The Sweetest Poisons: Preston Sprinkle's "Embodied" Chapter 2B Sex and Gender. A Review

This is the fourth installment in my series reviewing Preston Sprinkle's book Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, & What the Bible has to Say. Click HERE for the Intro to this series where I discuss my thematic concerns with the book and for an index for the full series.

In the second half of Chapter 2 Preston Sprinkle focuses in on defining and briefly exploring Sex and Gender. So let's do this.

Sex

Sprinkle has a lot to say about sex and, to quote him, "Not having sex, but biological sex" and that's fair enough. The thing that is often referred to as biological sex (1) is a really important concept in this conversation. He starts by saying that humans are sexually dimorphic and that that means that our species reproduces when the gametes of two different "kinds" of humans fuse. He then offers the first in a long list of varied definitions he provides, and seems to endorse, for "male" and/or "female" throughout this section. Here is the full list as best I can compile it (the following list are all direct quotes; italics + bold are my emphases):

1. The categories used to classify the respective roles humans play in reproduction are "male" and "female".
2. Females are distinguished from males based on their different reproductive structures.
3. Males and females also have different levels of hormones.
4. Genetically, the presence of a Y chromosome distinguishes males from females.
5. To sum it up, a person is biologically either male or female based on four things:
• Presence or absence of a Y chromosome
• Internal reproductive organs
• External sexual anatomy
• Endocrine systems that produce secondary sex characteristics
6. Feminist philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper describes "female" and "male" as "general biological categories that apply to all species that reproduce sexually.
7. The American Psychological Association says, "Sex refers to a person's biological status and is typically categorizes as male, female, or intersex. There are a number of indicators of biological sex, including sex chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive organs and external genitalia."
8. [A]n organism is male or female if it is structured to perform one of the respective roles in reproduction," and "[t]here is no other widely accepted biological classification for the sexes."(2)
9. Male and Female are categories of biological sex based on structures of reproduction.

After a number of read throughs of this section and the rest of the book, it remains unclear to me whether Dr. Sprinkle thinks that person's sex is based on a role or on certain physical characteristics. He is fairly clear later on that he doesn't think a person's sex can change even when some, or even a majority, of those characteristic change and typically people who hold that view want to reduce sex to the size of gamete a person produces—yes it is very strange to suggest that we can't know whether a person is male, female, or another sex category without measuring that person's gametes—and get a little vague on the topic of people who produce differently sized gametes or none at all. On the other hand the definition Sprinkle Provided—implying that he agreed—from the APA is probably the closest to what you would hear from trans and intersex people: sex references someone's status and that status is typically (not universally or necessarily) categorized as male, female, or intersex, and that those categories are indicated by a variety of physical factors. Honestly when I read it, Sprinkle providing that definition seemed out of place as it seems to undermine his repeated assertions that 1. Sex is binary and 2. Sex is clear (except for intersex people). I almost wonder whether he somehow glosses over terms like typically and variety of factors. 

For the record, I am inclined to accept and use Julia Serano's defintion based on it's similarity with the APA definition cited by Sprinkle and her qualifications as a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biophysics together with her own history of research and writing on this subject:

[W]ith regards to bodies, [sex] refers to a suite of sexually dimorphic traits that may include chromosomes, gonads, external genitals, other reproductive organs, ratio of sex hormones, and secondary sex characteristics...

For the purposes of making sense of  the book, I would suggest that Sprinkle most frequently means by sex and the related terms male and female, the definition he cites from Paul McHugh: 

[A]n organism is male or female if it is structured to perform one of the respective roles in reproduction

but let the canny reader beware: he will not be consistent and that definition is subject to change in places where Sprinkle needs a more expansive definition to make his argument work. 

Sprinkle's Bracketed Intersex People.

Much of the reasons for Sprinkle's inconsistent definitions of sex may be attributable to the approach he takes in this book to the existence of intersex people—he brackets them. To be fair, I think he wants to be nice about it. He says:

The topic of intersex [sic] has its own set of questions and assumptions. It'll be better to discuss intersex [sic] head-on rather than weaving intersex [sic] in and out of conversations about non-intersex people. So, for the next several chapters, I want to focus on humans who don't have an intersex condition. My motivation for doing so is to honor my intersex friends, not to sideline them. It's common for non-intersex people to invoke "intersex" as some faceless concept in service of an argument. But I find this practice rather dehumanizing to actual intersex people, and many intersex people do as well. I'd much rather talk about (and with) intersex people extensively in a separate chapter before considering how intersex [sic] relates to our conversation. 

Let's start by recognizing and appreciating that Sprinkle is (I will assume sincerely) attempting to prioritize and center the humanity and dignity of intersex people. That is a good impulse and something that is important to keep in mind. I have done some writing of my own on the subject and have been engaging with Sprinkle about it every since his review series of Megan DeFranza's Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God. The problem in this case is that Sprinkle's decision to defer questions about how the existence of intersex people impacts the definitions of of terms like sex, female, and male has the effect of distorting the conversation. Intersex people obviously complicate simplistic, binary, and reductive accounts of sex in the human population. Sprinkle tacitly admits as much with constant caveats that he is talking about non-intersex people and with his announcement in this chapter that he is postponing any discussion of intersex people for Chapter 7. Trying to define sex, female, and male while bracketing intersex conditions and then concluding that "[A]n organism is male or female if it is structured to perform one of the respective roles in reproduction" is bit like trying to define all animals as "mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish" while bracketing platypuses(3). When real beings don't fit the categories, we don't get to bracket them, we have to admit that our categories are imperfect and, if we want to have accurate and comprehensive categories we then re-do, or at least soften the boundaries of, our categories. You see this boundary softening in the APA and Serano's usage of qualifiers like suite of, typically, and variety of factors. 

By bracketing any incorporation of intersex people from his definition of sex, male, and female, Sprinkle erases those persons from having an impact on his argument at this point in the book, thereby justifying an over-simplified definition of key terms in the conversation. He is, in effect, cherry picking his human data and justifying it by deferring discussion of counter examples for a future Chapter. In principle that could be sort of technically acceptable if Chapter 7 itself were to somehow demonstrate conclusively that the existence of intersex people in no way impacts his conclusions here. But first Chapter 7 does not actually accomplish that, and second the effect is to leave the trusting reader with the impression that Sprinkle has made that case without actually exposing them to the argument. By the time the reader gets to Chapter 7 (I do wonder why it wasn't Chapter 3) Sprinkle's definitions of these terms are likely to have lodged in their mind as solid rather than as "provisional provided he successfully makes the case in Chapter 7" which would be the logically rigorous, and also psychologically difficult, way to read the text.

Conclusions on Sex

Beyond the above, Sprinkle meanders a bit (he briefly explores his best understanding of Judith Butler's claim that sex (and not just gender) is socially constructed but he ultimately rejects it on the basis of the "cold hard fact that sexual dimorphism exists in humans" a claim, depending on what he means by "sexual dimorphism"—he seems to be thinking of hermetically sealed categories rather than heavily populated poles along a dimorphic spectrum—, that can only work so long as he continues to bracket the existence of intersex people. His conclusion is fairly straightforward: "Our interpretations of sex and sexed bodies might be socially constructed, but sex itself is not socially constructed". Honestly I suspect he simply doesn't actually understand the philosophy involved and what it means to "assign meaning" to a phenomenon. At any rate he then moves on to gender.

Gender

Sprinkle opens this section first by saying that the distinction between sex and gender only goes back as far as the 1960s—a claim I would like to see some evidence for since C.S. Lewis made the distinction in 1946 and it may well pre-date that significantly we we recognized that the concepts themselves may have been expressed in different terms—which transition him to what he calls "the most basic and widely agreed upon definition of gender" which he takes from Mark Yarhouse:

The psychological, social, and cultural aspects of being male or female

In a footnote he claims that this is widely accepted by scholars. I don't love it but he is probably correct about it's general acceptance. He then breaks the definition down into what he says are "two different (yet overlapping) categories": gender identity and gender role. 

Before I get to an analysis of his reflection on those terms though, I want to quote Serano's definitions both since they are closer to what I would use and so you can hold them in apposition to what Sprinkle has to say.

Gender Role: a term that has been used in psychology to describe the various roles that one is expected to fulfill in society or within relationships based upon their gender status; this might include specific behaviors (e.g., acting masculine, feminine) or more formal interpersonal roles (e.g., father, mother, boyfriend, girlfriend). This phrase is used less frequently today, and has been largely replaced by (or subsumed under) the term gender expression.

Gender Identity: the gender that one identifies as. The term originated in teh field of psychology where it is generally understood to be distinct frm an individual's sex (i.e. their physical body), as well as their gender role/gender expression (i.e., outwardly-directed gender-related behaviors). While most people in our culture identify as either a boy/man or girl/woman, others come to adopt non-binary gender identities. In Whipping Girl (pp. 77-93) I introduced the term subconscious sex in order to distinguish between the conscious and deliberate act of idenitfying with a particular gender, and the more unconscious and inexplicable self-understanding of what sex/gender one should be (the latter of which many trans people experience prior to explicitly claiming that gender identity).

Gender Role

Sprinkle's treatment of this term, which he describes (he doesn't really define it) saying:

Gender roles have to do with how males and females are expected to act in any given culture.

I don't really take significant issue with his description so rather than a point-by-point analysis of his reflection on it I want to offer a few top-line observations and one critique of his sourcing for this section. 

First, I am not at all clear on why Sprinkle decided to use the term "Gender Role" rather than "Gender Expression". It may have some ideological basis (he doesn't really refer to the latter term), perhaps based in a desire not to present the concept as emerging from, or being rooted in, a person's gender identity, or because he is getting ready to talk about John Money who is thought to have coined the term; it may be as simple as the fact that his research and reading seems to have been disproportionately weighted towards TERF and trans-denying accounts which are potentially more likely to have used the term, but it isn't clear. It is odd for him to have chosen the less common, and largely outdated term though.

Second, throughout this section, Sprinkle plays pretty fast and loose with a sort of impression that trans people's concerns are significantly formed by "Gender Role" expectations. Now it is absolutely the case that navigating and working out how we relate to existing cultural expectations regarding our gender expressions (the way we live out our gender) is a significant subject for trans folk. My concern is that Sprinkle is overplaying it to the point that one might expect after reading this section to hear that trans-ness at least can consist only in wanting to have a non-standard gender expression while still having a cisgender identity. And in as much as there may be some people who identify cis-ly but feel drawn to non-standard gender expressions and identify as trans on that basis, those folks just kinda aren't what the conversation generally and in this book is actually about—remember that Sprinkle says the central question for the book is "If someone experiences incongruence between their biological sex and their internal sense of self, which one determines who they are—and why?" and that "internal sense of self" references not gender expression but gender identity. I have to notice, then, that the time Sprinkle spends on this topic and on decrying oppressive gender stereotypes and establishing himself as affirming a far wider-than-is-common-for-Christians vision of expansive gender expressions (I would agree with him on those points) will end up serving as a serious foundation for his regurgitation of harmful TERF talking points later in the text when he makes the move to question whether gender identity may not actually just me a desire for serotyped gender roles. In short it isnt' that I particularly disagree with him in most of this section—I would quibble with a few phrases—it is that I am, by now, suspicious of what he is doing with it.

Finally it stood out to me, and not in a positive way that Sprinkle devotes a significant part of this section to the story of David Reimer. On the one hand, that seems almost inevitable. The rather tragic story of David Reimer is a sort of touchstone for nearly everyone who wants to talk about trans people. The appeal is, is suppose, obvious. David was a twin who suffered an accidental injury to his genitals as an infant. Dr. John Money—about whom everyone has a lot to say—convinced David's parents to try raising David "as a girl" on the theory that gender is entirely a social construct and that children who are raised "as girls" will adopt that understanding of themselves. It went horribly wrong, David quickly and early on asserted himself as a boy and at 14 he detransitioned from a forced "role" into his own gender identity—that of a boy. He then continued to live his life in his gender identity until his tragic suicide which is generally attributed to his complicated childhood. 

Everyone wants to draw conclusions from the David Reimer case. It is s a sort of obvious go-to for Nature/Nurture debates (which is how Sprinkle deploys it) but it is often cited by trans affirming folk as evidence that gender identity persists regardless of how a child is raised (thereby challenging various claims made by people who think trans-ness can be treated out of us) and it is sometimes rather ham-fistedly deployed by anti-trans people as a sort of "any transition type treatments of youth are bad". Sprinkles use is mostly just to sort of point to it and observe that neither nature or nurture seem to give the whole story on the subject of gender. What I find concerning is first that he put it in this section (geneer role) rather than the next (gender identity) and second that he seems to have made a point of portraying Dr. Money as a sort of pro-trans researcher. Money was complicated but is in no way broadly accepted or celebrated in the trans community and it isn't great seeing Sprinkle hanging him around our necks.

But it is after all of that that we get to the heart of this chapter. Preston Sprinkle's reflections on gender identity.

Gender Identity

Buckle up.

Sprinkle starts off relatively well. His immediate definition of the term is "one's internal sense of self as male, female, both, or neither" and he cites (for once) solid sources (name the Human Rights Campaign an Austen Hartke. He pretty much goes off the rails from there. 

More than any part of the book to date, I think this section highlights the paucity of Sprinkle's research into what mainstream trans folk are actually saying and the distortions in reporting that result from that. As I have remarked elsewhere, I don't have any clear way of determining whether Sprinkle was just lazy/unconsciously motivated in his research or was aware of the broader conversation, perspectives, and accounts that his book ignores and simply chose to suppress them. Either way the effect is a read that probably makes sense to cis people who don't have a lot of trans people in their lives but comes across as alternately confused and alarming to actual trans people.

Sprinkle organizes his reflections into four questions.

Does Gender Identity Exist?

He concludes the two paragraphs he devotes to this section by tabling it as requiring more exploration to answer. The rest of the two paragraphs are almost entirely devoted to highlighting the voices and positions of people who say that gender identity is not real and expressing his concerns. He does follow that with an acknowledgement that "there are some biblical and scientific arguments for gender identity being a more ontologically robust aspect of human nature" but instead of even listing them—much less explaining them with the detail he used for the anti-trans arguments—he just tables the discussion.

The effect is to leave the reader dubious about even the reality of gender identity without giving them even a representative experience of "the debate", hardly an open minded position from which to evaluate the rest of what he says about the topic.

In fact, if Sprinkle had done his reading he would have encountered the works of trans theorists who enunciate (in the vein of Serano above, but Talia Bettcher, Sandy Stone, Justin Sabia-Tanis, even Contrapoints or Abigail Thorn would have clarified it as well) an explanation that gender identity designates an experience that we largely hold to be very much real while recognizing that (at least for the time being) the experience of a person's gender identity is available only to that person. It is just a fact of human existence (consult your own) that there are some experiences which we have but which we cannot grant outside observers access to. For instance, if I were to take Sprinkle's approach in this section but apply it to the concept "being a Christian" I would observe that many Evangelicals mean by being a Christian that they have accepted Jesus into their heart or that they will sometimes use the phrase believing in Jesus. "But" I would argue, "there is no caridographic instrument that will show us Jesus in a heart and there is no brain scan that can demonstrate that a person believes in Jesus—we can't really even know what they mean by 'Jesus' there: a historical figure they have only read about? a person they have only spoken to or experienced as an inner feeling? Honestly there seem to be as many versions of Jesus floating around as there are Evangelicals who say they believe in him." The irritated Evangelical would likely respond that the experience of believing in Jesus—having him in their heart—is very real even if it can only be known subjectively. 

The fact of the matter is that there just are a certain set of experiences which are only available to the person who has them and, as many trans people and philosophers have pointed out, a lack of external verifiability does not indicate that a claim is false.

In any case and for the record, my response to the question is that, yes, gender identity does exist, that it is a thing we all can know subjectively and which has very real and verifiable impacts on each person. I would add that cisgender people, those whose gender identity easily or comfortably aligns with the sex they were assigned when (or before) they were born, have a hard time "locating" it for the same reason that we are less likely to constantly notice comfortable, well fitting, clothes but are constantly aware of pinching, ill fitting clothes: unless something seems to not fit, the whole thing is processed in the back ground at a pretty deeply subconscious level. 

 

But having cast a significant shadow over the concept as a whole, Sprinkle moves on to:

How Many Gender Identities are There?

I don't see why Sprinkle thinks this is an important question to ask at this point. Rather, I can't think of a compelling good faith reason why he would. The effect that this section has—Sprinkle spends it first positing that there may be as many as ten thousand gender identities and then rather ironically reminding the reader that we need to make sure we know what people mean by the terms they use—is to give the impression of a sort of arbitrary gender chaos without giving any real consideration to what is meant by people who talk amount a multiplicity of gender identities and why they make those claims. What is so difficult to explain away is the clear contingency of this question: What does it matter how many gender identities there are before we have established whether or not genders identities are real in the first place? Even then, Sprinkle doesn't really explore the particularities of different gender identities anywhere in the book, so why should it matter to him how many there are if the answer has no bearing on what he has to say? 

The answer that springs to mind isn't charitable so please take it with a grain of salt. The only reason I can see for Sprinkle including this question at this point is to give himself an opportunity to portray gender identity as vague and a bit ridiculous in in the mind of his readers.

How do you determine a person's gender identity?

On this question Sprinkle only responds that there are a range of views and he locates self-id at one side of that range and transmedicalism at the other side. From various podcasts (and somewhat in line with Mark Yarhouse's "Least Invasive Treatment" approach) I know that Sprinkle takes a sort of begrudging transmedicalist-as-last-resort-and-if-nothing-else-will-work position on the question of transition and that likely has a bearing on the way he thinks about that range of views. 

I will note before moving on that Sprinkles' "If you identify as a woman, then you're a woman. There is no objective criteria that need to be met" line when describing the self-id position is rather dismissive. 

Is gender identity malleable?

This comes right at the end of the chapter, is very brief (81 words) and contains no citations whatsoever so I don't really have any insight into the justification for Sprinkle's claim in it that: 

The fact is—and it is a fact—for some people gender identity changes, and for other it doesn't. This shouldn't be surprising. After all, we're dealing with "one's internal sense of self."

Sprinkle is on the record as still believing that conversion therapy (though he doesn't like it being called that in this instance) is a real and positive option for "people who experience gender dysphoria" and beyond holding open room for that heinous view I don't know that Sprinkle is accomplishing, or trying to accomplish much here. 

As for the claim itself, the truth is significantly less cut and dried than Sprinkle seems willing to admit. Put another way, the word "some" is doing a lot of heaving lifting in his claim.  Sprinkle sums up the section and chapter by promising to revisit each of these questions in more depth later in the book, once more effectively giving himself a sort of permission to have done a sloppy job with them here while also establishing a degree of doubt in his readers minds about the claims of trans people. 

Series Index

Intro

Part 1—Chapter 1: People

Part 2—Chapter 2A: Terms

Part 3—Chapter 2B: Sex and Gender

Part 4—Chapter 3: Varieties of Trans 

Part 5—Chapter 4: Male, Female & The Image of God

Part 6—Chapter 5: Gender Stereotypes

 

Footnotes:

(1) There isn't really a perfect term for the thing he is trying to get at and hopefully the reason for that will become clear over the course of this series. I would argue that sex is only the physical manifestation of gender but my take on that is not mainstream in even transgender Christian discourse.

(2) He cites Dr. Paul McHugh for this claim and that is more than a little problematic for several reasons. First because Dr. McHugh is a really problematic source, and second because in this interview conversation he had with Christina Beardsley on the Unbelievable? podcast, he takes offence and pushes back when she lists Dr. McHugh among his sources, she apologizes and qualifies that other in Sprinkle's camp cite McHugh and he sort of harumphs back something to the effect of "others but not me". Meanwhile in the book they are talking about he had specifically cited McHugh to define a term he identifies as crucial to understanding the topic.

(3) Platypus as a word is in a class of English words (along with octopus and a few others) with Latin sounding Greek roots. The result has been considerable misinformation about the proper pluralization of these words in English. If the word were derived from Latin, the correct plural would be Platypii or something of the sort, but when English incorporates words from non-Latinate languages the practice is to either keep the original pluralization (the classical Greek knowers in my life tell me this gives us something like Platipodes) or to use the standard Germanic English pluralization. Hence, Platypuses.

The Sweetest Poisons: Preston Sprinkle's "Embodied" Chapter 2A Definitions. A Review

 This is the third installment in my series reviewing Preston Sprinkle's book Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, & What the Bible has to Say. Click HERE for the Intro to this series where I discuss my thematic concerns with the book and for an index for the full series.

In Chapter 2 of Embodied Preston Sprinkle defines his terms. Or, at least, he defines some of them. He opens with a reasonable caveat that there are lots of terms and he recommends "the internet" for the ones he doesn't include in this chapter. To that end, here is a link to GLAAD's media reference guide for trans related terms, and here is a link to the HRC's glossary. He also makes it clear that these are going to be substantial definitions  and that the terms sex and gender will take up a half of the chapter. Chapter 2 is really both definitions and Sprinkle's initial reflection on those terms and their definitions. 

Before I launch into an analysis of Sprinkle's take on these terms, I want to recognized that many
debates and arguments are won or lost on the basis of definitions. An argument or position built on a definition of key terms will often fall or stand depending on the careful definition of those terms and, for that reason, in a good faith discussion it is important to agree with your interlocutor up front about what the key terms mean and how you will be using them. A small difference in the definition of a few key terms may be minor at the outset but as the lines of argument built on them extend, the distance between what is said and what is heard can grow significantly. Thus it is important to be clear about terms as we dive into the book.

For those reasons, this installment is only going to respond to the first half of Chapter 2. Sprinkle's definitions and statements are...let's say problematic... and it is going to require a good deal of space to respond.

Most of the Terms

As I hope will be clear by the end of this section, Preston Sprinkle is either sloppy in his research or a disturbingly motivated reporter throughout the text and no less in this chapter. Sprinkle provides a total of 5 footnotes to the first half of this chapter and only one (for "transgender" where he cites Mark Yarhouse) cites or uses a definitional source for the terms he uses. Instead Sprinkle provides his own definitions. The effect of this is to allow Sprinkle to present himself in this chapter as a teacher, helping the reader familiarize themselves with the technical jargon of this subject. But that mode of writing disguises (and Sprinkle only alludes to this when he absolutely has to) the extremely contested nature of a lot of these terms. Specifically because arguments and then positions are built on the definition of words, trans people are extremely careful in our usages of relevant vocabulary. Every single one of the terms Sprinkle lists and reflects on is presented in a way that differs from the definition and/or explication of it that you would encounter reading a text by a transgender person. 

And that leads me to my second top level observation of this chapter, one that will resurface again and again as we work through the book: Sprinkle uses "debated-ness" in an almost entirely one sided way. When he encounters scholarship or terminology that he doesn't like he is quick to highlight any debates or contention about it before stating his position. He will sometimes provide a citation for the debate but even when he does his sources is nearly always wildly unbalanced in favor of his position. In contrast whenever possible he seems to have avoided mentioning debates or contentions that would tend to challenge his position or the usage of his terms. His bias for a particular set of conclusions is hidden by his tone and the unbalanced nature of his citations which has the alarming potential of leading the reader to misapprehend the state of the discussion by and about trans people. 

Transgender

Sprinkle actually chooses to defer any in-depth discussion of this term for Chapter 3. For the purposes of this chapter he provides Mark Yarhouse's definition: An umbrella term for the many ways in which people might experience and/or present and express (or live out) their gender identities differently from people whose sense of gender identity is congruent with their biological sex. Beyond that he really wants to stress the "umbrella" nature of this term. And on one level, that's fair—"transgender" is indeed importantly an umbrella term—but on another level, he is setting up to engage in the sort of slippery rhetoric that I identified in my introduction to this series and which I will have a good deal more to discuss as he explains some of his thinking when we get to Chapter 3.

Nonbinary

Here again, Sprinkle highlights that the terms is an umbrella term and provides a fully adequate explanation of what binary entails and that nonbinary designates trans identities which are not binary. He then rather dismissively lists genderqueer, genderfluid, and pangender as sub-categories of non-binary identities. He doesn't offer any clarity into the difference between those three identities.

And then he digresses: 

To be clear, all non-intersex(1) persons (and most intersex persons, as we'll see) are biologically male or female, regardless of how they identify.

He goes on to say that the various non-binary identities designate something about the person's relationship to the categories "masculinity and femininity" or it indicates "that they experience some level of incongruence between their bodies and their minds". He then suggests that all of this well be less confusing when he unpacks sex and gender. But I have a little more to say at this point.

What Sprinkle is doing, with a light touch here, is setting up a critique he will be leveling at trans folk later on. It is a critique based primarily in TERF allegations against trans women (though it is used against trans men and non-binary people as well) and boils down to the idea that we reinforce harmful gender stereotypes. This is a wildly off base accusation based, usually, in not having interacted with more than a handful of trans people. I will respond to it when he finally makes the accusation but for the time being let us just note his decision to highlight the "don't fit into strict categories of masculinity and femininity" bit. Here he seems to be widening the umbrella a little farther than trans people actually do. I don't know that I have ever encountered a trans person who rejected the possibility of a tomboy or a feminine guy as fully cisgender identities, but by Sprinkle's definition here those folk (who may be more or less varied in the expression of their gender identities based in cultural gender assumptions) would seem to be categorized as non-binary and therefore trans.

Trans*

Sprinkle's justification for using trans* with the * is brief:

Since so many gender identity terms can overlap with each other, some people put an asterisk after the word trans, styling it as trans*, when they want to us it as a broad umbrella term to include a whole range of identities that aren't strictly transgender, such as nonbinary, genderqueer, and the like. I'll do the same in this book. [emphasis original]

I don't know who these people are (and Sprinkle declines to cite the claim so I have no way of knowing whom he has in mind here). In my experience, and as I discussed in the intro to this series, people who want to use trans as an umbrella term just do, they don't add an *. More strange to me was Sprinkle's suggestion that non-binary and gender queer folk aren't strictly transgender. I am of the impression that there is some variation in which people with those identities choose to identify, or not, as trans but simple declaring them not "strictly transgender" isn't anything I have seen in mainstream trans discourse. As one non-binary friend of mine responded, "Sprinkle would have done far better to have simply observed that some non-binary people identify as trans while other don't"

Gender dysphoria

Sprinkle's definition of this term is great:

Gender dysphoria is a psychological term for the distress some people feel when their internal sense of self doesn't match their biological sex.

For sure, he doesn't cite that definition from any particular source but it is fairly standard. And after this paragraph Sprinkle proceeds to give us three heart wrenching descriptions, all first hand accounts, of the experience of gender dysphoria. Again this is perfectly reasonable in a text of this sort. 

Unfortunately between the definition and the examples, Sprinkle sneaks in this little false claim which I will have to respond to:

As a diagnosis, Gender Dysphoria used to be called Gender Identity Disorder, but the name was changed to Gender Dysphoria in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th edition) in 2013.

This is a common enough misconception but it is decidedly wrong and a text on the subject of transgender people absolutely ought to know better. With even a little bit of research, Dr. Sprinkle would have found that

With the publication of DSM-5 in 2013, "gender identity disorder" was eliminated and replaced with "gender dysphoria." This change further focused the diagnosis on the gender identity-related distress that some transgender people experience (and for which they may seek psychiatric, medical, and surgical treatments) rather than on transgender individuals or identities themselves. [emphasis mine]

That is from the American Psychiatric Assocaition's Guide for Working With Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Patients it took me all of 2 minutes to google. The difference between reality and Sprinkle's claim should be clear but in case it isn't, the shift from Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria as the "core" diagnosis for trans people who seek therapy designates a shift from seeing the identity or the person as the problem in need of treatment to the distress generated by the experience of gender incongruence. With the old diagnosis the person or their identity was the problem; with the update, it is the distress that is the problem. That is not at all insignificant. 

Transition

Sprinkle opens this section by saying that transition "is the term most trans*[sic] people prefer for what is sometimes called "sex change." In fact transition is a larger category (and Sprinkle is about to acknowledge the range of the the term) than "sex change" ever was. Again it isn't a huge thing but I want us to notice that by locating the distinction between the two terms in what trans people prefer rather than in a technical difference, Sprinkle is adding one more little bit to his argument (intentional or not) that trans people and trans identities are all about feelings and that we are not making defensible truth claims. 

Sprinkle then goes on to accurately identify social transition, hormonal transition, and surgical transition as three categories of transitioning. It is more common in my experience to see these categorized as social transition and medical transition but I see no need to quibble. 

• Social Transition Sprinkle describes as typically dressing and acting as the sex with which a trans person identifies. This is a little weird as he is about to set himself against the idea that there are forms of dress and behavior of a given sex, but overall it is not egregious. He also mentions new names and pronouns as included in this form of transition

• Hormonal Transition in Sprinkle's view "means taking high levels of hormones typically produced by the opposite [sic] biological sex: those transitioning to male take testosterone, and those transitioning to female take estrogen(2). I don't really know why Sprinkle insisted on "high levels of hormones" other than to make Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) seem more dangerous than it is. The general goal for binary trans people who are on HRT is to have hormone levels that mirror those of their cis counterparts. If I were to find that my estrogen levels were significantly higher than the standard range for cisgender women I would be alarmed. 

Sprinkle then goes on to say that this intervention "is called 'cross-sex hormone therapy' (CHT) or 'hormone replacement therapy' (HRT or  HT). I don't know a single trans person who calls it CHT or HT, we pretty much universally (to my knowledge and in my experience) refer to it as HRT. And yet Sprinkle will refer to it as CHT for the rest of the book and I can't help noticing that this serves to emphasize the "cross-sex" element rather than the therapeutic element of this medical procedure. He doesn't justify the choice but by now I can't help being suspicious.

• Surgical Transition is one Sprinkle gets wrong right off the bat. He says that it "goes by various names: 'gender confirmation surgery' (GCS), 'sex reassignment surgery' (SRS), and a few others." In fact, and he halfway alludes to this further into the paragraph, surgical transition designates all the surgical procedures that a trans person might undergo as part of their transition including but not limited to GCS. He instead tries to lump some of those other surgeries—top surgery, ffs, etc—under the rubric of GCS/SRS after acknowledging that each term has ideological justifications. He makes a hash of it, and his reference to facial feminization surgery and top surgery as "cosmetic" is just inaccurate—those surgeries are medically necessary (when prescribed) therapies for the treatment of gender dysphoria; they are not cosmetic.

Transman and Transwoman

These are terms where what I am going to call Sprinkle's "reporting bias" really comes into play. Sprinkle gives two paragraphs to state that transman is "a biological female [sic] who identifies as male" and that transwoman is "a biological male [sic] who identifies as female". And he adds that these terms are sometimes "shortened as FtM (female to male) for transmen [sic] and MtF (male to female) for transwomen". 

All of that is...wrong? Or rather it is wildly distorted specifically because it omits a lot of relevant information. In fact the terms transman and transwoman written in that way are deeply controversial and have been rejected by the mainstream of transgender discourse. The correct expression of these terms are, respectively, trans man and trans woman (or transgender man and transgender woman) separated into the distinct terms "trans" and "man/woman"(3). This may seem like a minor distinction from the outside but, in fact, the distinction holds significant ideological value. 

In English "transgender/trans" is an adjective. Placing it as a word before "man" or "woman" indicates the sort of man or woman we happen to be talking about so that "trans man" indicates a man who is trans, and "trans woman" indicates a woman who is trans just as "short man" indicates a man who is a short and "short woman" indicates a woman who is short. In contrast the terms transman and transwoman are neologisms which seem to designate not types of men and women but novel categories. It would be odd to encounter a text in which there are men and then also there are shortmen and I imagine that short men would be inclined to take ideological umbrage with such a text arguing that they are men and not some novel new category. The same argument is made by trans people. I am a trans woman because I am a woman and "trans" designates the type of woman I am. I am not a transwoman because I am a woman just as I am not a christianwoman because I am a woman who is a Christian. 

Now it will become clear to any reader that this ideological divide is what actually forces Dr. Sprinkle into the transman/transwoman formulation. He does not believe or grant that trans women are women, that trans men are men or that non-binary poeple are non-binary. Thus for him to use "trans woman" would be to impute a status to me (womanhood) that he does not believe I possess. 

On one level, then, Sprinkle's choice to use transman/transwoman makes sense. It allows him to use terminology which communicates the object of his writing without granting a premise he will not allow. And if he had only acknowledged as much this critique would have been little more than a footnote. Instead Sprinkle doesn't even mention the controversy or justify his choice despite using what are clearly non-standard forms. There are two explanations I can think of and neither is especially reassuring: on the one hand Sprinkle may have chosen these terms and neglected to mention the distinction because he was unaware of the controversy and it's meaning. The research citations in his book evidence far more reading in the trans-denying corpus where the versions Sprinkle uses are routinely deployed and thus he may simply have not done enough research to be aware of a basic terminological distinctive; or Sprinkle may have known about the controversy but chosen to ignore it in an effort to suppress contrary views to his own in this text. 

On a final note it does also need to be said (referring back to Sprinkle's initial explanation of these terms) that "MtF" and "FtM" are, not at all "shortened" versions of the terms he claims to be defining. They are specialized terms used only as necessary (and generally frowned on even then—I am not "an MtF" I am a woman who is trans) to designate both the gender that a given trans person was assigned and the gender they actually are. I can't think of a reason beyond either sloppy research or sloppy writing for Sprinkle to have suggested that they are.

Cisgender

Sprinkle's bit on this term is both short and important enough to justify quoting in full:

Cisgender is a recent term that refers to those who identify (and are comfortable) with their biological sex. (Cis means "on the side of.") Basically, cisgender refers to everyone who doesn't identify as trans*[sic].

Since the term sometimes comes with ideological assumptions and connotations, I'll avoid it in this book unless the context or quote demands it. Instead, I'll use the more neutral term non-trans* to refer to people who don't identify as trans*

I have... a lot to say. First, of course, it has to be noted that when Sprinkle feels the need to justify avoiding a term, he is quick to highlight that it "comes with ideological assumptions and connotations"—trransman/transwoman do too but he didn't bother saying anything there, just smuggled in the "ideological assumptions and connotations" that happen to support his position. Second, beyond that (hypocrisy? academic sloppiness? motivated reporting?) I want to highlight Sprinkle's claim that cisgender refers to... "everyone who doesn't identify as trans*". He will, in fact, go on to include all sorts of people who by his own account here would otherwise fall under the category cisgender or non-trans*.(4) Third, I think we see here one (there will be more) weakness of Sprinkle's not having read Julia Serano's Whipping Girl.(5) The book was first published in 2007 and in it, Serano discusses uses of the term extensively. She identifies the terms as one that was coined in 1995 and was in the course of gaining currency between 2005 and 2007. She also provides significant discussion of the term, none of which Sprinkle shows evidence of understanding.(6) Of course "recent" is a relative term so Sprinkle's use of it here can, of course, be justified. With that said, by all accounts transgender studies is a rapidly developing field such that a term that has been in mainstream use within our community for more than fifteen years now, is hardly a "recent term"; in any case many of the terms Sprinkle uses throughout this book are far more recent.

But most importantly, while Sprinkle did identify the fact that the term cisgender "comes with ideological assumptions and connotations" he declined to identify them and I suppose that means it falls to me. 

Much of this analysis is taken from Whipping Girl and from Serano's subsequent work on the subject. in essence cisgender, by providing a complimentary term to transgender, gives all of us the capacity to talk about ways in which cis-ness impacts the way people experience and process reality. It makes cis-ness a thing and in so doing situates it as one potential option describing ways in which people related to the gender they were assigned at birth. Serano provides the following Koyama quote which nicely summarizes the utility of the terms cisgender, cissexual, and cissexism: 

...they de-centralize the dominant group, exposing it as merely one possible alternative rather than the "norm" against which trans people are defined. ... I felt it was an interesting concept - a feminist one, in fact - which is why I am using it.

In sum, cisgender "comes with ideological assumptions and connotations" because it implies that trans people are not freaks but one variation in the human experience and that cisgender people are likewise another variation. Those are the assumptions and connotations that Sprinkle wants to avoid. 

Intersex

Sprinkle defines Intersex  as "a term used to describe the sixteen or so medical conditions where a person is born with one or more atypical features in their sexual anatomy or sex chromosomes". It is not clear to my why Dr. Sprinkle sees a difference between "sexual anatomy" and "sex chromosomes". He then identifies "differences/disorders of sex development" as "the medical term for intersex conditions". His reflection on the term largely punts to Chapter 7 which is devoted exclusively to the topic, but thinks it is "important to know two things" now:

(1) Intersex is different from transgender. (2)  Ninety-nine percent of people with an intersex condition are biologically male or female (and the other 1 percent are both). In other words, intersex does not mean "neither male nor female".

He then moves on to sex and gender which I will cover in the next part of this series, but before I can move on from this topic (I will address his stance on intersex people fully in my own review of chapter 7) I need to very clearly state that both (1) and (2) there are complicated and much discussed topics in the intersex and trans communities (the existence of brain sex theory really complicates (1), and (2) is an ongoing discussion within the intersex community, various intersex individual understand themselves and their relationship to sex/gender in a significant variety of ways.

Series Index

Intro

Part 1—Chapter 1: People

Part 2—Chapter 2A: Terms

Part 3—Chapter 2B: Sex and Gender

Part 4—Chapter 3: Varieties of Trans 

Part 5—Chapter 4: Male, Female & The Image of God

Part 6—Chapter 5: Gender Stereotypes

 

Footnotes:

(1) I find it rather peculiar that Sprinkle chooses to use the - in "non-intersex" but declines to do so in non-binary where he uses the formulation nonbinary. If there is some discussion about this in non-binary circles please let me know.

(2) In point of fact, while trans men do typically take testosterone, trans women will typically take a testosterone blocker, estrogen and often progesterone until and if the blocker becomes...unnecessary.

(3)GLAAD maintains a media reference guide for publishing about trans people and, notably, it includes the separated form of the terms, and notes that "trans woman" rather than transwoman is the correct form

(4) The question of whether or not a person who chooses not to identify as trans but who bears certain distinctives of trans people (such as a person who identifies as gender dysphoric but rejects the label trans) are, or should be referred to as, trans is a complicated one and I am not in a place to suggest an answer. It is very much still being discussed. My inclination is to try to use the terms for people that they choose and I would be personally loathe to, in any serious way, assert that someone who rejects the term is trans.

(5) For the record, Serano also supplies us with an extensive glossary of trans related terms—one that Sprinkle would have done well to have consulted for this chapter so that, even when he deviates from the terms or definitions she supplies, he would at least have written the chapter with an awareness of how these terms and ideas are more frequently expressed and used among trans people. 

(6) Notably, Serano cites Emi Koyama as the source from which she first encountered the word and Koyama's citation is the one that identifies a 1995 coinage by trans man Carl Buijs. Sprinkle has interacted with Koyama's work as some level (he cites Koyama's work in his Chapter 7: "What about Intersex"—Koyama is an intersex feminist activist) but seems to be ignorant on this count.

The Sweetest Poisons: Preston Sprinkle's "Embodied" Chapter 1 People. A Review

This is the second installment in my series reviewing Preston Sprinkle's book Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, & What the Bible has to Say. Click HERE for the Intro to this series where I discuss my thematic concerns with the book and for an index for the full series.

Chapter 1 of Embodied starts with three stories of variously gender diverse people and a paragraph listing off six more people with one sentence introductions to their relationship to trans-ness accompanying four of them. It is notable that none of the stories he tells are of transgender Christians who affirm the goodness of their own trans-ness, who affirm transition for all those who want it, and who are confident in their own identities. 

Instead Sprinkle gives us the stories of someone "struggling with gender dysphoria", someone whom he claims (1) was browbeaten by the medical establishment into facilitating a transition(2) for her child that Sprinkle implied was inappropriate to the child's gender, and someone who identifies as a cisgender man who struggles with "an unchosen desire to dress, act, and behave like a woman"(3). Then he briefly mentions a detransitioner, another person who identifies as a man "who has wrestled with gender dysphoria his whole life", then "fathers whose daughters are now sons, and sons whose fathers are now mothers" followed by someone "whose struggles with anxiety only seem to diminish when he wears women's underwear" and finally one named person "who also transitioned from male to female three years ago". 

It may be worth re-reading that list, the only mention of what is, by all accounts, the mainstream of transgender Christian people, is a single sentence snapshot right at the end. This sets a pattern that will continue throughout Embodied: Sprinkle routinely distorts the overall picture of trans folk (often under the justification that he wants to demonstrate "the diversity of trans*") so that the actual center position and identity set of our community is minimized while the positions, attitudes, and approaches to "trans*"-ness that support his overall narrative and conclusions are magnified.

People and Concepts

Having recounted the stories he has chosen to foreground, Sprinkle outlines the tension that he senses behind the "conversation" around transgender people in the context of churches and Christianity. In Sprinkle's view (and I think it has merit) the tension is between recognizing that there are real people who are affected by Christian thinking, speaking, and acting on the basis of their ideas about trans-ness, and a concern for the truth value of the concepts we use to think about and evaluate trans people. I need to say that I think that when looking at this framing, we see Sprinkles greatest strengths (or at least his greatest potential strengths). Sprinkle is...nice. More than that his niceness is, by all accounts, genuine and seems to stem from an unfortunately rare capacity to keep the personhood of the subject centered throughout his engagement in a given topic—this one included.

And I don't think Preston's identification of this tension is false. Certainly I have, far too often, encountered Christians who reduce LGBTQ+ people generally and especially trans people to enemy tokens in a culture war. Sprinkle puts it quite aptly when he says, positing a hypothetical person who "struggles with his [her] gender identity": "He experiences church not as a hospital for saints but as a graveyard fro the marginalized—and so many Christians are whistling through it". 

And yet...

Already Sprinkle's views on who trans people really are is shining through a bit in the background. We are, for him, people to be healed, while so many of us are shouting to him that we are not ill aside from the poison we have been given by so many who are determined to cure us.

Mark Yarhouse (one of Sprinkle's favorite Christian Sources for this topic—their views and approaches align fairly closely) in his book Understanding Gender Dysphoria proposed three contrasting frameworks to categorize the ways in which Christians tend to think about trans folk: the Integrity Framework, the Disability Framework, and the Diversity Framework. The Integrity Framework prioritizes preserving binary and cisgender understandings of gender and is generally willing to ignore or discount the experiences of transgender people. The Disability Framework focuses on the wellbeing of trans people but identifies trans-ness as a product of the fall and sees it something to be healed or, if healing isn't possible in this life, then at least treated. The Diversity Framework recognizes the legitimacy and validity of transgender identities and seeks to celebrate the diversity and perspectives we bring to both the Church and the world.

Preston Sprinkle is a functional champion of the Disability Framework (I can't imagine that he would deny this though he might want to pad it with nuance about "good pastoral approaches to people who need to be loved") and it shows. It shows through a thousand little cracks in Embodied where, in the same sentences that he insists we be treated with dignity, respect, and love, he alos implies or says that we need to be cured. That our trans-ness is not a blessing but an unfortunate curse; a "product of the fall". His smiles are laced with pity 

And I want to talk for a moment about why this is dangerous for trans people and why it is a problem:

Being transgender in this world is not easy, it is hard. It is hard to be the target of right wing attacks and to have your "allies" debate the strategic merit of standing up for your as opposed to ignoring those attacks so they can focus on "kitchen table issues"—have they forgotten that I too have a kitchen table? It is hard to be a member of a community that yearly stops to remember those of our community who were killed for being what we are. It is hard to have your family, your neighbors, your co-workers, your classmates, your friends reject you when you tell them who you actually are. It is hard to watch the children in your community reduced to talking points while their healthcare is criminalized and their basic existence is sexualized. It just isn't easy to be trans.

And in a world where it isn't easy to be trans, it is really really hard to resist the lure of someone who wants to pity you. I don't know that anyone really wants to be pitied but I do know that pity is orders of magnitude better than rejection and hostility. And in a world where it is hard to be trans it is so so terribly easy to think that the problem is not the hate, the bigotry, the small-mindedness, and the fear, the problem is your own transness. I don't think Preston Sprinkle sets out to prey on that insecurity, but regardless of his intention, this book and his approach absolutely do prey on it. All a trans person has to do is reject a beautiful God-given part of who they are—call it a struggle, a temptation, evil—and Sprinkle will reward them with kind words, with encouragement, with praise for their courage and the depth of their faith. The poison is well candied.

Preston finishes out this section not by insisting in good evangelical idiom that both truth and love need to be celebrated. He depicts Jesus' "upside-down" Kindom as a place "Where truth is upheld, celebrated, and proclaimed. Where those who fall short of that truth are loved." I also want both truth and love to be celebrated. I also affirm that both are central in the Kindom of God. I just don't think that they are in any tension when it comes to the identities of transgender people.

As a final reflection on this section of the chapter, my impression on reading this was that Sprinkle intends his position on trans people to be a sort of "Side B but for transness" type position—Preston Sprinkle serves on the Advisor Council for Revoice, one of the largest Side B organizations in the country—and that he sees Yarhouse's Disability Framework as providing the basis of a Side B equivalent, while the Integrity Framework would stand in the place of Side X, and the Diversity Framework would work for Side A. I would posit that this attempt simply doesn't work and I will have more to say on it later in this series. For the time being, if a Side B trans or cis person wants to reach out to me to talk about this idea I would welcome your input.

The Question of Incongruence

In the next section of the chapter, Sprinkle identifies the central question of his book 

"If someone experiences incongruence between their biological sex and their internal sense of self, which one determines who they are—and why?"

Sprinkle presents this question(4) as the critical factor in determining what a Christian ought to think about trans-ness in general. There are worse questions to center and it is clear that Sprinkle has worked hard to find as neutral as possible a phrasing for the question. I will say though that, if I were to run across that phrasing "in the wild" I would almost certainly move on satisfied that it got close enough without doing any specific harm. In any case Sprinkle then sketches the barest outline of the questions he promises to tackle in chapters 8 and 9 and then moves to the close of the chapter. His sketch continues to use language (e.g. "biological male", "ontology") for which he has somewhat odd or questionable definitions(5) but I will hold my response for the parts of the book where he makes his argument more fully.

We would be honored to

Sprinkle ends the chapter in good irenic fashion by returning to a story emphasizing the fundamental humanity of one of the gender diverse people whose story he opened with. He tells a story of being welcomed and loved through tragedy by a church and the way that the church's love brought his subject back into Christianity. The story is heartwarming, the moral a little more infernalist than I am comfortable with, but centered in mainstream evangelical soteriology. 

Some final thoughts about how Sprinkle genders those he talks about in his book

Throughout the book Sprinkle is careful to always gender (in terms of pronouns and names) the people he talks about in the way that they want him to gender them. He defends this practise as hospitable rather than as reflecting reality in Chapter 12 and I will have a good deal more to say about it at that time, but he has a different practice when he uses stories of hypothetical people and I think it is really telling.

Chapter 1 ends with a question:

As we continue to think through questions related to trans* identities, just remember: there might be a fourteen-year-old girl [boy/non-binary person] in your youth group on the verge of suicide because she [he/they] doesn't feel like a girl and has no one to talk to. She [He/They] was created in God's image and is beloved by Jesus.

Will she [he/they] be loved by you?

and it is such a representative question. I hope that my use of corrective "[]" demostrate the failure of Sprinke's approach. While I believe he was honestly hoping and trying to still be "neutral" on the question of the validity/reality of trans identities at this point in the book, his actual view shines through. And because he hasn't yet stated it, his approach (gendering the hypothetical child according to the sex they were presumably assigned at birth) actually serves to reinforce in the readers mind the idea that trans people are really the sex and gender we were assigned at birth. My hope is that this is unintentional on Sprinkles part—another case of a cis author failing to recognize where his cisnormativity manifests—my fear is that he knows that by stating neutrality in a form that his cis readers will grant and then allowing his text to be shaped by one conclusion rather than another without recognizing that his violates his stated neutrality, he is insidiously influencing his readership to see these case studies, these people the way he does.  

Series Index

Intro

Part 1—Chapter 1: People

Part 2—Chapter 2A: Terms

Part 3—Chapter 2B: Sex and Gender

Part 4—Chapter 3: Varieties of Trans 

Part 5—Chapter 4: Male, Female & The Image of God

Part 6—Chapter 5: Gender Stereotypes

 

Footnotes

(1) Sprinkle got this story from a "Public Discourse" article in which the accounts provied are anonymous and uncredited. We don't know whether it is authentic

(2)Sprinkles quote here (referenceing puberty blockers) is "From what we do know, they may have an adverse efffect on a person's bones, heart, and brain" (emphasis mine).  The footnote he provides to source this may is a comment that he will talk more about this in Chapter 11. Notice that he is sourcing a future argumnet in a way that makes the claim feel supported at the outset of the book and will likely have been internalized and forgotten by the time he puts the argument forward. And the argument he makes is very weak and unevenly sourced per the habits I discussed in the intro to this series.

(3) This story (Alan) is one he footnotes to his own blog and it is an account of someone rejecting the identity of being a trans woman on the basis of thier interpretation and experience of Christianity. 

(4) There is a lot to say about it already but I am going to leave that for my review of later chapters for the time being I will only identify that "biological sex" and "internal sense of self" are doing a whole lot of heavy lifting for Sprinkle and that he is going to prove rather slippery around them throughout the book.

(5) Spinkle defines "ontology" as "a philosophical temr that has to do with the natrue of being; specifically, what does it mean to be human, especailly a sexed embodied human". I am not sure where he gets that definition but beyond the first clause he seem to actually be talking about philosophical anthropology. Regardless he is not wrong in locating his question as ontological "what is a transgender man?" is properly an ontological question as well as a question of philsophical anthropology depending on where the emphasis is placed.

The Sweetest Poisons: Preston Sprinkle and "Embodied: Transgender Identities, The Church & What The Bible Has To Say". A Review

"You have frightened me several times tonight, but never in the way the servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine. I think one of his spies would—well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand."

That is how Frodo justifies his decision to trust Strider in The Fellowship of the Ring. As I was casting about for an opening to this review it struck me that Strider is a near perfect opposite to Preston Sprinkle and his book. Here is a man (and his book) who seems fair and feels foul—obviously whether or not he is a servant of the enemy is beyond what I can know—the book is all honey, sunlight, and a fresh breeze, but it is laced (at least for trans folks and those who love us) with deadly poison.

I recognize this opening leaves me at risk of sounding melodramatic or hyperbolic. I want to assure you that it is not. Cards on the table: my major thesis in this review is that Sprinkle's book, Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church & What the Bible Has to Say, grossly misrepresents not just trans people generally but the basic facts of the matter, both scientifically and theologically; and that this misrepresentation amounts to, at the very best, a mortifying example of laziness, question-begging, and confirmation bias, and at worst a deliberate program of misinformation and deceit.

My intention in this series is to work through the book, in roughly(1) the order it is written in, focusing on specific themes and issues in the book. I will attempt to give credit where it is due (the majority of what Sprinkle gets right is not wanting people to be outwardly cruel to trans folk, and in this day and age, even that does count for something), but for the most, part this series is intended as a warning and critique of Embodied. I will be supplementing my analysis of Sprinkle's thought and writing in this book with what I have learned listening to his podcasts and from reading his blogs and debates with other writers, as well as one or two interactions I have had with him on Twitter.

In this introductory post, I want to cover the two main intellectual flaws in the book. But before I do I want to clarify the social location from which I am writing this review series. I am a transgender woman. I am also a Christian. I hold a Master of Arts in the Liberal Arts and, while I have studied gender theory, theology, and trans theory pretty extensively the only one of those that I have had formal education in is theology (I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Bible and focused one portion of my Masters in theology). Throughout this series I do not intend to write as a sort of removed third-party observer but as someone who is in the text I am discussing. Where Dr. Sprinkle discusses transgender folk from the outside and presents himself as a sort of neutral theological arbiter who has processed information about us and is not providing it to the reader, I will be reacting as a transgender christian woman who is confirmed in her gender identity and in her identity in Christ. I do not pretend to objectivity but would suggest that my subjectivity on this subject is more useful in revealing truth on the subject of transgender people.

1. Flawed Research

Preston Sprinkle engages extensively in motivated and shoddy research. This isn't the first time I have called this out, and at this point, it has happened so frequently that I am practically compelled to conclude he is aware of this tendency and doesn't care. There are many examples throughout his book; two here at the outset ought to prove illustrative.

Unbalanced ROGD Research

One of Sprinkle’s interests is an etiology of transness (a theory of what causes some people to be trans) often referred to as "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" (ROGD). Sprinkle is so taken with this theory that he devotes a full chapter of his book to it. The idea, in short, is that transness has become a "social contagion" by gaining so much currency among school-aged children (especially those assigned female at birth) that theyare developing gender dysphoria as a result of interacting with the idea of trans-ness. The theory—which has, by the way, been thoroughly debunked and discredited—is rather more complicated than that, and since Sprinkle gives it a full chapter I will address the substance of the idea in my review of that chapter; the point here is only to observe Sprinkle's research methodology. In the chapter in question, Sprinkle provides 31 footnotes in support of ROGD, citing 17 unique sources by 16 different authors. He does also recognize that there are critiques of the theory, and provides 4 citations of 3 authors for reference. Out of curiosity, I looked up the Wikipedia entry on ROGD: at that time, Wikipedia provided 16 unique sources in favor of ROGD, and 21 unique sources critiquing the theory. In other words, Sprinkle's chapter on ROGD is more fully sourced than Wikipedia in favor of the theory, yet contains less than a third of Wikipedia's sources against it.

Now, it is possible that Sprinkle read more extensively than those four sources critiquing the theory, and simply chose not to identify organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's (WPATH) statement on the problems with ROGD, or any of the multitude of scholarly journal articles critiquing the theory on basic methodological and scientific grounds. But if so, that fact itself betrays an almost criminal choice to misrepresent the state of the debate to his readers. It seems easier to believe that Sprinkle invested real time and effort in reading only texts and papers which supported the theory he found convenient to the picture of trans folk that he wanted to paint in this book.

Sprinkle's Whipping Girl Problem 

As of September 30th 2021 Preston Sprinkle had not read Julia Serano's Whipping Girl: A Transexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Of course that in itself is no great crime—the overwhelming majority of people have never read Whipping Girl—and if Sprinkle had not published a book all about transgender people on February 1st of 2021 his oversight wouldn't be a big deal. But he did publish his book before reading it and so it is a big deal. Let me try to explain.

In the trans community we often use the term "cracking the egg" to reference the moment at which one of us realizes that they are transgender. "My egg cracked when I..." is the sort of form this generally takes and I can't think of any one book that is responsible for cracking as many eggs as Whipping Girl is. I can say with near total confidence that if you were to assemble any random collection of 10 transgender anglophone women, the majority of any gathering will have at least interacted with the content of Whipping Girl if they haven't read it fully, likely more than once. If there were a central text for trans women, that text would be Whipping Girl. And yes, I like it, it made a significant difference in my life, but that is not the point. The point is that the idea of an author writing a book about transgender people without reading Whipping Girl is as academically ridiculous as someone trying to write an academic treatise on the history of English literature without having read any Shakespeare. 

In any discipline there are central texts which are foundational and necessary as entry into the "conversation", and there are peripheral texts which might be helpful or useful to a researcher. Often there are far too many texts for any researcher to reasonably read. In this case, the problem isn't that Sprinkle hasn't read a text that I happen to find useful/helpful, the problem is that Dr. Sprinkle hasn't read a basic, foundational text in the discipline. In contrast Dr. Sprinkle did take the time to read multiple texts (central and peripheral) opposing the mainline trans position, and supporting his argument. My concern isn't exactly that Dr. Sprinkle doesn't do his homework before writing, it's that his only rigorous reading appears to be of texts that support the argument he wanted to make while missing central texts which would counter his position.

2. Slippery Rhetoric

Throughout the text, intentionally or not, Sprinkle employs several rhetorical devices of which the reader had better beware.

"If you've met one trans person you've met one trans person"

This quote (which Preston Sprinkle attributes to Mark Yarhouse) is technically accurate and, depending on context, can be not just true but vitally important. Certainly it is common among trans and trans-affirming folk to hear that there is no one way to be trans, and that trans people are highly varied: what we have in common, by definition, is simply that we identify as a gender other than what we were assigned at birth. Beyond that, there is great and glorious diversity in the trans community. Sprinkle's phrase (which he returns to often) is thus, on a certain level, both welcome and accurate. The problem is what Sprinkle does with it.

First, I should note that his focus in the book (and, by the way, also in his podcast and in his general speaking about us) is on trans people who do not fit what might be called the "norm" among transgender Christians; or to be more objective about it, he appears to go out of his way to avoid talking to or about Christians who are transgender, who affirm the goodness of gender transition (living as who we are rather than as the gender we were assigned), and who are happy with that decision. Sprinkle devotes the majority of his anecdotes, case studies, and interviews to people who either do not even identify as trans (they self ID as "gender dysphoric"), or who do identify as trans but have significant reservations about any kind of transition (for example, those who feel that it was an unfortunate necessity for themselves due to the severity of their dysphoria and that other trans people would do better to avoid it). Given that affirmation of the goodness of transition and of being trans is the position with which Dr. Sprinkle has the most disagreement, on this subject this "oversight" is rather stunning.

What Sprinkle does with the phrase "if you've met one trans person, you've met one trans person" is to focus on cases of trans arguments and identities which he feels more able to fit into his overall argument. He reminds us that they too are trans and thus, by "debunking" their experience of transness (often with the help of their own affidavits and quotes), he is able to give the impression that he has significantly weakened the case for trans affirmation in general. His unstated working assumption is that if all trans identities are unique, then all claims to transness are equally valid. Again, there is a level on which is an important claim that much of the trans community upholds, myself included: you do not need to experience dysphoria or pursue transition to be “really” trans. But Sprinkle's usage of the phrase implies that the basis on which any given trans person claims to be trans can equally apply to all trans people—even when he goes on to cite people do not even claim to be trans but whom he includes due to factors which both trans people in general and the scientific community have concluded are not legitimate constructs, namely Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and Autogynephillia (AGP)(2). By implication, then, Sprinkle is saying that someone who claims to be trans on the basis of autogynephilia (i.e., sexual arousal at the thought of being or becoming a woman) is making just as legitimate a claim to the meaning of transness as, say, Laverne Cox. In contrast, trans folk, the medical establishment, and the scientific establishment all maintain that AGP is not a legitimate diagnosis, and that while the trans people who are put into that category really are trans, they are not made trans by the experience Sprinkle is referring to as autogynephilia. Sprinkle's unstated reasoning runs something like: all trans experiences are unique and therefore, since trans people are nonetheless a group, undermining any one trans experience amounts to undermining transness as a whole. (In logicians’ terms, this is a delicate combination of the strawman fallacy and the fallacy of composition.) This is augmented in his book by a complementary bit of slippery rhetoric: his use of "trans*."

Trans*

Since so many gender identity terms can overlap with each other, some people put an asterisk after the word trans, stylizing it as trans*, when thye want to use it as a broad umbrella term to inculde a whole range of identities that aren't strictly transgender, such as nonbinary, genderqueer, and the like. I'll do the same in this book [italics original] 

-Chapter 2

There are a lot of problems with this little passage, and I intend to address them specifically when I review Chapter 2. Here, I want to focus only only the fact that he chose to use "trans*," with the asterisk, throughout his book. His claim (that "some people" use the asterisk version of trans) is probably, technically, true—I am not about to make a universal negative claim; but I have hardly if ever seen a trans person use it "in the wild," and I am a trans woman who is reasonably active in multiple secular and Christian trans social circles. So Sprinkle is using a term which saw some popularity in the early 2010s—Serano documented its rise and the beginning of its decline in 2015—but had already faded before he sat down to write the book (Embodied was published in 2021). Trying to be extra PC or inclusive and getting something like that wrong, wouldn't be a significant problem and a cis person, even one who has researched and published a book on trans people might be excused for using dated language if only Sprinkle had made a point of using the term well; he doesn't.

The reason there are umbrella terms (like the short-lived trans*) is so that we can effectively discuss diverse things which share a particular commonality. For that reason, those terms should only be deployed when that degree of generalization is necessary. If there is a more accurate term which could apply, it should generally be used instead. Thus I might use the acronym LGBTQ+ if I am referring generally to lesbians, gay folk, bi and pan people, trans people, people who identify as queer, and any other people who aren't generally considered straight and cisgender(3); but if I am only referring to gay men, I will use the term gay, or if I am (for some reason) only referring to cis gay men, cis lesbians, and cis bi/pan folk I might use LGB(4). Rather than following this rule of linguistic clarity, Preston uses trans* (or "trans* identified") throughout the book, even when more specific terms are available. Again this, in itself is excusable in the abstract—we will sometimes switch up our use of terms at the cost of strict accuracy for the sake of linguistic variety, or because the distinctions we might gain from more precise language aren't relevant to the topic at hand—but the way Dr. Sprinkle actually uses the term is misleading in the particular case of this book.

The effect that his usage has has is twofold: first, Sprinkle's repeated use of trans*, even where more specific terms are available and would be more accurate, counteracts the positive strength of "if you've met one trans person you've met one trans person" by lumping us all together linguistically even when such a move is not relevant. This allows Sprinkle to have his cake and eat it too, insofar as he has paid lip service to the fact of trans diversity while simultaneously lumping all of us into a single category that is subject to the critiques he makes of specific members. When it is convenient to him for us to be a monolith, he gets to treat us as one, when it is helpful to him for us to be diverse, he treats us as diverse.

Second, I noticed, about halfway through my reading of the book, that the constant use of the asterisk tends to make the term (and, by extension, the concept) feel dubious. We put an asterisk next to a term when we need to indicate that it should taken with a grain of salt. By the time I reached the end of Embodied, it had become almost impossible to read Sprinkle's “trans*” without a sense of a shrug.

Conclusion to the Intro

I am aware that the introduction to this review is not winsome. If you go and read through the two part series I wrote back in 2015, responding to his review of Ken Wilson's A Letter to my Congregation, you will see that seven years ago I had a much higher estimation of Sprinkle's intentions. Since that time, I have watched him persist in the sort of habits I identify above. As he gained an interest in writing, speaking, and podcasting about trans people, he was given multiple, earnest entreaties to widen his reading and to engage with the broader scientific consensus on the subject. Throughout this series, I intend to highlight certain places where Sprinkle has either admitted to or demonstrated a shocking degree of ignorance regarding basic trans theory, and of the shape of the conversations that trans people and especially trans Christians are actually having.

For all of that (and it is a lot) I do want to end with a positive comment about Sprinkle's book or, rather, about his project. Preston Sprinkle does seem to sincerely like the trans people he knows and speaks with and he does actively advocate against the sort of culture war vitriol that so many white evangelical Christians are directing at LGBTQ+ people—and that is something. I also want people to be kinder to trans folk and if Sprinkle's book helps to move people in that direction then I will be grateful for that while I remain deeply concerned about his book, his habits, and his work as a whole. And for people who are trans or who may have just begun to wonder whether they might be trans, I am very concerned that this book will cause deep, deep harm to them. 

Footnotes

(1) for reasons that will become clear over the course of the series, I will have to jump around somewhat.

(2) The complications and difficulties in talking about ROGD and AGP are manifold and I will explore and explain them in detail in my reviews of the relevant portions of the book. For now the most concise way I can explain it is that both terms refer to constructs which both the medical and psychological communities and the vast majority of trans people consider bunk. There are people whose experiences can be imperfectly described by these terms but the categorization itself forces false premises onto the experiences of trans people.

(3) I absolutely will have something to say about Sprinkle's decision to not use the term "cisgender" in my review of chapter 2.

(4) though these days I probably wouldn't given the use certain hate groups in England are making of that shortened version of the acronym.

Series Index

Intro

Part 1—Chapter 1: People

Part 2—Chapter 2A: Terms

Part 3—Chapter 2B: Sex and Gender

Part 4—Chapter 3: Varieties of Trans 

Part 5—Chapter 4: Male, Female & The Image of God

Part 6—Chapter 5: Gender Stereotypes