Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1003: #1003 - Gender Ideologies, Feminism, and the Catholic Church: Dr. Abigail Favale

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Abigail has a fascinating story! Conservartive evangelical turned Christian feminist, turned third wave post-modern (practailly agnostic) feminist, turned catholic wife and mother–all while being a robust scholar of gender theory and theolgoy. We talk about all things related to gender, feminism (all 3 waves), transgender ideologies, the Catholic Church, and everything in-between.  Abigail Favale, Ph.D., is a writer, professor, and speaker. She has an academic background in gender studies and feminist literary criticism, and now writes and speaks regularly on topics related to women and gender from a Catholic perspective. Her latest book The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory was just released in June 2022 by Ignatius Press.  https://abigailfavale.wixsite.com/home If you would like to support Theology in the Raw, please visit patreon.com/theologyintheraw for more information!  –––––– PROMOS Save 10% on courses with Kairos Classroom using code TITR at kairosclassroom.com! –––––– Sign up with Faithful Counseling today to save 10% off of your first month at the link:  faithfulcounseling.com/theology –––––– Save 30% at SeminaryNow.com by using code TITR –––––– Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review. www.theologyintheraw.com

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is Dr. Abigail Favali. Dr. Favali is a writer and professor in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, where she just recently got hired. She has written for the Atlantic, First Things, Church Life. She's written, her first book is Into the Deep, An Unlikely Catholic Conversion. And her most recent book, which was just recently published this July, is The Genesis of Gender, A Christian Theory. And that's the launching point for our conversation. We talk about her expertise in the concept of gender. We also talk about her journey into and out of third wave feminism. And we go into a lot of details about what that even means,

what's the difference between first, second, and third wave feminism, and why she used to buy into some of that and then now no longer does. And we also talk about her conversion to the Catholic Church. So please welcome back to the show for the second time, the one and only Dr. Abigail Favreau. Thanks so much for coming back on the show. There's two kind of big topics I want to talk about. First of all, you just released your book.

Is this your first book or first popular level book? It's my second popular level. I have an academic book that was like my dissertation, which shall not be named. No, I'm just kidding. But I'm not going to like plug that right now. I did write a memoir about my conversion to Catholicism in 2018. Okay. So that was my first kind of popular book.

And then this is my second. So this book, The Genesis of Gender, A Christian Theory, which the last podcast we did, we talked all about gender and really enjoyed that conversation. I also, I did want to hear about in more detail why you left feminism. And that's not even the right way of framing it because it's like, what kind of feminism are we even talking about? But I kind of want to do both. But let's start with your book. Give us an elevator pitch of what your book is all about.

And I'm sure I'll have several questions at the end of your elevator pitch. Right. So the title is The Genesis of Gender. And there's sort of a double meaning there because the first part of the book covers the genesis of the concept of gender. So it traces a more or less linear narrative of how the concept of gender developed over the 20th century, because it entered the scene in the 1950s through the work of psychologist John Money. It's kind of morphed, right? It morphed through second wave feminism and then third wave feminism. And then now it's kind of become gender identity theory. So it's, I kind of trace that,

um, that story and, and go in depth, but also hopefully in a way that's accessible to people, because I think one of the confusing things about talking about gender right now is that people are using the same word and meaning wildly different things by it. Right. And the, but they're having this conversation of talking completely past each other. So I try to at least trace the source of that confusion, why there are so many different definitions that people use without maybe even realizing it. And some of them are even contradictory. Anyway, that's the first meaning of the genesis of gender. And so that gives rise to what I call the gender paradigm. Um, and I, I use that term rather than gender ideology for a few reasons. One, I think gender ideology is like, it's not a really helpful term cause it's pretty

divisive. Um, but also I think the gender paradigm, I use the word paradigm because it, it refers to this entire way of seeing thing. And so I think once you kind of buy into this way of understanding the human person without realizing it, maybe you also kind of buy into this way of understanding the human person without realizing it, maybe you also kind of buy into a certain understanding of reality and God and truth and all that kind of stuff. So it's this way of seeing. So I described how the gender paradigm arises, but then I compare it to what I call the Genesis paradigm or the Christian paradigm. And then I kind of do a worldview comparison between those two. Also discussing some of the contemporary things we're seeing with gender.

Yeah, making the case for a Genesis understanding of gender. Oh, like the book of Genesis or? See, see the book of Genesis. The Christian theory, right? So I'm kind of basically making the argument that, look, to be a Christian is to enter into a particular way of seeing. And that informs everything, even our bodies and sexual difference. And that, in a Christian understanding, all of that is tied together. difference. And that in a Christian understanding, all of that is tied together. So it's not just this kind of side issue or this tangential issue, but how we understand the relationship between the soul and body. I mean, that touches on how we understand the incarnation, the resurrection, the Eucharist, right? So there's so much theological truth at stake in how we understand the human person.

I want to just go a little bit deeper into the development of the concept from John Money to today. How would you summarize? So is John Money, he was like the main one that started to talk about gender as something different from biological sex. Is that kind of correct? Yeah. Well, he was the first, yeah. Well, so he was, he was the first one to use the term gender, right? So he kind of borrowed the term gender from linguistics because prior to the 1950s, it was a linguistic term that meant category or genre, right? Genre, gender. Um, you might have heard the feminine gender, but it wasn't, it wasn't just attached to that idea. It was mainly, um, mainly referred to forms in language, right? You've got like in Spanish, you have masculine,

feminine endings to words, right? So that would have been the words gender. Okay. But then John Money took that linguistic term and began to apply it to people. Um, and he was the first one to do that. But in my book, I, I, I start the story a little bit before John Money with Simone de Beauvoir, because in her book, The Second Sex, even though she doesn't use the term gender, she names the concept that the word gender will soon become attached to. but rather becomes a woman. So in that statement, she's kind of denaturalizing the idea of woman and she's making a distinction between woman and female. Right. And then,

so John money's work kind of develops that distinction. Um, and he uses the term gender. So he, he has this idea of a gender role. There's this socially constructed identity or role that has no intrinsic connection to sex, um, but then becomes fixed after

the first two or three years or something through a process of socialization. So that was his theory. And I'm sure you know the story, right? The kind of harrowing story of the Reimer twins and his horrific experimentations on them and how they both committed suicide. Anyway, so on them and how they both committed suicide. Anyway, so there's this tragedy that plays out from, say, the 1960s when he begins to treat this pair of identical twins, one of whom has his genitalia destroyed in a botched circumcision. And so he says, wow, this is a great opportunity to test my theory. I've got a control right here. I've got like twin boys, right? So one will enculturate as a boy and the other we will enculturate as a girl and it'll all be fine. So he treated them throughout their childhood. And eventually the boy, the gender identity of a girl found out about the truth. He rejected that identity and

he ended up killing himself. Actually, both boys ended up killing themselves. But by the time that happened, that was in the early 2000s. So in the interim, from the 60s to 2002, 2004, you have this concept of gender completely taking hold, that's totally separate from sex, ended up being proved wrong by his controlled experiment of these twin boys. But it was too late by then. The idea had already taken hold. So anyway, then I talk about how the concept develops through second wave feminism and then third wave feminism with Judith Butler. It takes another turn. Yeah. feminism and then third wave feminism with judith butler it takes another turn yeah i know so um yeah just to be so he had this idea that gender let me use a phrase like masculinity femininity like or gender role even like this this this boy who you know six months old or eight months old

or something they basically had did surgeries to make him into a girl because he lost his penis to the surgery or through the botched circumcision um so if we just raise this person as a female then and they didn't they wouldn't even know any different then we can kind of like because the assumption is that gender expression is culturally constructed therefore it all worked out it didn't like he he very much had a more masculine identity that was felt suppressed is that a yeah is that an accurate way of kind of repeating what you said in my own terms to make sure i understand okay did that i mean it didn't really come out till i feel like it was as i read the literature it was really popular when it was seemed to be working oh yeah and then it came out that he found

out what happened went through depression committed suicide his brother did too that doesn't that seems to be i don't say buried like if you google it you can the wiki article it's there but it it's almost like the his concept of gender just still kind of took off and even though the experiment kind of failed it. Right. Yeah. Because, yeah. So in the sixties and seventies, he's publishing on this concept of gender. And then second wave feminists take, take his terminology of gender as a way to develop the classic sex gender split in feminist theory, which is the idea that sex refers to biology and gender refers to the social norms and expressions of sex in a particular culture. And so that allowed feminist theorists to sort of critique gender norms while also

affirming that yes, sex is real, but that doesn't mean that women have to have long hair and dresses, for example, right? Like that's not a nap. That's not something that naturally happens. Right, right, right. That's a social norm or expression or custom. Can you quickly define and summarize first, second and third wave feminism for people that maybe not know those categories? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So first wave feminism refers to the movement that grew out of the abolition movement and was really focused on getting women the right to vote in the early 20th century. The suffragettes, you know, cast off the shekel the fray. Anyway, so after the 1920s, when women got the right to vote at least to the United States, feminism kind of went dormant as a movement. Right. So that was really focused on legal equality. First wave. And then in the late 1960s, early 1970s, you get the second wave of feminism. Even though Simone de Beauvoir kind of happened between, or she wrote the second sex between the first two waves, she greatly influenced Betty Friedan, who wrote The Feminine Mystique, an American woman. And that book really sparked the second wave. And so the second wave of feminism was much, went beyond just legal equality to analyze or to kind of reject more social equality. And Marxist theory was much more influential at this time. And so instead of just accepting the terms of the liberal state and wanting legal access within that, instead they began to interrogate the system itself, right? That this is patriarchal and taking kind of the Marxist analysis and thinking of women as a class, almost like the, you know, the proletariat that's

oppressed by the bourgeoisie. You have the class of women that's a patriarchy. And it's during the second wave that, you know, the sexual revolution is also kind of taking hold. And so the sexual revolution and second wave feminism kind of form a bit of an alliance. And while for example, first wave feminism was not pro-abortion or even pro-contraception by the second wave feminism and becomes really allied with, um, the, the pro-abortion and pro contraception movements, which, um, at least the abortion movement prior to the second wave was very much a male dominated movement. It was led by men. Oh, really? Yeah.

Yeah. So it wasn't until they kind of wooed the National Organization for Women in the 60s, which was pretty controversial. There were plenty of second-wave feminists who really thought, no, this isn't a good solution for women. Anyway, but NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Something Something, was founded by men and mainly run by men until they formed an alliance with now in the second wave feminism. So then third wave feminism is really influenced by postmodern theory and postmodern philosophy. So in third wave feminism, you get, this is, we're talking here like the late eighties and nineties, Judith Butler, for example, I think is one of the key figures there. And so when we're talking about sex and gender, she draws on, say, Michelle Foucault to say that not only is gender a social construct, but sex itself is a construct. Because any claims of knowledge or reality or truth that we make are ultimately exercises of power.

You also get in third wave feminism more um, more of a sense of, you know, sex positive feminism. So you have these inter, you have these, um, inter feminist wars in the late eighties, the sex wars, the feminist sex wars, where you have the, um, the second wave feminists, mainly second wave radical feminists who are anti-pornography, anti-prostitution. And then you have the third wave sex positive feminists who are like, noornography, anti-prostitution. And then you have the third wave, sex positive feminists who are like, no, sex work can be liberating. Porn can be liberating. Let's really lean into the sexual liberation ethos because that's where freedom is found.

Anyway, so that's kind of the first, second, third wave. Is there a fourth wave? I've heard people talk about a fourth wave. Is that not really a thing? Is there a fourth wave? I've heard people talk about a fourth wave. Is that not really a thing? I mean, honestly, the wave metaphor kind of breaks down after the second wave because the first and second wave makes sense because there's literally decades, two world wars between them or one world. I mean, there really was this interim where there was not much going on at all. But after the second wave, feminism is always around. It just kind of takes these different shapes and forms, right? So fourth wave, I think if I were to define fourth

wave feminism, I would say that once you get the advent of social media and the meat movement, you kind of see a different form of fourth wave feminism. So I would say fourth wave feminists actually are a little more skeptical of sex positive feminism, a little more likely to maybe say that there are kinds of technically consensual sex that can still be bad for women. So you'll, you definitely see that perspective in the Me Too movement, right? So, and a greater focus on intersectionality. So the ways that different kinds of oppression intersect. So, yeah, it is. I mean, well, this is why I don't like the term feminism as a whole.

It's like, well, what kind, like if someone asked me, are you a feminist? I'd say, well, which way are you talking about? Like any Christian should be a first wave feminist, right? Like that's just basic equality, right? Would you say, or is, or was, are there some like more less than? Yeah. Well, it's also complicated because even within the waves, cause you're thinking waves are almost like historical snapshots of feminism. Even within a particular historical snapshot, you have different, you know, even in second wave, you've got like the radical lesbian separatist feminists and you've got the like Marxist feminists and you've got the, you know, the feminists who are still kind of like trying to make friends with political

liberalism, you know, so you still have a variety there. Um, one thing that I think is helpful to realize is that feminism as such doesn't really have a lot of philosophical content to it. It tends to borrow that from other philosophical systems. Like feminism, a particular kind of feminism tends to be grafted on another kind of philosophy. So that's why first wave feminism, it really takes the, like liberalism, the idea of, you know, individual rights, autonomy, and equality, you know, that takes those values and that kind of understanding of society and the human being for granted, and then looks tomodernism. So I think that's where it gets really complex because the feminine feminism tends to be kind of the flowers maybe, but like, what's at the root, like, that's where you have to figure out like, okay, what, what kind of

worldview is being taken for granted here? Which, so you were knee deep. I mean, in feminism, which wave were you? Were you more of the third wave or second wave? Yeah, I would say I was a postmodern feminist. Yeah. So I was really influenced by French feminism of the 80s and 90s. I think I kind of absorbed the sort of sex positive perspective of feminism as well. So yeah, I would say I was a, I was a third waiver. Am I missing something when people, when, when women say pornography can be,

is liberating for women? Like that just seems like the most, like you don't believe that you can't, right. Or am I missing, is there, is it lesbian porn that they're talking about? Or, I mean, it just seems so demeaning to and i keep hearing it's getting more violent and just more almost i heard one person describe it as like very rapey almost like how yeah but you so if you were a third way like did you actually believe that at one point or is it kind of like you have to say that because your environment is i don't know like i just can't imagine somebody actually believe in that right let me see if i can get back into that headspace for a second because i agree with you right like

i'm so i'm so like man like i listen i i follow a few like i guess i would they would be second wave that modern feminists and yeah they're very no porn is not liberating like they're very like adamant like main talking and that's i think that's much more of a feminist perspective that's being articulated now than it was when i was oh okay my in my feminist heyday i think that would have in fact actually this reminds me in my dissertation i one of the texts i analyze it's called the the novel was called original bliss by this scottish writer and it's about pornography like it's a and. Like it's a, and it's,

and it takes a critique of pornography and it's really fascinating novel. I kind of see it as almost this like sort of rewriting of Adam and Eve story, but it's weird. But anyway, one of the characters, the male characters has this like debilitating violent porn addiction that he eventually kind of comes out of. And so I,

I analyze that as, so even though, you know, even though I'm saying like I was kind of a, of. And so I, I analyzed that as, so even though, you know, even though I'm saying like I was kind of a sex positive feminist, I still was critical of, of that kind of violent pornography. But one of my, um, one of the, at my defense, when I was defending my thesis, one, uh, I had, I had to defend the fact that that chapter was critical of pornography. And cause one, one. And because one of the examiners was like, well, porn, you know, I mean, this seems to be, you know, a little bit, you know, conservative and, you know, kind of regressive and that it's saying that porn can be bad, you know, and I was like, ah. So I actually had to defend that position because it was a little not the

feminist norm, I think. So basically, I think the idea is that it's like the moral framework of sex positive third wave feminism is consent, right? So if you consent to something, then it's liberating, right? And there's not much nuance there. So, so power differentials within consent don't really matter. I mean, as long as it's consent, I mean, that's, I mean, I think, I mean, I think you would get some analysis there, but, but say, for example, you know, the idea that a woman could, you know, a woman who decides to do sex work, that can be a way of her claiming agency and ownership over her body. And, you know, it's, it's just very much this sense of autonomy, freedom and consent.

Like that's kind of if it's if you're not hurting anybody and you're agreeing to it, then, yay, it's awesome. Right. So there isn't there isn't really a sense that you can consent to something that's harmful, you know, or that harms you whether or not you agree to do it. So I remember when I was a few years ago, I was teaching a gender theory class and I had some students who were on this coming from this perspective and they argued against me like porn's awesome. You know, if it's like, you know, woman centered porn that's made by women and for women kind of, you know, it could be great or whatever. But I, you know, I asked them like, okay, well, what about a, they were pushing this consent thing. And so I was, I asked them, well, what about, okay, what about a woman who consents to be physically abused? Like, is that, is that good? And they were like, you know, you kind of see the gears like sticking

a little bit. Cause it was like, wait, yes, but no, it can't be right. So I think that, um, I actually, I write about this in the genesis of gender, this, this perspective, um, and how consent is not enough. Like, yes, it's important, but it should be the startingesis of gender, this perspective, and how consent is not enough. Like, yes, it's important, but it should be the starting point of the sexual ethics, not the ending point. Because it's not enough to just say the best that we can hope from sex is that it's not rape. I think we can do better than that, though. Well, it seems a little sociologically naive, like just the concept of consent. Like, yeah, but let's what are we talking about?

Like, OK, so take porn. Like a woman is had a horrible upbringing, has been abused by men, has been down and out, becomes an alcoholic and now needs the money, can't hold a job. And male domination has created this horrific environment that has led her to have to make a consenting decision to become a porn star and sign up to be dominated and one might even say i don't want to say let's not even say abused but let's just say be yeah dominated by a man men um in in whatever way they want and she is agreeing to that that's consent like like yeah to be a porn star unless you're like trafficked into it is consent but really like you're i mean how is that not promoting just the yeah male domination on such a horrific level like just

the word consent to me just seems so empty now it's like well that's that's a starting point but like let's talk about power differences let's talk about environments that lead to certain unhealthy forms of consent or whatever or even manipulation i mean exactly yeah i had a friend who was who was uh it was a young teen and he was coaxed into a consenting sexual relationship with his it was same-sex sexual relationship with his older, I think cousin or something, you know? And he says, it wasn't like I, it was, I did not enjoy it. I was confused and he was dominating all this stuff, but like, I, I wouldn't say it wasn't consensual,

but there was power differences there that were off the chart unhealthy, you know, and messed me up for life, you know? So I don't know. Yeah. People that celebrate consent, are they asking, you know, and mess me up for life, you know? Um, so I don't know. Yeah. People that are they asking, I mean, is this like a discussion or is it kind of like, Oh, I haven't thought about that or, well, I do think that the conversation has, um, evolved more in the direction that you're describing, especially post me too. Right. Cause that was, that was really the conversation there. And um i think young younger feminists are more skeptical of you know the liberation of hookup culture and all that kind of thing so like emba she just wrote the book called rethinking sex which is a a critique of the sexual revolution

but from you should get her on here she would be be great. Um, Christine Emba, EMBA. She is a writer for the Washington post. Um, so there, so you're, you're beginning to see critiques of the sexual revolution, but from leftist feminist perspectives, um, not, not just Christian feminists. Interesting. interesting i i listened to uh megan murphy been following her stuff and she she's one who would be kind of a classic second wave feminist would really protest some of the all the stuff we're talking about like i think she's the one who even said like i don't know if it was her actually but like harvey weinstein's you know the casting couch you know she says that that's a form of consent, you know, and if a woman in one sense, a woman says, Yeah, I want this job. So I'm gonna

go to the casting couch. It's like, but you can't, there may be some kind of consent there. But the whole power dynamic, the whole situation is just a hot mess, right? I mean, so you're saying more and more people are kind of questioning the consent only kind of model. Yeah. But I mean, I think you have to have some sort of sense of an objective good for human beings, like, you know, maybe an objective sense of human flourishing, because I think that's what the sex positive perspective is lacking because there is no objective good, like good. The good is simply doing what you want in the world, like kind of exercising your agency in the world and doing what you want and having this unfettered freedom, um, this self-determination. Right. But if you have a sense of, if you're

coming from a perspective that, well, no human beings have a particular kind of nature that's made for certain things. And so it's living in a way that we're allowed to achieve those good ends that we're made for. That's what freedom is. And that a society that is ethical should be one in which human beings are allowed to achieve those particular ends, not just whatever ends they decide to achieve. So that seems to be, I think, a big distinction there. Like what does freedom mean? Does freedom mean achieving the ends for which we're made or does freedom just mean, you know, achieving whatever ends we pursue? That's a great distinction. Achieving the ends. That sounds very Catholic, right? You guys are good at natural law stuff.

achieving the ends for that sounds very catholic right you guys are good at natural law stuff it's probably a little catholic i see some incense uh yeah burning behind actually i actually got some incense for my room uh my kids love it because i'm in my basement and i'll burn incense and it goes through the floorboards and like they'll come down and sometimes i'm listening to i literally listen to um uh gregorian chants sometimes when I'm studying. So now I, I turn on the lamps, turn the lights off, burn my incense, have the chants going. And oh man, if that doesn't convert you, I don't know what will, but I know, man, slippery slope. What, so what you kind of touched on it, but just, I would love to touch into your narrative a little bit. So what really drew you into this third wave feminism? And then I would love to hear what, what was your journey kind of out of that, that way of thinking? to college, I think from a young age, I was already interested in questions of gender. I think I was coming from a religious background that had not that much to say about what a woman should be

or do beyond be submissive and assist a man, you know, find a man to help, right? There wasn't a lot of, you know, I didn't grow up in a tradition where women preached. I never heard a sermon on a woman in the Bible growing up, you know, so it was, I think that question was already alive. And I went to college and then I discovered feminism for the first time. And I thought, this is what I've been looking for. This is amazing. And I think my first, I went to George Fox University as an undergrad. And there were, I had a feminist Bible professor and a feminist philosophy professor. And that's, so at first I was really, I was really interested in feminism. And I would say, though, at first I approached it still from an evangelical perspective.

So I very much took God seriously. I thought he existed. And I thought that, you know, Jesus is our Savior. The Bible is authoritative. The Bible is divine revelation. It just needs to be interpreted correctly, right? So my first kind of feminist phase was just doing a lot of hermeneutical stuff. Like, let's look at these tricky passages that seem to say women can't teach or preach, and let's look at the Greek words, and let's look at the Greek words and let's look at the cultural context. Right. So it was very much that kind of work as a, an evangelical egalitarian

feminist. Um, and, but then the more I immersed myself in a feminist theory, feminist philosophy, feminist biblical interpretation, the more over time I adopted what's called a hermeneutic suspicion. So most, I say, aside from, I would say, egalitarian evangelical feminists, most even Christian feminists would really be probably adopting a suspicious posture toward the Bible, kind of seeing the Bible as this human man-made, specifically man-made text that is patriarchal and has this intrinsic patriarchal bias that we always have to be resisting. I think I eventually adopted that perspective and I began to see the Bible as just that. This is a human artifact, essentially a patriarchal artifact. And I think if you're

coming from an evangelical perspective and then you completely just like neuter the authority of the Bible, then, you know, you don't really have any clear way, like authority that you're standing on, right? So I think without that foundation, then I easily entered into a much more postmodern sensibility, both as a Christian and as a feminist. So this, you know, by postmodern, I mean, this idea that everything is a social and linguistic construction, including religion. But, you know, Christianity is beautiful. It's this beautiful story, this beautiful narrative, and I still find meaning in it. But there's also this patriarchal stuff. So we need to kind of save Christianity from itself, right? We need to like salvage and purify Christianity from its sexism.

Then that's when I went to graduate school and my dissertation focused on analyzing women novelists who were rewriting religious concepts in their fiction. And then I was using feminist theory to do that. Right. So yeah. And during this time of my life, I didn't, I, I dissertated, but I didn't like practice Christianity at all. Like I thought about Christianity a lot, but only as this sort of idea or thing to pick and choose, you know, um, what to believe. So I didn't pray. I didn't go to church. I certainly didn't read the Bible. I think I was in a phase where I just really hated the Bible, I think probably. And so I was there for a while in that spot, but still considering myself a Christian.

And so I had this kind of cognitive dissonance, I think, where there wasn't a lot of content to my Christianity. And I wasn't like beholden to anyone. That's like, that's what I see now. When I look back, I, there was no, there was no authority higher than myself to which I was beholden. Right. So that kind of Christianity can't offer any real conversion. Right. Because it's just, it's all on my own steam, you know? And I don't know, I was like a 24 year old, like, you know, I'm only a 38 year old now. Like you can't, I've only been on the world for like a second. Um, but I was, I was ready to sort of look at this 2000 year old tradition and be like, Oh, you guys are so wrong. I need to fix you. Let me fix you. You know? Um, anyway, so fast forward toward the end of my twenties,

I, it's such a weird, it's hard. It's a weird tell a story because it doesn't really make sense. But basically, I had these intersecting crises. So I had this spiritual crisis because the kind of Christianity that I had adopted, like I just said, can't offer any real conversion. Like I had cut, I had reduced God to an idea that I was analyzing, you know. So I did not worship him. I didn't God to an idea that I was analyzing, you know, so I did not worship him. I didn't pray to him. I had really closed myself off from his grace, from him being able to work in my life. Of course, he was still working behind the scenes, you know, all the time.

I also became a mother for the first time, and that really rocked my world. That kind of disrupted some of my, I think, just really easy feminist assumptions about things like abortion, for example, actually seeing an ultrasound of my 12 week old baby who was like sucking his thumb and, you know, doing circles like in the first trimester, I was like, Oh, this is, this is not what I was told. That's not a clump of cells. Like, that's a human. That's a human being.

And anyway, so I began, I think, feminism had really become my religion. It was the way that I really viewed the world. And that experience of motherhood disrupted it enough. And that coincided with a spiritual crisis that I just kind of panicked and became Catholic. Oh, really? Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. Like, it's a crazy story. Panicked and became... So what was it about the Catholic church that was the safe place to run to in your panic attack? Yeah, I mean, that's... You wouldn't imagine that it would be, right? It's like, okay,

you're talking about the patriarchy, like all those like men in their red hats running the world or whatever. So yeah, well, I think I had been drawn to Catholicism for a while. So as an undergrad, I also became Anglican. And that was my first exposure to the sacraments, to the saints, to that kind of Eucharistic worship. And I found that really meaningful. to that kind of Eucharistic worship. And I found that really meaningful. But then I kind of went on my little, you know, postmodern trek that disconnected me from that. I mean, I think I was honestly at the point where I was like, I either need to be honest with myself that I'm pretty much an atheist in practice, or I actually need to get serious about this Christian thing if I'm going to still call myself a Christian. So it really could have gone either way. But I think God just

took that moment of vulnerability. So at the time, I was teaching at George Fox, which is a Christian school, right? And that was not an easy thing to be doing in this complete, you know, state of spiritual crisis, right? We're supposed to be spiritually forming our students. And I'm like, I can't even spiritually form myself. So I was like, oh, I'll just go work at a Catholic school. I got that in my head because I thought, yeah, Catholic schools, you don't have to like really be Christian to work at a Catholic school. But, you know, I could still think about Christianity because I'm still interested in it, you know. So I applied to a couple of Catholic places and then I realized, yeah, maybe I shouldn't uproot my family because I'm having a crisis. But so I was sitting at my desk. I just sent these emails withdrawing my application to

these two Catholic schools. And then I just had this thought enter my head. And the thought was, you don't have to be at a Catholic university to be part of the Catholic church. And again, this is not, I mean, I had not been going to mass. I had not been doing like, this is crazy. And, but then in that moment, I just Googled the local Catholic parish, called them up. Someone answered, which is also a miracle. And it happened to be the woman who runs this, this 70 year old nun named Sister Juanita. And I was like, uh, she's like, what do you want? I'm like, I don't know. I think I might be sort of interested in maybe talking about becoming

Catholic, you know, just all these hemming and hawing. And she was like, come to the church. So I did. I just went down there. And as soon as she asked me, like, why do you want to become Catholic? I would have expected myself to say, whoa, there lady, I not you want to become Catholic? I would have expected myself to say, whoa, there, lady, I not necessarily want to become Catholic. But instead, I was like, the Eucharist, the saints, like, I just all of a sudden, I think this longing that I had been pent up because I just had this, this like, if you think about this, like longing of my heart, that was like a river. It was like I had built this dam that was my kind of feminist ideology. And then as soon as there were, there were just kind of these little cracks in the dam that had built over time. And then in that moment, it just broke through. But then the outcome was that I became Catholic while still having some of my feminist objections unresolved. So those would be namely related to sexuality and marriage. Um, like the, the gay marriage thing was real hard for me. That was the one that I

just struggled with, um, the most. And it took, you know, just, um, equality or fairness or. Yeah. I mean, I think because I had been on the, you know, from a progressive perspective for so long, you know, I had gay students, loved my gay students. I had kind of mentored them and I had seen their struggle to find a place in the church. And it was one thing to say, okay, you know, I'll accept the Catholic teaching on contraception. Like that, that's me taking a hit. If you look at it that way, I actually think it's great now, but at the time it was like, okay, well, this is a, this is a cross I'm taking on, right. Or, you know, as a woman or saying that, you know, that's okay. I think only men can be priests. Like as a woman, it didn't, those were hard to wrestle with. But then when it came to

gay marriage, it was like me putting a cross on someone else. Okay. And that didn't feel good. Right. Like it was one thing for me to accept a cross. What I then again saw putting a cross on someone else. Okay. And that didn't feel good. Right. Like it was one thing for me to accept a cross. What I then again saw as a cross, which again, now I don't. Well, or I guess they're the good Christian kinds of crosses that come with perks like salvation, you know, and sanctification. But that was the hardest one for me. And this was right when the Obergefell decision was being made.

So that was the hardest one for me. And this was right when the Obergefell decision was being made. So it was also like just like at this moment that the culture was like, yeah, I was like, oh, no, I'm starting to think differently. And anyway, so that the first couple of years of being Catholic was really just me wrestling through all this stuff, reading a lot, praying a lot, sitting with it, you know, kvetching to my husband, like confessing all my liberal sins. I joke that he was like this little agnostic priest that I would come and confess my liberal sins to him. Like, oh no, no. I think I might think that like sexual complementarity is part of marriage. Like, was he, was he raised Catholic or Catholic when you married him or no? No, no. He, he grew up evangelical as well. And then he was, he was more intellectually honest

than I was. And he just became an atheist after college rather than doing this, like, I'm still a Christian, you know, but with no real content to it. So anyway, but he's, he's now kind of come full circle, sort of, he's on his own conversion path as we all are, but, um, yeah, so he's, he's now mostly Catholic, I would say, but you know, in his own way. Yeah. He's working through it. He's figuring things out. He did join the church in 2020. Yeah. Okay. How would you describe now? So that was a few years ago and it's all part of a journey. You're still on a journey. I'm sure. Um, How would you describe now? So that was a few years ago and it's all part of a journey. You're still on a journey, I'm sure. How would you describe your now view from, as you understand

how God created us, like what is, how would you describe male and female relations with each other? I mean, for lack of better terms, I mean, would you consider yourself like to use an evangelical term like complementarian or do you have a more nuanced view of things or how do you read Ephesians 5 and women's husbands or whatever? Yeah, this is a good question. So I would say I am, I hold to the idea of integral complementarity. So that's a Catholic understanding of complementarity that I would distinguish from evangelical complementarianism and also egalitarianism. So most forms of complementarianism that I encountered when I was an evangelical, one, they're very hierarchical, even though they might say, sure, men and women have equal dignity in practice, they often didn't.

Like there really seemed to be a sense that men and women are so different, they're almost opposites. And that translates into specific and restrictivearity sees both men and women as whole persons. So fully human and sharing in the full range of human capacities, human virtue, human vocations. But then because of our sexual difference, our embodied difference, we live out our humanness differently in the world. And so there's a certain kind of wisdom or genius that men have access to and can cultivate because they are male and women because we are female. And so there's a synergy that happens when men and women collaborate. But it's not like you have like half of a human and half of a human and together they make a whole human, right? Which even though if it's not explicitly stated,

sometimes seems to be implicitly stated in a lot of more complementarian views. Like, you know, like men are assertive, women are submissive. You know, they're kind of, you know, men are strong, women are docile. Like there's this almost polarity that like men and women are like these cartoonish opposites. Whereas integral complementary doesn't have, doesn't see men and women in that way, but rather sees that when they, instead of a half and a half coming together and making a whole, it's like you have a whole and a whole and they come together and make something even more awesome just because they have a different way of being in the world that can inform the other. Would you say in the Catholic Church, it's less male hierarchical, even though you have male only priests and bishops and popes and all that stuff. I mean, would you say it, it, it feels different. It feels more, for lack of better terms, I don't know, equal or yeah, less hierarchical or would that be not? I mean, it's hard to say. So on the

one hand, the Catholic church has a very clear hierarchy. So it is, it's a hierarchical church, right? Like it has a visible hierarchy. You can like do the whole like apostolic succession thing, you know, like it's very clear. But at the same time, I think one thing that's different between a Catholic and Protestant context is that the role of the priest is not necessarily coextensive with the role of a pastor or a teacher. So, for example, you have the idea that women can't teach or preach is not a Catholic thing. So women can teach and preach. We can't give the homily in the mass because the mass is having a specific liturgical function. So the mass, the priest's role is very much a sacramental one that's specific to the mass. But when it comes to parish leadership, administrative leadership, teaching, preaching, I would say most parishes are female-dominated.

I don't mean dominated in a negative sense, but I would say that you see a lot of female catechists, you see a lot of female directors of religious ed, you see a lot of female catechists. You see a lot of female directors of religious ed. You see a lot of female theologians, teachers, speakers, you know. And now just in my own experience, too, like since becoming Catholic, like I'm asked all the time to teach and preach to, you know, as a woman and or to even advise clergy on things. Right. So or to serve on pastoral councils. So I think there's, I think sometimes in a Protestant context, because you don't really have the priestly role as such anymore, you don't have this sacramental function as much, that the emphasis is much more on teaching and preaching. And so if you have this idea that only men can be priests, that usually gets expanded to

only men can teach and only men can preach. And then that really kind of shrinks women's influence in the church as a whole. So would you say, I mean, I'm trying to use the right words here, but like the priest doesn't have as much or maybe the same kind of authority as like a typical evangelical like mega church who has who maybe has like a CEO type leader who kind of founded the church and they kind of make the decisions like that kind of authority for good or for ill. I want to make a neutral evaluation of that. But like for an evangelical church that has a senior leader that has a lot of authority, would you say the priest typically does not have the same kind of authority over the church body in the same way? Yeah, I would say so because the priest himself is under authority, right? Like he's under

the authority of the bishop and the bishop is under the authority of the pope he's leading the parish right in a sense for sure he's shepherding the parish is probably a better a better way to put it he's the local shepherd but he's not like there's there's a way in which he is submissive to the church like he doesn't choose which readings we're going to read on sunday right like that's chose that's that's every every single catholic in the entire world will have the same readings. So there's this sense in which, yeah, the priest, the role of the priest is more subordinate to the church as a whole. Right. He can decide what homily he wants to preach, but he doesn't choose the readings. He doesn't decide what order he wants mass to go in. Of course, you know, priests, you know, can, their personality comes through,

that's for sure. You know, it does like, and that's beautiful. But at the same time, you know, you don't regularly have priests kind of, I think that the priest usually doesn't have as much power over what the parish looks like as a whole, because so much is just already kind of shared with the broader universal church. Yeah. Yeah. I do have to ask,

it's just popped in my head and maybe it's in light of, uh, the stuff that's come out with the SBC, uh, with the abuse situation. Where are we at with the Catholic church and abuse and allegations and all that? Like not being Catholic, it's just such a distant thing. I just hear it, a blip on the news here and there, but is this a crisis that the church is going through? Are they doing a good job

cleaning it up or do you, or can you even speak into that or? I mean, that's a great question. So I think that a lot has improved, especially since the scandal that broke, oh, is it the early 2000s? Maybe this was before I was Catholic. So I'm a little bit vague, you know, in Boston. Because in response to that, a lot of things changed, a lot of norms changed. And so when the most recent wave of scandal broke, which I think was in 2018, and that was my first one to face as a Catholic. And that was tough. That was tough. But I think by the grace of God, I also happened to be that particular semester teaching a medieval seminar. And so we were reading and I realized like, oh my gosh, all my favorite medieval saints and writers, and they were all dealing with craziness in the church all the time. You know, like you read Dante's Inferno and it's like there's popes in hell, man, because they had some really bad popes that were, you know, and Hildegard of Bingen, I love her.

She preached and speaking of preaching, she went on preaching tours in the 12th century as a woman. And she's always writing. She was kind preaching tours in the 12th century as a woman. Um, and she's always writing, she was a, she was kind of a ball buster, but she was always writing these letters to like popes, like get your shit together. You know what I mean? I'm paraphrasing, but because that was the investiture crisis, which was also, uh, a scandalous crisis of like, you know, priests having concubines and getting married and, you know, so, so that, I think that helped me realize, okay, there's like, the church is bigger than just these like horrible, evil men who abuse their authority within the church and actually, honestly, like desecrate what the church teaches, you know, you know what I mean?

It's like realizing that, like, I can't walk away from the truth of the church teaches, you know, you know what I mean? So like realizing that like, I can't walk away from the truth of the church because there are men who like abuse it. But that said, you know, there, there has to be reform in earthly institutions all the time because the human tendency to dominate, especially when it comes to sexuality, I mean, this is just like a perennial human evil. And anytime you have institutions that, you know, I think people will use institutions to get access to people who are vulnerable. And if you don't have good policies in place and guardrails in place, then no matter what the institution is, whether it's a public school or a mega church or, you know, a Catholic church. is, whether it's a public school or a mega church or, you know, a Catholic church. Anyway, so I do think this most recent wave in 2018, and this is not at all to dismiss it, but just to contextualize it so that the report that came out of the abuse that happened, it happened a while ago. So it's

not, it's like stuff that's been covered up that happened a while ago is being exposed, but the stuff that the stuff that's happening now, there just are a lot more, there's a lot more knowledge. There's a lot, you know, laity are a lot more empowered. Um, there's just a lot more protocols in place for making sure that power can't be abused in that way. Um, but it's always something you have to be vigilant about, I think. Um, because I, you know, I think especially if, I don't know, I mean, I don't want to sound like super Catholic here, but you know, I really do think that like, if Satan is going to be attacking the church, like the best way to attack it is to try to bring it in,

you know, down from within. Like, and I think that, and that happens not just in the Catholic church too, but I mean, I think that that is such a good way to, to destroy or to push back against the church because that, that rocks people's faith. You know, people feel betrayed and devastated. And especially if you're sexually abused in a religious context, like how, how much that can harm just your relationship, your ability to connect with God. I mean, there's just, there's probably like nothing more evil than that kind of abuse from someone who should, who's in a position of spiritual authority. You know, I mean, it's just another thing that semester we read the gospel of Matthew and Jesus talks so much about hell in the gospel of Matthew. And guess who he sent into hell? Religious people in religious authority using their authority,

you know, and he's like, woe to you, especially that lead the young people astray. And so that was actually comforting to me, you know, that I was like, yes, Jesus, give him hell, preach it, you know? Yeah. Like that, that kind of justice, like that, there's, that there's some kind of eternal justice at work. Yeah. The word Gehenna is used, I think 12 times in the gospels and 11 times in Matthew and like once in a book or something like that. And yeah, it's always in the context. He never really preaches hell to non people outside of religion, but those who are abusing religious authority, which is interesting.

As we, as we think about what's the utility of the doctrine of hell. But I want to come back to your book. We kind of launched talking about your book and then we got off on several rabbit trails and that's totally my fault. When going back to, this is going to take a hard left turn, but so John Money, you kind of articulated his understanding of gender.

And then you say at the beginning of the book, you kind of trace that to today. What's the difference now? How are people talking about gender now that is rooted in, that never would have happened apart from John Money, but is kind of different in how he's talking about it? Or is it different? Yeah, it is different. So I guess one important piece of the puzzle is Judith Butler, right? So I think I mentioned this a little bit, but so Judith Butler was coming from a pretty radical postmodern perspective that I call anti-realist. So she's a hardcore social constructionist. Like I'm, I'm a soft

social constructionist, like absolutely our social norms and the words that we use, they do shape our perception of reality in a very real way. But reality still exists, nonetheless. Right. Right. So that's kind of my perspective. But Butler would, her whole project is an attempt to denaturalize everything. So like anything that's seen as natural or normal, she really is trying to sort of unmask that as ultimately about social power. Okay. And that includes gender and sex. So she's the first one to say that sex, the idea of maleness and femaleness is just as much a social construct as gender is.

Just as much. She would, I mean, to say it is a social construct is, is, is wow. Okay. Um,

but to say just as much as even more almost unbelievable. Yeah. I think like, here's like sort of a direct quote, if I can quote from memory, but she says, you know, the, the word female has a meaning that is as on trouble as troubled and unfixed as woman. Right. So she's, she's really saying that the way we see woman as a construct, we should see female the same way. And I've climbed inside of her head for about five minutes. I can kind of see where she's going. At the same time, when I read Judy Butler, which isn't a lot, I don't wake up every day and do my devotions in Butler, but I've read a little, a bit. It's not my field of study, okay? So I want to give her the credit. She's obviously a brilliant person study. Okay. So I want to give her, you know, the credit.

She's obviously a brilliant person. But when I read her, there's times that I'm like, I don't think you know what you're talking about. But is that just me not being smart enough? But like, but I've heard other people say, some people, even Foucault and Butler, especially, like, I think they're just saying stuff that it doesn't act like I don't, if you ask them to kind of explain this paragraph, I don't think they even know what they're talking about. But is that? Yeah, I mean, one of the things I've seen, I've had whole paragraphs and I've read it like 10 times. And like, this is written in English, but it doesn't seem to make any sense. Right. Yeah. Well, I think that's one of the things that's dangerous about some of these high theory

texts is that they're so intentionally obfuscating. Yeah. Right. And sometimes I do think it's intentional because there's this self-conscious attempt to play with language and to push at the boundaries of language, right? And to kind of push at the boundaries of knowledge. So, yes, I think that's actually one of the reasons why, not to sound too melodramatic, but some of these theories are dangerous and why I've felt increasingly conflicted about teaching, say, Butler to undergraduates because I would assign a text of Butler and I would see undergraduates, they would like, they would like grab on, you

know, when you're reading a difficult text, you like grab on to like the two things you understand and you're like, yes, I understand that, you know, and then they just run with it without realizing that like they love her idea of gender as a performance because they're like, oh yeah, I totally perform my gender all the time. Like I put on high heels and da-da-da. But then I'm like, no, no, no. She's saying it's only a performance. She's saying that the femininity that you're wanting to express doesn't exist.

Like it doesn't exist. Like there's no you. There's no like feminine you behind the performance. There's only the performing, right? And I think most people would find that less appealing. They'd be like, oh, say like, especially young people who have these kind of emerging gender identities, the way they talk about it is not really, it doesn't really align with Butler because they are, I think, often talking about it in more essentialist. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's my gender identity is this real thing that I need to express in this particular way through this label, through this, you know, gender presentation. And so that's very, I think that's not the claim that

Judith Butler is making. But the reason I think her work is important is because she, she kind of, I think, disrupted what we had sort of assumed and taken for granted about human beings. Like we had just assumed that sex is real. It's a thing, male and female, like this is, this is how human beings are organized. And then she just comes in and says like, nope, sex is a construct. And then that paves the way then for what I call gender identity theory, which is the idea that gender is this, that one's gender identity is based on subjective self-perception rather than the body. And so I think that's kind of the common framework that we see now, which is different from what Money thought because he thought that that gender identity was more of an external form of socialization rather than something that's innate and within the human being which seems to be what people say when they talk about their gender identity like it's

something they sense within themselves yeah that needs to be expressed like it seems to come full circle back to like i mean you said the term that gender identity now is described in more essentialist terms without even using that term um which it seems like butler would not at all agree with that but she kind of paved the way for that i mean it was it's a weird yes she paid the way for that i don't know what she actually thinks now because she actually was critiqued by trans people because her whole idea of gender as only being a performance doesn't really map onto the gender identity theory. And so I think in her more recent work, she's been a little bit more like, you know, she does a little more duck and roll with that question to, to be more trans friendly. Well, in my, again, I am in no way a Butler expert. I'm looking at my shelf here. Um, so her more, so her, what's her most famous book? Um, the main one, well, there's gender trouble

between gender trouble and our more recent undoing gender, gender trouble in my very naive vantage point seems to very much undercut a lot of modern trans certain trans ideologies i always use the plural because there's not one thing right exactly certain transit it seems to really undercut it but it was written too long ago to where it wasn't a thing yet undoing gender her more recent book recent i don't know maybe it's 15 i don't know what it was okay i feel like she's tried to is now this whole trans conversation is is more aware and she's trying to talk about gender in a way that doesn't undercut certain trans ideologies not that's where i'm like well what you say here you're saying you're agreeing before but it sounds like you're not but again she's so hard to follow sometimes like i don't you're saying stuff just saying yeah just throwing stuff

out there and i'm like right i don't know what you're saying you know um exactly and a further complication is that the average undergrad who takes the gender studies course is going to read gender as a performance from butler right so that's the things that get taught aren't necessarily the most recent things, which is why I think that, but there's so much incoherence, right? So here's something that I encounter. I don't know what your experience is, but when I, especially when I am dialoguing with,

you know, young adults, like undergrad age, they'll say things like, I'll ask them like, what is gender? And they're kind of like deer in headlights all of a sudden, like, and they'll say things like gender is a construct or gender is a spectrum you know but then they'll want to pivot and endorse again something like gender identity theory which doesn't say that gender is a construct oh yeah right it says that gender is again this kind of

innate self like an ontologically uh stable innate part of humanity right exactly like it's alongside sex just as like the inner you right like the inner you knows your gender whether or not whatever your body might say like you know you have this inner self that is gendered right and that's not that's not a social construct right so it's very messy out there like it's hard to it's hard to even map or they'll say gender is a spectrum. And I'm like, okay, do you mean gender is a spectrum or do you mean sex is a spectrum? Because those are two very different claims, you know, and what do you mean by gender? Cause sometimes it sounds, they'll use the term gender, which almost sounds like it could

be a synonym for like personality, right? Like, well, some people are like a little more feminine, some people like this, some people like that. And I'm like, well, yeah, if we're talking about, you know, human personality, then of course it's a spectrum. There's a great range of, you know, different kinds of variation. Um, but if we're talking about male and female human beings, then, you know, there are certain characteristics that you can talk about being on a spectrum like height, Now, there are certain characteristics that you can talk about being on a spectrum like height, you know. Right, right. But then there are other things like gametes that are real hard binary, right?

So it's, anyway, it's difficult to talk about gender because it seems like there's so much incoherence where they want to say like gender is a social construct. But yet I also need to maybe have a double mastectomy in order to become my true gender. It's like, well, if it's a construct, then why do you need to have invasive surgery? You know, that seems to be not entirely a coherent idea. Right, right. The whole gender as performance is that in your most charitable understanding of Butler and those who follow that from my vantage point, it seems like it's that whole concept of gender as performance is propped up by gender stereotypes. Like, what does it mean to perform womanhood or perform woman-ness or whatever? Woman is my, what I'm performing. Okay. Describe that to me. Could you describe that to me without falling

back into stereotypes? Right. Is that fair? Or is that, am I missing something there? Like how would she respond to that? That's fair. And I think that's what she's saying. I think she's basically saying that we have these social scripts about this thing that woman is and this thing that man is. And that from the minute we enter the world, we're being indoctrinated and socialized into these social scripts oh okay but it's the scripts that create the illusion that a man or a woman exists it's not something that's natural or intrinsic to human nature so she would basically say the same thing and so at least early Butler, like the performativity Butler, you know, she would, she kind of advocates just basically

the best you can do is just try to disrupt these norms, right? Like just play with them. You know, she talks about drag as being this kind of parody that both shows the performativity of gender, but then also kind of undermines its, by self-consciously making it a performance, they're kind of subversively showing gender to simply be a performance, right? So, but she's kind of pessimistic in the sense that she really sees social power

as having so much determinism over human beings that you can only really be this perpetual gadfly um you know you're kind of you can just kind of just try queer norms here and there but you can never be totally free of them would she would she say sexuality is a contract as well so there is the whole like born this way essentialist kind of narrative would she have to i mean she probably wouldn't would she disagree with that or would her theories end up disagreeing with that without her actually saying, yeah, that's. I think she would disagree with that. And I think her, I think really her whole project and there's, I swear in one of her early books, she's very explicit about this, but her entire philosophical project, at least it began with the goal to denaturalize the idea of heterosexuality.

Okay. So to make room for, um, non-heterosexual identities and to make those appear just as natural and normal, even though she's not going to say that anything's natural or normal. Like she even, even in undoing gender, you know, she writes against the incest taboo because, you know, she's trying to, that's the thing, right? If you denaturalize any, you know, any, there are no sexual norms, right? Then, okay, what about incest, you know? And she goes there. So she's kind of consistent. I mean, she's not, she's very self-aware.

Yeah, you gotta give her credit for consistency. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, yeah, she kind of, I mean, she does the like suggestive, you know, I mean, that's what, she's very self-aware. For consistency. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, yeah, she kind of, I mean, she does the like suggestive, you know, I mean, that's what, that's what academics love to do. Like I'm not actually making a claim. I'm just, you know, raising a question or gesture word, you know, something like one might wonder whether the taboo of incest might, but who knows, you know, it's that kind of

hand wavy sort of stuff. Yeah. That's so funny. I haven't gotten out of academia sort of, and like looking back, it is, yeah, there's, it is interesting, but, um, yeah. Well, thank you so much for being, I, yeah. So the book is, uh, the Genesis of Gender, a Christian Theory. And I told you offline, I mean, you're, it's selling really well. I mean, a lot of people are buying this book and reading it. It was just published July 11th. So just at the time of recording just a couple weeks ago. Well, thank you so much for the conversation. And I'm excited to actually dig into the book when I get a free. Yeah, let me know what you think. I'd love to hear what you think. I'm always willing to, you know, find out where I'm wrong and make adjustments.

Anyway, I'm always happy to talk to you. I think I'm going to find a lot of resonance. That's my guess. Thanks, Abigail. Thanks so much. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.