Bareface Revisited: C.S. Lewis and the Identity Claims of Transgender People

Prologue to the Second Edition

This is an update to a piece I wrote 4 years ago. Think of it as a second edition. When I wrote the original (which is still available HERE) I knew that I am a trans woman but was not yet out. Writing about this topic under those conditions was always complicated for me. On the one hand it was a topic I felt almost compelled to write about and to weigh in on and at the same time, recognizing my own apparent social location and not wanting to betray truths I was not yet ready to share meant writing with a sort of artificial distance from my subject matter—I had to write as though my first hand knowledge were second or third hand instead and as though those concerns which impact me directly instead applied to "those I care about". Certainly it helped that I had read a lot on the topic (and have read more now) and that I do care a great deal for all of my trans siblings who are affected by this topic, but that distance led me to feel that, as much as I like this essay—and it is one of my personal favorites—it was never as strong as it might have been. 

Recently a friend of mine brought my attention back to this piece mentioning that he had found it helpful in relating to trans people in his life and, on a whim, I re-read it and found that while I still believe the the core argument is strong, I wanted to re-write it so as to fully own its contents and form. Thus I have chosen to edit and re-formulate to my hearts content, in some places bolstering lines or reasoning that some readers found thin and in other places merely updating the language and the phrasing to more accurately represent my own relation to the subject matter. I hope you enjoy it. 

On Historical Method

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 our 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 compelled to accept. That is not to say that his thinking is easily compatible with the different models—there are more than one, and for many of us theory only comes after experience and attepts to fit itself to what we already know—which transgender people put forth in defense of our 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.

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, though I would be very interested to see an analysis of his overall thought which might contextualize his stated position as contradicting his philosophy and theology as a whole.

Vocabulary, Terminology, and Background Theory

This essay makes regular reference to much terminology which is specific to the contemporary (2023) 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.

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 our experiences of themselves, reality as we 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 be a woman who was thought to be a boy when she was born and therefore assigned "male" initially): 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/cisgender, which risks being "found out", having deniers label her a deceiver. In both of these situations the denier generally references the transgender woman's genitals as "proof" of her "real" status.

Pixabay

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 genuinely 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 sympathize 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.

And I want to comment that as a trans woman and a fan of C.S. Lewis I find this remarkably comforting. A little too often I find that we end up consigned to a sort of "second class womanhood" by people who shy away from rigorous exploration of the claims of transgender people in favor of sort of provisionally accepting that the polite/pc/nice thing to do is to "treat us like" women without ever recognizing the ontological weight of our claims. 

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 we generally cite our own experience of ourselves in relationship to the world. The evidence that the trans person cites (our own experience of the world) is subjective insofar as we are the only person with direct access to it but it is also a claim to an objective reality (we are claiming that we 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 us. 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. Our disagreement has all to do with the meaning of the transgender person's body as it relates to their claim, a fact which is worth at least commenting on to observe that this is all very awkward for trans people for the same reason that is is awkward for anyone to engage in significant discourse with someone over the contested meaning of our own body—we are talking about what is intimately ours while they are not talking about what is intimately theirs.

In any case, 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 those claims 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 and depending on whether or not/to what extent she has medically transitioned, 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 something (her gender) over and above her prominent sex markers. 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). 

To anticipate an objection that has become all too common among Christians over the last decade, yes this is all rather platonic. That is because Lewis was, in addition to being first and foremost a "mere Christian", rather an ardent Platonist who was eager to accept what Platonism had to offer philosophically so long as it did not contradict his Christianity. While there are certainly worthwhile conversations to be had about the place of platonic philosophy in Christian theology it should be accepted across the board that some degree of Platonism has never been understood to be disqualifying to orthodox Christianity. Further for any Evangelical reader it will be important to recognized the the much loved Lewis/Tolkien understanding of Christianity as "myth become fact" is an equally (and relatedly) platonic concept, one which Lewis enunciates most famously only a few pages from this selection on gender in Perelandra.

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 (often disambiguated as gender expression) 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 the 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...). 

In this usage I am still trying to work out whether or not Lewis can properly be called a pioneer. J.R.R. Tolkien (who shared a writing society and informal philosophy club with Lewis) seems to reference a similar view of gender in The Silmarillion where, speaking of angelic beings he says

the Valar take upon them forms some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby

and I have found some intimations of the same view in Owen Barfield and Charles Williams but I have not yet worked out whether this was something that they collectively arrived at, one convinced the others of, or something they all received from their shared love of medieval and romantic literature and theology.

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 our experience of our 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 things commonly occur in nature would, for Lewis, depend 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 to argue for the divinity of Jesus in Mere Christianity . 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 are really only three possibilities: the transgender person is either lying, insane, or telling the truth.

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 our 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 we endure in order to live into our gender identities ought to undermine any serious suggestion that we 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".

It is worth pausing before moving on to the third option (that transgender people are telling the truth about who we are) to notice that in fact those most prone to engage in programmes of reality enforcement against transgender people seem forever trying to have it both ways. They want to accuse us of being insane ("deluded" is form of the charge with the most currency today) while treating us as though we are liars. The hate and vitriol with which anti-trans pundits ranging from TERFS to white Christian Nationalists attack and condemn transgender people would be entirely out of place when dealing with someone who was deluded or insane; they make accusations of insanity but behave as though we were liars.

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 our individual 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—,and 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 —think back to his language about the true Narnia in The Last Battle. 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 materialized 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, whinnying 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.

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 and 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.

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—if 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. In fact those last haunting lines "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?" would fit perfectly into the mouths of every parent, partner, or family member who rejects a trans person for coming out as who we are.

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.”

- From the essay Scraps in the collection God in the Dock

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 specific 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:

1. Julia Serano: Books and Blog
2. Austen Hartke Book and Youtube channel
3. Talia Mae Bettcher: Learningtrans resources and class  
4. Susan Stryker Transgender History

Jesus Revolution is a Good Story that Needs an Honest Frame.

It has to be said that Lonnie Frisbee was a gay man who died of AIDS in 1993.  

Lonnie was also one of three major protagonists (together with Chuck Smith and Greg Laurie) in the recent religious/historical drama Jesus Revolution about the Southern California originis and beginning of the Jesus People movement. The movie faithfully and, sometimes humorously sometimes tenderly, portrays Lonnie as a the goofy, prophetic, hippie preacher who was instrumental in convincing Chuck Smith to give the hippies a chance at god and who moved his Calvary Chapel church into an era of love and inclusion that marked the beginning of the Southern California Jesus People movement. In the movie Lonnie is played compellingly by Jonathan Roumie who, based on the accounts I have read and footage I  have watched of Frisbee, ably captures his trippy-hippie demeanor and his intense passion for Jesus and for "his people". And in Jesus Revolution there is no mention of the fact that Lonnie Frisby was gay and died of AIDS, not even in the final summary of his life at the end of the film. They tell us he died in 93, they don't say how. That is why it has to be said that Lonnie Frisbee was a gay man who died of AIDS in 1993.

I wanted to foreground that fact because watching Jesus Revolution was, for me, an agony of conflicting emotions, informed by what I already knew about Lonnie Frisbee. Part of my own spiritual jouney includes seven or so formative years in the Vineyard movement and the story told in this movie and Lonnie's part in it were already very much on my radar. Because of my experience with the Vineyard I have been reading through the three part co-authored autobiography of Lonnie Frisbee and
appreciated the 2005 documentary on his life. I have also managed to get several conversations with people (all within the Vineyard movement) who knew Lonnie and, as a queer Christian it has been hard not to see Lonnie and his story as a bit of a portent for other LGBTQ+ christians vis-a-vis the Vineyard.*

Going into the movie I told my wife that I was intrigued to watch it particularly because so many of the people I know have been divided in their response to the film and that the division doesn't seem to fall along any predictable lines. Some progressive Christians like it, while others very much don't; some Vineyard people who were there either for the events of the film or for the Vineyard centered version a decade later involving many of the same people and ground liked it while others didn't. I wanted to understand why. 

It makes sense to me now. At its heart the surface message of the film is that Jesus is for everyone, that trying to gatekeep access to Church and to the Holy Spirit is wrong, that the Holy Spirit moves in ways we wouldn't predict among people we wouldn't predict and that loving and including the socially marginalized and alienated is central to the call of the church. While there might be a few theological quibbles (the salvation narrative in the movie is rather notably individualistic but that is accurate to the theology of Calvary Chapel) by and large that message is absolutely one that progressive and affirming Christians can get behind. At one dramatic moment about halfway through they include a powerful (if slightly on-the-nose) scene in which two out of three of Chuck Smith's stodgy "square" original attenders march out of the church in protest after Smith (magnificently played phenomenally by Kelsey Grammer) overcomes some of his own prejudices as declares that the doors to Calvary Chapel are open to any who want to enter and to all who want to leave. The third attender stands up as if to leave and then re-seats himself among the hippies. I started to weep. 

But I wept at that scene for two reasons. All throught the scene, the camera keeps panning over to Lonnie, smiling at Chuck, affirming and blessing his decision. For those of you have have also been watching The Chosen it is worth noting here that Jonathan Roumie is the same actor who plays Jesus in that series and I found it almost impossible in that scene not to see Frisbee through the sort of double vision linked both to the character's role in the movie and the actor's portrayal of Jesus in a separate series. The scene feels like Jesus is blessing Chuck Smith and welcoming him deeper into God's beutiful kin-dom as Chuck chooses inclusion over comfort and "clean carpets". Under any circumstances that scene would have moved me. But it was deeper than that.

In storytelling we often encounter the mechanic of a frame narrative in which the central story is presented as a story within a larger story (the frame). In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien presents himself not as the author (though of course he is) but as the translator and compiler of The Red Book of Westmarch and other fictional material. In The Canterbury Tales the stories are are presented as travelling tales told by a diverse party who are all on pilgrimage together. You get the picture. In Jesus Revolution the strory-wthin-the-story is all about people coming together to find that God is Love and that the mission of the Church necessarily involves the inclusion of the marginalized, outcast, and alienated. But the frame of the story is heartbreaking. 

Chuck Smith, and John Wimber after him, both used Lonnie as a powerful vessel of the Holy Spirit (Lonnie was, for the record, a really strange man with some bad tendencies who rubbed some good people the wrong way—he wasn't an angel) and who both then effectively wrote him out of the history of the movements they used him to start once they had rejected him. In Chuck Smith's case my understanding is that he rejected Lonnie based on some personality conflicts (which are showcased in the film) and some theological differences which the film barely nods to. John Wimber rejected and erased Lonnie Frisbee from vineyard history for being gay and for all that came with being an honest but closeted Christian gay man in the early to mid 80s. When Chuck Smith gave a eulogy at Lonnie's funeral, the most he could manage was that Lonnie had been "like Sampson", full of potential, too much of which was squandered. 

The frame around the beautiful story the film tells is a different story. That frame is a story of rejection; a story of limited inclusion sold as full inclusion; a story of spiritual abuse, of hiding who you are. The story-within-the-story of Jesus Revolution is one that is all to familiar to queer Christians. Far too often we have been invited in with gospels of inclusion, radical love, deep community, and full belonging only to find that, when we inevitably failed to be "cured" of the holy queerness that was never a sin to begin with, that love, inclusion, welcome, and acceptance are inevitably revoked. Jesus Revolution is the story of boomer hippie Christians finding God's radical love and acceptance framed within an ultimate rejection of queer Christians. For Gen Xers and Millennials, that story played out during the emergent, welcoming, and missional church movements of the early-mid 2000s. The Vineyard Movement in the US didn't officially restrict the full participation of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Christians until 2014** though they had been running/sponsoring "soft" conversion therapy programs for a long while before that. The pain of rejection by those who claim to follow the God who loves and accepts queer people, who affirms us as we are, is very deep and very real. And so is the history of erasing that.

In some ways then, Jesus Revolution, when taken together with its frame, tells a deeply true and honest story. It is the story of a church who has used queer Christians so long as our queerness remained invisible, has damaged us in the process, and has ultimately worked to wall us off from any work of inclusion the Holy Spirit may perform among them—even works that the Spirit uses us to initiate. The true and honest story of how the church also shamefully tries to erase us and to hide the evidence both of its dependence on us (who sings Vicky Beeching songs anymore?) and of its rejection. Our cries outside of the church doors give lie to their acceptance of the Gospel of peace; when Chuck Smith invited the hippies in, he also shut a part of Lonnie out. 

Before I went to the movie, knowing what it was about, a friend of mine asked on social media, what the story meant to different people. I said that to me, the story of Lonnie Frisbee represents a heartbreaking lost opportunity. I invited those in that conversation to imagine how things today might have been different if Chuck Smith or John Wimber had stopped to wonder what it could mean that the Holy Spirit chose to work so powerfully though a gay man while he was in a relationship with another man. To wonder why the Holy Spirit who had miraculously healed people through Lonnie and delivered them from addictions and oppression, never "healed" Lonnie of his homosexuality and had realized that God does not fix what was never broken. I asked them to think about a world where Lonnie's death of AIDS drove the Vineyard to sponsor a chaper of ACT UP in every Vineyard Church. To me this is a heartbreaking story of a lost opportunity and what might have been.

Ultimately Jesus Revolution without its historical frame is a mostly beautiful and compelling picture of what the Church is called to be; with it's frame it is a deeply troubling picture of what the church actually is: messy, harmful, healing, broken, and growing whole. I am encouraged by what is there and I hope in Christ that the Spirit will make up in Her power what the Church has not yet learned to do.

Footnotes

*For a fuller account of Lonnie's story I really recommend Matt Nightingale's piece HERE 

** In its Position Paper 7: Pastoring LGBT Persons Vineyard USA prohibits the ordination of anyone in a same-sex marriage and forbids pastors from performing same-sex marriages in their capacity as Vineyard pastors. In keeping with the theme of this review, VUSA has elected to remove Position Paper 7 from its website but has not recinded it.

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.