#abigail favale

[entanglingbriars]

The Intersex Body Is a Revelation

Abigail Favale on binaries.

Favale argues that intersex people do not disprove the male/female sex binary, but rather reinforce it. Her article depends on a very strict requirement for someone to hypothetically not fit into the male/female binary: they must produce both large and small gametes; a phenomenon she claims has never been observed in humans.

Favale's argument amounts to this: if it is at all possible to force every human being into one of two boxes -- male or female -- we have a moral obligation to do so in order to respect the teleological design of humanity. Failure to do so transforms the body from the foundation of personal identity into a tool of personal identity, which is at odds with her sacramental view of human embodiment.

[apesoformythoughts]

«While I cannot endorse this bad faith approach to people, the ideas and practices of gender identity theory are ripe for critique, and [Matt] Walsh brings a forceful one. The eponymous question—what is a woman?—is such a good one to ask because it exposes the Achilles heel of gender identitarians: the inability to define “woman” while making emphatic claims about her. Walsh’s interviews, though lacking in goodwill, expose the illogical circularity of the claim that “a woman is someone who identifies as a woman,” and also unmasks the fact that womanhood, without the ground of femaleness, is, to riff on Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, little more than a drag show.

In addition to this definitional problem, the film effectively reveals the rampant conflation of sex and gender by those who have appointed themselves as guardians of those very terms. The gender-affirming therapist in the opening scene, for example, describes being “assigned female” at birth as being “assigned a gender,” and uses the compound phrase “sex and gender” without making any distinctions between them. Similarly, Dr. Michelle Forcier, a gender-affirming pediatrician, confusingly describes a chicken as having “an assigned gender,” but not a “gender identity,” and she claims that we can only “assume” that an egg-laying chicken is female. For both of these professionals, “female” points to gender rather than sex. What seems to be happening here is that all sex-related categories are collapsed into the melting pot of “gender,” which has no clear definition and can be endlessly deployed.»

— Abigail Favale: “What Is a Woman?: A Half-Answered Question”

[smol-catholic-bean]

"So, if my son, for instance, likes My Little Ponies, he likes bright colors, he’s really drawn to beauty, he has a very poetic sensibility, I could panic and say, “No, absolutely, you can’t play with My Little Ponies.” Or I could be like, “Oh, wow, he must be a girl because he likes My Little Ponies.” Those are both the wrong things to do in this situation. Rather, let’s just let him play with My Little Ponies and not make a big deal out of it, because I think it’s pretty normal developmentally for a lot of children to not fit into stereotypes and to kind of push back against them."

-Abigail Favale

[eternal-echoes]

[zmkccommonplace]

A woman is the kind of human being whose body is organized around the potential to gestate new life.

Abigail Favale

[simchafisher]

Read This, Not That: Better books than ASK YOUR HUSBAND

Read This, Not That: Better books than ASK YOUR HUSBAND

Perhaps you are interested in the topic of femininity: what it means, why it’s important, what the Catholic church teaches about it. You’ve heard of Stephanie Gordon’s new book on the topic, Ask Your Husband, and you see that it’s getting (mostly) glowing reviews on Amazon.  But then you see that some of the more granular and scholarly reviews, like this one and this one, say that, while book…

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[apesoformythoughts]

«Both sides are overly enamored with externalities, especially genitalia […] A better place to anchor the discussion is procreative potential—this is a matter not simply of discrete body parts, but rather the organization of those parts: the totalizing structure of the body as a whole.

This is something that simply cannot be changed, and if the definition of “man” and “woman” is grounded here, the fantasy about being able to transform into one or the other disappears. The procreative potentiality of women exists whether or not it is ever brought to fruition: pre-pubescent girls have it; post-menopausal women have it; women who are infertile have it. This innate potential can be prevented from being actualized, but it can never be taken away—nor granted to someone who does not have it. The very category of “infertility” points back to this fact, naming an inherent potential that is, for whatever reason, unable to actualize.

In the documentary, only the Maasai people still think along these lines. It is unthinkable to them that a man could be a woman, or vice versa, because “a woman delivers; a man cannot.” The Maasai are aware of sexually dimorphic genitalia, of course, but as external signals of something more important: procreative power.»

— Abigail Favale: “What Is a Woman?: A Half-Answered Question”

[smol-catholic-bean]

"And another critique I would make of the emphasis on “traditional” gender roles is that I think it’s a mistake to define what men and women should do by a specific historical, cultural or economic situation, because we often don’t have control over things like employment patterns or economic realities. The model of the man working outside the home, 9 to 5, and the woman staying at home and exclusively taking care of the children, that’s a fairly recent manifestation of gender roles, so it would be wrong to universalize that. Because Catholicism is connected to history and culture, our vision of sexual identity is always engaging with those things, but it can’t just be anchored to one particular era or one particular culture. It has to transcend that in some way."

-Abigail Favale