What is human nature?
In the Western world today, science and religion are often
understood to be enemies. It’s believed they offer two competing explanations
of how the world works. What I want to show you is how when it comes to
understanding human nature, Christianity and Science are in fact complete
bedfellows. They both are deeply invested in a belief system, which I will call
the Ideology of Natural Sex. And both have been shoring up that ideology,
enforcing it brutally, and imposing it by force on others around the globe, for
centuries.
What is this Ideology of Natural Sex? What do authorities
from the Pope to our medical and scientific textbooks jointly believe, and
insist we believe, about sex? It’s their unified theory of sex, gender and
sexuality, and it goes like this:
“As ordered by God/evolutionary biology, humans come in two
and only two physical sexes. This is the nature of things because a male and a
female make a reproductive unit. The purpose of sexual interaction is
reproduction. Thus, the determinative factor in dividing men from women is
genitalia. Genitalia determine gender—the way society organizes people through
gender roles, and the way people should properly identify and understand their
place in the world. And this world is one in which men are (by God’s design or
by biological imperative) the dominant sex, the sexual “aggressor,” while
women’s interests center on nurturing families and offspring.”
Four things that are central to my own life pose challenges
to this ideology. The first is that the empirical reality of physical sex is
that it is a spectrum, and people, like myself, have always been born intersex.
The second is that people around the world and throughout history have
identified with genders other than male or female, and/or have been assigned to
one sex at birth, and felt called to move to live in another. The third is that
people engage in sex all the time that is not procreative. This is true of
people who are infertile, people in same-sex pairings, and fertile men and
women who do not wish to conceive with one another at the time of their sexual
interaction. And the last is the reality that gender inequality is not
inevitable. Patriarchy, the privileging of men over women, is a form of
inequity that is successfully being reduced.
How have religious and scientific authorities dealt with
these challenges over the past several centuries? They have periodically declared
them to be “unnatural.”
Now, if ever you want to know when to suspect an ideology is
at work, you can be sure it is the case when someone tells you something is
unnatural and should not occur. Because here’s the thing about true natural
laws: they function whether you want them to or not. Nobody needs to urge or
force anyone else to obey them. Consider gravity. It’s a natural law, so nobody
needs to enforce it. No religious tracts or psychological textbooks have been
written urging people to obey the principle of gravity and refrain from floating
about bumping into ceilings. Or consider this example: people may argue over
vegetarianism, and whether it is healthy. But you have never seen a letter to
the editor or an internet comment war complaining about how kids these days are
engaging in the unnatural practice of giving up both meat and vegetables and
choosing to engage in photosynthesis instead.
There is no #PhotosynthesisIsUnnatural hashtag because it
truly is unnatural for people to turn green and live off sunlight directly
instead of eating things for energy. Truly unnatural things do not occur, so
they generate no outrage squads decrying their transgression.
As for the “laws of natural sex”—well, it’s another story.
Around the world, over the past four or five hundred years,
people have been cajoled, threatened, forcibly re-educated, beaten, imprisoned,
locked in mental hospitals, put in the stocks, publicly humiliated, mutilated, and burnt at the stake for violating one or more of the precepts of
“Natural Sex.” That’s the sure sign of enforced ideology, not a true natural law.
And it’s not just a story of superstitious, ignorant days
gone by. There is a war being waged over the ideology of “Natural Sex” today.
And in that war, religion and science stand hand in hand on the same side. Who
stands on the other?
Intersex people whose genitals are surgically mutilated
without their consent to force their bodies to resemble binary sex
expectations.
Trans people who are treated as having a mental illness, as
delusional, as perverted, as pariahs.
People in same-gender relationships, who have made great
strides in the West recently in terms of a right to secular marriages, but who
are still not permitted to marry in many religious denominations, and who are
not protected from perfectly legal discrimination of many sorts in many places.
Oh, and women pursuing sexual pleasure. Religious
authorities frame women in particular as ruining themselves through seeking sex
outside the context of marriage. Meanwhile, scientists continue to frame female
orgasm as a puzzle as they state it is “unnecessary,” since women can conceive
without it. Women, according to both religion and science, should want babies,
and only engage in sex to make them, not for fun.
The extraordinary thing is, with so many groups fighting and
suffering for recognition denied them under the ideology of “natural sex,” how
incredibly powerful that ideology is, how amazingly resilient. We are taught the
Ideology of Natural Sex so early, by parents and media and schools and
churches, that we believe in it at the same fundamental level that we believe
in things like gravity.
And even when individuals are persecuted in some way under
the Ideology of Natural Sex, very often it never occurs to them to challenge
the whole, as that seems unthinkable, but only one small part of the ideology
impacting them particularly. Thus we have women who decry female genital
mutilation as cruelly enforcing the belief that women should not have sex for
pleasure, yet who see similar surgeries being performed on intersex babies as
appropriate, as heroically “correcting malformation.” We have gay men and
lesbians who frame themselves as natural and normal, wanting only to marry and
reproduce like anyone else, while disdaining trans people as "crazies" who
are making gay people look bad by association under the LGBT umbrella. We have
people born with sex-variant bodies who reject the label intersex, and wish only to
be referred to as “people affected by disorders of sex development.” Why?
Because they are worried that the term “intersex” will make others associate them
with trans people or think they have nonbinary identities or otherwise find
them disturbingly transgressive of the Ideology of Natural Sex, and God forbid,
they don’t want any of those things to be thought of them.
And everywhere, everywhere, we have ignorance of the long
and violent history of the imposition of the Ideology of Natural Sex under
European colonialism.
The genius behind framing an ideology as “natural” is that
its history erases itself. Why would anyone study the history of something
natural and eternal? We don’t study the history of covalent bonds in chemistry
or cumulus clouds in meteorology. And so
we don’t study the spread of European binary sex ideology under colonialism. If
you do, you’ll find that all over the world before European colonialism there were
societies recognizing three, four, or more sexes and allowing people to move
between them—but that’s a subject for another post. Suffice it to say that
societies were violently restructured under European colonialism in many ways,
and one of those was the stamping out of nonbinary gender categories and
stigmatization of those occupying them as perverts.
Meanwhile, missionaries and European scientists spread the
word that nonprocreative sexual practices—same-gender relationships, oral sex, masturbation—violated God’s
will or the scientifically known purpose of sex, and were thus both sinful and
sick. Christian missionaries even taught that the only acceptable intercourse
involved a married man atop his wife, other positions being “unnatural.”
Scientists concurred, saying that only in the missionary position would gravity
lead semen to the uterus. Nature, colonized peoples were taught, requires men to be on top--of society, and in sexual activity, literally.
Most people today are ignorant of this history of the ongoing struggles to impose the Ideology of Natural Sex on reluctant nations and social groups. This ignorance allows each generation to believe that those who do not fit under the ideology, such as intersex and trans people, are rare freaks—or, if there are many challenging the ideology at that time, such as feminists demanding access to birth control and abortion, or the gay pride movement, as a brand new threat to an until-then-eternal system.
And for a system that is presented as eternal and inevitable,
the Ideology of Natural Sex is also strangely framed as fragile and endangered,
requiring vigorous defense. One example: the 20th century claim that
“homosexuality is unnatural, and if it is tolerated, the human species will go
extinct as procreation will stop.” This claim was made by opponents of the so-called
gay liberation movement, many of them religious conservatives, but using the
language of science. And after all, for many years, scientists had been
claiming that homosexuality was a medical disorder that must be cured.
The really weird thing about the end-of-the-species claim,
if you think about it, is that it presumed that if same-gender sexual activity were
tolerated, then nobody would ever have mixed-gender sex again. Why would people
who presumably happily identified as heterosexual think something like that?
Well, it’s because each of the precepts of the Ideology of Natural Sex are seen
as inextricably linked. The purpose of sex is reproduction; this requires men
and women; people must accept their assigned gender roles. Allow two men or two
women to have sex, and the other precepts will fall as well. Society as we know
it will collapse, and in fact, we’ll die out as a species as we won’t reproduce
anymore. Our nature will be destroyed and humans will suffer an apocalypse.
Today, in the early 21st century, intersex and
trans issues are coming to the fore. And the same patterns emerge, as they have
in the past of which we are unaware.
From science and medicine, what we see is the framing of
bodies, identities and behaviors that fall outside the Ideology of Natural Sex
as disorders to be classified and treated. The goal is to restore the “natural
order” through techniques developed by science: eugenic programs, surgical
“normalization,” and psychotherapies. Consider intersex status right now. There
is a growing social movement of intersex people to put an end to the nonconsensual
genital surgeries that have been imposed on intersex children since the 20th
century. But doctors are extremely resistant to this movement. Living with a
sex-variant body is presented by doctors as a fatal condition. It will lead to
social death, which may lead in turn to suicide. Without a body that conforms
to binary sex expectations, it will be impossible to find a mate, so even if
one lives, it will be an empty life, a painful one full of strange
nonconforming behavior and self-loathing. Surgeons claim they are
compelled to continue intersex genital mutilation to preserve life and quality
of life, dismissing the cry of intersex advocates that these “treatments”
in fact degrade their quality of life.
From the religious side, what we see is an assertion that
Natural Law created by God must be affirmed by all human laws. To do otherwise
is not only an offense to God, but will destroy humanity. Speaking recently of
the supposed danger of the trans rights movement, Pope Francis said, "We
are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of man as the image of God."
Natural law, understood as decreed by God, requires binary sex, and that gender
conform to that binary sex. Worldly laws must not be enacted to acknowledge and support people's gender identities. In fact, say religious conservatives, to speak of
gender at all is to offend God. There is only sex, and never before have humans
suggested that one also has a gender identity and should express its inner
truth! (The fact that gender identity recognition and gender transition are as
old as humanity is a history that we’ve already seen has been erased by the
“natural law” framing.) And fascinatingly, the Catholic church evokes science
to “prove” its position. Sex, the Church states, is determined by DNA. DNA,
unlike clothing or hormones or genitals, cannot be changed. Thus, one can never
change one’s “true” sex. Gender transition is a wicked lie, a deception, and
according to Pope Francis, as dangerous to humanity as nuclear weapons. It must
be stopped and “nature” defended.
So science and religion walk arm in arm, trumpeting the
ideology of the Natural Law of Sex. This gives everyone in the general
population something to latch onto in framing the oppression of some group as
necessary and good. Are you a socially conservative religious person who finds
trans people disgusting? Claim that the statement “male and female created He
them” in Genesis is not a generalizing poetic phrase but a morally prescriptive
statement that must be socially enforced. Are you a radical cis feminist who
disdains the Pope, but shares with him disgust for trans people? Claim that DNA determines sex, that gender
identity is a delusion, and that trans women are thus sick male threats to the
safety of “biological women.”
There’s something for everyone.
What makes the Ideology of Natural Sex so powerful is that,
like all deeply effective belief systems, it is so taken-for-granted that it is
like water to a fish. Most people are unaware of the very concept of a
sex/gender ideology. And therefore, merely to ask the question “How many
genders are there in your society?” strikes them both infantile and very
offensive. Show them a drawing of intermediate genitalia and they gasp in profound
shock. Present them with a visibly trans body and they laugh or gag or feel
incited to commit violence. These strong
negative reactions occur because having your ideology challenged is bad enough,
but when you didn’t even know it was an ideology in the first place, it makes
you question everything. And sadly, most people don’t want to do that at all.
But we have to do it.
If we truly believe in science, in a rational world where we
look objectively at what is, rather than impose our beliefs onto reality, then
we need to reject the Ideology of Natural Sex. We need to see the reality of
the sex spectrum and stop framing intersexuality as a rare disorder that
somehow violates natural law. We need to understand that different societies
have divided the sex spectrum up into different numbers of social sexes, and
that binary sex is no more or less arbitrary than trinary or quartic sex
systems. We need to give up the silly idea that sexual interactions only serve
reproductive purposes, when it is massively evident in nature that
nonprocreative sex is everywhere in social species. We need to become aware of
the omnipresent world history of gender transitioning, and let go of the myth
that not until the 20th century introduced modern surgical
transition procedures did “real” gender transitions occur.
And if we truly believe in religion, then we must adhere to
the precepts of compassion that all religions teach, and stop using religion to
oppress minorities or spread hate.
Intersex people, trans people, queer people, lusty women. .
. we don’t violate natural law. In fact, we’ve always been a part of human
nature. And accepting and respecting us as we are will not cause the end of the
world. At all.
It could, however, spell the start of a kinder and fairer
world. So please, just let go of the Western Ideology of Natural Sex.
