Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
In the publication“Unpacking the Sin of Gender” (Religion & Gender 2016), Sarah Bracke and David Paternotte turn against the Roman Catholic Church’s view of what Pope Francis calls “gender ideology.”
Let us begin by emphasizing that of course we do not subscribe to the pope’s views on gender ideology. In AGTRT-5, we tried as best we could to put into words what our problem with that is. We completely agree with Bracke and Paternotte that criticism of the church’s fundamentally outdated view of gender theory is necessary.
What we do have a problem with is the way in which this criticism is expressed. They place the Pope in a broader movement that would reject the idea of gender as an analytical category altogether: “In recent years we are witnessing the rise of a particular kind of trouble that rejects the notion of gender as an analytical concept.”
The authors also see a “pushback against gender.” There would be “anti-gender visions” that would lead to alternative knowledge networks: “these oppositions to gender can be read as projects of alternative knowledge production.” Within this, gender would not be accepted as an analytical category: “Gender as an analytical category has been resisted from theoretical and political standpoints that differ significantly, and may not have anything in common beyond a quarrel with the concept.”
But can opposition to the use of the concept of gender be dismissed as a misunderstanding of gender as an analytical category? The term analytic category is used in many publications but usually without explanation or clarification. Is the category of men who like to buy blue tulips with white spots on the petals and put them on the table an “analytical category”? Presumably not, if only for lack of relevance.
Anno now, gender figures as a “ternary” rather than a “binary” notion: male, female and non-binary are then the three gender labels. Gender identity is determined by how one sees oneself, and gender categorization indicates how people see a person in a chosen social context. Co-essentialism (complementary essentialism, or counter-essentialism, see AGTRT-1 and AGTRT-5) is the idea that only psychological factors and one’s own decision of will determine gender identity, and that in the case of gender catetogization, one must additionally conform to gender identity. In other words, gender has become an answer to a survey question: what is your gender?
Bracke and Paternotte use a vague and ambiguous notion such as “analytical category” as a tool to lump together a multitude of issues. Anyone who criticizes parts of or directions in gender theory is cast in a problematic light. This is lumped together in “Unpacking the Sin of Gender” as follows:
“The usefulness of “gender” in “gender ideology” is precisely that it brings together a number of concerns high on the agenda for conservative Catholic activists: rejection of a wide range of reproductive rights for women (notably abortion), rejection of same-sex marriage and homosexual parenting, attachment to particular roles for men and women and rejection of the transgression of these roles, sex education, and the endorsement of particular – heteronormative – norms about sexuality. Gender as an analytical concept provides the analytical and political connections between these different topics: it renders different ‘issues’ into a coherent vision. It also amalgamates potentially dissenting actors (feminists, LGBTQ activists, and gender studies scholars) under a single figure of ‘the enemy’ to be combated by the Church.”
A large number of people in the field of gender (both theory and practice) work under the label “gender critical.” This is an unfortunate term because most of them do appear to subscribe to the relevance and even necessity of using gender, namely as different in meaning from their chosen notion of biological sex. Anyone who believes that biological sex cannot mutate through any intervention needs the notion of gender to understand transgendering. Thus, that gender-critical people would by definition be exclusively toward trans people does not prove to be the case upon closer inspection.
The rhetorical and demagogic “misuse” of the terminology of gender that the authors rightly accuse the Roman Catholic Church (and especially this and the previous pope and Cardinal Sarah) of is practiced at least as much by some “advocates” of gender. In a recent tweet, for example, Sarah Bracke mentioned the terms gender criticism, facism, Nazism and genocide in the same breath.
This tweet from Bracke (which we analyze more extensively in AGTRT-M5 and AGTRT-11) far exceeds the comparison Cardinal Sarah made with ISIS (see Bracke and Paternotte’s paper for the entire quote), if only because many write in good faith under the label gender critical, however unfortunate that term may be.
We see the aforementioned tweet by Bracke as an attempt to deliberately discredit to the extreme the work of people who, for their own reasons, adopt the term gender critical. This action thus completely neutralizes the arguments mentioned in “Unpacking the Sin of Gender,” for those arguments turn out to be apparently inapplicable in the direction of authors themselves, they are thus, in retrospect anyway, no more than arguments “ad hominem.”
More decisive and less ideologically colored arguments against the official position of the Roman Catholic Church have been discussed in several papers, see gender-theory.org.
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