Abstract
Recently the food blogger Jack Monroe (biologically female) ‘came out’ as … bisexual? transgender? Perhaps both, but primarily s/he was refusing to be tied to any gender identity, the so-called ‘genderqueer’ position. This is disturbing to those who see gender binarism as bound into the very logic of creation. But the fact that this assumption is now under such scientific and social questioning cannot be ignored by theologians.
Thatcher is one of the handful of such who have recognized that the issues around sex and gender are much more far-reaching than the ‘women-and-gays’ questions which have recently obsessed the churches. This book follows such works as his Liberating Sex (SPCK, 1993) and Making Sense of Sex (SPCK, 2012).
The biblical texts appear to assume two genders, male and female, with distinctive and complementary roles, and to condemn confusion in gender relationships, not least by homosexual practices. However, Thatcher demonstrates that philosophy and proto-science in antiquity assumed one gender – the male – of which the female was simply an imperfect exemplar, and that the idea of two distinct genders is much more recent, driven mainly by developments in biological knowledge. He suggests that this latter polarity may have contributed to marginalizing those who do not fit neatly into male/masculine or female/feminine. And, while accepting that the older ‘one sex’ tradition could also marginalize women, he argues that the biblical vision of one nature – humanity – wholly assumed and redeemed in Christ, puts problems of gender and sexuality into a new light. He draws on the doctrine of the Trinity to reject all forms of essentialism, gender or other, in favour of a relational approach, where each of us is defined, not by our genitals or by social expectation, but by the distinctions-in-unity of our relationships.
Thatcher’s rich scholarship, from Scripture to medical science, is beyond question, and it gives some valuable ammunition against those who still interpret Christian faith in a patriarchal way. The trinitarian argument is a little too dependent on simply quoting the paradoxes of the Athanasian creed, and the applicability of his thesis to LGBT (let alone cases such as Jack Monroe) is also underdeveloped. But this is a short book!
I was, however, left in doubt about practical implications. Surely it is clear that neither science nor philosophy/theology can offer a panacea to the dysfunctionalities of gender relationships. What if this book, instead of being about gender, had been about ‘race’ or ‘class’? The so-called science of racial identities is far more spurious than any theory of gender; yet is ‘colour-blindness’ the way forward to a new humanity, or do we sometimes have to insist that Black Lives Matter? The sociology of class is a slippery thing, yet the ‘classless society’ has not delivered the goods, and we now hear calls on the Left for a revival of class-based politics. If we, realistically, must sometimes talk similarly about gender, does Thatcher provide us with the tools for this? I think not fully. But he may, like a good preacher, provide us with clues which can alter our ways of thinking.