Angela Franks, associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America, argues that transgender debates stem from a deeper "identity crisis" rooted in Christianity’s rejection of fixed social roles and secularism’s failure to replace them. Her book Body and Identity critiques how bodily modifications—like gender-affirming surgeries—offer false solutions over self-reflection, while modern theories (e.g., Judith Butler) exploit existential confusion by conflating attraction with identity. Franks urges spiritual fulfillment through God’s unique purpose for each person, not external interventions, warning that divorcing sex from reproduction erases biological distinctions. Klavan highlights her work as part of a growing trend among women intellectuals challenging secular gender politics with Catholic-inspired critiques. [Automatically generated summary]
Doing something like gender confirming surgery, as they call it, seems to provide an identity that in many ways is easy.
It's easier than saying, I'm going to turn inward and look at myself and my selfishness and, you know, the things about me that aren't great and try to figure out who I really am.
And so I think we go to the body because it feels easy.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan with this week's interview with Angela Franks.
A few years ago, I started talking about the fact that a cadre of women were rising up who were addressing feminist and other issues in a highly intelligent way.
Most of them, for some reason, were Catholics, but not all of them.
They included Mary Harrington, who will be a Catholic Catholic.
I'm not a Catholic, but Catholics are always saying that people will be Catholic soon, but Mary definitely will.
Erica Bakayochi, Louise Perry.
But the one who really grabbed me was Angela Franks, mostly because she writes so brilliantly about literature and because she is operating at just another level than most thinkers out there at all.
She's an associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America.
And what I want to talk to her about is her new book, award-winning book, Body and Identity, A History of the Empty Self, which I just finished last week.
Obviously, a topic that's much in the news.
Angela, it is so nice to meet you.
Thank you for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
What award did you win?
I didn't know you won an award.
It's called the Expanded Reason Award, and it's given by the Joseph Ratzinger Foundation and a university in Spain.
So it's an international award.
It was a real honor.
Nice, nice.
Congratulations.
Well, obviously, you know, we're coming off a week in which the Supreme Court heard these arguments about why whether or not women should be allowed in, men who think they're women should be allowed in women's sport.
And my reaction to this is pretty definitive.
I mean, my reaction is why does somebody write a theoretical book, you know, and suddenly one of the central facts of human biology vanishes?
Why is a theory able to replace reality so easily that these major legal minds who sit on the Supreme Court and Katanji Brown Jackson can suddenly are suddenly calling people by the wrong pronouns and thinking that this has some virtue to it.
You tell the history of this idea.
And I'm wondering if you can explain to people who are just regular people going out their lives how women especially vanished as a category due to theory.
How does that come about?
Yeah, I argue that we think often that we have a body problem.
Transgenderism is presented as a body problem.
Somebody says, I'm in the wrong body and my problem is that my body is not sexed the way it should be.
But my argument is that a lot of these body problems are actually identity problems.
People don't know who they are and they're desperate to figure this out.
And the body is the thing that's most accessible.
It's the most at hand for us to tinker with.
And it also feels, even though I think this is false, the body feels like it's kind of at a distance from me.
You know, there's me and then there's my body.
That's how a lot of people think about it.
And so it feels like when you're messing around with your body, that that's somehow not, that's somehow easier to do.
It's somehow kind of detachable from me.
And so the body has kind of taken the brunt of our identity problems.
And you're right that this especially impacts women in part, I think, because women are more, it's harder to detach women from their bodies just because of how we're built, like how our cycles go and everything.
But also, we're just more vulnerable physically.
And so it's easier to trespass in on a female space than it would be to try to do it the other way around if it were unwelcome.
So I think for a lot of different reasons, we're seeing this come to these things come together the way they are.
I can't help feeling that the existence of women has troubled people, at least since the 18th century.
I mean, I wrote a book about the romantic poets and talked about not a poet, but Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which people say that Frankenstein is trying to replace God, the Dr. Frankenstein is trying to replace God.
But one of the things he's also doing is what God did was he's creating a person without a mother.
And I think that that's a big theme.
And I thought Mary Shelley was thinking about that at the time.
What is it about women in the movie Barbie recently?
They had a line, men hate women and women hate women, which I've never found to be that case.
So what is it about women where you can say a line like that and it resonates with people?
So this is, I don't cover that that much in this book, but I actually have done a lot of work on Margaret Sanger, who was one of the, she was the founder of Planned Parenthood and she was probably the most influential promoter of birth control.
And she really proposed that women are oppressed by their biology.
And I think that women often feel oppressed by their biology and men often feel as though women's reproductive powers are uncontrollable and therefore scary and dangerous.
And so I think both on the side of women and on the side of men, we see people trying to control something that is fundamentally not controllable, right?
You can ask any person who desperately wants to have a baby and you recognize really quickly the extent of your own ability to control your biology on this score.
And so I think that women appear more uncontrollable precisely because of what their bodies can do.
And that makes us pretty nervous in a technological age where supposedly we have control over matter completely.
And women's bodies show us that that's actually a lie, that we really don't have control.
In your book, The Body and Identity, you're giving a philosophical history.
Is there a moment, you're saying that we think this is a body problem, but it's really an identity problem.
Is there a moment where you feel this identity problem becomes a problem or was it always a problem?
So part of my proposal in the book is that our history of identity problems is longer than we think it is.
It's easy to say, well, we've had identity problems since the sexual revolution.
And I think that's true.
But I don't think you get to the real source of our identity problems without looking at this longer history.
So one of the things I point out is that one of the major disruptors of identity was actually Christianity.
In the ancient world, you know, you didn't, people didn't, people asked the question, who am I?
But they answered that question pretty easily.
You could say, you know, the cosmos is, you know, we have the gods in the cosmos and I fit here in my city, in my class, in my trade.
Or, you know, it just, it was easy to look around and find external social categories to answer the question, who am I?
And Christianity says those are important and they're good, but they're not the ultimate thing that gives you your identity because God can call you out of your social class.
So in the Catholic tradition, we have the case of Thomas Aquinas, who was an aristocrat and he was supposed to go to a Benedictine monastery, which is where rich people went and, you know, be the abbot.
And he said no, and his family locked him in the attic for months until he said yes, or until they said yes, till they changed their minds.
So, but you know, we also have the case of St. Paul, who is has one trajectory based on his class, his people, his ideas, and gets thrown off of that trajectory.
So, Christianity creates a condition in which we have to ask about vocation.
Like, who does God want me to be?
And it's a harder question to answer.
And as the centuries go on, the things that surrounded the solid categories that surrounded people's identity, like their family and like their class and all of these things, in part because of Christianity, those become more and more liquefied.
They become less important for giving you an identity.
But simultaneously with modernity, you get secularism, which says actually identity is not about God's vocation.
And so I think if I had to pick one point, it would be when secularism really takes over how people in the West understand themselves, because it keeps this fluid identity situation that Christianity creates and removes Christianity's identity answer.
And so now you really do have a crisis.
That's fascinating.
So Christianity unmoors you from the identity that's based in worldly cares.
What is exactly does it replace it with?
It replaces it with, what exactly would a Christian say about his identity?
Yeah, and I talk less about this in the book, but there will be hopefully a future book that I'll talk about it more.
Christianity replaces it with God's call to the individual, which is not going to be just a call out of society.
Even somebody who goes off to be a hermit is still connected to the church and praying for the world and all of that.
But it is a call that's tailored to the individual in a way that is just not what you see in the ancient world, where the individual's sense of what God or the gods wants him to do is just not a component of identity formation the way that Christianity demands.
So, all right, so now you so now you've unmoored your identity from social facts.
How did we get to this point where, well, people are mutilating children to change their sex?
I mean, I can hardly say that and actually believe it's happening, but it actually is not only happening, but at some point the most powerful person in the country was inciting it.
How do we get from, all right, now I'm unmoored.
I've lost the idea that God is calling me to be somebody.
So I've got to find my identity.
How did we get then to this next stage?
It takes quite a few centuries, in part because within Christianity up through modernity, you still had those solid structures that were concretely providing a lot of people's identity content.
You know, people still were, you know, in the Middle Ages, you still don't have a lot of identity crises.
And most people, Thomas Aquinas is a bit of an exception.
Most people are staying pretty close to their social class and family and everything in order to understand who they are.
But when the divine content, the Christian content is removed, and when we get told in modernity that freedom is the primary good and these things that constrain our freedom like class or like family or like our human nature, right?
We get the modernity argues that if you think you have a human nature that makes you what you are, that means you're not really free, right?
And so human nature is one of the things that modern philosophers reject in the name of freedom.
And so now it's people are really lost.
And this, it takes several centuries for the social structures to disintegrate enough that people feel lost.
And I think by the 20th century, we pretty definitively have that.
And now people are trying to solve their identity crises primarily by messing with their bodies.
And so doing something like a transgender, you know, sex change or gender confirming surgery, as they call it, doing that seems to provide an identity that in many ways is easy.
Like it's not easy because taking the hormones are really hard on you and the surgeries don't, you know, like what people are left with after the surgeries, it's a mess.
Dream Powder Discount00:02:04
And like, so it's not hard, but in a sense, I'm sorry, it's not easy, but in a sense, it's easier than saying, I'm going to turn inward and look at myself and my selfishness and, you know, the things about me that aren't great and try to figure out who I really am.
And so I think we go to the body because it feels easy.
You know, the new year used to mean something simple, taking stock of your life, promising yourself you do better and then failing, work a little harder, be a little stronger and then stop, show up for the people who depend on you and then stop doing that too.
But it's hard to do any of that when you're not sleeping well.
That's where our sponsor, Beam, comes in to help.
That's why you need to try their best-selling dream powder.
It's a healthy nighttime blend packed with proven ingredients, shown to improve sleep so you can wake up refreshed and ready to take on the day.
Dream is made with a powerful blend of all natural ingredients, rayshi, magnesium, l-thenine, epigenin, and melatonin.
And unlike other sleep aids, there's no next day grogginess, just great restful sleep.
I'm somebody who struggles with sleep, but I drink it because it puts me to sleep.
And so at least I get some sleep.
And it's got great flavors too.
It's got like chocolate, peanut butter, sea salt, caramel, brownie batter, cinnamon, cocoa, and it is delicious.
It's the perfect hot cocoa before bed.
And it makes a difference when you try to pass out.
So if you've been waiting for the right time to try Dream, this is it.
They're offering my listeners an exclusive discount going into the new year.
Go to shopbeam.com slash Claven, use code Claven and to get my exclusive offer for up to 40% off Beam's dream powder.
So with my discount code Claven, you can get their best-selling dream powder for just $39.
Think about it.
How much would you pay for a truly great night of sleep?
With my discount, it's just a buck 25 per night.
Go to shopbeam.com slash claven today, but you have to know how to spell claven.
Some of you don't.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
K-L-A-B-A-E-N, there are no easy things.
Start With Bigger Questions00:15:14
I know the body and identity, the book only covers certain things.
And as you say, you say in the book that you're going to cover other things later.
But I think for the purposes of this conversation, I think we have to move into some of those things.
I read an article by you that I just loved.
It was called What is a Woman, I think, which my colleague Matt Walsh also likes to say.
Is there something that you would say to someone who came to you personally and said, I'm thinking of having this operation because I'm not a woman?
How would you respond to that?
Yeah, there's one former somebody who detransitioned who asks people in that situation, when did you start feeling like your body was foreign to you?
And so, you know, asking people to look at their own, the history, really the psychological and spiritual history of their relationship with their bodies.
And when did that relationship disintegrate?
And why?
Like, what was the context of that?
So to try to understand oneself better and why a person might have these instincts on the one hand.
On the other hand, I think this is advice that's often given to parents of children who are who are playing around with these kinds of identities.
And I think it's absolutely stellar advice.
What is the good thing in that person that you can see and affirm to help that person form an identity out of who they really are instead of grasping at straws and looking at surgeries and all of these other things that are really external, like turning inward and saying, okay, but what am I really ordered towards?
And so, you know, this can look like very concretely for a parent is just like compliment the heck out of your kid, you know, like they take the dishes and be like, wow, you're really helpful.
And, you know, maybe at some point they'll be like, you know, who am I?
I'm helpful.
I'm a good son.
I'm, you know, a loyal friend, right?
Like those are the real things that you actually construct your identity from.
And I think that's what people need to access.
They need to realize that they do have an identity that is not dependent on hormones and surgeons and all of that.
You know, one of the things that I think is difficult for people is that, you know, the gender distinctions, sex distinctions are, when we talk about men and women, we're always talking generally.
We're not, you know, we all have traits that cross over lines and things like this.
I mean, nobody is one thing or the other.
If you were 100% male, you'd be a psychopath.
And if you were 100% female, you'd be another kind of psychopath.
A different psychopath.
Yeah, a different psychopath.
And you mentioned in one of the things I was reading by you that you're a football fan, which if it were possible for you to rise in my estimation, that would have done it.
And so, you know, we all have these crossover traits and everything.
But is there something?
You know, when I watched Matt Walsh's film, What is a Woman?
I was sitting in there going, you know, it's actually not an easy question because when you ask the question like that and people start saying, well, the X, Y of it all and this and that and this body part and all that, but that's not really what we mean, is it?
I mean, I know somebody, when somebody walks in and I say, wow, she's womanly, which is a great compliment and something that commands a room I've seen again and again, you know, we mean something by that.
What exactly do we mean?
Yeah.
So this is in many ways the distinction between sex and gender, which a lot of people don't like the language of gender because it's gotten hijacked.
And if you don't like the word, that's fine.
But I think the distinction itself is really helpful.
In other words, there is one way to fundamentally be a woman, but there are many ways to be a woman or to be womanly, right?
In other words, there's only one way in which one really can be a woman.
And that means the capacity to reproduce in a certain way.
There are two ways that the human race reproduces itself, and they need to come together.
They're different ways.
We need to have the male way of reproducing outside of yourself with small gametes and the female way of reproducing inside of yourself with large gametes.
And that is the whole basis for why we talk about the difference between male and female at all.
That's the original insight that people had when they're like, oh, there's a class of people that we call male and a class we call female.
And it's based on how they reproduce.
So for a lot of people, this sounds really crass.
It sounds like kind of unimportant and material.
And, you know, we don't like to connect sex and reproduction at all anyway.
That's been part of, you know, that was the whole point of the sexual revolution was to try to divorce those two.
But if you don't get that there's this bodily basis for being either male or female, then all of these other secondary kinds of traits become much more important than they should be.
And so this is where you have teachers who, you know, see the kindergartner boy playing with dolls and say, oh, well, he must be a girl because they fastened on some kind of downstream characteristic as being the thing, when in fact it's a thing.
And it's a thing that maybe even a majority of females do, but not all females.
The only thing that classifies all females is that they have the kind of body that's ordered to this way of reproducing.
And the same for males.
That's only the beginning of the conversation, because then like it's really interesting to talk about those other characteristics and there's a lot to say there, but you have to talk about them on the basis of this shared understanding of what fundamentally maleness and femaleness is.
You know, you mentioned this thing about a doll, you know, this secondary characteristic that girls play with dolls because they are essentially practicing for something that they somehow know that they are capable of doing.
The entire, when I was watching some of the Supreme Court argument, the entire thing seems to me backwards like that.
And I'm baffled by why it has convinced so many people why it's become this feverish.
I mean, I guess that's kind of what I'm trying to find out is why it's become a sort of fact of mental life.
We start out by saying, well, women are kind of like this and men are kind of like this, meaning not like every woman is like this or every man is like this, but these are traits that we see a lot.
And so we call them feminine traits.
And then somebody says, well, this guy has a feminine trait, so he must be a girl.
That just seems to me incredibly backwards, an incredibly backward way of thinking.
And yet, some of the philosophers that you talk about in Body and Identity are philosophers I've read and admired and who are actually quite insightful.
And then there's Michelle Foucault, who I think was maybe the devil.
But still, you know, they were trying to think their way out of something.
How do we get to a point?
I mean, I guess what I'm almost trying to ask you is, what is it in the human mind that allows theories to obliterate what we all know to be true?
Yeah, theories generally answer, theories that get popular generally answer widespread questions.
Now, they might answer them badly, but they've latched on to a widespread confusion or misunderstanding or existential crisis that the theorist is providing a certain answer to.
And so I think that the identity problem is the widespread crisis and problem that's been building for centuries.
And in the 20th century, especially with the sexual revolution, as Carl Truman points out, sex becomes not so much what somebody does, but who one is.
So how I am sexually attracted, you know, the classes of people to whom I'm sexually attracted, the way that I want to have sex, like all of this becomes not just a matter of behavior, but a matter of identity.
So, and that just becomes in many ways the socially acceptable way of crafting an identity.
And I think that's why, you know, teens are naturally, adolescents naturally are going through an identity crisis where they're trying to separate out from their parents and form their own sense of self.
And it's hard in the best of circumstances, but when they have so little identity content, it's really hard.
And so these identities on the rainbow, for example, like trans or others, they're like pre-made suits from the rack.
It's like, I'll just pick this one and see if it fits me.
And I don't have to sew one myself, thank heavens.
And oh, actually, this suit is really popular right now.
And people who put it on get praised by their teachers and everything.
And so it ends up, it creates a situation in which identity politics is almost inevitable because we want easy, quick ways to answer the identity question.
So that makes a lot of sense because you look at people like Judith Butler, who writes about gender, and they almost seem like malevolent, but really they are speaking into something, a problem.
They may be malevolent in fact, but they are speaking into a problem that's already there.
So now I have to ask you, because I'm coming to the end, I have to ask you, you teach at the Catholic University.
You're winning prizes named after Ratzinger.
I assume that you are a believing and practicing Catholic.
What is it we need, what does it we need to find?
I mean, I think that I really would like to hear this in spiritual terms because I think that to put it in philosophical or physical terms is not going to serve the purpose.
What is it exactly a young person thinking, who am I?
What should they be thinking about?
Yeah, I agree exactly that it has to be fundamentally a spiritual answer.
I mean, you have to know what it means to be a human being in order to understand who you are.
That's a more philosophical truth.
But in order to understand really who am I as opposed to who are you or who is anybody else, you have to be, it's really the question you're asking is, who does God want me to be?
And so to use more Catholic language, that means who is the saint that God wants me to be?
What's my version of holiness?
What's my version of being a fulfilled and radiant creature of God that God has intended from all eternity just for me?
You know, all of these billions of people.
And yet every single one of us, God in his providence, there's a particular saint that he wants us to be and that he's planned out.
And so our path is really to try to line up as much as possible, line up the concrete realities of my life, line up my personality and hopefully virtues and everything in line with that picture that he has.
And so we have to figure it out.
Like, what is it?
And so that requires some silence and it requires prayer and it requires talking to people who know us well and all of those things.
It's a long-term answer.
It's not a quick and easy answer, but it's the only one that's really fulfilling.
So I agree with every word that you just said.
And I would like to know if you feel, because I sometimes feel that the church, and by the church, I mean all the churches, you know, the church in the biggest possible sense, sometimes get in the way of that operation.
They seem to have a kind of like the, you know, I don't want to single out like the Catholic catechism, but any kind of catechism has a sort of one-size-fits-all feeling to me.
And when people are, you know, Scott Adams just died and said, you know, I don't believe, but I'm going to accept Jesus Christ because that basically took Pascal's wager.
He said, you know, I think it's a better deal.
And if, and if I wake up and I'm in heaven, then I'll believe.
So that'll be fine.
And people were screaming and yelling at him.
I thought, you know what?
Go home, pal.
You know, anything, any road that gets you home is good for me.
Is there a way that the church stands in the way?
Because I've talked to a lot of people who don't believe and have had conversations where I'll say, why don't you believe in God?
And they'll say, well, I can't accept the Trinity or the Virgin Birth.
And I'll say, why don't you start somewhere else?
I should start with a bigger question.
Is there a way to, briefly, that the churches get in the way?
I think that definitely we can imply to people that they have to go from zero to 50 immediately.
And I think that that can be part of the messaging of churches.
And I think it certainly comes up and, you know, like apologetics efforts by Christians, for example, can imply that, well, unless you believe exactly everything that I do, which can get very nitpicky very quickly, that, oh, like, you know, don't even try.
It's like, you know, all of these traits are none at all.
I don't actually think when you look at the, you know, what I'm familiar with, which is more the classical doctrine of something like Catholicism or the older Protestant churches, I don't feel like there's this one size fit all path for holiness.
I mean, you know, you could have a long conversation about that.
But like in the Catholic Church, for example, there's many different states of life.
And it's not presumed that a person belongs to any one of them.
That's God's action, not my own choice.
So I, but yeah, like absolutely, I think to your point that people are at different places.
And like, I personally consider my job to be helping people move a little bit further along from where they already were.
And if God wants to use me more than that, that's wonderful.
But like that's, it seems to me, is a service.
If I've helped people move a little bit closer to what the truth is, and God willing, they'll go all the way.
Patient Progress00:01:45
But we have to be patient with each other and we have to be patient with God because he's really in a lot of ways the, you know, he's the giver of grace.
And we have to trust that his providence has a plan for all of these people who don't seem to be following our plans.
But I do believe God has a plan for them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that is, I do find a great lack of trust in God.
And even in believers, they feel that they have to carry the weight.
It's like when I was learning to fly a plane, my instructor used to say, stop flying the plane.
The plane will fly.
And I think that that's a lot of people have that problem.
Angela Franks is an associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America, beautiful university.
Her latest award-winning book is Body and Identity, A History of the Empty Self.
Angela, it is so nice to meet you.
I hope we get a chance to do this again, especially when you have more stuff coming out.
I always look for your name in first things, and I always love reading what you write.
It's really doing a fantastic job.
It's nice to meet you.
Thank you so much.
Again, Mob, I think for me, the leader of the pack of this new group of women intellectuals, as I say, many of them Catholic, who are coming back at feminism, not from an anti-feminist point of view, but from a very human and spiritual point of view, and are writing beautiful stuff in the magazine First Things and in books and elsewhere.
And really, really worth looking for.
It's a phenomenon.
It's this thing that's happening because I think women are the ones who've been damaged most by some of the modern thought, including feminism as it's practiced by the left.
And of course, if you want just spiritual healing, you want to come to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.