology? How did Sex and Gender Ideologies Begin? What are the Characteristics of Sex and Gender Ideologies? How did Gender Ideology 'Go Viral?' Who Mapped the Virus of Gender Ideology? How can Gender Reality be Ransomed? This article is available in Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics: http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/ solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 1 Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology Sr. Prudence Allen, RSM ______________________________________________________________________________ St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of Humanity, Pray for us Holy Mary of Guadalupe, Intercede for us Introduction This presentation will be divided into three basic sections: First, a description of the origins of sex ideology and gender ideology; Second, a mapping of the rapid spread, or 'going viral', of gender ideology; and Third, arguments drawing upon the work of Catholic philosophers for a vigorous defense of Gender Reality. 1 Much of the material in the first and second sections of this paper is disturbing to read; it is even more distressing to realize how many innocent persons have been and are being harmed through a combination of intentionally deceptive research methods and reporting of results. Thus, it is very important that it be brought into the light so that remedies and counter-arguments can be developed which are based on the truth about the real identities of women and of men. The Doctor of Humanity offers us a context and encouragement to undertake this difficult task. Thomas Aquinas in his Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians repeats Chapter 2 verse 14: But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumph, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. 2 Thomas then describes how to spread the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ everywhere: Here it should be noted that preachers of truth should do two things: namely to exhort in sacred doctrine and to refute those who contradict it. This they do in two ways: by debating with heretics and by practicing patience toward persecutors. 3 Debating well demands knowledge of the sources and arguments of one's opponents. It also helps us to practice patience towards those with whom we strongly disagree. I hope that this presentation will help us towards this goal. 1 Versions of this lecture were given at The American Catholic Philosophical Association Conference in Marina del Rey, California (November 3, 2012). the Gender Colloquium, University of Notre Dame Australia (July 2, 2013), and as Plenary Address for Conference on Thomas Aquinas: Teacher of Humanity, Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Center for Thomistic Studies, and John Paul II Forum, Houston, Texas. A fuller development of it will be published in The Concept of Woman: Search for Communion of Persons, Volume III: 1500-2010) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, Forthcoming c. 2015). 2 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, ed. J. Mortensen and E. Alarcón, trans. F.R. Larcher, O.P. et al. (Lander, Wyoming: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012), 427. 3 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary, 428. 1 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 2 I. What is the conflict between Gender Reality and Gender Ideology? The present conflict between what I call 'Gender Reality' and 'Gender Ideology' is the result of two different views of the human person. Gender Reality holds that human beings are 'always or for the most part' women or men, female or male. Gender Ideology holds that human beings fall along a continuum of 3, 5, or even 15 different loose groups of genders. Gender Reality is rooted philosophically in a descriptive metaphysics (Aristotelian and Thomistic grounded) and Gender Ideology is philosophically rooted in a revisionary metaphysics (Neo Platonist or Cartesian founded). 4 Finally, Gender Reality depends upon a hylomorphic (soul/body composite unity) understanding of a human person, woman or man; Gender Ideology leads to a deconstructionist approach to the human person as a loose collection of qualities, attributes, or parts. II. How gender ideologies begin Neo Platonic Reification of Masculinity and Femininity In distinguishing between the concept of gender and the word 'gender', it is helpful to notice that Neoplatonism has historically been associated with making masculinity and femininity into cosmic reified entities like Forms that tend to reduce the significance of the individual man or woman. For example, the Neoplatonist Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) introduced a theory in which the concept of gender as cosmic masculinity and femininity operated within a 'coincidence of opposites' with reified independence from bodily distinctions of male and female. 5 In 1620 Reform England, also influenced by Neoplatonism, a satirical text inverting article and noun, entitled Hic Mulier was answered by another satire reversing this play on words and engendered characteristics Haec Vir. 6 In this text, the concept and word 'gender' merged together when the satires focused on culturally gendered masculine clothing and characteristics ascribed to a woman and culturally gendered feminine clothes and characteristics ascribed to a man: "For since the days of Adam women were never so masculine; masculine in their genders and whole generations, from the mother, to the youngest daughter; masculine in number, from one to multitudes; masculine in case, even from the head to the foot; masculine in mood, from both speech, to impudent action; and masculine in tense: for (without redress) they were, are, and will be still most masculine, most mankind, and most monstrous." 7 Three-hundred years later, the Neoplatonic text The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris is commonly thought to have been the source for C.S. Lewis's Perelandra and other texts in his Space Trilogy. In Perelandra, the narrator (who is thought to be Lewis himself) separates Gender as a higher cosmic masculine and cosmic feminine reality from sex. In his words: "Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the 4 This distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics comes from Peter F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Metheun and Co., Ltd., 1961), 9. 5 See 'Nicholas of Cusa,' in Sr. Prudence Allen, RSM, The Concept of Woman: The Early Humanist Reformation (1250-1500) (Grand Rapids/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2007), 761-88. 6 Hic Mulier, A3, in Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640, eds. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 264-289, here 265. 7 Hic Mulier, 265. 2 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 3 adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; ... . [T]he male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine." 8 These three examples of Neoplatonic approaches to reified masculinity and femininity and cosmic gender reveal a certain tendency to devalue the concrete individual human being, man or woman, in comparison with some abstract 'real' form. This is not to suggest that especially C.S. Lewis ignores concrete women and men in his other works, or to argue that he or Nicholas Cusa would have agreed with the radical gender ideology that has become so evident in the 20th-21st centuries. However, a Neoplatonic approach to the human person especially as it influenced the Reform traditions, which accepted and built on Descartes' metaphysical dualism, ended up rejecting the Aristotelian/Thomistic concrete hylomophism or foundational soul/body composite identity of an individual woman or man. And it is this rejection that has led to the radical gender ideology of the present time. Sex Ideology: Proactive Reduction of Sex Identity to Sex acts Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) Dr. Alfred Kinsey, an entomologist, earned his Sc. D. from Harvard University in 1919 studying Gall Wasps. His original orientation towards animals and particularly insects, framed his attitude towards human beings as simply another kind of animal. 9 Raised in a Methodist Reform family, Kinsey totally rejected God and also the view that the human soul was both form and spirit. 10 Subsequently, when he became part of an interdisciplinary course on sexuality and marriage at Indiana University, he studied sexual activity as a human animal 'outlet', to use the word that characterized all his research. 11 Kinsey decided to quantify all aspects of a man's, woman's, and child's sexual 'outlets', by age, the size of organ and frequency of 'outlets' without being concerned whether the socalled 'outlet' occurred with the person alone, with members of the same or opposite sex, with animals, or with children. He included in his classification systems of men, any and all who would agree to give their sexual history in a detailed interview. The groups included serial rapists in prison, pedophiles, single men, married men, male prostitutes, and so on. Kinsey included in 8 C.S. Lewis, Perelandra: A Novel (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944), 214. 9 See Lionel Trilling, "The Kinsey Report," in Donald Porter Geddes, ed., An Analysis of the Kinsey Reports on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Female (New York: Mentor Books, 1954), 213-229. Trilling observes that while comparisons with animals are explicitly made throughout his two volumes on males and females, "Professor Kinsey is a zoologist and he properly keeps us always in mind of our animal kinship, even though he draws some very illogical conclusions from it;...", 218. 10 Wardell B. Pomeroy reports the following incident with Kinsey's 4-5 year old son Bruce when he said: "'Look at the pretty flower, Daddy, God made it.' 'Now Bruce,' Kinsey said gently, 'where did that flower really come from?' From a seed,' Bruce admitted. He had learned his father's lessons well.", Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, 1972), 29. 11 Consider just the titles of his chapters in Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia and London: W.B. Saunders Company, 1948), Part II: Factors Affecting Sexual Outlet, 6: Sexual Outlet, 7: Age and Sexual Outlet, 8: Marital Status and Sexual Outlet, 9. Age of Adolescence and Sexual Outlet, 10: Social Level and Sexual Outlet, 12: Rural-Urban Background and Sexual Outlet, 13: Religious Background and Sexual Outlet; and Part III: Sources of Sexual Outlet. xii-xv. 3 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 4 his classification systems of married women, women in common law relations as well as female prostitutes living with their handlers. 12 Kinsey's data samples were contaminated, and his work was actual more 'pseudo-science' than the hard science he claimed. When the volume on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published in 1948 with its initial claim of being based on interviews with '12,000' males and the volume on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953 with its claim of being based on interviews with 'nearly 8,000 females' it had the force in the popular culture of authority of numbers. Even though Kinsey revised his numbers down by claiming that he 'scientifically-conducted' interviews with 5,300 men and 5,940 women, it was widely received in the broader culture as describing the truth about human sexuality separated from any context of love, marriage, or human good. The publication of the first volume became a best seller and it promoted the theory that the greater the quantity of so called 'sexual outlets' the healthier the man or woman. According to Pomeroy, "... by the time Kinsey died there had been eleven printings of the Male volume..., and the book was translated into French, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Italian, Dutch and German." 13 Kinsey's report of the 'usual numbers' of sexual outlets in various population groups had a proactive influence on a hyper eroticism not only in the United States, but throughout the world. It redefined what had been considered 'normal' sexual activity and encouraged counselors, psychologists, and others to push his new version of normal. Kinsey's single-minded promotion of quantative amounts of sexual activities without regard to human relations eventually took on the qualities of a cultural sex ideology. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) The French philosopher, Michel Foucault thought that sexuality ought to displace sex identity in any analysis of this aspect of human life. In The History of Sexuality he claimed that "sex...[is] an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality." 14 Foucault argued further that sex identity was completely a social construct, and that the 'anchorage points' of "the body, anatomy, the biological, and the functional" should be eliminated in favor of "sexuality." 15 Here we see the elimination of the human being per se and its replacement by an experience. In Foucault's deconstructionist approach, the metaphysical foundation of the human being as composite substance or hylomorphic union of soul/body is jettisoned for a floating 'I think' or 'I feel' sexual pleasures. "In the spring of 1975 Foucault plunged passionately into San Francisco's gay community, attracted especially by the consensual sado-masochistic eroticism that flourished in a number of bathhouses in the Bay City at that time. In History of Sexuality, he argued that sex is an illusion, while at the same time he choose to seek purpose or intelligibility of his own identity in its multiple sexual acts. 12 See Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia and London: W.B. Saunders Company, 1953) and Paul H. Gebhard and Alan B. Johnson, The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938-1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research (Philadelphia/London/Toronto: W.B. Saunders Company, 1979). 13 Pomeroy, Kinsey and the Institute, 274. An immediate critique from the perspective of broader human values and sexual activity with respect to the Kinsey reports, can be found in Donald Porter Geddes, ed., An Analysis of the Kinsey Reports on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Female (New York, Mentor Books, 1954). 14 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980, 152. 15 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 156. 4 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 5 Foucault's rejection of sex identity had been preceded by his prediction in The Order of Things (1966) of the disappearance of man, the human being, from western culture. Stating that "man is a recent invention" and "an invention of a recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end." Foucault speculated that if structures of language crumbled "one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." 16 Foucault's deconstructive approach to the human being and his reduction of one's sex identity to maximization of sexual pleasures gained many adherents among intellectuals throughout the world. It also began to become a cultural sex ideology. Gender Ideology: Proactive Fragmentation of Gender Identity Margaret Mead (1901-1978) earned her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University, New York in 1929. She soon revolutionized methodologies that anthropologists used to study primitive cultures. Mead described her early goal: "So, in 1931, my problem, which I had declared to be central to the research I was undertaking, was to study the different ways in which cultures patterned the expected behavior of males and females." 17 Her articulation clearly emphasized how a man's or woman's identity resulted from what other persons expected of sexually differentiated behaviors. Mead concluded later that her research project to identify "... how culturally attributed contrasts in masculine and feminine behavior differentiated the character structure of men and women, seemed to have yielded very little." 18 She reoriented the field of anthropology away from any consideration of essential differences between the sexes and towards a relativism of 'sex styles'. During her research in south Asian primitive cultures Mead also rejected her familial Episcopalian religion for an attitude of cultural relativism. By 1949, in Male and Female, the anthropologist Margaret Mead claimed that sex-roles and sex-styles were simply culturally learned. In one example she argued: "Characteristic after characteristic in which the differences within a sex are so great that there is enormous overlapping are artificially assigned as masculine or feminine." 19 Mead's conclusion about the relativism of sex roles and sex identities flowed over into a reflection on the word 'gender' itself. She introduced the word 'gender' in a discussion about polygamy when she posited the difficulty a person has to imagine contrasts in other societies. In her words: "We know by sad experience how difficult it is for those who have been reared within one civilization ever to get outside its categories, to imagine, for instance, what a language could be like that had thirteen genders. Oh, yes, one says masculine, feminine, and neuter-and what in the world are the other ten?" 20 In her framing of this hypothetical question, Margaret Mead set the world stage, perhaps unknowingly, for a mutation of gender ideology to begin. Towards the end of her life, at a conference they both attended, Dr. John Money reported that Margaret Mead encouraged him to continue his work breaking sexual 16 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Guillimard, 1960), ed. R.D. Laing (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 386-87. 17 Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: Touchstone, 1972), 196. 18 Mead, My Earlier Years, 200. 19 Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (1949), 373. 20 Mead, Male and Female, 13. Bold my emphasis. 5 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 6 taboos related to incest and adult-child activities by telling him that: "This is something he has to do." 21 Dr. John Money (1921-2006), when a young man in New Zealand likely knew of Mead's anthropological research in his area of the world. Traveling to the United States for graduate studies, he completed a doctorate in Psychology in 1952 at Harvard University on the study of hermaphrodites. Shortly after its completion, Dr. Money was hired at John's Hopkins University Medical School to join a medical team in a newly formed gender clinic. In 1955, Money published a paper arguing directly from the study of 131 intersexed individuals to a conclusion about normal males and females, namely that gender identity is environmentally caused during the first two years of life. 22 Money later called this time-frame of approximately two years from birth to the settling of one's gender identity a gender gate or gender window. Twenty years later in 1975 Dr. Money continued to argue from the exception of hermaphrodites to the rule of all infants: "Convincing evidence that the gender identity gate was wide open when you were born and stayed open for some time thereafter can be found in matched pairs of hermaphrodites ... But is the gate also open for those who were sexually normal at birth? Transexuals give the answer-yes." 23 Dr. Money's gender-gate theory claimed that all children have a period of approximately two years from birth within which they could develop as either a male or a female. Money's fixed attitude towards the fluidity of all infant-children gender identity soon became a cultural gender ideology. III. What are the Characteristics of Sex and Gender Ideologies? In order to highlight specific characteristics of sex and gender ideologies this presentation will focus primarily on the work of Kinsey and Money with occasional references to similarities in Foucault and Mead. It will also go back and forth between Kinsey and Money in further elaboration of common elements in their arguments, research practices, and consequences. There is no doubt that Money was well aware of Kinsey's research and also that Mead personally encouraged Money's continued research. It is also likely that Foucault was well aware of Money's research on hermaphrodites. Gender Ideology developed mostly within the social sciences and pseudo-science under the radar of traditional philosophy and theology. Only recently have its corrupt roots and serious consequences come into the heart of rigorous philosophical and theological critique. In the next section, six erroneous aspects of sex and gender ideologies are identified. Faulty Arguments Arguing from the Exception to the Rule 21 John Money, Love and Love Sickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Difference and Pair-bonding (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), Introduction. 22 John Money, Doctoral Dissertation on Hermaphroditism: An Inquiry into the Nature of a Human Paradox, in John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (New York/London/Toronto/Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2000/2001), 33-34. My emphasis. 23 John Money and Patricia Tucker, Sexual Signatures: On Being a Man or a Woman (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), 90-91. 6 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 7 The first error of reasoning that we encounter in John Money's method is to argue from the exception of hermaphrodites to the rule that gender development is fluid and able to be changed in all children for a period of two years. Money argues from the fact that some children born with ambiguous sex identity could, with medical intervention, become either male or female to the conclusion that all children with normal sex identity from birth could become either male or female in gender. Michel Foucault made a similar error of reason when he analyzed the personal diary of Alexina-Herculine Barbin (1978). Identified as female at birth in 1838, Barbin developed male anatomy and physiology after puberty. Changing her civil status to male led to depression and suicide in 1868. Arguing from this exceptional case to a rule, Michel Foucault asks in the first paragraph of his text: "Do we truly need a true sex? With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative." 24 Foucault instead answered negatively. His error was to reason from the exception of hermaphrodites to the rule that no children should be male or female. Arguing from Multiple Parts (sexes and genders) to the Whole As early as 1955 John Money described "the sexuality of the individual [as] a cumulative composite of [six] separate sexes:" 25 The six separate sexes were called: Chromosomal sex, Gonadal Sex, Physiological sex, Morphological sex, Behavioral sex, and Psychological sex (gender-role/identity). 26 In 1972, Money and Ehrhardt continued this same pattern by sequential sub-titles in their book: Terminology and Nature of Hermaphroditism; Chromosomal and Gonadal Sex; Gonadal, Hormonal, and Morphologic Sex; and Fetal Hormonal Sex, the Nervous System, and Behavior; External Morphologic Sex and Assigned Sex; and Differentiation of Gender Identity; Gender Identity and Pubertal Hormones. 27 By 1975 Money introduced the concept of 'forks' in the road, which were detours 'selected' by an unborn individual, in the space and time between some of the earlier named sexes: chromosomal sex, gonadal sex, and external genitals, before the letter 'm' or 'f' are put on his or her birth certificate. 28 The question that a philosopher must ask is: "What guides this sequential and multivariate process?" In other words, how can an unborn human being, as a collection of different sexes, take a detour or fork when there is no organizing principle within the being? Money has no principle comparable to a substantial form which actualizes potentialities within the developing fetus. 24 Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, (Guillimard,1978), trans. Richard McDougall (The Harvester Press, 1980), vii. 25 J. Money, "Hermaphroditism, gender and precocity in hyperandrenocorticism: Psychological findings," Bulletin of Johns Hopkins Hospital, (2005) 96, 253-64. As summarized by David Crews, "Functional Associations in Behavioral Endocrinology," in Reinisch, et al, eds., Masculinity/Femininity, Chapter 6:83-105, here 91. 26 Crews, "Functional Associations", Table 6-2, 91. 27 Money and Ehrhardt, Man & Woman, Chapter 1, 6-25. In subsequent chapters further categories included internal genital, external genital, brain dimorphism, and gender dimorphic traditions; 41, 44, 95, 248-49, and 130ff. 28 See John Money & Patricia Tucker, Sexual Signatures: On Being a Man or a Woman, (Boston:/Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1975), 48-49. 7 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 8 Arguing from Artificial Division Gender-Identity/Role (G-I/R) to Fractured Identity In 1972 Dr. Money artificially separated 'Gender Identity' as private to an individual from 'Gender Role' as public expression to others. 29 Using a forward slash ( /) to keep this artificial distinction clear, he introduced the anagram G-I/R to represent "gender identity/role." 30 In this context he used 'masculinity' and 'femininity' to characterize proportions within a person who is more or less masculine or feminine in "vocational and domestic role" and "role as an erotic partner." 31 By1980, in Love and Love Sickness, in a chapter titled "Gender Identity/Role (G-I/R), Money described the mind in Cartesian terms: "Herein lies the issue of solipsism. Oneself, alone, is privy to what goes on in one's own mind. In the absence of its being overtly transmitted to other people behaviorally, that is to say, either in words or in body language, the content of one's mind remains forever covert and unknown to others." 32 Frank A. Beach raised an important question about Money's division between "the introspective component gender identity and his "defined gender role as a social script". In an essay entitled: "Alternative Interpretations of the Development of G-I/R". Beach stated: "Somewhere in the argument the distinction between gender role and gender identity gets lost. I understand that sociologists consider gender role as a script imposed on the individual by society. But what happens to gender identity? Is it relegated to Immanuel Kant's category of innate ideas?" 33 Arguing directly from animal behavior to human behavior Turning to another more serious error, the entomologist Kinsey, began to erroneously draw direct conclusions from insect sexual behavior to human behavior. Kinsey concluded that early sexual activity in children was a better preparation for successful adult sexual activity in human beings and conversely the lack of early sexual behavior would inhibit capacity for successful adult sexual behavior. A recent article by Judith A Reisman, et al., in the Ave Maria International Law Journal has demonstrated the direct link between Kinsey's arguments and SIECUS (supporting early sexual education and freedom for children's sexual expression) as well as UNESCO (promotion of international sexual education and freedom of children's sexual expression). 34 John Money was fascinated with lower forms of animals and fish. In his 1987 article on "Propaedeutics of Diecious G-I/R", he introduces the theme of "diecious fishes", or fish who sometimes breed as males and other times as female. Dr. Money concluded that "[o]nce science uncovers the secret of hermaphroditic versatility of sex-changing fish and parthenogenetic lizards, then on the criterion that today's science fiction becomes tomorrow's science, it will 29 Money, Man&Woman, 4 and 300-301. 30 Money, Man&Woman, 153. 31 Money, Man&Woman, 153. 32 Money, Love and Love Sickness, 153. 33 Frank A. Beach, "Alternative Interpretations of the Development of G-I/R," in Kinsey Institute Series, eds. Reinish, Rosenblum, and Sanders, Masculinity and Femininity: Basic Perspectives (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 29-36, here 30. 34 Judith A. Reisman, Mary E. McAlister, and Paul E. Rondeau, "Global Sex Deviance Advocacy: The Trojan Horse to Destroy the Family and Civil Society: A Report on UNESCO and International Planned Parenthood Federation," Ave Maria International Law Journal (Spring 2012): Vol 1, no 2: 231-263. 8 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 9 undoubtedly be applied to mammals. Thus, one can envisage a future when sex-irreducible G-I/R will no longer be fixed and irreducible, but, by a process equivalent to reverse embryogenesis, it will be sex reversible." 35 Dr. Money considered that "The chief source of empirical data on juvenile erotosexual rehearsal play is the Wisconsin Regional Primate Center where juvenile rhesus monkeys have been studied." 36 He derived from this study where both female and male monkeys deprived of sex play in early life proved unable to mate in later life, a conclusion that "It may well play an extremely influential role as a critical-period phenomenon wherein nature and nurture merge to establish future erotosexual health, male and female." 37 He began to introduce pornography into his therapy sessions in the gender identity clinic with young children, and to give lectures on the so called 'positive uses' of pornography in the home and school. 38 Power, deception, and harming the Innocent In this next section further aspects of Kinsey's and Money's research methods and promulgation of research results which came to light over time will be described. Here we begin to discover the pernicious effects of their ideologies on people. Abuse of power to promote the ideology Dr. Kinsey had the utilitarian requirement for anyone who wanted to hear a lecture by him or have some other favor from him such as employment, to agree to give an interview sex history. 39 The interview techniques involved frequent use of what philosophers call 'the fallacy of a complex question', i.e., "trying to support a proposition with an argument in which that proposition is a premise." 40 The interviewer would ask 'When did you start ____ sexual activity?' and this question would be repeated frequently even when the person denied they had ever done that particular act. Kinsey's associate Wardell Pomeroy later on described it this way: "We also never asked whether a subject had ever engaged in a particular activity; we assumed that everyone had engaged in everything, and so we began by asking when he had done it." 41 35 Money, "Propaedeutics of Diecious G-I/R", in Masculinity and Femininity, 18-19. See Frank Beach's argument that Money's theory about the dimorphic brain schemata present in both males and females implies an erroneous leap from the general to the particular, "because his list includes both human and animal behavior...in several cases [where] no such implication appears justified.", in "Alternative Interpretations of G-I/R", in Masculinity and Femininity, 33. 36 Money, "Propaedeutics of Diecious G-I/R", 26. 37 Money, "Propaedeutics of Diecious G-I/R", 26. 38 Money, "Pornography in the Home," in Zubin and Money, eds, Contemporary Sexual Behavior (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 409-440, here, 410. 39 For interviewing techniques see, Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in The Human Male, 35-62; Gebhard, The Kinsey Data, 11-24; Wardell B. Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and The Institute for Sex Research, 97-137); and for critique of interviewing techniques see Judith A. Reisman, Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences :The Red Queen & the Grand Scheme (Arlington, Virginia: The Institute for Media Education, Ind., 1998), 28-31; 58-63 and 211 ff. 40 See 'Fallacies' in David Kelley, The Art of Reasoning (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988), Chapter 6, here 133. 41 Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex, 112. This fallacious approach to interviewing was pursued indefinitely. For example, Pomeroy adds: "If a subject was of low mentality we might pretend that we had misunderstood his negative reply, and ask another question as though he had answered affirmatively; for instance, 9 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 10 The abuse of power in this technique eventually wore down the resistance of the person being interviewed until many would make up an answer to just get over the process. Kinsey also told his university audiences that he would not agree to speak unless everyone in the audience would be interviewed. This brought peer pressure onto the young women or men to complete the interview. Finally, the content of the interview involved specific mention of every conceivable sexual act, and the interviewee would often use slang words for these acts that would be commonly understood by the group to which the person interviewed belonged. The overblown statistical results, whether true or not, ended up promoting sex activities under the implication that 'everyone did it.' At the time of Kinsey's gathering of his data, some individuals protested, but most people did not realize what was happening. Another abuse of power in Kinsey's work was his use of persons as 'objects' rather than subjects of sexual activity. This obvious utilitarian use of the person reduced him or her from a loved 'someone' to a used 'something.' 42 Kinsey's reports made no connection between sexual activity, married love, the generation of children, and a woman's experience of maternity. The reports also seemed to encourage sexual activity outside of marriage, breaking promises of fidelity for experiences with prostitutes, homosexual partners, and other heterosexual spouses. It suggested that adults 'need' this kind of variety for their 'sexual outlets'. John Colapinto, a journalist, who gained the trust of the members of a family who had been clients of Dr. Money's gender identity clinic, has left for posterity a detailed record about how Money's abuse of power was directed towards individual persons. 43 After John Money's research method of arguing from hermaphrodites to normal male and female children was criticized by a medical research team from Kansas in 1958 and another one from Toronto in 1959, 44 Money thought he found "a perfect controlled experiment" to prove his gender identity theory: two normal identical male twins where one could be brought up as a boy and the other as a girl. A Canadian couple from Winnipeg with identical twin boys born in 1965, Bruce and Brian Reimer, consulted at Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic for help because one son (Bruce) had lost his penis through a poorly performed circumcision. So Dr. Money recommended bringing up the wounded son as a girl surgically, medically, and socially; and he insisted that this not be revealed in any way to either of the 22 month old children. Consequently, the wounded child Bruce's name was changed to Brenda, and he was castrated in 1967. Mrs. Reimer and Mr. Reimer were told to constantly reinforce typical (i.e. stereotyped behaviors of girls and boys in every possible way. In spite of Dr. Money's projected goal of helping this normal male child grow up as a 'normal' female, Brenda fought the change continuously. Even with hormonal displacement and continuous reminders about what girls do 'Yes, I know you have never done that, but how old were you the first time you did it?' To make it as easy as possible for subjects to correct their answers, we ignored contradictions, accepting the correction as though it were a first reply". 113. 42 See Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference Between 'Someone' and 'Something', trans. Oliver O'Donovan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 43 John Colapinto As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (New York/London/Toronto/Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2000/2001). 44 Colapinto As Nature Made Him, 44-46. 10 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 11 and what boys do, by 1970, Brenda was not adjusting well to being told he was a she. He was a normal active boy, a physical fighter, hitting and attacking others, and actually defending his brother. He poorly adjusted to school and suffered a great deal. During annual visits of bringing the Reimer children to the clinic, in a clear abuse of power, Dr. Money encouraged sexual play between the two with one being the girl and the other the boy, and he photographed the children in these positions. The twins, during a later interview by John Colapinto said that Dr. Money "would show us pictures of kids–boys and girls- with no clothes on....; and also showed them pictures of adults engaged in sexual intercourse. He'd say to us, I want to show you pictures of things that moms and dads do.'" 45 Dr. Money even suggested that Mrs. Reimer walk around nude at home and that the parents allow their children to observe them having sexual intercourse. They refused to comply to this latter suggestion. In 1978, at the annual visit of the Reimers to Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Money wanted to convince 13 year-old Brenda to have further sex-change surgery. He introduced Brenda to an adult transsexual, and the adolescent patient fled his office, never to return again. Through the help of Dr. Mary McKenty, a Psychiatrist in Winnipeg, the Reimers were encouraged to tell their 15 year olds the truth about what had happened so many years ago. In March 1980, as soon as Brenda learned the truth, she immediately made the decision to revert to the biological male sex of her birth, and to take the name of David. In spite of the complete failure of John Money's Baconian experiment, he always publically claimed it was a success. Deception in research methods, results, and ignoring facts The Kinsey Institute, located in an elegant house near the campus of Indiana University, provided a veneer of respectability to the project of the study of sexuality and also to those who worked at the Institute of Sexology. Only much later has it become know what actually happened in the Institute. It is now known that behind the walls every conceivable kind of sexual activity was occurring in multiple combinations of people there or who were specially invited and much of it was being filmed. 46 Thanks to the work of Judith Reisman and others, it is also known that many of these activities included children from birth to eight years, whose parents offered them up for the experiments. 47 The Kinsey Institute not only deceived those whom they interviewed, but it also deceived governmental agencies and members of the public about the nature of their research and the facts that did or did not support their exaggerated claims. As the truth began to trickle out funding was withdrawn, and towards the end of Kinsey's life the Institute was no longer able to continue as in the past. By that time, sex ideology was launched through media and journalism, and it began a new life of its own in willing hosts. A similar result came to Dr. John Money's project of reconfiguring gender. In 1972, a shift from academic professionals to broad public audiences occurred when Dr. John Money published, through the Johns Hopkins Press, Man & Woman Boy & Girl: The Differentiation and 45 Colapinto, As Nature Made Him, 86. 46 Linda Wolfe, Kinsey: Public and Private (New York: New Market, 2004), 15-80; Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research, 47 Judith Reisman, "Global Sex Deviance Advocacy," in Ave Maria International Law Journal (spring 2012): especially 252-61. Reisman, Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences, chapters 3 and 4, 51-90 and chapter 7, 140-186. 11 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 12 Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity. In this book, intentionally deceiving the public, he proclaimed the 'great success of his twins experiment' in spite of the fact that he knew it was failing. Sprinkled through the book Money states proudly, after describing his successes in gender identity-differentiation among human hermaphrodites, "A similar extraordinary contrast has been observed even which a child born as a normal male was surgically reassigned as a female...[I]n gender behavior, she is quite gender-different from her identical twin brother." 48 This new book of Money's was praised on its cover by The New York Times: "The Brilliant New Landmark study of human sexuality... The most important work since the Kinsey Reports!"; Time Magazine soon followed. The conclusion most often repeated was that sex and gender identity was more due to environmental factors than to genes, anatomy, hormones and other natural factors from conception, birth, and puberty. Money himself "made the case the centerpiece of his public addresses, rarely giving a speech in which he did not mention it." 49 In 1975, Dr. Paul McHugh was appointed as psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. McHugh requested a systematic study of those who had gender identity changes at the Gender clinic. After two years he realized that "we in the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Department eventually concluded that human sexual identity is mostly built into our constitution by the genes we inherit and the embryogenesis we undergo." 50 In 1979, Dr. Paul McHugh closed down the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital and soon after moved Dr. Money's office off campus and limited his teaching. However, John Money continued to publish his false claims about the gender gate and his 'so-called proof' for changing a normal male to female gender. Even though Dr. Money and the general public continued to herald Dr. Money's 'twins experiment', Dr. Milton Diamond from Toronto had published serious doubts about 'the twin' case in two journals; he "never deviated from his conviction that sex reassignment of a developmentally normal infant was impossible." 51 Around this time, the BBC had discovered where the Reimer twins lived and went to school to film for a program called "Open Secret" on medical scandals. After the BBC's report in 1979, Dr. Money just went silent on the Reimer case, but by then it had become part of a 'gender ideology' which had its own trajectory. Harming the Innocent It is a characteristic of ideologies that in addition to ignoring facts and abusing power, they also tend to harm innocent persons. Beginning with Kinsey we already noted his focus on children's sexual activity, and his promotion of it as healthy even when initiated by adults. His reports contained clear sections of data which quantified sexual arousal in children from 0-8 48 John Money & Anke A. Ehrhardt, Man & Woman Boy & Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library Mentor Book, 1972).19. The text also refers the reader to further details in this case in Chapter 7 of the text) 49 Colapinto, As Nature Made Him, 71. 50 Paul McHugh, "Surgical Sex" in First Things (November 2004): 1-6, here 4. 51 Colapinto, As Nature Made Him, 45ff, 166 ff, 174ff. 12 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 13 years, citing that they were stimulated by an adult. Even though Kinsey was careful to mention that one of the child's parents was always in the room, there is no doubt that pedophile behavior was occurring even behind a screen of scientific research. Kinsey also argued that early sexual activity in children, in analogy with animals, was a better preparation for successful activity in adults. 52 We also noted that Kinsey's research techniques involved suggesting to, and even badgering, innocent and chaste college age students with questions about when they began and how often continued all kinds of sexual activities. When the Kinsey reports on male and female behavior were published what sort of harm may they have caused people who thought they should engage in these activities in order to be 'healthy'? Did the Kinsey reports contribute to creating an environment conducive to the explosion of the seminarian and priest initiation of homosexual activities with youths and children? Michel Foucault, our other example of someone promoting a sex ideology, turns out to have knowingly with AIDS participated in group sex in 1983 in the bathhouses of San Francisco without informing others of his contagious fatal illness. 53 In his History of Sexuality, Foucault 'prophetically' predicted his own way of death: "The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for... ; the grumble of death [is] within it." 54 Sex ideology replaced the culture of life with the culture of death. Returning to John Money's gender ideology we discover that each member of the Reimer family was harmed by Money's use of them for his experiment to prove his theory of the gender gate between birth and two years of age. Dr. Paul McHugh stated unequivocally in his critique of Dr. Money's approach at John's Hopkins: "I have witnessed a great deal of damage from sex-reassignment. The children transformed from their male constitution into female roles suffered prolonged distress and misery as they sensed their natural attitudes. Their parents usually lived with guilt over their decisions-second guessing themselves and somewhat ashamed of the fabrication, both surgical and social, they had imposed on their sons." 55 The harsh reality of human suffering for the Reimer family was not only evident in the parents' struggles with alcoholism and depression, but it may have contributed significantly in 2002 when Brian Reimer died from an overdose of medicine for his mental disease of schizophrenia; and again in 2004 when David Reimer died from shooting himself in the head after a time of despair. In addition, John Money lectured on "Pornography in the Home: A Topic in Medical Education." 56 Dr. Money's approach to pornography is clearly stated in this professional essay. He explicitly showed pornographic images to audiences and argued forcefully for the so-called 52 See Table 34 in Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 180, and Reisman, Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences, note 44, 147. 53 See James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 27-29 and 253; and Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 125-26 who refers his reader to the more detailed account of these events in Miller's text. 54 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 156. Grenz, in A Primer on Postmodernism, summarizes the sex-acts that Foucault was choosing to undertake at the very same time as he was writing his History of Sexuality, 253. 55 Paul McHugh, "Surgical Sex,"6. 56 Money, "Pornography in the Home," in Zubin and Money, Contemporary Sexual Behavior, 409-440. 13 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 14 value of sharing of this kind of imagery in schools and homes "into the total context of sex education." 57 He argued that exposure to pornographic images, even at a young age, is valuable because they "lead to the possibility of bettering one's own sex life, leading one to have less guilt and fewer 'hang-ups', and more honesty and freedom about sex"; furthermore, he added that "one becomes better able to help others by achieving a position...of non judgmentalism;" and "satiation effect,...the half-life of pornography...is from about two to four hours out of your total lifetime. So... perhaps you better make sure you'll enjoy it tonight!" 58 Money forged a solid connection between the more general theme of a woman or man's gender identity and erotic experience and sexual orientation; and he publically promoted pedophilia. 59 In Sexual Signatures (1975) Money argued that it is good to encourage children to observe sexual intercourse of adults, and that "the best time to introduce such pictures [The Pictorial Guide to Sexual Intercourse, by Schwenda and Leuchner, 1969] is before a child's biological clock has signaled the start of puberty." 60 He further argued against the "incest taboo." 61 Finally, in this same text, Money argued that it was possible that "all humans are capable of developing a bisexual gender identity/role....and giving it an erotic expression, ..." Money's praise for pornography was also paired with a direct attack on the Catholic Church-a pattern that repeats itself over and over again. In his 1970 essay promoting pornography in the home and school, he draws an analogy called "an allegory of the Crucifixion". Money argues that even though millions of children for two-thousand years have learned at Church on Sunday's about 'how to commit a crucifixion', he adds that he has "not heard of children who come home and play crucifixion games with their dolls or playmates." Money concludes: "Pornography does not automatically have the power to incite behavior." 62 Contemporary research proves otherwise, and it also demonstrates how pornography increases the culture of death against the civilization of love. When working on research for gender ideology I was surprised to discover four of Dr. John Money's books in our seminary library, and again I thought about the innocent persons harmed by the behavior of some seminarians and priests because of the forcefulness of those promoting a gender ideology. IV. How did Gender Ideology 'Go Viral?'' As I pondered and researched the problem of gender ideology further, I discovered that Dr. Money's works had soon after their publication become imbedded into secular feminist text books. An analogy with the way a virus spreads and the contemporary expression about an electronic photo or story 'going viral' seemed to apply. A virus has to find a willing host cell to 57 Money, "Pornography in the Home," 410. 58 Money, "Pornography in the Home," 418-19. For a more detailed description of his interactions with the Reimer twins about this theme, see Colapinto, As Nature Made Him, 86ff. Money also drew upon some hypotheses (which turned out later to be false) about the value of "sexual rehearsal play" among Australian aborigines, the Yolngu, 88 ff. 59 John Money, "Interview in Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia (Spring 1991), vol 2. no. 3, p. 5 as reported in Wikipedia, 'On pedophilia,'available at http://wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money [accessed 12/22/2011]. 60 Money, Sexual Signatures, 134. 61 Money, Sexual Signatures, 182. 62 Money, "Pornography in the Home," 417. 14 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 15 attach itself to, and it usually destroys the host cell or ends it normal activities before moving on to infect another cell. 63 Adopted by Feminists The original promoters of sex and gender ideologies were not educated in the academic field of perennial philosophy. Instead they worked in areas of pseudo-science and social sciences such as anthropology. The next phase of gender ideology is formed by persons almost all in social sciences, literature, or politics. Again these authors were really not engaged with traditional philosophers or theologians during this phase when gender ideology mutated from a more isolated phenomenon into the broader culture of the women's movement. Secular Feminists In 1970, in chapter two of her book Sexual Politics Kate Millett (1934-) introduced the term 'gender' and its use with respect to establishing a core gender identity by the age of eighteen months. 64 She followed the line of thought of Robert Stoller, who had established a gender identity clinic in California. 65 Chapter two of this text was drawn from her PhD dissertation in Literature from Columbia University in 1970. Millett begins "Indeed, so arbitrary is gender, that it may even be contrary to physiology;" 66 Millet directly quotes Stoller, who includes reference himself to Dr. John Money "...although the external genitalia (penis, testes, scrotum) contribute to the sense of maleness, no one of them is essential for it, not even all of them together. In the absence of complete evidence, I agree in general with Money, and the Hampsons, who show in their large series of intersexed patients that gender role is determined by postnatal forces, regardless of the anatomy and physiology of the external genitalia.'" 67 Millett then directly quotes John Money approving his view: "...the condition existing at birth and for several months thereafter is one of psychosexual undifferentiation." 68 In 1966, Kate Millett became a member of the National Organization of Women (NOW), shortly after it was founded. Another early feminist connection with Dr. Money occurred through Dr. Alice Rossi (1922-2009), who earned her doctorate in sociology at Columbia University a sociologist who was a founding member of NOW in 1966. 69 Rossi was hired by Johns Hopkins University and 63 See Introduction to viruses: "... most virus infections eventually result in the death of the host cell...(cell 'suicide')...; and often cell death is caused by cessation of its normal activity..." Available from http://en.eikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_viruses [accessed 2/6/12], 1 of 1. 64 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970), 29. 65 Millett, Sexual Politics, 30, referring back to Robert J. Stoller, Sex and Gender (New York: Science House, 1968, 9. 66 Millett, Sexual Politics, 30. 67 Millett, Sexual Politics, 30, referring back to Stoller, Sex and Gender, 48, who in turn refers back to J. Money, J.G. Hampson, and J.L, hampson (1955). "An Examination ... of Human Hermaphroditism" and J. Money, J. G. Hampson, and J. L. Hampson (1957). "Imprinting and ... Gender Role". 68 Millett, Sexual Politics, 30, referring to John Money, "Psychosexual Differentiation," in Sex Research, New Developments (New York: Holt, 1965), 12. 69 A step in the rapid spread of gender ideology is found in the collaborative work of Dr. Money; with the previously well-established field of sexology as represented by the Kinsey reports (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) and subsequent reports of Masters and Johnson (Human Sexual Response (1966) and Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970). All of these elements were in place at the 61 st annual 15 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 16 Goucher College in Baltimore when Dr. Money was running his Gender Identity Clinic. She participated with him in a 1970 symposium at Johns Hopkins that also included Masters and Johnson. In addition, Alice Rossi's seminal work, The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, was published in 1973, when many universities were beginning courses in women's studies and feminist studies. Alice Rossi also gave attention early on to abortion rights for women. 70 Feminists also produced text books for academic courses using Money's descriptions about gender identity/role; and these provided hosts for gender ideology that spread throughout universities across America, Canada, England, Australia, and the English-speaking world. Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach was published in 1978 in the four countries of England, Australia, Canada, and the United States. In the preface, its two authors Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna state "Our theoretical position is that gender is a social construction, that a world of two 'sexes' is a result of the socially shared, taken for granted methods which members use to construct reality." 71 This textbook cites seven different sources authored by John Money; and it incorporates nearly verbatim many of Money's definitions. In just one example: "Gender identity refers to an individual's own feeling of whether she or he is a woman or a man, or a girl or a boy. In essence gender identity is self-attribution of gender." 72 The text repeats all the various arguments from cross cultural studies and from animal studies to humans. A second example of a popular textbook is provided by The Question of Sex Differences: Psychological, Cultural, and Biological Issues authored by Katharine Hoyenga and Kermit Hoyenga. This book was published in the US and Canada in 1979. Even though the title emphasizes the word 'sex', the content completely adopts Money's use of terms and definitions for gender identity and gender role. 73 The Hoyengas changed Dr. Money's list of sexes and genders to a list completely of genders in a chart titled: "Eight Definitions of Gender: Chromosomal Gender, Gonadal Gender, Hormonal Gender, Gender of the Internal Sexual Accessory Organs, Gender of External Genitals, Gender of Rearing, Gender Identity, [and] Gender Role." 74 The academic secular feminists discussed in this section were moderate feminists who laid the ground-work for gender ideology to "go viral". In the next section, the word 'gender' gets infused with more radical meaning which added to its virulence. American Psychopathological Association Conference sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore in 1970. Dr. Alice Rossi, a moderate feminist, was a participant in this same conference. In 1959, Rossi had been hired to teach full time in Sociology at the University of Chicago. 70 In the conference proceedings, Saul Rosenzweig supported early detection of fetal sex and simple abortion so that "parental choice of neonate sex would become fairly simple", Contemporary Sexual Behavior, 202. Rossi also wrote: "Feminists of all political stripes have been united in their insistence on the right of women to control their own bodies, have been sharply critical of masculine assumptions concerning female sexuality, and, hence, have demanded safe contraceptives and abortion repeal...:", 155. 71 Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (NewYork.Chichester/Brisbane/Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, 1978), vii. 72 Kessler and McKenna, Gender, 8. 73 Katharine Blick Hoyenga and Kermit T. Hoyenga, The Question of Sex Differences: Psychological, Cultural, and Biological Issues (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 4, referring back to Money and Ehrhardt, Man &Woman. 74 Hoyenga and Hoyenga, Sex Differences, 5. 16 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 17 Marxist Feminists Gayle Rubin (1949-), after completing her MA in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, introduced the phrase 'sex/gender system' in her 1975 article "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." Following a Marxist approach, she defined the phrase: "...the 'sex/gender system' is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied." 75 Arguing that men traffic in women to satisfy their sexual needs, Rubin argued: "Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes [into men and women]. It is a product of the social relations of sexuality" 76 Rubin's solution to the so-called division of sexes is to reorganize the sex/gender system, in her words, by "... the elimination of obligatory sexualities and sex roles. The dream I find most compelling is one of an androgynous and genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one's sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love." 77 Rubin leaned towards a Marxist political interpretation of gender. By 1978 she turned her own life and research towards completing her doctorate in Anthropology for the University of Michigan on sado-maschism in gay men and lesbian women from San Francisco. 78 Dr. Rubin is presently teaching a course on Foucault in her position as Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Rubin's phrase 'the sex/gender system' became popular among many feminists, including many who did not realize its Marxist roots. More popularly the phrase 'sex/gender system' was used to emphasize by the forward slash, that sex is a biological category totally separated from gender as a psycho-social category. Following a Cartesian mentality, sex is limited to bodily characteristics and gender is limited to social psychological characteristics felt in the mind. This division between mind and body is symbolized by a forward slash as in sex/gender. Over time, however, the 'category' of gender broadened to include various kinds of sexual activity and medically transgendered human beings. Once this happened, the body entered into gender through the back door, and we begin to get the original two genders of man and woman, expanded to five, ten, or fifteen including variously examples such as intersex bisexuals (male or female), homosexuals (male or female), heterosexuals (male or female), transgendered males, transgendered females and so on. So the original sex/gender system, the separation of gender from sex, collapses in on itself. 75 Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Rayna R. Reiter, Monthly Review Press (1995): 157-212, here 159. 76 Rubin, "Traffic in Women," 179. 77 Rubin, "Traffic in Women," 204. 78 Gayle Rubin, "The Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco 1960-1990", Phd Diss. U of Michigan, 1994. 17 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 18 Post Modern Feminists Another pathway of androgyny mentioned by Ruben follows a postmodern or nominalist approach to words and categories. In this understanding both sex and gender differentiation disappear into a sexless and genderless human being which, as we saw in Michel Foucault, in turn itself disappears. The identity of the person evaporates. Some intellectual radical feminists began to follow this pathway of collapse. Monica Wittig argues in 1980 that since gender is a socially constructed political concept, it ought to be reconstructed: "Man" and "woman" are political concepts of opposition, and the copula which dialectically unites them is, at the same time, the one which abolishes them. It is the class struggle between women and men which will abolish men and women. The concept of difference has nothing ontological about it. It is only the way that the masters interpret a historical situation of domination. The function of difference is to mask at every level the conflicts of interest, including the ideological ones. In other words, for us, this means there cannot any longer be women and men, and that as classes and categories of thought or language they have to disappear, politically, economically, ideologically. 79 Wittig concludes that since sex and gender are socially constructed, they ought to be abolished. Teresa de Laureates in her 1987 text Technologies of Gender, claims that gender is the effect produced in bodies by complex political technology which produces technologies of sex, technologies of gender, and socially constructed engendered beings. She describes the partial deconstruction of the human being in Technologies of Gender: "We cannot resolve or dispel the uncomfortable condition of being at once inside and outside gender either by desexualizing it (making gender merely a metaphor, a question of difference, of purely discursive effects) or by androgynizing it (claiming the same experience of material conditions for both genders in a given class, race, or culture). 80 In 1988, Biddy Martin takes a further step in developing contemporary consequences of Foucault's social construct argument when she states that: For Foucault, the question of the truth of one's sex, of one's self is not a self-evident question, and the answers which literature, medicine, psychiatry and religion provide are, in fact, a matter of rendering our bodies and psyches subject to control. Having created sex and gender as problems of a particular kind, the experts must necessarily intervene in our lives to provide solutions and to bind us within a particular identity, a subjectivity. 81 79 Monique Wittig, "The Straight Mind," Feminist Issues, vol.1 (summer 1980), 108. 80 Teresa de Laureates, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U. Press, 1987), 11. 81 Biddy Martin, "Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault," Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, eds. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Illinois: Northwestern U. Press, 1988), 14. 18 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 19 Martin considers what she perceives as a difficulty of modern feminists, or how to "desexualize the category of woman" at the same time as woman is kept as a starting point for critical reflection on oppressive structures of society. She sees this as the paradox of desexualization and cultural criticism. By 1990, Judith Butler entered the dialogue about the deconstruction of gender with her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. She recognizes the contradictions that catch post-modern feminists: "...Wittig calls for the destruction of 'sex' so that women can assume the status of a universal subject." 82 In this paradoxical move, Wittig seeks to keep some semblance of gender identity at the same time as she is abolishing the ontological grounds for its stability. In Butler's words: "Wittig appears to dispute the metaphysics of substance, but on the other hand, she retains the human subject, the individual, as the metaphysical locus of agency." 83 Butler recognizes the serious implications of the deconstructive approach which flows from a theory that gender and sex are only socially constructed: But once we dispense with the priority of "man" and "woman" as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility. 84 More recently, in her 2004 text, Undoing Gender Judith Butler continues her philosophical critique of postmodern feminist and political approaches to the question of sex and gender identity. Her questions raise fundamental issues, while her solutions at times get caught in the cross-fire of the social sciences, politics, and philosophy. 85 V. How did the Gender Ideology Virus 'Get Mapped'? When a new virus gets noticed, medical experts begin immediately to map its movement from one location to another. By analogy, Catholic journalists and attorneys began to map the gender ideology virus. Their persistent sounding of alarm was remarkable; and we have to be very grateful for their work. Catholic Journalists and Attorneys Dale O'Leary The American writer Dale O'Leary described in her book, The Gender Agenda, how preparations were being made in different regional meetings of Non-Governmental 82 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 20. 83 Butler, Gender Trouble, 25. 84 Butler, Gender Trouble, 24. 85 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (Routledge: New York and London, 2004). See especially Chapter 9 "The End of Sexual Difference?", 174-273. 19 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 20 Organizations (NGO's) for the United Nations world conference in Mexico City in 1975 for the UN Year of the Woman and to prepare for the Decade of Women proclaimed by the United Nations (1976-1985). At one regional conference for Latin America in 1977, which met in Mar del Plato, Argentina, Marta Llamas, a Mexican Feminist, proposed a theory of five sexes. Her words sound like a carbon copy of Dr. John Money's theory: Biology shows that, outwardly, human beings can be divided into two sexes; nevertheless, there are more combinations that result from the five physiological areas which, in general and very simple terms, determine what is called the biological sex of a person: genes, hormones, gonads, internal reproductive organs and external reproductive organs (genitals). These areas control the five types of biological processes in a continuum... A quick but somewhat insufficient classification of these combinations obliges one to recognize at least five biological sexes: men (persons who have two testicles); women (persons who have two ovaries); hermaphrodites or herms (in which there are at the same time one testicle and one ovary); masculine hermaphrodites or merms (persons who have testicles, but present other feminine sexual characteristics; [and] feminine hermaphrodites or ferms (persons with ovaries, but with masculine sexual characteristics). 86 In addition to this proposal for five equal sexes, Marta Llamas also argued that a person's identity as a man or woman is simply socially constructed. She often spoke of gender and defined it as: "the symbolization that each culture establishes over sexual difference." 87 During September 1-4, 1994, representatives from 179 governments around the world met in Cairo for a United Nations Program of Action on a variety of global issues. A large group of NGO's met just before the United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. At this conference a rather intense argument erupted over the meaning of the word 'gender' which was frequently used in a draft text. American secular feminist and National Organization of Woman leader Congresswoman Bella Abzug tried to redefine gender, or blur distinctions when others tried to stop her. 88 In her words: "The current attempt by several Member States to expunge the word gender from the Platform for Action and to replace it with the word sex is an insulting and demeaning attempt to reverse the gains made by women, to intimidate us, and to block further progress." 89 Politicizing the discussion of the meaning of the words 'sex and gender' Abzug continued: "We urge the small number of male and female delegates seeking to sidetrack and sabotage the empowerment of women to cease this diversionary tactic. They will not succeed. They will only waste precious time. We will not go back to subordinate inferior roles." 90 Her political position was based on a kind of Cartesian unisex equality which promoted abortion rights, the social construction of 86 Marta Llamas, "Cuerpo: Diferencia sexual y género", in Dale O'Leary, The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality (Lafayette, Louisana: Vital Issues Press, 1997), 69-70. 87 Llamas, "Cuerpo," in O'Leary, The Gender Agenda, 71. 88 For a thorough description of the arguments and tactics, see O'Leary, The Gender Agenda, 86ff. 89 O'Leary, The Gender Agenda, 87. 90 O'Leary, The Gender Agenda, 87. 20 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 21 several sexes and genders. After considerable discussion, in the end, the 'word' gender was left vague in the documents to mean "as it has been commonly used and understood". 91 This common usage of the word 'gender' which had been generally understood as referring to the two basic divisions into male and female human beings now became the target of the gender ideology virus. It is at this point that gender ideology proponents sought to dominate the discussion and resolutions at the United Nations Fourth Conference on Women in Beijing, China in 1995 by redefining equality of men and women to mean statistical equality in every kind of work or political situation. Dale O'Leary summarized it: "The Gender Agenda begins with a false premise-the differences between men and women are social constructs-and then goes on to demand that this premise be 'mainstreamed' in every program and policy." 92 As a result of her research on Gender Ideology, Dale O'Leary concluded that the word 'gender' itself was toxic. She recommended abandoning the use of the word 'gender' in "Don't Say Gender when you mean Sex." 93 Mary Ann Glendon Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard Law Professor was appointed head of the Vatican Delegation to UN Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995. Glendon provides a welcome insight into the mind of John Paul II towards the actual work of that conference in her written summary: "... our assessment of [documents of the conference] their pros and cons was communicated to the Vatican Secretariat of State. On Thursday morning, we received the Holy Father's decision: Accept what is positive, but vigorously reject what cannot be accepted." 94 Details about the fight over the use and meaning of the word 'gender' in the preliminary conferences leading up to the UN international conference were reviewed. Mary Ann Glendon states: "Accordingly, the Holy See delegation associated itself in part, with several reservations, with the conference documents... A controversy over the word "gender" that loomed before the conference had been largely defused with a consensus that gender was to be understood according to ordinary usage in the United Nations context." 95 Consequently, Pope John Paul recognized the need to clearly set boundaries for the conflict between those who wanted to take over the word 'gender' for political purposes and those who desired to keep its meaning within the usual range referring to women and men. In her words: The Holy See, however, deemed it prudent to attach to its reservations a further, more nuanced, statement of interpretation, in which it disassociated itself from rigid biological determinism as well as from the notion that sexual identity is indefinitely malleable. In keeping with the Holy Father's instruction to vigorously reject what was unacceptable, my concluding 91 O'Leary, The Gender Agenda, 159. 92 O'Leary, The Gender Agenda, 161. 93 Dale O'Leary, "Don't Say Gender when you mean Sex." Available from Pontifical Council on the Laity: Women's Section (January-February 2012), 1-5, here 2. 94 Mary Ann Glendon, "What Happened at Beijing," Traditions in Turmoil (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2006), chapter 37: 301-13, here 310. 95 Glendon, "What Happened at Beijing," 310. 21 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 22 statement was sharply critical of the conference documents for the remaining deficiencies that our delegation had tried from the beginning to publicize and remedy." 96 In addition, Mary Ann Glendon's fight in Beijing against the expanding reach of gender ideology led her to realize that the gender ideology virus had mutated far from the text books of academics into a world-wide epidemic that was poised to redound back onto individual nations with a new virulence. In her words: The most important political lesson to be taken from the Beijing conference is that huge international conferences are not suitable settings for addressing complex questions of social and economic justice or grave issues of human rights. Unfortunately, there is an increasing tendency for advocates of causes that have failed to win acceptance through ordinary democratic processes to resort to the international arena, far removed (they hope) from scrutiny and accountability... [They] can be expected to keep on trying to insert their least popular ideas into U.N. documents for unveiling at home as "international norms." 97 Glendon's summary also included a warning about the European Union (EU)'s radical promotion of abortion rights, contestation of every place the word 'motherhood' positively appeared in documents, remove all references to religion, morals, ethics, spirituality, and even human dignity. 98 The virus had spread its infection not only to the United States, but also to Europe. Marguerite Peeters Dr. Marguerite A. Peeters, is a journalist and Director of the Institute of Intercultural Dialogue Dynamics in Brussels, and faculty member of the Pontifical Urbaniana University. Dr. Peeters has written extensively on the ideology of gender and is at the forefront of mapping its intellectual and political expansions. Her article maps very well the strategy of "gender mainstreaming, from 1968 Teheran, 1974 Bucharest, 1975 Mexico City, 1980 Copenhagen, 1985 Nairobi, and 1995 Beijing". 99 Her work is an invaluable reference for the viral spread of gender ideology. Peeters correctly identifies that "In the gender revolution, the real power is wielded by experts... [who] are given direct access to senior civil servants and all the real decision-makers in 96 Glendon, "What Happened at Beijing," 310. 97 Glendon, "What Happened at Beijing," 310. Congressman Chris Smith corroborates Glendon's conclusion in his key note address to the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in Pittsburgh (2004). He stated that he had received anonymously a package which listed the ten or so steps that United States feminists had decided to take to circumvent the difficulty at that time of changing U. S. law. Among these steps was the plan to go first to the United Nations and get certain rights approved there (as it was easier to accomplish) and then return to the United States to argue that this country should conform itself to the international precedent established at the U.N. Another step in the plan was to insert their own members into the middle tier of administrators, who took the UN policies and its finances out to the world, and country by country to make sure they could be put in place. See Representative Christopher H. Smith (R.-N.J), Keynote Address "Pro-Family Prospects in the Congress," Chapter 1 in Kenneth D. Whitehead, ed., The Church, Marriage & the Family (Notre Dame: St. Augustine's Press, 2007), 1-10. Unfortunately these informal remarks in the context of his lecture are not included in the published written text. 98 Glendon, "What Happened at Beijing," 304-306. 99 Marguerite A. Peeters, "Current Proposals and the state of the debate," Pontifical Counsel for the Laity: Laity Today, Men and Women Diversity and Mutual Complementarity (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2006):73-98, here 85. 22 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 23 every country, in order to be able to exert their influence without hindrance." 100 And she prophecies correctly that "The gender revolution is spreading like wildfire, albeit silently, without any form of public debate, and without anyone feeling the need to give it any democratic legitimacy." 101 In her book, The globalization of the western cultural revolution: key concepts, operational mechanisms, Dr. Peeters analyzes the rights-based approach strategy of gender [ideology]: "The first is the integration into human rights of the objectives of the erotic revolution...The second is the integration of socioeconomic development into human rights...;...and the post-modern right to choose." 102 She traces the Gender mainstreaming at the UN and its use of "global gender specialists through the UN's Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, or OSAGI." 103 In addition, Marguerite Peeters correctly describes a new battleground for gender ideology vs. gender reality in the field of education through a clear agenda from UNICEF for transforming schools in five stages: gender sensitive; gender healthy; gender priority to girl's education, gender rights of children to express their opinions and to have access to sexual and reproductive health; and evaluation on the children's positive participation in society. 104 Dr. Peeters' mapping of the globalization of gender ideology is excellent. She identifies a 'gender paradigm' supported by 'gender feminists' who "have established a dialectical distinction between the concept of sex, feminine or masculine, whose differences are written in biology and are therefore unchangeable, and gender, feminine or masculine, whose differences, according to them, are socially constructed, unstable, and changeable." 105 There is, however, one aspect of her argument that I strongly disagree with, namely that she suggests that we not use the word 'gender' at all because it is so contaminated by the ideology of gender. My position, which will be articulated in the final section of this presentation, is that we should fight to reclaim the word 'gender' for its true meaning in gender reality. Pontifical Council for the Laity-Women's Section In 2008, at a conference sponsored by the Pontifical Council for the Laity in Rome on the occasion of the 20 th anniversary of Mulieris Dignitatem, Marguerite Peeters gave a lecture entitled "Gender: an anthropological deconstruction and a challenge for faith". This lecture began with the strong claim: "Gender is one of the most harmful categories in the feminist, sexual and cultural revolution that we are experiencing in the West." 106 Peeters generally used the word 'gender' without the qualifier 'ideology.' She concluded that "The concept of gender 100 Peeters, "Current Proposals," 95. 101 Peeters, "Current Proposals," 96. 102 Marguerite A. Peeters, The Globalization of the western cultural revolution: Key Concepts, Operational Mechanisms, trans. Benedict Kobus (Brussels: Institute for Intercultural Dialogue Dynamics [ASBL], 2007), 88-89. 103 Peeters, The Globalization, 131-133. 104 Peeters, The Globalization, 161-62. 105 Peeters, The Globalization, 71. 106 Marguerite A. Peeters, "Gender: an anthropological deconstruction and a challenge for faith", in Pontifical Council for the Laity, Woman and Man the humanum in its entirety, On the 20 th anniversary of John Paul II's Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem,1998-2008) (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2010): 289-299. 23 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 24 has the revolutionary objective of restructuring society according to a new model of gender equality." 107 At times in her presentation Peeters brought up the concept of the ideology of gender. She argued that "gender is not an ideology in the proper sense of the term," because it did not flow from a master who created it like Marx or from a systematic great theory. 108 Later on in her presentation, Peeters correctly referred to gender ideology's attack on mothers and on manwoman complementarity. I was present at this conference, and in a public discussion I raised the question about whether we could ransom 'gender' because it was our word from the beginning. Her clear response was that the meaning of gender could not be retrieved from its associations with an ideology of gender. The Council for the Laity: Women's Section has left the debate about gender open by being willing to post articles written against the use of the word 'gender' by Dale O'Leary and Marguerite Peeters alongside of articles written by me in which I use the word 'gender' in the sense of gender reality. 109 Since, with the increasing urgency Peeters and O'Leary are expressing concern about using the word 'gender, ' I felt that it was time to make a direct case for ransoming gender as part as an effort of new evangelization in this year of Faith. In 2006, the Pontifical Council for the Family had produced a Lexicon: Ambiguous and debatable terms regarding family life and ethical questions. In this lexicon, there are two essays on the meaning of 'gender.' In the article called "Gender" by Jutta Burggraf, after tracing the history of the word, the question is left open about whether or not to use the word 'gender'. While not accepting "the ideology of gender", Jutta Burggraf proposes a "gender perspective" that defends the right to differences between men and women, and promotes co-responsibility in work and family." 110 In the same Lexicon, Oscar Alzamore Revoredo defines gender in "An Ideology of Gender: Dangers and Scope" drawing from the UN conference in Beijing he states: "Gender refers to the relations between men and women based on the socially defined roles assigned to one sex or the other." 111 Then, drawing from his experience of the regional conference at Mar de Plato, Argentina, Revoredo cautions: "It becomes clear that the supporters of the gender perspective were advancing something more reckless, like, for example, 'a natural man or 107 Peeters, "Gender", 297. 108 Peeters, "Gender", 290. She stated correctly that "Gender carries in its wake residue from feminism and Marxism...". 109 For example, they posted an article by Peeters entitled: "A New Global Ethics; Challenges for the Church, and an interview with Marguerite A. Peeters on the gender theory." They also posted articles by Dale O'Leary on "A Woman's Perspective on Mainstreaming a Gender Perspective," and "Don't Say Gender when You Mean Sex. And during the same time frames they posted articles by me which use gender to mean basically woman and man as the two ways of being human, in "Mulieris Dignitatem twenty years later; an overview of the document and challenges" and "Man-Woman Complementarity: The Catholic Inspiration". All Available at www.laici.va/content/laici/en/sezioni/donna/articoli.html 110 Jutta Burggraf, "Gender", in Pontifical Council for the Family, Lexicon: Ambiguous and debatable terms regarding family life and ethical questions (Virginia: Human Life International, 2006): 399-408, here 408. 111 Oscar Alzamore Revoredo defines gender in "An Ideology of Gender: Dangers and Scope" in Lexicon: 465-482, here 466. 24 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 25 woman does not exist...". 112 These two conflicting positions in the Lexicon of ambiguous terms leave the question of gender open for further study and clarification. I am very grateful for the Women's Section of the Pontifical Council for the Laity for leaving the question of the use of the word 'gender' open at the present time. In its posting for SeptemberOctober 2013 A Synthesis by the Women's SectionPontifical Council for the Laity subtitled "Safeguarding the human being, created as man and woman" summarizes the conflicting approaches to the use of the word and concept of 'gender.' In this document written for "Fifteen years on from John Paul II's Letter to Women and from the 4 th UN Conference on Women (1995-2010)", we read the following summary: "There was some doubt as to whether or not the term 'gender' ought to be used in the present context. Although the term is in itself neutral, it has become highly charged with ideology nowadays and using it can be confusing. However, other experts were in favour of its use as long as it is placed within the rich categories of a Christian anthropology." 113 The document continued with a contribution by Maria Eugenia Cárdenas, who said that: "If Catholics abide by the recommendation (to avoid using the term gender) they will leave the field open to radical feminists, who would eliminate the counter-balance achieved by the laity in many countries. If we refuse to use the term, radical groups will infiltrate with their own agenda faster." 114 The rest of my presentation is focused on providing a number of arguments to defend the continued use of the word gender, and to distinguish gender reality from gender ideology in each context it is used. VI. Abandon Gender or Ransom Gender? In this final section I will offer several arguments to defend the claim that we should ransom the word and concept of gender. In particular, my arguments will discuss why we should ransom gender, how we could ransom gender, and some fruits of ransoming gender. The root of the concept of gender belongs to the beginning of Western history. It is for Catholics to have, to keep, and to foster its growth if we accept the gift of the meaning that has been entrusted to us. Ransoming Gender through Scripture and Philosophy The Root of Gender in the Old Testament A first step in ransoming gender reality is to reclaim the meaning of the root 'gen' in the word 'generation' as articulated in the Old Testament. The meaning of the root 'gen' in its verb form is 'to produce' or 'to beget'; in its noun form it refers to offspring or kin. This meaning is explicitly integrated into early Jewish history. A clear example, dated variously between 1400 BC and 900 BC, is found in Book 5:1 of Genesis which begins: "This is the book of the generations of Adam"; it continues through verse 32 marking off different periods of history in 112 Revoredo, "An Ideology of Gender", 467. 113 A Synthesis by the Women's SectionPontifical Council for the Laity, "Safeguarding the human being, created as man and woman" (September-October 2013): 1-50, here 44. Available at http://www.laici.va/content/laici/en/sezioni/donna.html (Accessed 10/4/2013). 114 "Safeguarding the human being, created as man and woman", 44-45. 25 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 26 recording the generations from Adam to Noah and his sons. 115 The root 'gen' from the beginning of Judaism establishes the significance of the history of a people living in continuity generation after generation. It incorporates the act of sexual intercourse, of a male and a female, of a man and a woman who become father and mother through their synergetic union. Thus we can also say that the concept of sex is inherently included within the concept of the root of generation, or 'gen'. The Root of Gender in Ancient Greek Philosophy A second example is found in Ancient Western Philosophy, more specifically in Aristotle's Generation of Animals, generally dated 350 BC. Aristotle examined in this philosophical text how animals generate. Higher animals are divided into male and female distinguished by the functions of their respective sexual parts or genitals: "They differ in their logos, because the male is that which has the power to generate in another..., while the female is that which can generate in itself, i.e., it is that out of which the generated offspring, which is present in the generator, comes into being." 116 Aristotle's erroneous hypotheses about how this generative activity is accomplished, with the male providing a single seed and the female providing only matter, was corrected over time. However, the concept of union of the male and female sexes is inherent within the concept contained in the root of generation or 'gen.' The Root of Gender in the New Testament A third example, some four centuries later is seen in the beginning of the first book of the Gospel of Matthew: "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the son of Abraham." In verses 1:1-16 the Latin word 'genuit' with the root 'gen' (meaning 'to beget', 'to generate', 'to father') is repeated thirty-nine times. In verse 17, the root 'gen' is repeated in the word 'generationes' (meaning 'generations') four times. Christianity follows Jewish tradition in recording history through counting births following specific acts of sexual intercourse of a particular man and particular woman. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ, a focal point of Christian history, transforms this history through the action of the Holy Spirit at the same time as it enters into it and depends upon it. Thus, as in the previous two examples, here the root 'gen' in generation or generate incorporates within it the meaning of sex. These three historical examples from the Old Testament, Ancient Greek philosophy, and the New Testament reveal that for over one-thousand years the concept of the root of gender, 'gen', was commonly used in both philosophy in Athens and theology in Jerusalem. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology records the continuation of the roots of these theological and philosophical concepts in the development of the English language. It includes the following rich ever expanding language-family related to the root 'gen': gender, genealogy, generate, generous (nobly born), genesis, genetic, gene, genial (nuptial, productive, joyous), genital (external generative organs), genitive (grammatical possessor or source), genius (innate capacity, person possession prevalent disposition of spirit), genocide, gens, gentleman, gentlewoman, genuine, 115 Genesis, The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, introduction, commentary, and notes, Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), RSV Bible text, second Catholic Edition, Gen 5:1-10 and introduction 13-14. 116 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, A.L Peck, trans. and ed. (Cambridge, Mass and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, Ltd., 1943), I.ii, 716a19-24. 26 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 27 and the suffix, -geny (e.g. progeny). 117 From this evidence alone, it would appear that the radical separation of the concept and word 'sex' from the concept and word 'gender' suggested by some 20 th century authors is artificial indeed. Ransoming Gender in Ordinary Language Another approach is to ransom the ordinary use of the word 'gender'. John Paul II in Fides et ratio encourages philosophers to test out the truth of their theories by the anchor of revelation. In the controversial sets of arguments about gender, we are very fortunate to have a clear and unambiguous revelation in Genesis that God created a human being as one of two and only two genders, as male and female; and he mandated them into a fertile union: "Go forth and multiply and fill the earth." This revelation sets the boundaries for philosophers' thought in a very rich way. Aristotle, as a natural philosopher, recognized that claims about nature or science are directed towards what is 'always or for the most part' the case. 118 He realized that in natural beings there is always some 'grey' area which allows for exceptions to be explained within the wider brackets of what is always or for the most part the case. In ordinary use of the word 'gender', the human being is identified as male or female, man or woman. I would argue that the more the word 'gender' is used by men and women within a Catholic understanding of the way in which a man and a woman are equally human persons and simultaneously two significantly different ways of being a human person, this will help ransom gender from its present ideological distortions. This public defense of gender reality by using the word 'gender' in its ordinary meaning is a method of new evangelization that will help to defend the integral gender complementarity that Blessed John Paul II worked so hard to articulate. At the same time several philosophers in the last century through the present have each one individually and together collaboratively provided a remarkably rich intellectual treasury of solid arguments to defend gender reality in the more technical sense against fallacious and distorted ideologies. Ransoming Gender through Catholic Philosophy The twentieth century experienced an extraordinary dynamic within the intellectual community of Christian philosophers who were writing about the human person. In the first place, many who had received Baptism later publicly rejected their faith. Among those are included the prominent philosophers Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Mary Daly and the social scientists Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Mead, and John Money. Secondly, during the same historical time-frame, many other philosophers converted to the Catholic Faith. Among those are included Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Jacques and Raissa Maritain, and Gabriel Marcel. These Catholic Philosophers formed a new intellectual community dedicated to defending the truth about the human person and about the integral complementarity of woman and man. In this endeavor they were joined by other Catholic philosophers such as Bernard Lonergan, Emmanuel Mounier, and Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II to 117 The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. Charles Talbut Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). 118 Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 1065a 2-6. 27 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 28 provide a rich patrimony of deep philosophical thought that we can draw upon to ransom gender today. The Thomistic Foundation for Ransoming Gender Two crucial innovations by St. Thomas Aquinas of Aristotle's hylomorphism are the essential foundation of this patrimony. First, Thomas developed Aristotle's notion of the human soul as the form of the body by demonstrating that the same human soul operates both as form organizing a living material body and as spirit in communication with other spirits. Msgr. John Wippel summarizes Thomas' innovation: "Hence it is through its essence that the human soul is a spirit and through that same essence that it is the form of the body." 119 Second, Thomas' principle of the metaphysical unity of a human being whose soul is both spirit and form of the body provides a foundation for the development of the integral complementarity of woman and man. A commensuration of each soul to a particular body solves the problematic legacy that Aristotelian metaphysics of contrariety (i.e. the female is a privative contrary of the male) left for the history of generation of females and males. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas describes it this way: " ... [D]iversity, nevertheless, does not result from a diversity in the essential principles of the soul itself, nor from otherness in respect of the intelligible essence of the soul, but from diversity in the commensuration of souls to bodies, since this soul is adapted to this and not to that body, and that soul to another body, and so in all other instances ... . Now it is as forms that souls have to be adapted to bodies." 120 This Thomistic development of the Aristotelian form/matter structure of reality has important implications for the concept of woman and of man as soul/body composite beings. The composite structure of real things is both ontological, i.e, about how a real woman or a real man is in the world; and epistemological, i.e., about how we come to know analogically what it is to be a woman or a man. The Gift of German Phenomenology to Gender Identity Phenomenology added a systematic account of different kinds of human experiences to the study of philosophical anthropology. 121 In 1923, Dietrich von Hildebrand, a convert to Catholicism in 1914, gave a public lecture On Marriage (Die Ehe) in which he introduced the concept that in marriage between a man and a woman are "metaphysically" complementary persons. 122 By this he means that each woman and each man is understood individually as a 119 John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000). Wippel continues "... [Thomas] argued that there are not two forms in the human soul but only one, which is its essence..., 337. 120 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 81, 8. See also W. Norris Clarke, S.J., The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 103. 121 See Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, "What is Phenomenology? An Introduction for the Unititiated," Crisis, vol 12, no. 4 (April 1994): 26-29; Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge: University Press, 2008). 122 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Marriage: The Mystery of Faithful Love (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 1991), 14, 21, and 53-55. 28 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 29 composite human soul/body unity with equal dignity, significant differentiation, and together with synergetic relations. Von Hildebrand continued to explore the nature of this complementary relation in 1966 in Man and Woman: Love and the Meaning of Intimacy, in which he characterized the relationship as "more in a face-to face position than side-by side" so that "it is precisely the general dissimilarity in the nature of both which enables this deeper penetration into the soul of the other...a real complementary relationship." 123 Dietrich von Hildebrand also elaborated extensively on different values in a personal gift of love in human relations. 124 In collaboration with his wife, Alice von Hildebrand, who wrote The Privilege of Being a Woman, 125 they brought their considerable philosophical talents to bear on the truth about woman and man's respective identities. Reacting against the unisex model of gender identity, in 1928 Edith Stein, a convert to Catholicism in 1922, concluded that: "[t]he Suffragettes erred so far as to deny the singularity of woman altogether...." 126 Using the phenomenological method to analyze experiences of women and men, Stein suggested some unique ways a woman approaches human relations: Her point of view embraces the living and personal rather than the objective; ... she tends towards wholeness and self-containment in contrast to one-sided specialization; ... [with an ability] to become a complete person oneself... whose faculties are developed and coexist in harmony; ... [who] helps others to become complete human beings; and in all contact with other persons, [who] respects the complete human being. 127 Stein joined to her phenomenological analysis a Thomistic metaphysical foundation for the ontological unity of the human person to uncover essential characteristics of the "lived experience of the body" in both women and in men. In her Essays on Women, Stein articulated complementary hierarchical structures of female, feminine/masculine within a woman; and of male, masculine/feminine within a man. In female/male complementarity, the female corporeal structure is oriented towards supporting new life within the mother while the male corporeal structure is oriented towards reproducing by detachment of seed as father. This root leads to a different lived experience in which a feminine psychic structure receives the world inwardly more through the passions and a masculine psychic structure being less affected by the body receives the world more through the intellect. She proposes that a woman's intellect tends to comprehend the value of an existent in its totality while a man's intellect tends to judge in a compartmentalized manner. Further she suggested that a woman's will tends to emphasize personal and holistic choices, while a man's will tends to emphasize exterior specialized choices. While Stein's contribution to gender complementarity tends at times to accept stereotyped generalizations about femininity and masculinity, she 123 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man and Woman: Love and the Meaning of Intimacy (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Press, 1966/1992), 91. 124 Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Nature of Love (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2009). 125 Alice von Hildebrand, The Privilege of Being a Woman (New Hampshire: Sapientia Press, 2002). 126 Edith Stein, Essays on Women, Second Edition, Revised (Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1996), "Outline of Lecture given to Bavarian Catholic Women Teachers in Ludwifshafen on the Rhine, April 12, 1928.", 27-28. Her italics. 127 Stein, Essays, Introduction, 38-39. Her italics. 29 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 30 nonetheless discovered important psychic effects of the lived experience of a woman's cycles of ovulation and pregnancy and of a man's generation outside of his self. In her later work on Finite and Eternal Being, after entering a Carmelite monastery and receiving the name Sr. Benedicta of the Cross, she elaborated a rich analysis of four different kinds of forms that a woman has in her identity as a soul/body composite unity: her essential human form, her unique individual form given at her conception, her pure form or who she is created to be in the mind of God, and her empty form when others describe her characteristics. Stein's analysis opened up a dynamic understanding of the relation of actuality and potentiality from the moment a person 'steps into existence', discovers his or her vocation, until death and beyond. Sr. Benedicta of the Cross followed von Hildebrand in giving an extensive analysis of love as the "mutual self-giving of persons." 128 The Gift of French Personalism to Gender Reality A striking aspect of the rising up of Neothomist philosophers in the early twentieth century is that in addition to their attempts to offer rigorous philosophical arguments to describe woman and man's identity and integral relations, they also began to foster dialogue with one another and to form new communities of philosophers together. Edith Stein corresponded with Dietrich von Hildebrand, Hedwig Conrad Martius, Roman Ingarden, and Jacques Maritain. Jacques and Raissa Maritain organized Thomistic study retreats in Meudon one of which Edith Stein attended. 129 In 1932 Emmanuel Mounier organized a personalism study group in Paris with Jacques Maritain and they began publishing Esprit a personalist review. Within two years Gabriel Marcel, Nicholai Berdjaev joined them; together they published a "Personalist Manifesto," articulating fundamental principles of a new Catholic personalism. The goals of these communities of philosophers was not only to study the works of Thomas Aquinas but also to consider how some of his principles could be applied in ethical, educational, and political areas of common life in the world. In 1934 Mounier published an article in a Polish review (Wiadomosci Literackie) describing the personalist movement in France. In the context of these dynamic series of conversations about the human person, the fundamental principles of gender reality, namely the equal dignity of women and men, the significant differences between women and men, and the synergetic effect of their integral relations, French personalists began to articulate philosophical arguments to defend these principles. In 1936 Mounier published in Esprit an important article on the relation between personalism and woman's identity, entitled "La femme aussi est une personne." (Woman is also a Person). 130 Mounier critiqued cultural patterns which inhibited women's full development towards actualizing her personal dignity. As lay men, many of the writings of the French personalists focused on dynamics of integral complementarity relationship in marriage. In one essay, Mounier argued against 128 Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being (Washington DC: ICS Publications, 2002), 453-459. 129 See Jacques Maritain, "Thomist Study Circles and Their Annual Retreats (1919-1939)", Notebooks, trans. Joseph W. Evans (Albany, New York: Magi Books, Inc., 1984), Chapter 5, 134-35. 130 Emmanuel Mounier, "La femme aussi est une personne." (Woman is also a Person). Esprit (June 1936): 292-297. 30 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 31 utilitarian and secular feminist critiques of marriage: "Man and woman can only find fulfillment in one another, and their union only finds its fulfillment in the child; such is their inherent orientation towards a kind of abundance and overflow, not to an intrinsic and utilitarian end." 131 Gabriel Marcel, a convert to Catholicism in 1929, added important dimensions to the analysis of synergetic relations among women and men. The first was a rich insight into fatherhood: "I am a father!" ...Pride...; it is impossible to reduce fatherhood to a biological category, and yet it belongs to the flesh. Adoption is a grafting." 132 Marcel's second insight was his description of the importance of the will in creative fidelity to one's spouse or child in life long loving commitment. 133 By 1938, a nearly three-hundred page manuscript titled A Personalist Manifesto was translated from French into English and published in London, New York, and Toronto. 134 The Personalist Manifesto was translated into Polish and distributed underground in Poland during World War II. Underground copies of this work circulated in Poland radiating from philosophers associated with the Crakow Jagellonian University. The Gift of Science to Gender Reality Although Aristotle's original attempt at a scientific explanation of generation led to two thousand years of a kind of 'sex ideology', identifying the human female with incapacity for contributing fertile seed to generation, his philosophy of science also advanced empirical observation which eventually led to science's great capacity for self-correction. Thus, by the eighteenth century, woman's active fertile contribution of egg to man's active fertile contribution of sperm opened the door to the discovery of the biological complementarity (equal dignity, significant differentiation, and synergetic union) of men and women. The renewal of the twentieth century philosophy through Neothomism included attention to new developments in science. In 1927, at Lake Como, Niels Bohr first used the word 'complementarity' to describe the wave-particle theory of light. Dietrich von Hildebrand applied the word 'complementarity' two years later to the metaphysical relation of a woman and man in marriage. When Edith Stein had entered the Carmelite convent she wrote a letter to her friend Hedwig Conrad-Martius asking her to send her information about the latest developments in the sciences of physics and of biology: "... I would like very much to have an introductory presentation on the latest on atomic theory, if you have anything on that." 135 Stein herself had studied psychology in her undergraduate years and seriously integrated aspects of the psychology of woman and man's identities in her work in phenomenology. 131 Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, trans. Monks of St. Johns Abbey (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1952), 108. 132 Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal 1943, in Presence and Immortality (Pittsburgh, Pa., Duquesne University Press, 1967), 91. 133 Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 'The Mystery of the Family,' 68-97; 'The Creative Vow as Essence of Fatherhood, 98-124; and 'Obedience and Fidelity, 125-134; and Gabriel Marcel, 'Creative Fidelity,' Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), Chapter VIII, 147-74. 134 Emmanuel Mounier, A Personalist Manifesto (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1938). 135 Edith Stein, Self-Portrait in Letters: 1916-1942 (Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1993), #228, 240. 31 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 32 The Thomistic renewal in Canada and the United States began through the work of Etienne Gilson (1927) Jacques Maritain (1933), and Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1940); and it spread through universities in Toronto, Ottawa, Boston, Montreal, and Halifax. In 1942 Dietrich von Hildebrand's book on marriage was translated into English with its description of the metaphysical complementarity of husband and wife. 136 Bernard Lonergan wrote a review of it for The Canadian Register (Quebec edition), and he soon adopted the word 'complementarity' to describe man-woman relations in his 1943 essay "Finality, Love, Marriage." 137 In his seminal work Insight, Lonergan expanded the metaphysical principle of the hylomorphic or form/matter structure of a human person to include a woman or man's central form (traditional substantial form) organizing a hierarchical series of conjugate forms. These conjugate forms explain the complementary differentiation of the sexes at the level of 'semi-fecundities' (referring to chromosomes, endrocrinal glands, anatomical structure, and physiological functions) and other levels of vital, psychic, sensitive, emotional and the higher non-organic activities of reason and rational appetite. By 1957, Lonergan had combined the notion of complementarity in Insight to emergent probability to explain how conjugate forms organized by a central form in the human person moved through the sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, to philosophy and theology. For Lonergan, sex and gender identity was not just a matter of division, but also of union. Sexual activity unites not only the semi-fecundities of spermatozoon and ovum but also their bearers: male and female complementary beings. A man and woman united in marriage may enter the spiritual realms of friendship and grace. In Poland, at the Catholic University of Lublin, M.A. Krapiec also integrated the advanced discoveries of science into a renewed Thomistic metaphysics. More recently, Msgr. Robert Sokolowski at the Catholic University of America began to explore the similarities and differences of forms and DNA. An important dimension of the gift of science is that the unity of the individual woman or man ontologically precedes any particular level of analysis. The Gift of Polish Existential Personalism to Gender Reality After World War II, in May 1946, Emannuel Mounier was invited to lecture on personalism at the Jagallonian University in Cracow when Karol Wojtyla was a seminarian studying there. John Paul II tells us directly in Gift and Mystery that "My formation within the cultural horizon of personalism also gave me a deeper awareness of how each individual is a unique person." 138 In 1954, M.A. Krapiec, Chair of the Department and Professor of Metaphysics, and hired Karol Wojtyla to teach ethics at the Catholic University in Lublin. By 1960, Wojtyla published a book in Polish, which was later translated into English as Love and Responsibility. This text 136 See Sr. Prudence Allen, "Metaphysics of Form, Matter, and Gender," in Lonergan Workshop, Volume 12 (1996), pp. 1-26. 137 Bernard Lonergan, "Finality, Love, Marriage," Theological Studies 4 (1943): 477-510. Reprinted in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Collection, eds. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967/1988): 17-52. 138 John Paul II, Gift and Mystery: On the Fiftieth Anniversary of My Priestly Ordination (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 94. 32 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 33 described some significant differences between a woman and a man and invited them to become aware and responsible for their engendered actions in relations with one another. Also Wojtyla conveyed with respect to gender reality not only differences in one's male or female psyches but also the important challenge through acts of will to become virtuous men and women in their mutual relations. Roman Ingarden, who had been a classmate of and frequent correspondent with Edith Stein in Germany introduced her work to Karol Wojtyla in Cracow. In Rise, Let us be On Our Way, Blessed John Paul had this insightful thought to share: "In Krakow I also tried to maintain a good rapport with the philosophers: Roman Ingarden ... My personal philosophical outlook moves, so to speak, between two poles: Aristotelian Thomism and phenomenology. I was particularly interested in Edith Stein, an extraordinary figure, for her life story as well as her philosophy." 139 In addition, in the 1950's, Karol Wojtyla had developed a collaborative friendship with Dr. Wanda Potawska, a medical doctor and psychiatrist who specialized in the care of women. 140 Following these two different sources Wojtyla noted that the monthly cycles of ovulation from puberty through menopause disposes a woman to receive new life and foster its growth. 141 This disposition is not a biological determinism because of a woman's free will; she can act against it through abortion or contraception, or she can act with it. In his later works as Pope John Paul II, he suggested that when a woman follows this disposition, her genius flourishes through the particular ways that she receives and fosters the growth of persons in her own sphere of activity. This feminine genius will flourish in spiritual maternity, intellectual maternity, as well as in physical maternity. 142 In Love and Responsibility, Karol Wojtyla suggested that the inheritance of original sin tends to effect women differently in some respects than men; a woman tends to want to possess others (husband and children); while a man tends to want to dominate others (wives and children). A woman also tends to desire a man through sentimentality; while a man tends to desire a woman through sensuality. Wojtyla's text elaborates ways that men and women can take this 'raw material of love' and transform it into mature married love. Spiritual, intellectual or physical paternity has some significantly different dispositions. Because a man generates outside of the self, John Paul II observes that he needs to make an act of will to 'adopt' a child or wife as his own. Once this is done, he tends then to protect and to provide for them. In a later text, St. Joseph is described manifesting these characteristics. 143 A man's genius is how he does this for members of his family or for his work projects and other significant attachments. 139 John Paul II, Rise, Let us be On Our Way (New York: Warner Books, 2004), 90. 140 Ted Lipien, Wojtya's Women: How They Shaped the Life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church (Winchester, UK and Washington, USA: O Books, 2008), 285-309. 141 Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981). "Every woman can observe in herself the changes which occur in the relevant phase of the cycle. Apart from this there exist objective scientific methods known of biology and medicine, which help us to determine the moment of ovulation, i.e., the beginning of the fertile period.", 280. 142 See John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, (Boston: St. Paul Books and Media, 1988), #30-31 and NCCB/USCC, John Paul II on the Genius of Women (Washington DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1997), #27 and 28. 143 John Paul II, Guardian of the Redeemer (Boston: St. Paul Books & Media, 1989), #1-2, 7-8, 17 and 22. 33 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 34 Attending the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's, then Bishop Wojtyla, then helped elaborate some important principles in Dignitatis Humanis and Gaudium et spes. In sum: 1) Truth persuades by its own gentle power; 2) Human dignity and Christian solidarity for the common good are the two principles for guiding the interaction of the Church with the world; and 3) marriage and family are one of five urgent problems that need to be addressed by the Church. By 1969, Karol Wojtyla published the Polish version of his book titled The Acting Person. This text integrated a Thomistic Metaphysical foundation for the human person with a phenomenological elaboration of the dynamic experience of being a person with self-possession, self-determination, self-government, called into authentic inter-personal relations. 144 It did not differentiate between men and women, but rather assumed their equal dignity as persons called to recognize the personalistic value of their actions (how each one redounds back on the person) and how to authentically participate in living the commandment of love. At Lublin, M.A. Krapiec and Karol Wojtyla together supported higher education for Ursuline Sister Zofia J. Zdybicka, and they also convinced her to join the philosophy department at KUL; eventually she became the Chair and Dean of Philosophy. Father Krapiec also introduced a theory of existential analogies among human beings. This theory opened research into how women are existentially analogous to one another in one way and how a woman and a man are existentially analogous to one another in a different way. 145 I can attest personally to the openness of Lublin existential personalism to the serious study of sex and gender identity with gender complementarity, as Sr. Zdybicka invited me in to give a series of four lectures to the students and faculty on this topic; two of these lecture were given in Fr. Krapiec's metaphysics class. In 1974-1975, Cardinal Wojtyla also elaborated his approach to building a community of persons in the family and through parenthood. 146 Later on he elaborated a theological foundation for complementary human vocations in the context of being called in likeness to the Divine Communion of Persons, as communions of knowledge and love. These themes are very important for ransoming gender reality because they provide both the intellectual principles for the ransoming as well as practical applications of these principles in daily life. Conclusion: The New Evangelization of the meaning of 'Gender' After Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II in October 1978, for the next twenty-five years he shared his great insights into the integral and complementary identities of woman and man from their Creation, through the Fall, and Redemption in Jesus Christ, True God and True Man. To summarize some key points he made: that God has created us male and female, is revealed particularly in Genesis 2:23; and that our knowledge of man, what it is to be human, 144 Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979). 145 See Prudence Allen, RSM, "A Woman and a Man as Prime Analogical Beings," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol LXVI, No 4 (1992): 456-82. 146 See Karol Wojtyla, "The Family as a Community of Persons" (1974) and "Parenthood as a Community of Persons," (1975), in Person and Community: Selected Essays, ed. Andrew Woznicki and trans. Theresa Sandok, OSM (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), Chapters 20-21, 315-342. 34 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/1 35 'passes through masculinity and femininity ...two reciprocally completing ways of 'being a body' and at the same time of being human-as two complementary dimensions of selfknowledge and self-determination and, at the same time two complementary ways of being conscious of the meaning of the body." 147 An innovation of John Paul II, yet unrealized by most people, is that he uses the word 'masculinity' only for men and the 'femininity' only for women. This is a change from preceding practices of many authors including Edith Stein, who attributed both masculinity and femininity to each man or woman. John Paul II argued that our sex identity as male or female is "not only an attribute of our individual identity", it is "constitutive for the person"...who is constituted by the body as 'he' or 'she'." 148 The meaning of our gender identity essentially includes our sex, and it is not reducible to a style or to a role. It is a core of who we are at the most profound metaphysical level of our being. Exceptions in nature which do occur are embraced with love and compassion for their suffering and welcomed into the communion of persons created by God and Redeemed by Jesus Christ. But they do not change gender reality. A further important innovation of Blessed John Paul II was to state that the meaning of masculinity is revealed to a man through his fatherhood, in biological and/or spirituality paternity; and the meaning of femininity is revealed to a woman through her motherhood, in biological and/or spiritual maternity. 149 This new insight is elaborated in depth in his analysis of the vocation to marriage and the conception, birth, and education of children. It also opens up to his wonderful analysis of the complementarity of vocations through the mystery of being living signs to one another of the love of the Bridegroom and the love in response of the Bride. The ordained priesthood participates in a particular way in being the living sign of Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom; a married couple together as a living sign of the love between the Bridegroom and the Bride, his Church; and consecrated persons as the living eschatological sign of the love of the Bride for the Bridegroom. 150 Within all his many elaborations of this deep mystery of the relation of vocation to sex and gender identity, Blessed John Paul reveals the new evangelization of relations and gifts of self to others, in equal dignity, significant difference, and chaste love filled by the Holy Spirit in communion of persons for the redemption of the world. He has provided a rich treasury of philosophical, scriptural, and theological foundations for us to draw upon in the new evangelization of gender. Many women philosophers and theologians have build upon John Paul II's invitation to develop a new feminism which is based on a sex and gender reality. In Evangelium Vitae #99 he called for this new evangelization: "In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place, in thought and action, which is unique and decisive. It depends on them to 147 John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), (General Audience of November 21, 1979), 10:1. Emphasis from the original text deleted. Hereafter TOB. 148 John Paul II, TOB 10:1. 149 John Paul II, TOB 21:2. 150 See Sr. Prudence Allen, RSM "Mulieris Dignitatem twenty years later; an overview of the document and challenges," Ave Maria Law Review, vol. 8 , no. 8 (Fall 2009) and "Catholic Marriage and Feminism," in The Church, Marriage, and the Family, Proceedings of the 27 th Annual Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Convention, Kenneth D. Whitehead (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2007), Chapter 7: 95-144. 35 Allen: Gender Reality vs. Gender Ideology: ransoming the concept of Gender. Published by ResearchOnline@ND, 2014 36 promote a 'new feminism'..." 151 Many contemporary Catholic authors have contributed in multifarious ways to the New Feminism. 152 Blessed John Paul added urgency to this mission as an essential aspect of the new evangelization: "I address to women this urgent appeal: "Reconcile people with Life. You are called to bear witness to the meaning of genuine love, or that gift of self and of that acceptance of others which are present in a special way in the relationship of husband and wife, but which ought to be at the heart of every other interpersonal relationship." 153 If the present virus of gender ideology is allowed to run wild, then many women and men will miss discovering their true vocations. They will be confused about what it means to be a human person, and they will be confused about what it means to be a woman or a man. They will be confused about the chaste ways to relate to one another in marriage and in celibate life. When we reflect on the incredible courage of those who began the Thomistic renewal in the context of the two world wars, we discover men and women who risked everything to defend the truth of the human person, the truth about woman and man as 'always or for the most part' the two ways of being a human person. They followed the call of their specific vocations by offering their work, their suffering, and even their lives to defend this truth. Can we today do the same, standing on their shoulders, and fighting for the truth which persuades by its own gentle power? 151 John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, The Gospel of Life (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1995), #99. 152 See for example, Michelle M. Schumacher, ed., Women in Christ: Towards a New Feminism: (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004 and Jo Garcia-Cobb, "In Focus: New Feminism" Our Sunday Visitor (August 16, 2009); and Francis Martin, The Feminist Question: Feminist Theology in The Light of Christian Tradition, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). 153 John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, #99. 36 Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, Vol. 4 [2014], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol4/iss1/