Transsexuality: Reconciling christianity and science

Toronto Journal of Theology

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 51-72

  Fehige, Yiftach J H ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ST MICHAEL S COLLEGE   (Canada)

Author keywords

J. Wentzel van Huyssteen; naturalism; normative pragmatism; reductionism; sexual diversity

Indexed keywords

EID: 80052361189     PISSN: 08269831     EISSN: 19186371     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/tjt.27.1.51     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. Wentzel van Huyssteen, "What Makes Us Human? The Interdisciplinary Challenge to Theological Anthropology and Christology," Toronto Journal of Theology 26, no. 2 (2010): 143-160.
2. Wolfgang Welsch, "Transversale Vernunft," in Unsere Postmoderne Moderne, 5th ed., 295-318 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), esp. 296: "Vernunft ist nicht ein begreifendes Vermögen auf höherer oder integraler Ebene gegenüber Verstand. Sie ist auf Totalität zwar bezogen, aber allein im Modus von Verbindungen und Ü bergängen. Daher... wird sie als transversale Vernunft bezeichnet." Italics are mine.
3. Van Huyssteen, "What Makes Us Human?," 145.
4. See J.H.Y. Fehige, "Transsexualität zwischen Genetik und Sozialer Praxis," Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57 (2009): 757-780
5. J.H.Y. Fehige, Die Geschlechtererosion des Semantischen Realismus: Eine Logisch-Semantische Untersuchung zum Begriff des Biologischen Geschlechts (Paderborn, Germany: mentis, 2006).
6. Robert B. Brandom, one of the most prominent defenders of normative pragmatism, puts it succinctly: "The basic idea is that normative vocabulary makes explicit important features of what knowing and acting subjects do when they deploy a vocabulary, when they use expressions so as to say something.... Put another way, normative vocabulary... articulate[s] discursive commitments... normative vocabulary addresses in the first instance acts of committing oneself." Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 181.
7. See also Robert B. Brandom, "Toward a Normative Pragmatics," Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3-66.
8. As will become clear, the normative pragmatism that I adopt differs from Brandom's in that it does not promote any form of idealism. See Michael Esfeld, "How a Social Theory of Meaning Can Be Connected with Realism," Facta Philosophica 4 (2001): 111-131.
9. See Simon Blackburn, Lust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 49-63.
10. See David Rayside, Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 39.
11. See also Pamela Dickey Young, "Same-Sex Marriage and the Christian Churches in Canada," Studies in Religion 35 (2006): 1-23.
12. See John Portmann, Sex and Heaven: Catholics at Bed and Prayer (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 88
13. Stanley Hauerwas, "Virtue, Description and Friendship: A Thought Experiment in Catholic Moral Theology," Irish Theological Quarterly 62 (1996): 170-184.
14. For a concise and scientifically well-informed critique of the arguments see David G. Myers and Letha D. Scanzoni, What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage (San Francisco: Harper, 2005)
15. Recommendable are also Stephen J. Pope, "The Magisterium's Argument against 'Same-Sex' Marriages: An Ethical Analysis and Critique," Theological Studies 65 (2004): 530-565
16. Todd J. Salzmann and Michael G. Lawler, The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2008)
17. Todd J. Salzmann and Michael G. Lawler, "Quaestio Disputata: Catholic Sexual Ethics; Complementarity and the Truly Human," Theological Studies 67 (2006): 625-652
18. Todd J. Salzmann and Michael G. Lawler, "New Natural Law Theory and Foundational Sexual Ethical Principles: A Critique and a Proposal," Heythrop Journal 47 (2006): 182-205.
19. James M. Childs, "Transsexualism: Some Theological and Ethical Perspectives," Dialogue: A Journal of Theology 48 (2009): 30-41.
20. See Alan Soble, "Introduction: The Fundamentals of the Philosophy of Sex," in The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings, ed. Alan Soble and Nicholas Power (Lanham, md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), xvii-xlii. To name a paradigmatic question of each field: Why are humans sexual (metaphysics)? Is prostitution morally wrong (ethical)? Is mutual masturbation possible (conceptual analysis)? Metaphysics is the most basic level of inquiry.
21. See, for a substantiation of this view, Edward Schillebeeckx, "Intrinsic Theological Reasons for the Democratic Exercising of Authority in the Church," in Church: The Human Story of God (New York: Crossroads, 1993), 220-229.
22. For a critique of Gen 1.27 as supposedly offering scriptural evidence against the recognition of transsexual persons, see Fraser Watts, "Transsexualism and the Church," Theology and Sexuality 9 (2002): 63-85.
23. It is difficult these days to find precise definitions of what a physical property is. I follow Uwe Meixner, The Two Sides of Being (Paderborn, Germany: mentis, 2004), 33: "A physical property is an item out of the specified set-ask the experts-of fundamental physical properties... , or a property which is definable on the basis of fundamental physical properties as a specification of the property of being a physical individual."
24. Steven Weinberg, "Towards the Final Laws of Physics," in Elementary Particles and the Laws of Nature, 9th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 63.
25. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 43.
26. See Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (Cambridge: mit Press, 1986)
27. Paul Churchland, Neurophilosophy at Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
28. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 105.
29. See Geert Keil and Herbert Schnädelbach, "Naturalismus," in Naturalismus: Philosophische Beiträge, ed. Geert Keil and Herbert Schnädelbach, 7-45 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000).
30. See Lorenzo B. Puntel, "Metaphysikkritik bei Carnap und Heidegger: Analyse, Vergleich, Kritik," Logos n.s. 4 (1997): 294-332.
31. In support of my view, see Sami Pihlström, "Methodology without Metaphysics? A Pragmatic Critique," Philosophy Today 48 (2004): 188-215.
32. In favour of the distinction, see Michael Ruse, "Methodological Naturalism under attack," South African Journal of Philosophy 24 (2005): 44-60.
33. Willard V.O. Quine, "Structure and Nature," Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992): 9.
34. I am aware that there are objections to physics as the leading science. See Ernst Mayr, What Makes Biology Unique? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 67-82.
35. If these objections are tenable then reductive naturalism in the defined sense is a non-starter. In this case I would argue that naturalism altogether is probably nothing more than a way of expressing a "respect for the conclusions of natural science" as suggested by John Dewey, "Antinaturalism in Extremis," in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian, 1-16 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944).
36. See Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, rev. ed. (1977; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 121-148.
37. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Knopf, 1998), 68.
38. See Paul E. Griffith and Kim Sterenly, Sex and Death. An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 318-332.
39. I refer here to Nicole C. Karafyllis and Gotlind Ulshöfer, eds., Sexualized Brains: Scientific Modeling of Emotional Intelligence from a Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: mit Press, 2008).
40. See also Anne Fausto-Sterling, "Sexing the Brain: How Biologists Make a Difference," in Sexing the Body, 115-145 (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
41. See Robert A. Nye, "The Biosexual Foundations of Our Modern Concept of Gender," in Sexualized Brains, ed. Karafyllis and Ulshöfer (Cambridge: mit Press, 2008), 73.
42. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, 9th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 11.
43. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 173.
44. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 135.
45. See Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning,"' in Mind, Language and Reality, ed. Hilary Putnam, 215-271 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
46. Stefan Hirschauer, Die soziale Konstruktion der Transsexualität, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999).
47. Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconsciousness (Cambridge: Belknap, 2002), 162-163.
48. See also Douglas Mason-Schrock, "Transsexuals' Narrative Construction of the 'True Self,"' Social Psychology Quarterly 59 (1996): 176-192.
49. See Jay Prosser, Second Skins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 4-9.
50. See Bernard Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst: Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Leibes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 44, 121.
51. The best example is Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
52. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 58.
53. See Marcus Willaschek, Der mentale Zugang zur Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003), 264.
54. See Hilary Putnam, "Realism with a Human Face," in Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 28.
55. Michael Esfeld, Holism in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Physics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 157.
56. This language-centric view has been challenged by the German philosopher Matthias Vogel. See his Medien der Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).
57. Esfeld, Holism, 61.
58. See Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of Fact/Value Dichotomy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 135-145.
59. For a very helpful discussion of the relationship between scientific inquiry and liberal democracy, see Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
60. I cannot defend here why I think that a Christian physicalism is feasible. For such a defence, see Kevin J. Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Alternative to the Soul (Grand Rapids, MI Baker Academics, 2006).
61. On the notion of cluster concept, see Donald Davidson, "The Folly of Trying to Define Truth," Journal of Philosophy 93 (1996): 263-278.
62. Joan Roughgarden, Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 394-395.
63. See Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL Open Court, 1987), 18-19.
64. This might be the only way that a unity of Scripture can obtain and function as a canon for the Church, given the theological diversity that characterizes Scripture. I follow here Richard Swinburne, Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 239-288.
65. Harold J. Ellens, Sex in the Bible (Westport, ct: Praeger, 2006), 16.