The DNC and Feminism's War on Women

A review of Abigail Favale’s 'The Genesis of Gender'

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, feminism’s war on women was on full display. The party of vaccine mandates attempted to rebrand themselves as the party of bodily autonomy by celebrating abortion. Women dressed up in abortion pill costumes, a Planned Parenthood bus provided free roadside abortions, there was a gumball machine full of Plan B pills, and in the speeches there was relentless focus on abortion. VP pick Tim Walz, seen as an indicator of the establishment’s abortion stance, recently signed into Minnesota law a bill that legalizes the denial of life-saving medical care to the babies born alive after botched abortions. At the DNC abortion was celebrated with a gleeful intensity that even pro-choice supporters found disturbing, making it clear that long gone are the days when abortion was considered something that should be ‘legal, safe, and rare.’

It was interesting to watch this unfold just as I finished reading The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory by Abigail Favale. This book struck me as a useful lens through which to consider the DNC’s ‘joyful’ celebration of abortion. As a lifelong feminist, I want to explore how it was that of all the many facets of feminism, it is a vision that cannot even define the word woman while demanding abortion ‘on demand and without apology’ that has come to be the sine qua non of the modern movement. What does it mean to live within a paradigm that pits women against their own bodies? How did we get to a place where the radical fragmentation and dehumanization of women can masquerade as liberation? If you read my essay ‘The Abolition of Woman’ you’ll be familiar with some of the ground I’ll cover here, but in The Genesis of Gender, Favale adds a new dimension to these questions while offering a radiantly beautiful solution to the problems they pose.

Feminism’s foundations

Favale begins The Genesis of Gender by describing her years as a feminist academic and a professor who taught gender studies – until she eventually realized she was feeding her students poison. From here, she launches into a historical survey of feminism to explain how we came to a time in which abortion is celebrated as the essential component of women’s liberation.

Feminism’s first wave, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, fought for women’s equality before the law, seeking representation in the political system. First wave feminists were typically opposed to abortion and saw no conflict between a woman’s rights and the rights of her unborn child. Many of them, in fact, viewed contraception as something that would ultimately benefit men and harm women.

Between feminism’s first and second wave came Simone de Beauvoir, a French philosopher whose thinking would indelibly impact the trajectory of the movement. De Beauvoir believed that masculine traits had traditionally been more highly valued than feminine traits. Ironically, she repeated the same error in her own thinking by arguing that female biology was tantamount to slavery. Freedom, to de Beauvoir, was escaping the shackles of our biological existence. It was only by autonomous self-sufficiency and paid work that womankind would know freedom, she argued, articulating an ethos that capitalist society would eagerly embrace. By envisioning women as enslaved to their biology, de Beauvoir laid the foundation for a feminist worldview that would pit women against their own bodies.

By the mid twentieth century came the widespread availability of hormonal birth control; now American women didn’t need to imagine what it would be like to mimic male sexuality – sex without the risk of pregnancy – they could theoretically live it. Ironically, though, touted as preventing unwanted pregnancies, hormonal birth control actually led to a massive increase in unwanted pregnancies. This is because the pill so thoroughly upended sexual mores, while not being 100% effective, that more women got pregnant than ever before. In the ten years following the widespread availability of the pill in the US, there was an increase in abortion of 130,152%.¹ But from this point on, feminism’s path was set; access to hormonal birth control and abortion became the foundational tenet of the modern feminist movement.

Health as illness, human as object

This foundational tenet of modern feminism – birth control and abortion as crucial to women’s happiness – creates a worldview in which the healthy functioning of the female body is seen as a disorder requiring medical intervention. In this paradigm, in order to be ‘healthy’ women must physiologically function like men. The serious health risks that come with hormonal contraception are routinely downplayed in order that women meet the omnipresent cultural standard that they always be sexually available to men without posing the threat of any resulting ‘biological burden.’

When I was a child I heard the preaching of this ethos that pervades society, teaching that pregnancy is a prison and motherhood slavery. As a girl, the healthy functioning of my body was presented to me as ticking time bomb that would prevent me from being my best self. So intense was this messaging that I even had nightmares of becoming pregnant. It never occurred to me to question this perspective or to look at human history and recognize that radical individual autonomy is antithetical to our species and that embedded, intertwined family and community life is precisely where we thrive. What would it have been like, I wonder, to be told that the capacities of my body were wondrous, that it was not my enemy but an irrevocable, intrinsic part of me?

In my twenties, I thought hormonal birth control and abortion were precisely what allowed women to be seen as human beings rather than breeding machines. Now, I realize this idea is saying, in effect, that unless women suppress their innate biology they are not full people. When women’s reproductive capabilities must be artificially divorced from their innate identity in order for them to be seen as emancipated individuals, we are not actually seeing women as who they are, we are seeing them as less than they are.

Favale goes on to examine the consequences of an entire society being taught that it is normal to view other human beings as sterile outlets for sexual pleasure. Viewed from this perspective, the Sexual Revolution was essentially, to borrow a notion from Wendell Berry, an industrial phenomenon.² Divorced from love and reproduction, sex was ‘freed’ only for it to be reduced to yet another outlet for mass consumption. In this industrialized worldview, freedom no longer means the freedom to live in harmony with our nature and fulfill our inherent potential; freedom is reduced to the pursuit of unfettered choice. “When freedom as choice becomes the open-ended telos of human existence, the body quickly becomes a problem… Feminism’s march toward freedom has simultaneously been a flight from embodiment.” ³

What is a woman?

Primed by years of thinking of the body as a prison, feminism’s third and fourth waves eagerly imbibed the ideas of post-modernism and began to unravel the reality of the body altogether. Post-modernism is a school of thought that teaches there is no such thing as objective truth or reality and any claim to truth or knowledge is actually a claim to power. Within this worldview, reality is created by language – which is why we now have a feminist movement in which the policing of language is paramount.

I will include here a paragraph about biological sex that pains me needs to be written. Sex is how the body is organized in relation to gamete production. In human reproduction there are two gametes - sperm and egg - therefore there are two sexes. Sex is not a spectrum but a stable binary.⁴ Sex can never be changed, it is determined from the moment of conception, and apparent in every cell of the human body. A woman is an adult human female, which is the kind of human whose body is organized around the potential to produce large gametes (eggs) and gestate new life. Men are adult human males whose bodies are organized around the potential to produce small gametes (sperm). The existence of intersex people does not challenge this fact, intersex people are males or females with disorders of sexual development. Hysterectomies or infertility likewise do not challenge the fact of the sex binary because it is a framework of potential and women with hysterectomies or people who are infertile are still members of their sex class. This inherent potentiality is always present, “even if there is a condition, such as age or disease, that prevents that potential from being actualized.”⁵

Today’s mainstream feminist movement, however, increasingly views biological sex as a social construct conjured with language. Within the billionaire-funded gender movement, the sex binary does not exist in a concrete way. The concept of male and female is thus divorced from material reality and remade into nebulous concepts that can never be definitively articulated. This is why we hear people refusing to define what a woman is or offering circular definitions like ‘a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.’ In this way, Favale writes, “it didn’t take long for a movement centered on the idea of womanhood to begin, bit by bit, dismantling that very category.”⁶

With maleness and femaleness split from the body, all that is left to animate these terms are regressive stereotypes. Favale points out that the irony here is glaring. Generations of feminists, myself included, have argued that women and men are not defined by gender stereotypes - women can act and dress however they like and they are still women, and men can act and dress however they like and they are still men - and it is this that is truly liberating. Now, though, through feminist theory itself, the concept of gender has displaced manhood and womanhood from bodily sex, so that “gender is defined by the very cultural stereotypes that feminism sought to undo.”⁷

Self-harm disguised as self-care

Before the advent of social media, the vast majority of people who wanted to transition were middle-aged men. This changed with the rise of smart phones and social media so that by 2019 three times as many females were seeking transition, most of them teenagers.⁸ This stratospheric rise makes sense when we acknowledge that teenage girls historically have been vulnerable to social contagions, which we have seen in the recent past with eating disorders sweeping through friendship groups like wildfire.

Many trans identifying girls are victims of a feminist paradigm that teaches that women’s ultimate happiness is to be found in suppressing their innate biology in order to be constantly sexually available to men. Favale recognizes that “these young women are rebelling, understandably, against the hyper-sexualization of the female body, but in doing so, they are turning against the body itself.”⁹ These girls are in real distress and their desire to escape their bodies should be taken seriously - but this does not mean their desire should be affirmed. (Unfortunately, in some American states, like Tim Walz’s Minnesota, health care providers are required by law to provide immediate affirmation to gender dysphoric youth because exploring other potential causes of dysphoria is illegal.)

When we provide affirmation, however, we force the complexity of the distress, often caused by trauma or undiagnosed neurodivergence, into the harmful paradigm of gender ideology. This reinforces the girl’s confusion and potentially makes them lifelong pharmaceutical patients – even though the irreversible medical interventions pushed by the medical industry show no benefit to mental health and are guided by ideology rather than evidence.¹⁰ In fact, “the one long-term study that exists shows a twenty-fold increase in suicidality after transition.”¹¹

Favale writes that “choosing a lifetime of medicalization in order to maintain an illusion of cross-sex identity is not ‘being who you really are.’ The affirmation model is self-denial masquerading as self-acceptance.”¹² Much like the paradigm built around hormonal birth control, gender ideology casts the healthy body as faulty and in need of medical intervention. In the words of Laura Reynolds, “a formerly trans-identified woman, the gender paradigm has ‘rebranded self-harm as self-care.’”¹³

Ecstatic culmination

Favale lays out an alternate vision to the gender paradigm in some of the most exquisitely beautiful passages in the book. Here, she describes her journey into Catholicism, writing that her feminism, in part, guided her there. She begins by laying out a powerful meditation on Genesis, explaining that it is critical to see Genesis not as a literal account of the world’s creation, but as something far deeper: a true myth that depicts mankind’s purpose and relationship to God. Studying Genesis it is clear that the intrinsic differences between the sexes is fundamental to our creation and our embodied emergence as male and female “from the sleep of nonbeing is not a footnote in our origin story: it’s the ecstatic culmination.”¹⁴

This is a vision that doesn’t rely on dehumanization or the constant denial of human nature, but a cosmology resplendent with the sacred dignity of individuals who are embedded in a world radiant with meaning. We were made in the image of God, which means our bodies are not prisons to escape, but gifts bearing a sacramental importance. We therefore do not have to force our bodies to reveal our true identity, Favale concludes, because our bodies are always already revealing our personhood.¹⁵

In Genesis, God creates through language, making a world that is imbued with meaning. Meaning is not something humans must create ex nihilo and project onto the world, as post-modernists would have us believe; rather, meaning is something that objectively exists that we can discern. But then comes the Fall, when the serpent tells Eve if she eats the fruit she will be like God. Favale writes that “these words lead her away from the recognition that she already bears a likeness to God... These words put doubt into the human heart, doubt about the goodness of the gift.”¹⁶ A wedge has now been driven between the body and the self, a fissure that signals humanity’s predilection for disembedding ourselves from reality so we can imagine ourselves as gods able to conjure worlds through the stories we tell.

Feminism, Favale contends, is born from the healthy recognition that something is not as it should be between men and women, that we are not meant to live in a dynamic of domination and oppression. Likewise, many of those caught in the dehumanizing jaws of the gender paradigm are experiencing the loneliness and disorientation that is so prevalent in this nihilistic age. But the solutions offered by mainstream feminism and the gender paradigm, the same solutions on display at the DNC, are themselves caught in an endless cycle of domination, violence, and alienation from our bodies. This fragmentation and distortion of reality can never offer true wholeness or true freedom; it is like treating an illness with the same poison that caused it.

The body is not an enemy to defeat, but a sacramental icon that pours forth into the material world a sacred truth. And in its humble flaws and limitations, the body reveals our deep reliance on others; in the food we eat, in the air we breathe, in the love we crave, it is through our bodies that we are embedded in the world around us. The transcendence we seek, then, must not be an imposter that denies this fundamental truth, but one that recognizes it, glories in it, and knows that true freedom is “an ever-deepening sense of belonging and wholeness, not only within oneself, but in relation to all that is.”

• the artwork is ‘Adam and Eve in the earthly paradise’ by Johann Wenzel Peter

1. Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender, 102

2. ibid, 110

3. ibid

4. ibid, 134

5. ibid, 121

6. ibid, 72

7. ibid, 158

8. ibid

9. ibid, 173

10. ibid, 180

11. ibid, 203

12. ibid, 200

13. ibid, 193

14. ibid, 40

15. ibid, 199

16. ibid, 44