The Anthropormorphizing Absurdity
Christians love to appeal to “nature,” especially when they are being nasty and picking on people. This is especially easy with transgender persons, the current political target of conservatives, the real kind and the faux, degraded, U.S. kind. The Vatican, a leading source of conservative ideology, published a few years ago a denunciation of “gender theory” as an attempt to “annilihate nature,” which is obviously absurd on its face.
According to this document, “gender theory” tells people that they may choose their gender. This is precisely backwards. We tend to map our concept of “gender” backwards onto the Native societies that had lived in “the Americas” for thousands of years before good Christians invaded and started killing people wantonly, but we have too little information about their cultures, since Christians killed people without bothering to find out, to know that our concept of “gender” would have made sense to them. We can tell, however, that they were not nearly so rigid about assigning humans to two genders as good Christians tell us their god wants us to be.
It is undoubtedly the case that many scholars in the modern west have articulated various ideas that one may reasonably call, “gender theory,” but the theory grew out of direct observations of variation in human gender identity and expression. What apparently violates “nature,” whatever…
