The Genesis of Gender: A Review
After spending years teaching college classes on feminism and gender studies and wrestling with inconsistencies in the field, Abigail Favale, a professor at Notre Dame, published The Genesis of Gender.
For many, she told me, “[Gender] is not something we receive from the potential of our particular nature as male or female. It is instead almost like a project, like gender becomes an avatar or a profile that we're designing.”
This desire to design our lives through our physical appearance is strongly communicated in movies and television shows. In the 2000s, it was essential for some characters to wear converse sneakers with a dress to show their sense of self. To not demonstrate their punk-ness would be giving into society, abandoning the church of Avril Levine.
Now, the popular avenue for self-expression among adolescents is to go trans. In 2023, medicating a teenager to pause puberty is the new fad. Getting blue streaks in your hair is so 2003. But the implications of this trend are severe. Detransitioners have come out of the woodwork with horror stories and lawsuits against the adults and medical industry that allegedly wronged them.
When commentators talk about people with gender dysphoria, they tend to lack compassion. Favale’s book was a refreshing read, urging more love for those struggling with their gender.
I admit that I bought, read, took diligent notes on, and even published a book review on Favale’s book to impress a guy that I was seeing — not my most feminist moment.
I wanted to do something he would find interesting to spark his curiosity and prove our intellectual likeness. My more-shallow motivations, however, are similar to what Favale describes as the reason for the double-speak language adopted by people in the gender studies field and classes. It’s only natural for people to want to be liked and accepted. We want to fit in, and we want to exist in the same reality as our friends.
There is great societal pressure to endorse a child's delusion that he or she was born in the wrong body. Academics, actors, singers and authors have been playing an ideological game of red rover whenever asked to speak to the women-in-sports issue.
Just in the past two years, the conversation on transgenderism has turned the Left against itself. J.K. Rowling and other prominent liberal figures have sounded the alarm over women being subject to unfair competition and predation in their own spaces in the name of inclusion. They have faced backlash and attempts to destroy their careers because of their contrarian views.
“It was not fun to be in the college classroom, because it suddenly became impossible to have real conversations,” Favale said of her experience in academia.
“People were afraid to disagree with one another, and you would get in this dynamic where one or two dominant personalities would just kind of hold the room emotionally hostage,” she said. “And I am starting to wonder if maybe we’ve turned the corner a little bit? So, I’ve been seeing some encouraging signs that, maybe, I don’t know if you want to call it like ‘the cancel culture phenomenon,’ has kind of peaked in certain areas. And that we’re seeing an easing up a little bit, a little more freedom, a little more willingness for people to engage, or people just being tired of that dynamic of fear and not being able to have real conversations.”
In college classes, at work, and elsewhere we all sit through pronoun sensitivity training, bias seminars, and a variety of other woke reeducation programs.
Today we live, at our companies and every corner of the public square, at risk of exposing ourselves as being intolerant. Passing any sort of judgment on another person’s life or relationship status is a major modern faux pas. CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin can’t be fired for masturbating in front of his colleagues on a Zoom call, because that would be sexual oppression. The governing philosophy is to judge nothing because everything is subjective and morality is a farce.
Favale’s book is a caring guide on how to thoughtfully express dissent from governing speech norms without treating the subject of one’s criticism with disdain and apathy. It’s worth a careful read, especially if you are struggling with how to connect with transgender people in your community.
https://www.theconservateur.com/conservateur-club/the-genesis-of-gender-a-review
