It's in the Code ep 152: “All Women Are Women, Pt. 1”
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Allie Beth Stuckey insists that gender and biological sex are the same thing, that there are two binary genders, and that gender identity and gender dysphoria are myths. In support of these claims, she offers simplistic appeals to “science” and the story of a woman who “detransitioned” from a transmale identity back to her previous female identity. In this episode, Dan takes a close look at these dimensions of Stuckey’s argument to show that gender and sex are not the same thing and that the story of “detransition” she offers actually demonstrates the opposite of what she thinks. Listen in to hear more!
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As always, I want to say welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Delighted as always to be here with you.
As always, I want to thank folks for listening.
And as always, want to invite folks to reach out and share insights, feedback, comments, disagreements, ideas for new series, whatever you've got.
Daniel MillerSwedge at gmail.com.
DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Best way to reach me.
I do try to check the Discord as well.
Working through some great ideas that folks have.
People have been reaching out with new episode ideas, feedback for some maybe potentially new series, taking notes of all of those, planning things out in advance.
And also the bonus episode that we do for subscribers.
I respond to some of the emails and comments that you have.
So if you're not a subscriber and that's something that would be of interest to you, I invite you to consider doing that and you can listen into those, kind of get a cool conversation going there.
I've got some responses to things I did in the last supplement that'll come out in this new supplemental episode.
So diving into this week, what we've been doing is kind of continuing a deep and frankly sort of nauseating dive into Ali Beth Stuckey's book, Toxic Empathy, How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.
And again, this is a book.
It's part of this discourse on the right at present about the evils of empathy.
And this is a book about how empathy is evil and will mislead us.
And it's structured around what she considers five lies that she believes lead us into the trap of feeling toxic amounts of empathy.
We looked at the first of the lies, which is that abortion is healthcare.
This week we started looking at the second of the so-called lies.
All women are women.
And again, to be really, really clear about this, I accept all of the things that she calls as lies as truth.
So I affirm all women, specifically the idea here, obviously, is trans women are women.
Broader, more broadly than that, the trans and gender non-conforming people are people and deserve all the same rights and protections as other people.
And that idea, the affirmation of trans and particularly trans feminine identity is often captured in that slogan, all women are women.
And Stuckey describes this as a lie, right?
As something that needs to be countered.
So this is basically her anti-trans chapter.
She had her anti-abortion chapter that we looked at the last few episodes.
This time we're starting in on the anti-trans chapter, okay?
Those who know me, who know my work, who know my background, who've listened to the podcast know that trans issues in particular are very personal for me.
And so this is a tough chapter.
That's a tough chapter to deal with.
And so we're going to do that for a while.
Again, as with the other issues that she addresses in her book, the real point of looking at Stuckey is that she's typical of perspectives that dominate within the contemporary American right, especially at the popular level.
She's a popular author.
She's not a scholar.
She's not a researcher.
She's not doing anything new or different or exciting.
She's like a clearinghouse for these perspectives that are dominant within the American right at the popular level.
And that's why we're looking at them.
As I say, I'm reading this book so you don't have to.
I've had some people reach out with emails and stuff and say like, you know what?
This is awful.
Like, why do you do that?
What is the point?
You know, why look at something you disagree with so much?
That's why is because it really is sort of a clearinghouse for what these perspectives are.
Okay.
So I want to start, you know, just very briefly by saying what Stuckey's general position is.
And this is not going to surprise anybody who's aware at all with the contemporary cultural discourse about trans, trans and queer identity.
Her position is that gender, one sense of being male or female, or those of us who affirm a continuum of gender identities would say that, you know, those who don't fall into that binary.
But her argument is that gender, one sense of male or female, being male or female, is determined by biological sex, right?
So if you have a male sex, you are gendered male.
If you have female sex, you are gendered female and so forth, which of course means that there are only two genders, right?
And the gender is biologically fixed at birth, actually before birth, right?
In the, you know, by genetics and so forth, but as the embryo develops and so on.
And the gender is invariable over time.
So it's a fundamental rejection of any conception of what we would tend to call gender identity or gender fluidity and so forth.
Okay.
And I want to start sort of the same thing I did in the last chapter.
I think this will be my pattern moving forward.
Again, I'm figuring this book out as we go.
We'll be to start with the sort of the big sort of overarching like meta level issues and then get into the more specific things that she says.
So with that in mind, I want to start with an overarching issue that structures her discussion of this.
And again, this is an issue that anybody who's engaged opponents will also have encountered.
If you've had discussions with Uncle Ron or coworkers or other family members or a partner or whatever about this kind of stuff, you will have encountered this.
And it is that she doesn't really argue for any of these positions.
She simply assumes them to be true by default.
She assumes them to be common sense.
So the burden of proof would be on anyone who questions them.
Or it's just common sense to know that if you have a penis, you're a man.
If you have a vagina, you're a woman.
That's how it is.
Period, full stop.
And it positions anybody who would challenge that as having the burden of proof.
And there's just an overarching rhetorical ploy here.
And this idea is clear when she says, it's on page 56.
And if you wanted to go look it up, she simply asserts that, quote, we know what the biological and biblical reality is.
There is no scientific or scriptural category for a, quote, gender identity, end quote, that is independent from sex.
End of her quotation.
So she just comes out and says that we already know what this is.
We all know this.
And she does go on to offer a couple Bible verses.
We'll probably get to those eventually.
Again, her claim in the book is that she's speaking through a biblical lens, though she doesn't talk about the Bible very much at all, which I find telling.
But she offers nothing in the way of so-called science to back up this claim that gender and sex simply align.
Nothing, not a single piece of discussion of that.
And those, of course, are incredibly common positions within our society.
As I say, if you've encountered anybody or engaged anybody on this, you'll run into that assumption.
For many people, maybe most people, these assumptions that gender and sex align and it's just a given reality and it's scientifically established and so forth, these assumptions are so taken for granted that the idea that gender could be more complicated than that is literally nonsensical.
It's an idea about which they literally cannot make sense of it.
It is incomprehensible to them.
And again, I've had this discussion, I don't know how many times over the years.
So if you've tried discussing issues of trans rights and gender with someone who thinks this way or has never been exposed to any other way of thinking, you'll know how deeply ingrained this way of thinking is.
And, you know, I talk about people acting in good faith and not repeatedly.
Those are the folks maybe acting in good faith, people who are ignorant of this, people who have never considered it before, people who've never been exposed to a different idea and so forth.
That's not, I think, Alibeth Stuckey.
That's not the sort of high-level people.
That's not pediatricians and doctors who don't affirm gender care and so forth.
They know very well how complicated the issue actually is.
It is obfuscation and sort of Orwellian doublespeak on their part when they try to convince us that it's a straightforward sort of thing.
It's a much broader discussion, but at any rate, those are the presumptions the Stuckey is making.
Those are the presumptions that she largely does not support.
She simply asserts them and so on.
Okay.
So what I want to start with, encountering that, and with that in view, the taken for grantedness of this view, I want to start with a couple basic kind of thought exercises that show why it isn't obvious that gender simply reduces to sex.
And in fact, I think they make clear that gender can't be explained solely on the basis of sex.
Now, if you've listened to Straight White American Jesus for a long time, you might have heard this first one.
I've brought it up before.
It's one I routinely use when I'm introducing the idea that gender doesn't reduce to sex.
I use it in my classroom a lot.
I've had a lot of conversations with people where I use it to illustrate this point.
And what it helps to illustrate is that whatever we might mean by gender, it involves more than male or, you know, quote unquote male or female genitalia.
It's about more than penises and vaginas, that there's more to gender than that.
And so here's the basic thought experiment, okay?
I want you to think, or anybody doing this, to think for a minute about the number of people that you will encounter over a lifetime.
And I mean everybody, people that you're close to, but people who are sitting in the car next to you on the commute to work, people who are sitting in the movie theater when you're watching a film.
And not just people next to you, but everybody you run into, the people in the concession stand, the people in the mall outside the movie theater when you're on your way there.
You go to a sporting event and there are tens of thousands of people there.
All of them, every time you go to a public restroom, locker rooms, family members, trips, flying on an airplane, all the people in there, like just think about this for a minute.
I don't have a number for this.
I've tried to find it.
I haven't found a good one.
You can email me if you've got a number.
But just thinking about like how many people we must encounter over the course of a lifetime.
It's got to be, what, hundreds of thousands of people?
Tens of thousands at the very least.
Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
Okay.
And in general, and for the most part, we readily identify the vast majority of those people as fitting into one of two gender identities.
We readily identify the vast majority of people as male or female.
And there are exceptions to this.
There are sometimes trans folk if they're not, if they don't present as a binary.
Genderqueer folks, people who are androgynous in other ways and so forth, fine.
But they're the exception that proves the rule.
We notice those people, we, people in the kind of Western society we live in that has been structured around the notion of two genders and so on.
We notice people who diverge from that binary precisely because the binary is so well established.
So that's my point.
All of those people easily, quickly, automatically, we slot them into one of two gender identities.
Okay?
Hope everybody's with me.
Why does that matter?
Because now I want us to think about all those tens or hundreds of thousands of people that we encounter and to think about how many sets of genitalia we see out of all of those people.
It's a tiny fraction.
Sexual partners, family members, maybe teammates, people in a locker room.
That's about it.
Out of all those hundreds of thousands of people whom we readily gender, we readily identify them as a gender, and most of them also identify as the gender into which we place them.
We almost never see what people like Ali Beth Stuckey think are the central physiological characteristics of gender, namely penises and vaginas.
We don't see their genitalia.
What does that matter?
Why does it matter?
Here's why it matters to me.
It means that gender can't reduce to genitals since we easily gender people without any reference to genitalia.
Okay.
Now, to be clear, gender does include various dimensions of embodiment, but embodiment's about a lot more than our junk.
Okay?
So that's the first thought experiment.
Whatever gender is, it doesn't reduce to genitalia.
And I think that that thought experiment just makes the point very, very simply.
Much bigger question, what all goes into gender?
We don't need to answer that.
All we got to say is like, well, whatever it is, it's not just genitalia.
Okay.
Let's go on to the second one.
People like Stuckey, they also seek to claim the scientific high ground when it comes to the denial of trans and gender non-conforming identities.
The same folks who are busy denying climate science and our anti-vaxxers and whatever.
When it comes to oppressing trans people, all of a sudden they're like, you know, they want to play their scientific credentials.
And so they're going to appeal to chromosomes.
The claim here is that gender is determined by biological sex and the biological sex is usually determined by chromosomes.
So if the argument about genitalia deals with what we might call phenotype or phenotypical gender markers, like external genitalia, here we're talking about genotypical gender markers, in other words, chromosomes.
And we know how this works.
If you have two X chromosomes, you are sex female with a female gender identity.
They would argue.
If you have an X and a Y chromosome, you are sex male with a male gender identity and so forth.
Boom, done.
Like I said, it's that simple, folks.
If we know somebody's genotypical sex, we know their gender.
And all you have to think is older discussions about bathroom bills and so forth.
And they would talk about, you know, chromosomes.
That's how we determine who's going to be quote unquote biologically male, biologically female, and so forth.
And they will argue that if you affirm that gender identities depart from genotypical sex, that's unscientific.
You're just not being scientific.
You're ignoring chromosomes and the obvious fact that chromosomes determine gender.
And this is the view of not just somebody like Stuckey.
Richard Dawkins argues this.
So there are a number of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals who affirm this kind of view that, you know, science is just that simple.
Just do a chromosome test and you know the gender.
Now, there are several problems with this.
One, which we can't get into here, is that so-called biological sex is also not binary, but presents on a spectrum.
We could talk about intersex conditions and a number of other kinds of things because even so-called biological sex involves more than chromosomes.
Okay.
Bigger issue.
We're not going to go there.
Here's the second, much more basic problem with this, and this is why I think it matters here for our purposes.
The equation of genotypical sex, that is chromosomes, with gender, is a presupposition about gender.
It is not a conclusion drawn from any kind of scientific observation.
People start with the assumption that genotype determines sex, that chromosomes determine sex, and that sex determines gender.
You start with those presuppositions, and then that assumption is used to dismiss divergent gender expressions out of hand.
But if we wanted to actually approach this as a scientific question, I think what we would do is we would note that most people with 2X chromosomes, yeah, most of them identify as female.
And most people, numerically speaking, with XY chromosomes, yep, most of them identify as male.
But a small but significant minority of people don't fit into those patterns.
People with 2X chromosomes who don't identify as female.
People with an XY chromosomes who don't identify as male, which to me, on a basic, fundamental, empirical level, should lead us to the obvious conclusion that, well, you know, whatever gender is, it doesn't just reduce to biological genotype.
The mere existence of trans and gender non-conforming people tells us this.
The mere existence of people who have a particular genotype and don't identify with the gender that most people that that genotype do, that tells us that gender is about more than genotype.
That, for me, would be a quote unquote scientific starting point looking at chromosomes and gender.
So what these reflections tell us together, these two points about physiological external markers like genitalia and genotypical markers like chromosomes, and we could expand on these, is that whatever gender is, it involves much more than biology.
Right?
Again, gender touches on embodiment, but it is also cultural, it is emotional, it is psychological in nature.
And so, for example, even we say, well, it's about bodies, great, but even how bodies themselves are presented, how they are understood, what they can and can't do, how they are interpreted, how they are policed in society, all of that is culturally coded.
That's what theorists mean when they talk about the quote-unquote social construction of the body.
That's what they mean is that what a body represents in society is not just about that body.
It's about a whole bunch of other stuff that is not about embodiment.
So when Stuckey and those like her work to reduce gender to biology, they are once again seeking to place the complexity of human beings into simple categories, into binary categories.
And if we just attend to how people express themselves and what they tell us, in other words, if we look at how people move around in the world, how they exist in the world, if we take the time to get to know them and talk to them and hear the things they tell us, what we find is a lot more complexity than somebody like Stuckey can possibly comprehend.
So let's tie these pieces together.
What are we doing in this episode?
Starting with sort of the big picture.
Stucke takes it for granted and basically says, again, we know what scripture and biology tell us about gender.
What she's claiming to know, what she's claiming is the common sense, that gender and biological sex simply align, that gender collapses or reduces to biology in the form, and they would say both, you know, both and, the form of both physical characteristics,
specifically genitalia and other, you know, primary and secondary sex characteristics that develop during puberty and so forth, and chromosomes, which of course are part of what determine how puberty takes place and so forth, that the two collapse.
What I'm trying to do here is say, you know, right from the start, there's reason to doubt that.
And I think it's important to recognize the presuppositions, the meta-level presuppositions that are operative in a text like this, in the reasoning of somebody like Stuckey, to be able to take that on.
Because so often, the specific examples, the specific arguments that are going to come along, they are working under the umbrella of those larger presuppositions.
And if we start with the presuppositions, if we don't share that presupposition to start with, and we come into it and say, well, actually, it's not self-evident to me that gender and biological sex simply map onto each other, then the other arguments that are offered are going to seem much less compelling as we move along.
We've scratched the surface.
Stucky's not done.
I think she's not off to a good start.
We're trying to poke holes in her fundamental presupposition.
Next episode, we'll continue on and we'll get into some of the specific things that she gives.
We're going to look at a sort of a running example she gives, a real-life example of a supposedly trans person who quote unquote detransitioned back to their, as the language might be for some, their natal gender or their natal sex.
And she takes this as a kind of a knockdown argument for the falsehood about gender identity and gender fluidity.
We'll look at some other things that she's doing.
For now, I just want to tackle that fundamental orienting presupposition and have given these two thought experiments that for me make it very difficult to simply smile and nod as somebody equates gender with sex.
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Again, Daniel Miller Swedge, Daniel Miller, S-W-A-J-A-Gmail.com.
Keep the ideas, comments, feedback coming in.
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