"Isn’t the 'binary' thinking we sneer at precisely a taking seriously of difference, after all?"

Pontifical John Paul II Institute, Washington, DC

"Isn't the 'binary' thinking we sneer at precisely a taking seriously of difference, after all?  Why is a culture so preoccupied with difference so reluctant to acknowledge anything that might significantly distinguish a man from a woman?  And just here we see the confusion implied in the ambivalence:  to reject binary thinking . . . is to affirm nonbinary thinking:  nonbinary thinking, in other words, is good, while its opposite, binary thinking, is bad.  This division of the world is just as 'binary' as the division it rejects; the only difference (!) is that, precisely unconsciously (in fact necessarily unconsciously), it denies the difference between its terms.  And it does so in the name of difference!  In short, we in the modern world affirm difference, only to absolutize it to the exclusion of all else; and we reject difference, only ruthlessly to divide the world into pluses and minuses, Sneetches with, and Sneetches without, stars on thars."

     D. C. Schindler, "Perfect difference:  gender and the analogy of being," Communio:  international Catholic review 43 (2016):  196-197 (194-231).