yrieithydd | Entries tagged with gender

Well I've now managed to finish reading LLF.

On the whole, I think it could be a good resource for the church to have the conversations she needs to have. However, I'm not convinced the conversations will happen.

It feels a bit basic to me in places, but that's because I'm someone who has read and thought and prayed about this stuff a lot over the last 20 years or so. It does a good job of setting out different perspectives fairly even handedly, although there are couple of places at least where they seem to be setting out something I expected I was going to agree with and then they'd go off at a different angle or in one case completely miss the point.

( Imago Dei and Gender and Disability Theology )

Last week I listened to a podcast by the Naked Scientists about gender and toys which seemed to me to miss this point. The presenter talks to Jo from @lettoysbetoys and Vicky a research pyschologist.
Vicky has a few points to make:

Biological processes as well as societal influence affects toy choice. So 'universally around the world' little girls like dolls and little boys like weapons. These are what they choose when presented with novel toys. She points to her research on the effect of congenital adrenal hyperplasy where the adrenal gland overproduces testosterone and causes girls with the condition to have more masculine looking bodies and to be more likely to choose weapons, trucks and cars than their non-affected sisters. Also 'even at 12 months' babies more likely to look at toys associated with their gender.
It's insulting to say that children don't know their own minds, can choose to go against societies' expectations
Campaigners are implying girls' toys less good than boys' toys
By adulthood neglible differences in abilities, so what they play with doesn't matter.

Jo answers many of these points well, especially pointing out that social stigma is greater for boys who like 'girly' toys than vice versa. But there were various points that I felt could have been made more strongly.

Vicky said 'even at 12 months' suggesting that at that age society hasn't influenced babies much. However, I've read of studies where babies where dressed in blue or pink (regardless of actual gender so some dressed in blue were girls and some in pink were boys) and observed how adults responded to them and interacted with them and there were clear differences in the sort of things adults said to those in blue to those in pink. IIRC, blue were more likely to be 'strong' and pink 'pretty', so social conditioning begins long before 12 months.

Vicky also hugely downplayed the social impact of stereotypes. Yes, the child might know his or her own mind and still choose things associated with the other gender, but that's not much help if the parent then refuses to buy the thing because it's wrong. @Everydaysexism on twitter has retweeted examples people have overheard of children being told they can't have something because it was for the other gender. So if a budding female scientist isn't allowed a chemistry set because it's for boys maybe she'll not choose science at A level and so her talents will be lost from science, even though, as Vicky acknowledges, the differences in talents of adults are negligible.

Vicky also mainly failed to address the issue of tendency versus universaility. Jo pointed out that you can't say 'all' girls and boys will choose with the tendency of their sex . VIcky said that putting the dolls elsewhere wouldn't stop girls choosing them, which is true and completely fine. The whole point of the campaign though isn't to stop girls choosing dolls or boys choosing weapons but to enable girls to choose weapons and boys to choose dolls if that is what they want. That's why marketting by function makes sense, it opens up the categories rather than shutting them down.

Kevin Ellis, the Vicar of Bartley Green (@vicarbartleyg) tweeted a link to a post on Fulcrum Anglican from Andrew Goddard
on the recent Faith and Order Commission report "Men, Women and Marriage"* saying that he found it a helpful contribution to the debate.

( My response to this )

The title of this post is a quote from the Report of the Church of England Faith and Order Commission (pdf) published today. Bishop Alan mentions it in is critical blog response to the report and someone tweeted it as a quote. I responded to this tweet saying " I have so many issues with 'people not asexual, either m or f' from @c_of_e that I don't know where to start." This blog post represents an attempt to start.

The quote appears in a longer paragraph which I will quote in full:

26.Biological differences do not simply cease to matter at the level of personal relationship; persons are not asexual, but are either male or female. Their sex attains a personal meaning, as relationships are built constructively on the endowments and strengths it offers. The relationship of marriage is more personal, not less, as the partners come to it in receptiveness of what only the opposite sex can bring to their own.

I think the basic issue here is the ignorance of LGBTQIA issues that is demonstrated here.

Firstly, Intersex people are declared not to exist as people are 'either male or female'. This just is not true; whilst the majority of people have an XY or XX genotype and male or female genitalia to match, there is a minority who do not fit these categories and have a range of different genotypes and genitalia and are known as Intersex.

Secondly, there are issues around gender and sex which are basically ignored. Where does a trans* person fit in this schema? For some people their sense of being male or female does not match with their genitalia. I am by no means an expert on trans* issues and indeed often struggle to get my head around them and am uncertain of the terminology perferred by those for whom this is personal, but those I know who have transitioned have been a lot more at home in themselves and happier after transition. There are also people who identify as genderqueer who do not define themselves as either male or female.

Thirdly, whilst I can see what they were intending to mean by 'asexual' here, it is a problematic word in this context because asexual is used as a descriptor of sexuality. The Asexual Visibility and Education Network defines an asexual as someone 'who does not experience sexual attraction'. This is the point at which it gets personal for me. I possibily have not send this publically before, but this is who I am. About a decade ago I found myself thinking the prefix to -sexual that most seems to fit me is a- though at the time I had no idea that other people identified like that and was glad to come across AVEN sometime later. As a teenager I just did not get what other people meant by fancying people, it doesn't resonate with anything in my experience. It doesn't really bother me, and it has meant that I have been happily single most of my life. I have had one relationship and there are things that I miss -- having someone to talk to about my day, share stuff with and cuddle up with mainly -- but I've never felt driven by sexual desire. That's just how I am. Now, my first reaction to 'persons are not asexual' was that my Church was telling me I didn't exist, but in fact they aren't talking about people like me at all; rather it is Intersex people who do not exist in CofEworld. But the fact that they used the word 'asexual' shows that they are not aware that there are people like me who identify as asexual and that is disappointing too.

Thus in a report which is problematic for Lesbian and Gay people (and Bisexuals who have fallen in love with a person of the same gender), the CofE has in one sentence also igrnored trans*, genderqueer, intersex and asexual people. There is a lot of information out there about LGBTQIA issues, is it too much to expect my Church to have engaged with them when writing a report on marriage in the context of the proposal to allow people of the same gender to marry?

The final sentence of this paragraph of the report also hints at complementarity 'what only the opposite sex can bring' and indeed the word complementary is used later in the report. This is an issue which is also highly contentious for the other red button issue of the moment -- the full acceptance of women in all rôles of ministry. I would ask my Church to go away and really engage with issues of sex, gender and sexuality apart from the specific issues of whether women can be ordained as priests and bishops and whether marriage is of necessity between two people of different genders. Human experience, that of human beings made in God's image is just not as simple as 'there are men and there are women and they should marry the opposite'.

Interestingly, at the Governing Body of the Church in Wales today announced that it was referring the issue of same sex partnerships to its Doctrine Commission. I hope it does better that the Church of England on this.

Since the failure of the women bishop measure to gain the required 2/3rds majority in the House of Laity to pass 2 weeks ago (20th November), and indeed in the run up to the vote. I have had a number of conversations on Twitter with people who oppose the ministry of women as priests and bishops about the meaning of Galations 3:28. This verse is foundational to me and a key one in arguments of women's rôles in the church. In full it is 'There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.' (NRSV). It is quoted in the principles of the Third Order of the Society of St Francis (of which I am a professed member):

The Second Aim:

To spread the spirit of love and harmony.

The Order sets out, in the name of Christ, to break down barriers between people and to seek equality for all. We accept as our second aim the spreading of a spirit of love and harmony among all people. We are pledged to fight against the ignorance, pride, and prejudice that breed injustice or partiality of any kind.

Members of The Third Order fight against all injustice in the name of Christ, in whom there can be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; for in him all are one. Our chief object is to reflect that openness to all which was characteristic of Jesus. This can only be achieved in a spirit of chastity, which sees others as belonging to God and not as a means of self-fulfilment.

As Tertiaries, we are prepared not only to speak out for social justice and international peace, but to put these principles into practice in our own lives, cheerfully facing any scorn or persecution to which this may lead

However, opponents of the ministry of women as priests claim that using this verse to support the ordination of women is misusing it. For example I got into a long discussion with a twitter user called @PeterDCXW after he told people to stop misusing this verse on the #synod hashtag. Unfortunately there were double tweets in the argument which makes reconstructing the exchange awkward as two responses to a tweet don't get picked up if you click on conversation. His basic argument was that because the context of the passage is whether gentiles can be baptised without being circumcised it only relates to salvation not rôles in the church. I pointed out that the church had not restricted gentiles from leadership rôles in the church and was told that this was irrelevant. but I still don't know why. This point of baptism is non-gendered has again been raised in the even more complicated Twitter conversation with @therevddr etc. In this conversation @therevddr said that Christ's maleness was incidental to his humanity, but yet maleness intrinsic to priesthood. I just can't see the logic. So I decided to sit down and read Galatians and reflect on the context.

The first thing which struck me was that in this case Paul is the innovator. The Party of the Circumcision are the ones who use tradition and scripture. This is not original but I can't remember where I first heard it.

This is the theme of chapter 2. Paul is arguing for a new thing because of what God is doling in Christ. In this chapter he also challenges Peter's hypocrisy for stopping eating with gentiles. This struck me as relevant to the other debate this week about women speaking at Bristol CU. Here the leadership of the CU appear to have wanted to innovate by nviting women to speak but one of their group couldn't accept this so they tried a compromise of allowing women in restricted circumstances. However, the exec member who objected still resigned. If the gospel includes freedom for women from restrictions of patriarchy/old covenant, then how can we draw back from that even for the sake of the conscience of some unhappy with the innovation? Isn't that what Paul criticises Peter for here?

In chapter 3 he continues this theme by criticising the Galatians for going back to law not the Spirit and this culminates in 'There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Andif you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.' Now to me baptism is what brings us into Christ Jesus,and it's in him that these divisions no longer pertain. Surely that's post baptism too because it's in the state we enter through baptism. Gentiles become full members of the body, able to partake in all things by their baptism. How can this be true for Gentiles and not women?

I also note that we are said to be children & heirs. Now women did not get to inherit much as I understand it. But in Christ women are included. I also wonder about the grammatical gender of child in Greek here?

In Chapter 4.9 he asks the Galatians whether they want to be enslaved again. and readng this I felt 'That's what dropping egalitarian position feels like as a woman', it would be being enslaved again. Christ has set us free from the false limits of patriarchy and I'm not going back. As 5.1 says ' For freedom Christ has set us free.' Today's mammoth Twitter conversation, which actually started from at tweet from the Church Times about a statement by WATCH calling for a single clause measure on Tuesday, had me asking several times (starting last night) what, other than biological motherhood, could women do that men couldn't. The only answer I got was be a mother. This is why I pointed out that the conservative claim of 'different but equal' only limits women (which is where @MirandaTHolmes became involved and it snowballed). It's easy for men to say something like that when it does not limit them at all -- that's what male privilege is all about.

This question of biological motherhood is put into an interesting focus when Paul, a man, says in 4.19 that he feels the pain of childbirth over the Galations. He isn't limiting motherhood to women.

So having reflected on Galations, I'm affirmed in my understanding of freedom in Christ. Freedom not limited by arguments from tradition and scripture when they ignore what God is doing now. A few years ago now I went on a theology day at St Michael's College Llandaf, and the thing that i took from the day, (which may have been me building on an argument of one of the lecturers) was the way in which the Church has struggled over the message of Galations 3:28 over the years. The Council of Jerusalem dealt with Jew and Gentile, but Slave and Free has a complicated history, ended in early centuries but then coming back in 19th Century, and Male and Female only being addressed now. I wonder whether slave owners claimed that Galations 3:28 only referred to baptism to justify keeping baptised slaves?