To my best knowledge C.S. Lewis never directly interacted with an out transgender individual or commented on the validity of the identity claims of transgender people. Because he lived and died before much of the current understanding of transgender experiences and identities had been developed it would be anachronistic to claim that he supported (or would have supported) transgender people in their identity claims. And because even the most logical of individuals is likely to be influenced and limited by the prejudices and beliefs of their own context it would be foolish to claim with certainty that Lewis—if he were around today—would affirm transgender people's identities. The "what would this person think of this if they were alive today" game generally not worth playing and I do not intend to take it up here. Instead, what I do think I can demonstrate is that there is ample material in Lewis' work to construct a strong argument in favor of the validity of the gender identities of transgender individuals—an argument which Lewis, if he had been consistent to his own professed assumptions and beliefs—would have been inclined to accept. That is not to say that his thinking is easily compatible with the different models—there are more than one—which transgender people put forth in defense of their identity claims; in fact Lewis' thinking doesn't quite map on to any one of the dominant models today. What his ideas and methods do establish, however, is a model both for conceptualizing transgender gender identity claims from an orthodox Christian perspective, a structure of reasoning which recommends (demands even) trusting the gender identity claims made by transgender people, and a perspective on the denial of those claims which frames them as a particular sort of sin.
Update 4/5/19 [It is probably worth stating here that Lewis did comment on homosexuality generally and on lesbian and gay sex specifically in his published and unpublished writing. While he was arguably less condemning than some of his contemporaries, he was not affirming of gay and lesbian sex and (in
That Hideous Strength) did engage in what can, at best, be described as queer-coding at least two of his villains.
As I have written elsewhere, I do not intend any apologetic for this view on Lewis' part—
I believe he was wrong—and anyone who might hope to "recruit" Lewis as a post-mortem advocate for LGB acceptance should be aware of his views.]
Vocabulary, Terminology, and Background Theory
This essay makes regular reference to much terminology which is specific to the contemporary conversation around or about gender, transgender people, and transgender identities. Readers unfamiliar with that conversation, or who just want to review/refresh their understanding of the relevant language will find a helpful glossary
HERE. While I will occasionally be nuancing some of the contemporary definitions (particularly the theory behind the word
gender) in order to bridge the linguistic gap between Lewis life and our current moment,
these definitions should fit my general usage.
Update 4/5/19 [To be clear, I do not at all mean to suggest that Lewis was saying the same thing that contemporary transgender theorists, gender theorists, and queer theorists are saying. I am hoping, here, only to develop a particular argument out of what C.S. Lewis can be demonstrated to have thought based on his published work and which arrives at the conclusion that we ought to affirm the gender identity claims of transgender people. While I certainly do hope that this argument will convince those who share many of Lewis' assumptions and beliefs to take that conclusion seriously, I am not suggesting that transgender people
need the affirmation of Lewis' thought or argument structures. Transgender theory and philosophy is already being done effectively by transgender academics, theorists, theologians, and advocates. I have provided links to some of their work throughout and at the end of this piece.]
Some Background on The Identities of Transgender People and Reality Enforcement
In her essay
Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance trans philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher identifies an impulse for
reality enforcement as the primary motive behind transphobia generally and anti-trans violence in particular. She claims:
While there are many features associated with reality enforcement, it has four essential ones: identity invalidation, the appearance-reality contrast, the deceiver-pretender double bind, and genital verification. Identity invalidation is the erasure of a trans person's gender identity through an opposing categorization (e.g., a trans person sees herself as a woman, but she is categorized as a man). This invalidation is framed in terms of the appearance-reality contrast (e.g., a trans woman may be represented as "really a man disguised as a woman"). And this contrast is manifested in one of two ways that constitute a double-bind for trans people—namely, passing as nontrans (and hence running the risk of exposure as a deceiver) or else being openly trans (and consequently being relegated to a mere pretender). Genital verification can be a literal exposure (as with Brandon Teena, Gwen Araujo, and Angie Zapata) or else a discursive reveal through euphemistic comments like "was discovered to be anatomically male." These disclosures anchor identity invalidation in the notion of genitalia as a kind of concealed reality.
The core problem for trans people here, according to Bettcher, is fairly straightforward and entirely insidious. The on-the-ground fact for trans people is the regular denial of their experiences of themselves, reality as they experience it. Though different trans people articulate it in different ways, the experience of a denied identity is a constant.
Reality enforcement as Bettcher explains it is the dynamic by which transgender people experience oppression and opposition in the world. The four ingredients which make up reality enforcement begin with a direct denial of the transgender person's gender identity claim. To use a transgender woman for an example (this would typically be a transgender person who was identified as male at birth and who has since claimed that she is a woman): In the face of the transgender woman's claim that she is
really a woman, identity invalidation occurs when someone else (the denier) insists on categorizing her as a man—the denier says, in effect, "no you are
not really a woman". The denier explains the situation (using Bettcher's "appearance-reality contrast") by claiming that the transgender woman is
really only disguised as a woman. The fact of this assertion and explanation means that the transgender woman is always in the double-bind of either being open about being transgender, which results in deniers labeling her as a pretender, or passing as nontrans, which risks being "found out" having deniers label hear a deceiver. In both of these situations the denier generally references the transgender woman's genitals as "proof" of her "real" status.
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Of course there is a danger here that in referring to this dynamic as "reality enforcement" we might give the impression that those who engage in it really are on the side of reality and that the complaint is only that they are being unkind in enforcing it on the affected trans person. But that would be a total misunderstanding of Bettcher's work and of the case of transgender people overall. In
Trapped in the Wrong Theory Bettcher begins by acknowledging that
reality is fundamentally contested in the interaction between a transgender person and someone who denies the trans person's gender identity. Thus the term
reality enforcement does not refer to someone enforcing reality
as it is(1) but to someone enforcing
what they believe reality to be.
One implication of this for any third party observer is that, like it or not, they are shunted into the position of referee or judge in the case of the transgender person. Short of ignoring the conversation entirely—a choice which comes with its own, fraught, consequences—the observer, cisgender(2) or not, is left having to choose first which version of reality to endorse and only second whether or not they will enforce it.
C.S. Lewis and Obligation to Reality
Now it is clear to me that C.S. Lewis would have recognized a preeminent duty obligation to reality insofar as he was able to know it. In his essay
Man or Rabbit he reflects:
The question [Can't you lead a good life without believing in Christianity] sounds as if it were asked by a person who said to himself 'I don't care whether Christianity is in fact true or not. I'm not interested in finding out whether the real universe is more like what the Christians say than what the Materialists say. All I'm interested in is leading a good life. I'm going to choose beliefs not because I think them true but because I find them helpful.' Now frankly, I find it hard to sympathise with this state of mind. One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing [emphasis mine].
Given that Lewis thought that the drive to know reality is one of the things which distinguishes humans from animals we must conclude that he would have applied this drive to the question of the contested reality between the transgender person and the denier. Thus we can safely conclude that he would have rejected the possibility of simply walking away from, ignoring, or refusing the question. He would also have refused to side with one reality-claim or the other based only on what would have made one or another party most comfortable or even safest. Lewis would have insisted on confronting the question straight on: Is the transgender person who claims to be a woman
really a woman or
really not a woman? Is the transgender man who claims to be a man
really a man or
really not a man? Only after answering that question, or deciding that it is finally un-answerable, can we approach the further question of whether or not reality ought to be enforced.
The Core Question
Let us, then, look at the claim through as Lewis-ian a lens as possible: A person (the transgender person) is claiming to be a woman. A second person has denied the claim. When a transgender person makes a claim to a particular gender identity they generally cite their own experience of themselves in relationship to the world. The evidence that the trans person cites (their own experience of the world) is subjective insofar as they are the only person with direct access to it but it is also a claim to an objective reality (they are claim that they
really are a particular gender). Against that the denier, depending on their background and inclination, will generally cite the transgender person's body as evidence against them. The irony here is that a transgender person's body is an objective reality which both the transgender person and the denier likely agree on. Their disagreement has all to do with the meaning of the transgender person's body as it relates to their claim.
Lewis clearly outlined his process for thinking through apparently unlikely claims (claims which entail what Bettcher calls the "appearance-reality contrast") in the opening passage of
Miracles:
If immediate experience cannot prove or disprove the miraculous, still less can history do so. Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence "according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry." But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are [emphasis mine]. For if they are impossible then no amount of historical evidence will convince us. If they are possible but immensely improbable, then only mathematically demonstrative evidence will convince us: and since history never provides that degree of evidence for any event, history can never convince us that a miracle occurred. If, on the other hand, miracles are not intrinsically improbable, then the existing evidence will be sufficient to convince us that quite a number of miracles have occurred.
Following this outline, Lewis would first want to know is whether the gender identity claims of transgender people are intrinsically possible. If he believed that they were, indeed, possible he would then have gone on to ask how probable they are.
Possibility and the Sex-Gender Distinction
Would Lewis, then, have thought that the transgender person's claim is
possible? A person who is claiming that they are five foot eleven inches tall and also that they are forty seven feet three inches tall must be wrong—not because I have never encountered a forty seven foot human before—but because being two different heights at the same time and in the same sense is a contradiction in terms. The transgender person, however, is not making a contradictory claim (here we head off one ridiculous accusation which is routinely directed towards the trans community). The transgender woman acknowledges (though she likely finds it more than a little rude for people to keep harping on it) the fact that, in some aspects, her body aligns more with what most people expect from men than with what people expect from women. Read carefully, the transgender woman's claim is that she is a woman
in spite of the fact that her body was identified as typically male back when she was born. Her appeal is to her gender and not to her sex. Therefore, so long as Lewis was willing to grant a distinction between sex and gender, we must conclude that he would have found the claims of transgender people at least possible.
As it turns out, Lewis not only recognized the sex-gender distinction, he positively
endorsed it. In his novel
Perelandra Lewis explores, among other things, the possible nature of angels. In that context he concludes that angels have a gender but not a sex, and he goes on to theorize about the relationship between the two.
When Ransom, the protagonist of
Perelandra, encounters the angelic Archons (referred to in the text as
Oyarsa) of Mars and Venus, Lewis describes those spirits (he is very clear that they do not have physical bodies but that "when creatures of the hypersomatic kind choose to 'appear' to us, they are not in fact affecting our retina at all, but directly manipulating the relevant parts of our brain") in a way which reveals much of what Lewis understood about sex and gender. It is worth noting that Lewis published
Perelandra in 1944, well before the contemporary distinction between sex and gender gained any popular currency(3).
Both the bodies [of the Oyarsas] were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try—Ransom has tried a hundred times—to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra [the archon of Mars] was like rhythm and Perelandra [the archon of Venus] like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don't know that any of these attempts helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine [emphasis mine]. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity... he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female).
There is a lot here so let me break it down in to three specific observations:
First, Lewis clearly thought that there is a meaningful difference between
sex and
gender(4)
. The legitimacy of this distinction forms the core thesis of this passage. While Lewis seems to define sex in nearly the same way that contemporary sex and gender theorists do (as a physical phenomenon linked to reproduction, body morphology, etc...) his definition of gender is noticeably different—so much so that his definition is the subject of my third observation. Still it is clear from this passage that Lewis would have granted the fundamental plausibility of a claim which relied on distinguishing sex from gender.
Second, Lewis insists that gender, rather than sex, is the more fundamental property. Notice towards the end of the passage that he refers to gender as "as reality" whereas he calls [biological] sex "merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity [gender] which divides all created beings". For Lewis gender is a metaphysical property whereas sex is a physical property. Lewis understood humans to be composed of both a material and immaterial/spiritual/metaphysical part. As he says in
The Screwtape Letters:
Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change.
The distinction between "spirit" (which Lewis understood to be, among other things, the location of
gender) and "animal" implies the possibility that a given individual in a world of imperfect and changeable bodies might very well find that the aspect of them which is body does not correspond, or in Lewis' words "properly reflect" the gender of their immaterial aspect. In an attempt at rectifying that incongruity, Lewis would necessarily have privileged the immaterial gender as determinative and recommended correction of the body. Further, since Lewis locates spirit in "the eternal world" he would not have seen gender-corrective therapy as a real possibility for anyone. Sex, as an aspect of body, is potentially subject to change. Gender is not(5).
Third, Lewis' understanding of gender was unusual both in his own time and today. In broad strokes
contemporary gender theory attaches two distinct meanings to the term gender and those two meanings are, in some cases, both affirmed by individual theorists. In the first meaning
gender references a socially constructed set of conventions. Here
gender means the set of social expectations and roles which a society attaches to women, men (and potential third + genders as well). The whole concept of gender as a performance is rooted in this view and has its origins in second wave feminism. In the second meaning
gender is as an identity (in this usage
gender is often paired with the term
identity forming the two-word term
gender identity) or a deep seated sense of self. Here
gender or
gender identity is something that each person has or possesses and which is rooted in the experience of self. This meaning is a later development, associated more with queer theory and third wave feminism. Lewis' usage is distinguishable from both of these. He understands gender to to be a metaphysical reality which pre-exists sex and is, in fact, something which biological sex must reference in order to find meaning. In Lewis' view, Masculine and Feminine gender are the realities which male and female(6) sex are images of. There is much that could be said about this and it is probably not quite a comfortable stance for any of the major participants in the contemporary discussion over transgender identities. His usage and understanding probably gets closer to Julia Serano's
Intrinsic Inclinations model though unlike Lewis Serano locates the property in question (Serano's closest equivalent to Lewis'
gender is her coinage
subconscious sex) in the psyche or subconscious rather than in any clearly metaphysical or spiritual part of the human person(7). For our purposes the key implication of this is that Lewis clearly believed that a person's
gender was something more true, more lasting, and more definitive of that person that their biological sex (organs, hormone levels, body shape, etc...).
From Possibility to Probability
So Lewis would certainly have seen the transgender person's claim—to be
really a woman in the face of the denier's claim that that the transgender person is
really not a woman—as possible. The next logical question then is: given that the claim is
possible, is it
probable? Just because a person makes a claim which is possible does not mean that we are under any obligation to accept the claim as true. If someone tells me that it is snowing in June, I can accept that snow is a possibility without having to believe that it is actually snowing in my vicinity at the moment. If I am told that someone has graduated from Yale, I can believe that Yale exists and that people do graduate from that institution without accepting that this particular person has really earned a diploma.
What should stand out almost immediately when we imagine how C.S. Lewis might approach the question of probability is the fact that Lewis was remarkably clear headed when it came to assessing relative probabilities of events insofar as he had a keen grasp on the distinction between something which is
uncommon and something which is
improbable. It is
improbable that a given individual, chosen at random, will be or become the president of the United States of America specifically because there are very particular requirements one has to meet in order to achieve that status; that is to say that being the president of the United States of America is an exceptionally
uncommon experience. However, it is not at all
improbable that, at any given time, there will be some person who is the president of the Unites States, quite the contrary. Since transgender people generally claim that their experience of their own gender is a minority experience, Lewis would not have seen the fact that transgender claims are
uncommon as an indication that they are, in any way,
improbable. Again from
Miracles:
How could they [miracles] be surprising unless they were seen to be exceptions to the rules? And how can anything be seen to be an exception till the rules are known? If there ever were men who did not know the laws of nature at all, they would have no idea of a miracle and feel no particular interest in one if it were performed before them. Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known.
The overall probability of a particular person being in a situation which runs contrary to the way thing commonly occur in nature would, for Lewis, depends on the particularities of the exceptional situation. Here things become a little more difficult for us. Transgender people do not claim a gender identity on the basis of the miraculous. Rather the claim of a transgender person is that of the minority report. Transgender people specifically claim that the experience of gender incongruity (having a gender identity which is at odds with the sex they are assigned by others on the basis of anatomy) is a natural but relatively uncommon phenomenon. The only way to test this claim would be to have objective third-party access to each transgender person's gender identity. But gender identity, as Lewis understands it, is not available to this sort of empirical observation. As Bettcher and other transgender theorists (notably Julia Serano) have pointed out, the major obstacle/double bind that transgender people face in the realm of reality enforcement is that those who successfully alter their bodies to align more closely with the gender identity they claim are discounted as "deceivers" whereas those whose bodies do not reflect the social-construct expectations of the gender identity they claim (or who claim a gender identity which is not familiar to the popular imagination) are discounted as "mere pretenders". From Bettcher's
Appearance, Reality, and Gender Deception: Reflections on Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Pretense
To the extent that it is within the power of a transperson to generate a convincing appearance, then, they will be confronted bu the no-win option of trying to pass (and running the risk of being exposed as a fraud) or else revealing themselves (and coming out as a masquerader or deceiver). And to the extent that it is not within the power of a transperson to generate a convincing appearance or, if it is to control the information that is circulated and available about their status, they may still find themselves represented as a pretender. In effect, because gender presentation and sexed body are viewed in this way (namely as correlated appearance and reality), in all possible permutations, they will have their identity relegated to a mere appearance and find themselves either open to charges of wrongdoing or relegated to somebody who plays at make-believe
Thus both Lewis—who sees gender as a metaphysical reality—and contemporary transgender theorists—who mostly see gender as either a social construct or as a personal identity—end up categorizing gender identity as something objectively real but ultimately only subjectively knowable(8) and therefore un-testable given the current state of our technology(9).
From Probability to Credibility
To recap then, Lewis would likely have seen the reality claim of a transgender person—to be
really their identified gender—as
possible but he would have been unable to determine whether the claim was
probable. This, though, does not imply a dead end to the question. In fact, some of Lewis' most famous material demonstrates the approach he took to claims wherein there was no way for external observers to objectively examine the evidence. He would look to the
credibility of the source: In his most famous novel
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Lewis deploys a piece of reasoning (the logical tri-lemma) which mirrors one he uses in
Mere Christianity to argue for the divinity of Jesus. In the novel the older Pevensie children (Peter and Susan) approach the professor in whose house they are staying because their little sister, Lucy, has been making claims which run contrary to their own experience and expectation of the world and which they have been unable to objectively verify. Specifically, she has been claiming—accurately as it turns out—that a particular wardrobe in the house is, under some conditions, a portal to another world. To further complicate matters, their brother Edmund has specifically claimed that Lucy was "only making it up" after she asks him to corroborate her claim.
The degree to which this scenario parallels the reality enforcement scenario described in Bettcher's essay is really astounding. Lucy, like the transgender person, has made a claim which, at face value, seems to be contradicted by general experience. Edmund, like Bettcher's denier, has specifically contradicted Lucy's claim. Peter and Susan, standing in for society at large, find themselves engaged in reality enforcement and are initially inclined to enforce Edmund's claim against Lucy(10). In this analysis, we should understand the professor to be a mouthpiece for Lewis' own analysis of the situation. When the children bring their questions to the professor, he asks them which of their two siblings is usually more trustworthy and they respond that they would generally trust Lucy and that the only reason they don't now is due to the apparent implausibility of her claim and their subsequent inability to independently verify her experience. The professor responds as follows:
‘Logic!’ said the Professor half to himself. ‘Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.’ [emphasis mine]
Or in Mere Christianity Lewis uses this structure of reasoning to argue that, contrary to popular expectation, Jesus of Nazareth was really God:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this mans was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.
Again we have a situation where someone is making a claim which, at first blush, flies in the face of popular expectation, which is not (at least not anymore) subject to external verification, and which is roundly denied by people who cite popular experiences of the world in defense of their denial. We are, therefore, perfectly justified in concluding that Lewis would have applied this specific logic tool to the question of transgender gender identities and reality enforcement. Specifically he would have told us that there were really only three possibilities: the transgender person is either lying, insane, or telling the truth.
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| What do they teach them in these schools? |
Before I apply Lewis' trilemma to the question though I want to head off one further suggestion that the transgender person may actually be mistaken. I do not think that Lewis would have granted this possibility on the grounds that we are specifically asking about something (gender identity) which Lewis believed people have and which he thought could be perceived directly. Still, even if the possibility is granted (expanding the trilemma into a tetralemma), the fact remains that the transgender person in question—being the person with the most data regarding their own gender—is in a better position to know their own gender than any outside individual. If they are mistaken, then they are more able to know that than anyone else and must therefore be treated as the authority on the subject.
The idea that transgender people are lying about their identities is not one that I think Lewis would have entertained for long. The simple fact of the difficulties trans people face and the suffering they endure in order to live into their gender identities undermine any serious suggestion that they are lying about it. People rarely—if ever—lie consistently, insistently, and persistently when the consequences of being believed is increased suffering on their part. In the instance of transgender identity claims, the claim only benefits the person making it if it is true since the concomitant suffering is only worthwhile if it purchases a deeper, more fundamental, satisfaction.
The suggestion that transgender people are simply insane is suggested more frequently, most often by conservative pundits who most often latch on to the fact that
gender dysphoria is often (though not universally) experienced by transgender people, and is a listing in the current version of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5). However, the association of gender dysphoria with insanity—and specifically a form of insanity which would prevent a person from accurately experiencing reality—is misleading, sloppy thinking at best and a deliberate misrepresentation at worst. A person who experiences gender dysphoria is not delusional(11) they merely experience discomfort (sometimes to the point of anguish) based on the incongruity between their gender and the sex they were assigned at birth. As the professor says of Lucy "ten minutes conversation will tell you she is not mad".
Having ruled out the possibilities of lying and insanity, the inevitable conclusion, given Lewis' beliefs and methods of reasoning would have to have been
"For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that [the transgender person] is telling the truth". Regardless of how difficult it might be to believe the gender identity claims of trans people (we cannot really control what we believe after all) Lewis' methods and metaphysics require that we trust transgender people who, after all, are the only ones with any access to their own gender status.
This gets us most of the way towards an understanding of how C.S. Lewis would have engaged with the reality claims of transgender people but I think there is value in pushing it one step further. Thus far I have been treating the whole business as a purely intellectual question. To leave it at that—as a mere proof in an intellectual "ivory tower"—would be a tremendous disservice to the transgender population who (as Bettcher pointed out) face serious and even life-threatening consequences as a result of popular perceived reality enforcement. I think that Lewis's writing has a little more to tell us about the ethical and moral nature of reality enforcement when it is used to oppress people whom we have an obligation to trust rather than mistrust.
The Implications (for Lewis) of Mistrusting Transgender People
Lewis cared about the core of who a person is—the
real person—, believed that that core is almost always hidden. In fact becoming who you really are is very much a theme in much of Lewis writings. It is seen best in the transformations he has various characters undergo when they enter (usually through bodily death) into the place where "all the sad things come untrue" and "for which they found they had been longing their whole lives without knowing it"; the place "for which they were really made". In fact Lewis suggests that one important outcome of the Christian life was to become fully what a person, in one sense, already was. He puts this most succinctly in
The Screwtape Letters when he has the senior demon Screwtape admit:
When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever
Another example would be the man tempted/tormented by lust in
The Great Divorce. Lewis describes the man (and his lust) both passing through a process of spiritual death only to be resurrected as beings which are described in near demi-god like terms:
Next moment the Ghost gave a scream of agony such as I never heard on Earth. The Burning One closed his crimson grip on the reptile: twisted it, while it bit and writhed, and then flung it, broken-backed on the turf.
'Ow! That's done for me,' gasped the Ghost reeling backwards.
For a moment I could make out nothing distinctly. Then I saw, between me and the nearest bush, unmistakably solid but growing every moment solider, the upper arm and the shoulder of a man. Then, brighter still, and stronger, the legs and hands. The neck and golden head materialised while I watched, and if my attention had not wavered I should have seen the actual completing of a man—an immense man, naked, not much smaller than the Angel. What distracted me was the fact that at the same moment something seemed to be happening to the Lizard. At first I thought the operation had failed. So far from dying, the creature was still struggling and even growing bigger as it struggled. And as it grew it changed. It's hinder parts grew rounder, the tail, still flickering, became a tail of hair that flickered between huge and glossy buttocks. Suddenly I started back, rubbing my eyes. What stood before me was the greatest stallion I have ever seen, silvery white but with mane and tail of gold. It was smooth and shining, rippling with swells of flesh and muscle, whinneying and stamping with its hoofs. At each stamp the land shook and the trees dindled.
The new-made man turned and clapped the new horse's neck. In nosed his bright body. Horse and master breathed each into the other's nostrils. The man turned form it, flung himself at the feet of the Burning One, and embraced them. When he rose I thought his face shone with tears, but it may have been only the liquid love and brightness...which flowed from him. I had not long to think about it. In joyous haste the young man leaped upon the horse's back. Turning in his seat he waved a farewell, then nudged the stallion with his heels. They were off before I knew well what was happening.
Thus the transgender person who abandoned identification with the sex they were assigned at birth in favor of their real gender identity would have been moving in the direction of sanctification. The transgender woman who insists "I
am a woman" evidences a spiritual breakthrough and spiritual health. It is vital that we not forget that the temptations of security and acceptance all push the transgender person to accept (or at least acquiesce to) the denier's declaimed reality; nobody familiar with their situation ever accused a transgender individual of cowardice for identifying as transgender. Just as important, Lewis would have understood the person who works to prevent someone recognizing and affirming their own real selves (in this case a transgender person living into their gender identity) to be doing the work of the devils—preventing another's spiritual and holistic growth. Bettcher's
reality enforcement enacted against transgender people is something Lewis's thinking would decry not only as sinful but as a particularly virulent form of sin; one which he found important enough to devote an entire novel to exploring it.
Reality Enforcement as the Sin of False-Love
Bareface (a reference to being one's true self, denying any mask or veil) was the working title of
Till We Have Faces the novel C.S. Lewis considered his best(12). The book is a re-telling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche told from the perspective of one of Psyche's two older sisters. In the original myth, the beautiful Psyche is sacrificed to the gods but ends up being rescued by the West Wind and carried away to a mansion where she is then married to the god Cupid. The one condition that is placed on her is that she is not permitted to look at her husband (whose identity she does not know). He leaves before she wakes each morning, only returns in the dark of night. Psyche is immensely happy with this arrangement until she is visited by her two sisters who convince her to violate the one rule by waiting until her husband falls asleep and bringing out a candle to look at him. Psyche follows her sisters instructions and is initially delighted to discover that her husband is the beautiful god of love. But in her excitement she spills some hot wax on him waking him up. Immediately he flees and leaves Pscyhe alone in a field. Psyche then undergoes a series of trials and suffering in order to eventually be reunited with her love.
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| Cupid and Psyche |
Lewis' retelling of the myth centers on Orual, the older of Psyche's two sisters. In
Till We Have Faces Orual is ugly and lonely as a child. She finds comfort in her tutor (a man she calls "the Fox") and in her little sister Psyche (who calls Orual "Maia") as well as a few other characters whom she loves and who love her in return. At the point in the story where Orual finds Psyche (whom she had thought dead—sacrificed to the God of the Mountain). Lewis introduces a poignant example of
reality enforcement. Psyche experiences herself to be living in a palace, but Orual sees only an empty field. In the following, you will want to note Lewis' return to the formula of the trilemma we have already encountered in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and
Mere Christianity:
For some strange reason, fury—my father's own fury—fell upon me when she said that. I found myself screaming (I am sure I had not meant to scream), "Stop it! Stop it at once! There's nothing there!"
Her face flushed. For once, and for the moment only, she [Psyche] too was angry. "Well, feel it, feel it, if you can't see," she cried. "Touch it. slap it. Beat your head against it. Here—" she made to grab my hands. I wrenched them free.
Stop it, Stop it I tell you! There's no such thing. You're pretending. You're trying to make yourself believe it." But I was lying. How did I know whether she really saw invisible things or spoke in madness? Either way, something hateful and strange had begun. As if I could thrust it back by brute force, I fell upon Psyche. Before I knew what I was doing I had her by the shoulders and was shaking her.
the scene continues with Orual trying to dissuade Psyche and eventually comes to a head when they begin to discuss Psyche's husband
"Oh I can't bear it," said I, leaping up. Those last words of hers, spoken softly and with trembling, set me on fire. I could feel my rage coming back. Then (like a great light, a hope of deliverance, it came to me) I asked myself why I'd forgotten that first notion of being mad. Madness; of course. The whole thing must be madness. I had been nearly as mad as she to think otherwise. At the very name madness the air of that valley seemed more breathable, seemed emptied of a little of its holiness and horror.
"Have done with it, Psyche," I said sharply. "Where is this god? Where the palace is? Nowhere—in your fancy. Where is he? Show him to me? What is he like?
She looked a little aside and spoke, lower than ever but very clear and as if all that had yet passed between us were of no account beside the gravity of what she was now saying. "Oh, Orual," she said, "not even I have seen him—yet. He comes to me only in the holy darkness. He says I mustn't—not yet—see his face or know his name. I'm forbidden to bring any light into his—our—chamber."
Then she looked up, and as our eyes met for a moment I saw in hers unspeakable joy.
"There's no such thing," I said, loud and stern. "Never say such things again. Get up. It's time—"
"Orual," said she, now at her queenliest, "I have never told you a lie in my life"
In the end Orual resorts to threatening Psyche's life and her own suicide in order to compel Psyche to accede to her (Orual's) understanding of reality(13). The result in Lewis' version as in the original, is that Psyche loses everything she had been given and is set a series of impossible seeming tasks in order to get back what she lost. Orual, ultimately separated from Psyche and, eventually everyone whom she loves and who loves her in return, lives out most of her life as the ruling queen of her country. She writes out the account we read in the novel as her complaint against the gods and her primary charge against them is that, by not allowing her to experience reality as Psyche had—that is by keeping the palace invisible to her eyes—the gods are responsible for Psyche's tragedy as well as her own. The novel ends at the end of Orual's life when she is granted a sort of mystical vision or spirit journey to the mountain of the gods where she is given the opportunity to "bring her complaint against" them. But when she begins to speak she finds that the words she speaks against the gods are not what she had originally intended—the story we have read thus far—but a different speech which she acknowledges to be truer than what she had intended. As part of that accusation-which-is-really-confession, Lewis has Orual declaim the following:
But to steal her love from me, to make her see things I couldn't see... oh, you'll say (you've been whispering it to me these forty years) that I'd signs enough her palace was real, could have known the truth if I'd wanted. But how could I want to know it? Tell me that. The girl was mine. What right had you to steal her away into your dreadful heights? You'll say I was jealous. Jealous of Psyche? Not while she was mine. If you'd gone the other way to work—it it was my eyes you had opened—you'd soon have seen how I would have shown her and told her and taught her and led her up to my level. But to hear a chit of a girl who had (or ought to have had) no thought in her head that I'd not put there, setting up for a seer and a prophetess and next thing to a goddess... how could anyone endure it? ... Oh, you'll say you took her away into bliss and joy such as I could never have given her, and I ought to have been glad for her sake. Why? What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which I hadn't given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy, that way?
Notice that the bitterness of Orual is directed, among other things, at the fact that her vision of reality was not the one which would ultimately allow Psyche's happiness (and before this point can be brushed away remember that Lewis understood happiness in Aristotelian terms as ultimate fulfillment of a self—
eudaimonia). How closely that parallels and makes sense of the anger and fear we find in the transphobia which is daily hurled against transgender people. The sin here is great and terrible specifically because it is the sin of a twisted love. It is the love which refuses to love another on any but its own terms. Because the denier cannot (or will not) make the move to empathy for the transgender person, cannot (or will not) recognize the validity of the trans person's account of reality; they must make every effort to destroy that which they cannot give and will not share.
The final title comes from a passage near the end of the book where Orual asks "How can [the Gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?". Orual is redeemed in the end only after she sees herself for what she has really been, both truly loving and beautiful and truly ugly and hateful. Lewis ends his last novel reminding us that health, happiness, flourishing are only possible when we know our true selves.
“Yes,” my friend said. “I don’t see why there shouldn’t be books in Heaven. But you will find that your library in Heaven contains only some of the books you had on earth.”
“Which?” I asked.
“The ones you gave away or lent.”
“I hope the lent ones won’t still have all the borrowers’ dirty thumb marks,” said I.
“Oh yes they will,” said he. “But just as the wounds of the martyrs will have turned into beauties, so you will find that the thumb-marks have turned into beautiful illuminated capitals or exquisite marginal woodcuts.”
Footnotes
(1) I suspect, but am not sure, that Dr. Bettcher holds reality to be finally unknowable. Thus she occupies herself in
Trapped in the Wrong Theory with an exploration of the power dynamics which are created and exploited against transgender people who operate out of two specif models of trans identity.
(2)
Cisgender means only "a person whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth" or more simply "a person who is not transgender".
(3) It really is vital to keep in mind that this was written in 1944. One hopes to avoid anachronistic criticism of an enunciation of gender theory years ahead of its time.
(4) It is possible that Lewis is one of the first modern authors to have publicly made this distinction. Whereas Perelandra was published in 1944, the research I have encountered to date locates the earliest examples of this distinction in either the 1950's or the 1970's. Here are a few links to that effect but more research needs to be done on this topic.
Muehlenhard and Peterson in Sex Roles 2011, Debbie Cameron on the Philology of Gender 2016,
Joanne Meyerowitz How Sex Changed Chapter 3
(5) an exception to this rule (that spirits do not change) might have involved the process of sanctification or glorification (though to my knowledge Lewis used neither of these terms). However, Lewis closely followed Boethius in his understanding of time and the mutability of soul so it is entirely possible that he would have denied even this exception.
(6) and, I suspect, Lewis would have included intersex bodies as well.
(7) Julia Serano coined the term
subconscious sex for her first book
Whipping Girl. The concept is at the core of her proposed
Intrinsic Inclinations model.
(8) with the exception that Lewis would have claimed that the gender of individuals is objectively known by God and possibly by any other being which is able to perceive simple spirit.
(9) The current brain-sex hypothesis, if it turns out to be valid, would suggest that sufficiently high powered and accurate brain-state and brain-structure analysis and observation might eventually give us a method to empirically verify gender identity claims.
(10) the fact that, in the story, Edmund knows that he is lying is ultimately irrelevant to this analysis. Peter or Susan could just as well be stand-ins for the denier.
(11) Check out
this piece at Debunking Denialism for a thorough run-down on the difference between gender dysphoria and delusion.
(12) Lewis is said to have worked with his wife Joy Davidman Lewis on this book to the extent that some of his friends at the time have suggested that she was almost a co-author of the novel.
(13) Threats transgender people are all too familiar with.
Transgender Resource Recommendations:
