Gender identity questioned in 2008

2008 was the year that a man had a baby and Pope Benedict XVI warned that those who question gender threaten the Creator’s plan for humanity.  Against this backdrop, Millersville’s Women’s Studies Program voted to change its name to Women and Gender Studies. What’s up with that?

Before answering, let’s return for a moment to 2008.   Thomas Beattie, the man who gave birth to a daughter, was born female.  He is legally married to the woman who is his daughter’s mother.

Beattie reversed his physiological sex change, a change including breast removal and male hormones, when his wife had a hysterectomy and could not conceive a child.

Thomas still had a uterus.   So he stopped taking testosterone, found a sperm donor, and was artificially inseminated.

Beattie’s decision to go public made explicit all the questions of gender identity that confront us in a world that acknowledges the social construction of reality and flirts with the science-inspired reconstruction of nature.   If Beattie has a uterus, is he a man?

If she calls herself a man, is she one?  If this man without a penis is in a relationship with a woman, is he heterosexual, homosexual, or something else?

How does the state determine whether a person is male or female? Are male and female the only two choices?

In a wild understatement of gender bending, Beattie wrote:  “Our situation sparks legal, political and social unknowns.”  The unknowns are also theological and moral according to Pope Benedict XVI.

In an address to the College of Cardinals just before Christmas, the Pope strongly stated the inviolability of a traditional conception of sex and gender as the Creator’s plan: “We need something like human ecology, meant in the right way. The Church speaks of human nature as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ and asks that this order be respected.”

To those theorists who question gender constructs and those persons who bend gender rules, Benedict says, “This is not out-of-date metaphysics.

It comes from the faith in the Creator and from listening to the language of creation, despising which would mean self-destruction for humans and therefore a destruction of the work itself of God.”

This is the quagmire into which the Women’s and Gender Studies (WGST) faculty have leaped willingly. Why?   There are two answers, one pragmatic and one theoretical.

The theoretical reason rests in the power of naming.  Naming a phenomenon strengthens and shapes its reality.

Bisexuality is an ancient phenomenon; however, only after being named in the nineteenth century has it become an explicit part of theorizing sexual behavior.

And naming one phenomenon can render another phenomena invisible.

Mothers have always worked, but when we refer to women with jobs outside the home as “working mothers,” we insidiously suggest that women at home with children don’t work.  The power to name reconstructs reality.

A program accurately named accomplishes its purposes more faithfully.

So when Cheryl Desmond asks, Whose School Is It Anyway?, she and her students explore both male and female experiences of schooling in a comparative mode.

When Carrie Smith teaches Reproduction and Birth, she includes a text called Sex, Men and Babies to make the point that reproduction is always relational.

When Rika Schmitt teaches Feminist Theory, she emphasizes that any theory of women’s experience is always also making claims about men’s experience.

Feminist theory does not replace a patriarchal, phallocentric worldview with a matriarchal, gynocentric one.

The point is not to pay attention to women at the expense of men but to refuse this either/or choice, studying gender as a reciprocal cultural and political system.

The pragmatic reason for the name change is a function of the faculty’s desire to expand course offerings, encouraging other faculty members and students, both male and female, to join in the systematic study of gender.

New program offerings are on the horizon. Creativity, Innovation and Gender is offered again this spring.

Dr. Ryan Orr joins the Sociology/Anthropology Department in the fall, bringing with him the expertise to teach Sociology of Sex and Gender as well as a new course called Masculinities. There is also potential for developing a Psychology of Gender course.
Introduction to Queer Studies may return.  In addition, there are existing courses not now approved for the WGST minor — like Human Sexuality — that could conceivably complement a focus on Gender Studies.

Courses that explicitly name a focus on men’s experience or consider gender as a relational system will complement rather than replace courses that acknowledge women’s experience as their starting point.  A richer exploration of sex, gender and human (inter)action will result.

Thomas Beattie challenges the sex/gender system that we traditionally take for granted;  Pope Benedict XVI espouses that traditional system as a matter of faith and morality.

Both of these positions – and the assumptions that underlie them — warrant scrutiny in the search for understanding that constitutes a university education.

With a name change, WGST faculty members signaled their willingness to consider these difficult questions raised so dramatically in 2008.