"a more basic distinction, prior to cultural variety"

Pontifical John Paul II Institute of Washington, DC

"I do not dispute that there is a distinction between [1] the fact of being sexually distinct (a boy or a girl, a man or a woman) and [2] 'living that difference out in a variety of cultures.'  But there is a more basic distinction, prior to cultural variety.  It is between [1] being one sex or the other (a boy or girl) and [2] growing up to become a man or a woman, which involves both [2a] the person 'living out' what he or she already is and [2b] those helping to raise him or her (parents, society, culture).  If we begin there, and not immediately with cultural variety, we allow ourselves to speak positively about the necessary role a culture has in forming a boy or a girl to maturity as a man or a woman. . . .  We extricate ourselves, in other words, from the agenda that originally inspired the search for cultural variety (beginning with Margaret Mead) to show how cultural 'expectations' are per se imposed externally in the arbitrary sense, according to the 'social construct' model belonging to the nature-nurture dualism.  Furthermore, in my view, the distinction as stated draws too sharp a distinction between [1] the biological and [2] the living out of sexual difference.  By using the modifier 'biological' for 'sex,' the terms are prey to the implication, however unintended, that 'living out' or 'expression' is not biological, and conversely, that 'sex,' or 'bodily, biological reality' is not always already socially embedded and in need of formation and personal 'living out.'  But that, of course, is not the case.  It is the one human organism (body and soul) that both is and then acts.  Think, for example[,] of the nursing of a child or the education of children and the making of a home, all of which are indivisibly human acts.  Think, too, of the fact that the human child is born 'too early,' and in need of the 'social uterus' of the family.  Perhaps the problem that the above distinctions are prey to arises from the preference for the use of 'biological' over 'natural,' the former being an abstraction of the latter.  As Karol Wojtyła said, 'The expression "order of nature" cannot be confused nor identified with the expression "biological order," as the latter, even though also signifying the order of nature, denotes it only inasmuch as it is accessible for the empirical-descriptive methods of natural sciences' (Love and Responsibility, trans. Grzegorz Ignatik [Boston:  Pauline Books and Media, 2013], 40).  In sum, by choosing the more abstract term, it is very difficult, especially in current circumstances given the history of the invention of the 'sex and gender' dyad, to designate the whole human organism who is male or female and then grows up to become a man or woman (quite apart from the actual intentions to the contrary of those using the modifier).  Finally, by using the 'sex and gender' pair . . . to indicate a proper distinction is to imagine, naively in my view, that anyone today is able to detect in the pair anything other than the dualisms the distinction has always existed to create and perpetuate."

     Margaret H. McCarthy, "The emperor’s (new) new clothes:  the logic of the new 'gender ideology,'" Communio:  international Catholic review 46, no. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 2019):  629n24, underscoring mine (620-659).  630n26:  "it would not be correct to refer to me as having a 'sound theory of gender,' as I do not recognize 'gender' as a thing distinct from sex."