Recognizing the Full Spectrum of Gender? Transgender,Intersex and the Futures of Feminist Theology

Introduction

In 1999, a volume edited by Deborah F. Sawyer and Diane M. Collier, published by Sheffield Academic Press, asked the question, Is There a Future for Feminist Theology? Based on papers given at a colloquium on Gender Issues and Contemporary Religion in Lancaster in 1997, the volume engaged with questions facing Feminist Theology at the start of the new millennium: had feminist theologies failed to be sufficiently Christian, thereby cutting themselves off from dialogue with the tradition in which they were grounded (Sawyer and Collier, 1999b: 17-18; Hogan, 1995; Woodhead, 1997; Watson, 1999: 74-5)? Had Feminist Theology become ‘ghettoized’ through its essentialist focus on women’s experience, thereby making itself less credible to non-religious feminist theorists who had moved on (Woodhead, 1999; Alsford, 1999:126; Beattie, 1999)? Was Feminist Theology ‘over’ as a discipline, either because its work was done, or because its internal instability had rendered it untenable as a credible critical voice in the broader theological world?

In their introduction to the volume, Sawyer and Collier noted the inclusion of essays by two male contributors, Gerard Loughlin and Sean Gill (Loughlin, 1999; Gill, 1999), and commented, ‘The inclusion of men’s studies … signifies the importance of recognizing the full spectrum of gender to ensure informed and credible critique’ (Sawyer and Collier, 1999b: 21). Loughlin’s essay, in particular, focused on the notion of gender complementarity, debunking it as an unproblematic good. But despite the volume’s many strengths, I suggest that it did not in fact engage with a ‘full spectrum of gender’. Indeed, it may unwittingly have served to reinforce the notion that there are only two distinct genders, masculine and feminine, and that gender ‘fluidity’ (as in Kahl, 1999) has often been understood merely as a shift from one to the other. For despite the essays’ often close and careful engagement with, and deconstruction of, unproblematized essentialisms of femininity (in e.g. Alsford, 1999; Page, 1999), ‘gender diversity’ (Watson, 1999: 80) too often here meant acknowledging clear femaleness as well as (that is, as an adjunct to) clear maleness, rather than pushing the envelope of both.

I suggest, then, that part of Feminist Theology’s future now, 15 years on from the Lancaster colloquium, must involve a re-examination and re-negotiation of what it is to be feminist theologians without fixed gender essences. Does Feminist Theology have space to hear from and nurture the voices of those whose gender experiences (especially as transgender, ‘third’ or otherwise) challenge a binary, either-or model? Can Feminist Theology, in contrast to much secular feminist theory, give space at the table to those whose sex-gender life stories undermine the notion that there is such a thing as a common or biologically-contingent feminine experience in the first place?

Essentialism and Exclusion

It has long been the case that transgender people who have transitioned to living as women have been met with suspicion from ‘women-born women’ (or ‘womyn-born womyn’), ¹ who sometimes claim that transwomen are nothing but men seeking to infiltrate the safety of ‘women-only’ spaces (see e.g. Raymond, 1979, and the vehement debate that followed). ² In this way, a biological essentialism is repeated: one can only be a woman if one is female – and, crucially, if one has a recognizably ‘feminine’ biography all the way back to the beginning of one’s life. Rosemary Auchmuty says,

Transsexuals … don’t have a woman’s past. They weren’t brought up as women and because so much of the women’s movement was premised on personal experience and sharing that experience and theorizing out of that, feminists argued for [the] exclusion of transsexuals. The other reason is the practical experience of actually being in groups with transsexuals … It’s very difficult for people to lose the habits of their gender upbringing. Male-to-female transsexuals in women’s groups dominate, in my experience. In this society women have little enough space and time for their voices to be heard (Auchmuty quoted in Nataf, 1996: 37-38).

In this reading, just as a leopard cannot change its spots, a man cannot lose his (self-) possession even if he loses his ‘manhood’ – and this will always mark out transwomen from the ranks of ‘born’ women.

But the positive desire to give space to women’s voices has sometimes led to an exclusion of voices which are therefore doubly-marginalized (Stephen Whittle notes that the repercussions of the Raymondesque approach continue, with transgender women excluded from women-only services such as women’s centres and rape crisis centres – Whittle, 2000: 51). Transgender women no longer have the privilege attached to masculinity, but they may not be welcomed in women-only arenas either. But this failure to recognize transgender women as ‘real’ women – in some theological spaces as well as elsewhere – reinforces the idea that male and female, masculine and feminine are unproblematically distinct, and thereby contributes to the further exclusion of other people with unusual sex-gender configurations. Myra J. Hird criticizes the biological essentialism inherent in some feminisms – like that betrayed in Auchmuty’s remark – in her exploration of the manner in which both intersex and transsexualism might radically challenge the sex-versus-gender binary (Hird, 2000). She says, ‘My objective is not to highlight the difficulties of “including” intersexuals and transsexuals as women, but rather to question how anyone claims this membership based on the current “sex”/ “gender” binary’ (Hird, 2000: 350). This highlights the arbitrary nature of ‘unambiguous’ identification as a given sex or gender in the first place, which should be questioned in a project of subverting repressive hegemonies and formulating just theological responses to differences in bodies and identities.

The heeding of women’s voices in theology, and the recognition that female embodiment and feminine experience are legitimate and specific sites of the revelation of God’s love, has been one of the most significant developments in theology in the last hundred years. However, an over-emphasis on feminine experience as supervening on female embodiment – as in some incarnations of thealogy and Goddess theology – risks writing out unusual sex-gender body-stories and perpetuating the idea that there are only some bodies which can mediate the divine. In this way, feminist theologians have sometimes contributed to a situation in which feminism, which purports to value and uphold quashed and silenced voices, actually itself quashes and silences those whose sex-gender life stories are unusual. Mary Daly, whose work was groundbreaking and great in many areas, nonetheless famously shared Raymond’s belief that transgender women were not women and that (male) surgeons were colluding with male-to-female transsexuals to invade female space (Daly, 1978: 67-72). Even if the majority of feminist theologians would not go along with Raymond’s assertion that transsexuals ‘rape’ women, they might – tacitly or otherwise – endorse her view that only ‘real’ women, those ‘born with female chromosomes and anatomy’ (Raymond, 1979: 114; cf. Daly, 1978: 238) can really say what it is to know feminine experience.

I suggest that such an assumption not only means that men’s voices are often lost to feminist discourse, but also that other modes of human bodiliness are written out of existence. As Hird shows, transgender women are not the only ones who have been excluded. Many intersex people, for example, identify as women, but this does not necessarily mean that their bodily experiences are the same as those shared by a majority of women. Most women with intersex conditions will not be able to menstruate, become pregnant and give birth to children (and this is, of course, also true of some non-intersex women: celebrating fertility and birthing as divine beautifully rehabilitates bodies debarred from theological signification; but if in so doing it renders non-fertile bodies less than divine on the grounds of their non-fertility, this is a sad irony). Women with one of the more common intersex conditions, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, have vulvas and, after puberty, breasts, hips and a classic ‘feminine’ body shape. A large majority of people with AIS are brought up as girls and identify as women into adulthood. However, they also have internal testes and XY chromosomes – characteristics usually considered unequivocally male. As a result, they cannot menstruate or become pregnant. Women with another intersex condition, Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, have XX chromosomes, but they may not (without surgery) have vaginal openings, and their clitorises may be larger than average, more the size associated with small penises. Women with CAH may therefore also find it difficult to have biological children, but this does not mean their bodies should be deemed to reflect or experience God any less fully than those of other women. Moreover, although a majority of people with intersex conditions are happy to identify as either men or women, there are also some for whom neither category fits adequately, and who prefer to claim a liminal or ‘third’ gender identity. Does this mean that Feminist Theology is at even more risk of not hearing their voices, because they do not claim a feminine experience per se?

New Futures for Feminist Theology

Feminist Theology in the future must therefore continue to take into account that ‘women-only’ spaces, and those which privilege ‘female experience’ – and assume that this occurs only along certain lines – can perpetuate exclusion (Cornwall, 2010). It is especially ironic when this occurs as a result not of conscious segregation, but rather of a simple lack of awareness that not all women do have ‘female chromosomes and anatomy’ as Raymond and Daly claimed. Feminist Theology must be circumspect about assuming unproblematic commonalities in the ways in which women physically inhabit their bodies and encounter God in and through them. Of course, Womanist and non-Western feminist theologians have long critiqued the idea that the story of what it is to be a woman can be told exclusively by only some women. Critique of white and/or Western feminists who fail to acknowledge that gender oppression is not the only problem women face has grown over the last decades. Kwok Pui-lan, Musa W. Dube and other postcolonial theologians have made clear that white feminist theologians must acknowledge their own privilege and the ways in which their own lifestyles may continue to marginalize and oppress other women (see for e.g. Kwok, 2005: 17-18, 55; Dube, 2000: 30, 36; Dube, 2006: 150; Ringe, 1998: 137-38). But it is also the case that feminist theologies into the future must engage with the ways in which their own strong valuing of bodily femaleness – and all it is assumed to entail – might unwittingly shut out women with unusual sex-gender configurations.

There are recent theologies by feminist theologians which do engage with the specificities of intersex and transgender (see, for example, the essays in Althaus-Reid and Isherwood, 2009), and it is to be hoped that, in future, this increasingly takes place within broadly feminist theological collections rather than as a ‘special case’ where the ‘otherness’ of transgender and intersex is especially remarked. It is vital that feminist theological communities welcome and embrace bodies as they are, particularly when they have been rejected elsewhere. The vast majority of transgender women are not ‘colonizing’ women’s experience: in fact, conversely, it might be feminist theological attempts to draw boundaries around the fold of feminine experience of God which is really to be figured as colonial. Individuals who have transitioned to another gender role should be welcomed as full members of their communities, and encouraged to speak fully into their new expressions of their identity. The futures of Feminist Theology must be futures where the celebration and championing of feminine voices is not contingent upon eliding variety, or predetermining too protectively quite what a feminine body-voice sounds like.