Gendered Worlds: Our Need for Belonging and Usefulness

Transgender and nonbinary self-identifications have risen exponentially in recent years—especially among certain vulnerable groups like young women, closeted gay teens, physical and sexual abuse survivors, kids exposed to violent porn, and those with mental health issues like autism, depression, anxiety, OCD, and body dysmorphic disorder. Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 are three times more likely than those over 25 to identify as transgender.

And yet the wider culture remains largely tuned out to this trend: until the trans movement affects someone you love, it just looks like one more grenade thrown in the perpetual culture war (and every registered voter knows in advance which side they’re supposed to be on). The fact that TQ has been tacked onto LGB, as if they were somehow one thing, allows people to assume they know what’s happening (isn’t trans just the new gay?), so they don’t bother becoming curious. In deep blue areas and in our culture’s intellectual “high places,” the patterns of thought that normalize and embrace transgenderism have become inescapable and incredibly powerful. The movement justifies itself through ideals that have broad appeal: love, acceptance, self-discovery, civil rights, and personal freedom of expression. “Gender-affirming care” is presented to the mainstream as a rights-based, life-saving intervention. Who wouldn’t support that?

But we now have the receipts to show that children and young people with gender incongruence or gender dysphoria are not actually helped by gender-affirming care. According to an independent review of all the available research (commissioned by NHS England and performed by Dr. Hillary Cass), there is currently no reliable, high-quality evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries that remove and attempt to recraft sexual organs offer long-term benefits to patients. Rather, they involve the risk of complications to fertility, to cardiovascular and endocrine systems, and to bone health, mental health, pelvic health, and cognitive development.

Otherwise physically healthy teens may start out on a “gender journey” that leads to a place of no return. Griffin Sivret, a trans-identifying woman, began testosterone at 14, had a double mastectomy at 17, a hysterectomy at 19, and a phalloplasty (the creation of a fake penis) at 21. After eight surgeries on her genitals and innumerable painful complications downstream from these elective procedures, she tragically died this summer at the age of 24. This should never have happened.

For any legitimate medical intervention, there will be side effects; some proportion of unlucky folks will experience more harm than good from a pill or a surgery. Medical risk is inescapable: we don’t ban c-sections or aspirin, even though a small segment of people will die from treatment-related complications. But treatment which provides no healing and only side effects for a particular cohort is pure iatrogenesis (physician-induced harm), and such harm is what the Cass Independent Review reveals about gender medicine in children.

The absence of evidence-based practices combined with the rhetoric of civil rights and the fear of suicide creates a scenario in which the burgeoning problem of being “born in the wrong body” is eagerly addressed by a consumer-driven medical marketplace. Scared parents will do what they have always done when their child is in trouble: trust the experts. What amounts to experiments performed without long-term follow-up (transition regret typically takes three to eight years to emerge) and entered into without informed consent, are mislabeled as “standard of care.” Meanwhile, one person’s “right” becomes another person’s profit. The phenomenon of “trans kids” is brand new, but the complex origins of this crisis are very old.

And so I ask: How is it that identity even became a commodity? Why must we buy what our ancestors had for free? Why are some of us purchasing our sexual selves from medical professionals in the first place? Cui bono?

The current of modern liberalism flows in the direction of increasing personal freedom and individual rights. Such framing, in which only voluntary obligations are legitimate, turns the announcement of a child’s sex from an observation into an “assignment”; it makes puberty look like a sinister force pulling that child into a future he or she did not choose. The natural transition of girl to woman and boy to man ceases to be a socially supported matter of course and becomes instead a violation of autonomy.

The givenness of our sexed bodies used to be a sure thing, right up there with death and taxes. No one could opt in or out of one’s sex because there was no technology that claimed to offer such a service (and thus no “right” to it). Prior to the modern era, manhood and womanhood were realities to be received—first by birth, then by puberty, and finally by social initiation. Every person came to belong to either “the world of women” or “the world of men,” that asymmetric, incommensurable, complementary duality in which men and women relied on one another not only to make babies, but to make the world go ’round.

According to Catholic priest and philosopher Ivan Illich, gender is the instantiation of sex within the contours of a particular culture—a social dance full of responsibility and reciprocity. In his book Gender, Illich describes the separate and sovereign spheres of influence for men and women within the world of pre-industrial subsistence, each with their own unique tasks, tools, duties, perspectives, and expertise. Gender reflected the way that a people (a gens in Latin) perceived and organized themselves around this fundamental duality. These “vernacular” gendered worlds minimized competition and envy between the sexes by making their work distinct and non-interchangeable: labor was adapted to the limits and capacities of their environment, as well as to the limits and capacities of their differently sexed bodies. The boundaries generated creativity and productivity rather than extinguishing them.

These gendered worlds did not follow a universal pattern, as if all women do X and all men do Y the world over: they evolved to be as unique as a local culture’s food, music, clothing, and dialect. Such gendered diversity does not imply moral relativism. Some cultures afford women dignity, agency, and safety; others don’t. There isn’t one single right way to manifest man or woman (there is morally neutral variation), and yet how these divisions are enforced and navigated is not morally neutral. The policing of boundaries can be convivial; it can also be oppressive. Acknowledging the inevitability of local differences isn’t the same thing as condoning cruelty.

The traditional division between the sexes was also not a matter of “men work” while “women nurture,” because subsistence requires all-hands-on-deck elbow grease. Women tended to do tasks which coincided more easily with keeping half an eye on youngsters (like weaving), but they were never non-productive. Which sex did what task varied from valley to village. While in nearly all cultures, hunting large game and smelting metal belonged to the world of men, and cooking and infant care belonged to the world of women, many jobs might easily fall to either side—making fire, weaving baskets, preparing animal skins, planting and harvesting crops—revealing that the fact of there being “men’s work” and “women’s work” was constant even as the content of each category was flexible and locally determined. ^{As Illich’s biographer David Cayley describes,}

However much the customs, prerogatives, and obligations of men and women might vary from place to place and time to time, this much was universal: in all pre-industrial, pre-capitalist societies, two “gendered subsets” faced each other, defined each other, constituted each other. (452)

Within this older framework, a “generic” (or nonbinary) human was as impossible to imagine as a generic hand. Hands only come as right or left, and people only come as male or female (congenital disorders and rare ambiguities notwithstanding); they come that way because it works. “Each man and each woman outside of a push-button society depends for survival on the interplay of two hands,” Illich wrote, which is analogous to the way the two genders used to relate. “The two hands always act together according to two programs that are never the other’s mirror image” or mere shadow, constituting an “ambiguous complementarity” which is fruitful for the production of life’s necessities as well as for the procreation of more people (72-73). The division of labor by sex reinforced cooperation and prevented pride: only in a household containing both a man and a woman could everything needed for thriving actually get done. Watch your hands the next time you tie your shoes or prepare your dinner to see a working metaphor for subsistence gender.

If the gender binary represented creaturely limits, toil, and reproduction (which we do in part because we don’t live forever), then androgyny was a way to imagine transcending those mortal limits for divinity. To be above the need for sex was simultaneously to be above the need for toil and beyond the reach of death. To be “nonbinary” was to become a god. Ancient stories—Daedalus, Prometheus, the Tower of Babel—cautioned against technological hubris that attempted to transcend the boundaries of human nature and take God’s place. Part of being human is learning to work within these limits rather than seeking to annihilate them. Thus gendered worlds served a religious purpose alongside the practical one: the reinforcement of humility, the reminder to every man and every woman that you are not God.

The “reign of vernacular gender,” as Illich called it, was thus quite the heavy lifter—not perfect, by any means, but clearly functional. What might happen to humans who took work out of gender’s capable hands? What would biological sex mean to us if we no longer organized our daily tasks and social lives around that all-encompassing communal duality? The strange contortions that the word “gender” has undergone in our time are a result of gender no longer having a job to do. When gender ceases to be productive, it becomes oppressive or fashionable (or both).

Today the word “gender” elicits the presumption that we’re talking about one of two things: sex stereotypes (associated with gender roles) or gender identities (associated with the LGBTQ movement). Feminists framed gender negatively as a tool of patriarchal oppression, reducing it to a universal set of sexual stereotypes rooted in biological essentialism, as if certain behaviors and desires were unquestionably “masculine” or “feminine.” This makes gender the enemy of women’s equality. Trans rights activists, on the other hand, reframed gender positively as a form of self-expression: it’s the discovery and affirmation of “who you really are” (a.k.a. your soul).

Both the universalizing tendency (sex stereotypes) and its individualizing opposite (personal identity) are recent developments, symptomatic of gender being at loose ends in modernity and getting into trouble. The old gendered worlds didn’t care about your feelings because their purpose transcended individual desire and instead concerned individual obligation to the group. Vernacular gender was about belonging and usefulness.

The origins of sex stereotypes and gender identities are largely a story of changes in economics and technology. Our sexed bodies ceased to be a given we worked with through locally determined divisions of labor and became instead a personal problem created and then “solved by” the market. Industrial capitalism—the modern cash economy which runs on universal wage labor—requires androgynous, unisex workers to function like interchangeable parts of a machine, Illich argued. This economy has no use for gendered worlds but is rather actively hostile to them, preferring competitive individuals to gender’s cooperative duality. “Subsistence economy coincides with gendered existence,” Illich wrote. “Only the rise of commodity-intensive industrial society led to the loss of gender” and its replacement with an intractable form of sexism (94). “I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men. Of everything that economics measures, women get less,” Illich noted (4).

Capitalist economies are hostile to female bodies which are cyclical and seasonal, subject to menses and menopause, gestation and lactation—unlike the more predictable and impregnable bodies of men. Capitalism requires, and thus creates, genderless humans; it economically punishes those whose bodies won’t comply with its machine-like expectations (hence the enduring “gender pay gap,” which is mostly a mother pay gap). The female body is bad for business: this is a feature, not a bug, of economic development. It achieves its most extreme fulfillment in horrors like the coerced hysterectomies which female sugar cane cutters in India suffer from to sweeten our sodas. In a system that prioritizes standardization and efficiency over more humane values (like relationships), fertile women will always be interpreted by The Bottom Line as poor imitations of men. Just when we thought we’d gotten beyond the reach of Aristotelian prejudice, the female as “defective male” has become enshrined as an economic principle. “Sexism is clearly not the continuation of patriarchal power relations in modern societies,” Illich wrote. “Rather, it is a hitherto unthinkable individual degradation of one-half of humanity on socio-biological grounds” (34).

Is it any surprise that women have been suppressing their own fertility and delaying childbearing to the point where every single industrialized country (except Israel) has below replacement birth levels? Most women can only access educational and economic opportunities when motherhood is delayed, diminished, or denied, and the problem of wanted but “missing” children now exceeds the problem of unwanted childbearing. If in the old world, too much significance was attached to women’s childbearing capacities, we suffer now from the opposite: an epidemic of economically driven unplanned childlessness that catches us by surprise in our thirties. The process of smoothing out the differences between men and women sadly smoothes away the baby bump.

“Sex blind” economics molds persons into a nonbinary frame, repurposing the broken pieces of our locally gendered past into commodities and services for sale, which we require to stabilize our sense of self. Want to be a real woman? Apply this make-up, wear that dress, get those implants, adopt that tone, express these preferences. Want to be a real man? Go to this gym, drink that beer, drive this car, hide those feelings, watch these sports. Manhood and womanhood are no longer a relational world into which one is inducted by local mentors and to which one is responsible for making vital contributions for the sake of the household and the community: they are now the price you pay for a fragile identity always in need of shoring up with another purchase, another display. Economically generic humans don masculinity and femininity like a personal brand, and Christians are no exception.

According to queer philosopher Judith Butler, we’re all doing drag. She’s right: the destruction of subsistence reduces gender to a drag show. When womanhood becomes performative and purchasable, the fact that Kaitlyn Jenner has nicer nails than me actually does call my womanhood into question. Without the products and personal enthusiasms that signal femininity or masculinity to the wider world, each of us is merely human, an androgynous homo economicus whose time and labor are exchangeable for money, and whose body is thus exchangeable for any other human body. Economic and technological development denature sexual embodiment, making it a mere surface variation of an underlying neutral (i.e. neutered) human nature. Queerness and consumerism are thus of a piece, according to Marc Barnes: “By transforming gender from a received gift into a human achievement … our dearest queer theorists did the good work of their capitalist god, transforming a subsistent reality into a scarce commodity.” We should stop acting surprised at the cultural purchase queer theorists have secured today. While they are wrong to read today’s situation back into the pre-industrial past, when it comes to the present moment, they’re simply saying the quiet part out loud (gender is just a performance).

The historically new interchangeability of the sexes is often seen as the source of women’s liberation, and women in well-paid, high status professions are undoubtedly the winners in this scenario. But it is precisely this economic fungibility that makes us dependent on products, stereotypes, and feelings for our sense of self. The meaning of gender was withdrawn from local, practical, embodied social relations and relocated to reside within individuals and objects. We no longer belong to a gender: we feel it, we declare it, we perform it, we buy it. This is the trade-off of “gender equality”—if we define that equality in the industrialized sense, as interchangeability, as merely more of the same.

That increased freedom and opportunity for (some) women is accompanied by increased loneliness, confusion, social estrangement, and economic sexism. It’s a deeply disturbing fact with no satisfying solution that second wave feminism’s success at integrating women into the workforce and high status professions is one aspect of the same process that is now generating the explosion of gender identities and their lucrative “treatments.” We want women-only sports and spaces, and we want women’s equal access to education and fulfilling careers, but achieving these disparate goods through the logic of interchangeability has some serious downsides.

Some conservatives are tempted to respond by cosplaying a 1950s “trad” arrangement steeped in stereotypes. This nostalgia won’t do us any good and only does women immense harm. Besides, you’d have to go back to the 1450s, not the 1950s, to find widespread vernacular gender still intact in the West (see Mary Harrington’s account in Feminism Against Progress, 179-180). “Tradwives” aren’t traditional at all, Illich would argue: they are distinctively modern and fit “just so” within an economy that requires somebody to do all the low status unpaid work that exists as the necessary shadow of paid work.

But splitting the productive households of the past into external wage labor and internal shadow work means that mothers caring for their own children are now placed into an economically invisible, “non-productive,” low-status, and highly dependent category that is historically new (and due to suburbia and shrinking families, often quite lonely). Hence Betty Friedan’s discussion of “the problem that has no name,” the subsequent “Mommy wars,” and the ambivalence many mothers feel about being away from their preschool children to earn a paycheck.

It feels unsettling because what had formerly been joined together in one place (motherhood and work, with female companions), the modern economy has put asunder, forcing women to either pick one, or to toggle constantly between them, only to feel inadequate at both. Staying home means closeness to one’s young children, but at the cost of one-way dependence on a husband who may or may not be trustworthy (a situation ripe for abuse). Going to work means independence, security, and (for the lucky) intellectual fulfillment, but at the cost of lost time with the children, exhaustion, and an undercurrent of competition with the other breadwinner (who still might not help with the dishes). The market isn’t quite the liberation feminists promised it would be.

American historian Christopher Lasch reveals the irony of our situation. It’s no wonder, he says, that women envied men for their economic opportunities; hence the nanny or daycare appearing to free (some) women from household and childcare drudgery and facilitate their careers, self-discovery, and independence. And it’s no wonder that men envied women for their freedom from the corporate drudgery of the rat race and for their connection with the children; hence the emergence of the stay-at-home dad and paternity leave. Both sexes perceived that the other was free, while they were in chains (93-120). The flipside of our newly gained interchangeability was the novelty of gendered envy. Men and women have quarreled and sparred since time immemorial, but this grass-is-greener longing to swap places is new.

Such sexist arrangements described above and their inevitable reactions (of swapping, outsourcing, and ambivalence) weren’t a feature of subsistence culture. While the market played a minor role, most people didn’t work for an outside wage to live on (only the desperately poor were reduced to “wage slavery”), and work was seldom segregated from the home. Today’s households are, by contrast, sites of consumption and shadow work whose burden mostly falls on women, even women with outside jobs (hence the sexism of “the second shift”).

The productive households of the past were self-provisioning rather than commodity-dependent (that’s what “subsistence” means: not poverty and destitution, but productive contentment, simply having enough). People organized themselves according to gendered patterns of subsistence activity that drew from and cultivated the commons—agriculture, hunting, fishing, weaving, animal husbandry, etc.—or that functioned as a small family business. This meant that men and women actually needed one another to survive. This is a very different dynamic from one-way dependence on a sole (male) breadwinner. Such gendered interdependence is likewise the opposite of the desire to compete with, to replace, or to become the other sex. What capitalism broke, feminism attempted to compensate for, with highly mixed results. As usual, the most vulnerable and impressionable among us—children—bear the brunt of our mistakes.

By grasping the real root of both gender ideology and economic sexism (which are intertwined and cannot be addressed separately), Christians in particular can begin to recognize our own participation in these problems instead of looking for a scapegoat to blame, such as the Sexual Revolution, feminism, John Money, queer theory, or the so-called “gay agenda.”

The political alliance of fiscal libertarians with socially conservative evangelicals makes it difficult for Christians to look critically at capitalism. Our approach to religious liberty (which is undoubtedly a virtue) ends up looking like an analogue to the free market. Each denomination functions like a franchise with its own unique brand for attracting spiritual consumers and out-competing other congregations by offering a more appealing “worship experience” and better social programs. The ever-expanding drop-down list of gender identities follows the same market logic as denominationalism: there’s a special niche for everyone—scroll through to find yours! Capitalism and Protestantism grew up in the same soil, at the same time, among the same people. For better and for worse, they share a psychology, and there is no simple way to disentangle them.

We can see this market entanglement in church conflict over “women’s roles,” in the false dichotomy of complementarianism and egalitarianism. Complementarians instantiate economic sexism in a pattern of male headship and female submission (turning difference and reciprocity into hierarchical dependence). Egalitarians instantiate feminism’s logic of male-female interchangeability, papering over our very real sex differences in an effort to foster mutuality and compensate for men’s moral failures. Neither of these positions reflects vernacular gender. Both operate within the framework of industrial capitalism’s baked-in sexism (which complementarians sanctify) and feminism’s inadequate reaction to it (which egalitarians sanctify). Both project their modern interpretations back onto the past and into the Scriptures, claiming that their version of the sexes goes back to the early church. Neither side recognizes their own contingency and historical novelty. Despite the fact that the arguments tend to revolve around the legitimacy of “working mothers” and whether women can break through the spiritual glass ceiling and be hired as pastors, they do not recognize that the market has already framed this problem for them.

Illich refused to let Christians off the hook for this modern dilemma. Protestants’ entanglement with the market as Illich described it prevents them from addressing economic sexism, and rather allows that sexism to creep into the home and the church.

Illich claimed that the pathologies of modernity stem from the corruption of Christianity itself: corruptio optimi quae est pessima, he would often say. “The corruption of the best is the worst.” It was, after all, St. Paul who proclaimed that there is no longer male or female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:28). Whatever Paul may have meant by that originally, the desire to obliterate the gender binary is now a virtue untethered from Christianity itself. “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad,” G.K. Chesterton wrote, and virtues cut loose and isolated from the whole wander wildly and do terrible damage (26).

If the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism is a Protestant virtue gone mad, then queerness is a Catholic heresy. Illich, himself a Catholic priest whose criticism of the Church got him into trouble, believed his tradition was complicit in breaking down gendered worlds by turning the sacrament of confession into a nonbinary act: the sexless soul confessing its sexless sins to receive a gender-neutral penance. The compulsory intimacy of the confessional led to a “homogenizing perspective of sex,” he argued, in which the curate offered “genderless care” to individual souls, producing “innumerable conflicts between the old vernacular and the new Catholic models of gender. The Church’s pastoral care weakened the hold of local, self-limiting gender” (151). Individual conscience guided by the priest (insert “therapist” for today) replaced gendered probity. The LGBTQ movement represents the virtue of care for the non-conformist “secret soul” cut loose from community limits and priorities—a partial truth determined to flood the world with rainbows (i.e. with exceptions to the rule) and thus drown out the one difference that really matters: sex.

But as Matt Walsh epitomizes, it’s much more satisfying to “skewer the Libs” than to engage in self-examination. It’s uncomfortable to recognize the trade-offs of the free market and the subtle ways it morally deforms us; it’s scary to admit that capitalism and bad therapy have a more corrosive effect on the family than the legalization of gay marriage does. Such realism would require seeing the LGBTQ movement (particularly its post-Obergefell TQ activism) as symptoms rather than as causes of our culture’s sexual confusion.

If gender ideology, which invents “trans kids” as a group in need of special rights and medical treatments, is merely one symptom among many, then what do we call the underlying illness that affects us all? Author Paul Kingsnorth calls it “The Machine,” that economic and technological system which sequesters everything natural, dismembers it from its relational context, slaps it with a price tag, and sells it back to us as a product or a service (think of Joni’s Mitchell’s “paved paradise”). Handsome profits are made in the name of progress, privacy, freedom, and choice. The ever-expanding market has gone beyond producing commodities to turning us into commodities.

As Mary Harrington argues in her masterful book Feminism Against Progress, the advance of personal freedom always opens up a space for the market to get its foot in the door; or rather, the market provides a way for us to bypass natural bodily limits as well as to get our desires met without having to rely on unchosen relationships with strings attached (like family and neighbors). “The utopian vision is one that frees all of us from our unchosen physiological obligations,” Harrington says. “The market reality is infinitely hackable human beings who are being privatized as meat commodities by the biotech industry.” The freedom our modern political order promises us seems inseparable from our power to purchase it and from our conception of such purchases as “rights.”

The creation of “trans kids” is a complex, multifaceted catastrophe that combines at least five problems—the uniquely modern search for identity, iatrogenic market-based medicine, gender-as-a-product, the economic assumption of sex interchangeability, and the power of social media to shape desire—with the age-old problem of unvirtuous men abusing their freedom and power (content warning). The loss of gendered worlds was the opening of Pandora’s box: the transitioning of children is the latest (and possibly the worst) in a long line of tragedies spilling out from it, alongside economic sexism, the erosion of women-only spaces and sports, the loneliness epidemic, the “birth dearth,” and the dwindling of lasting and fruitful marriages. The solution isn’t as simple as voting for one party over another or rebooting Leave it to Beaver.

I claim no direct causal link between the death of traditional gendered worlds and the rise of gender identities, but rather that the logic of interchangeability and androgyny on which industrial capitalism runs makes transgenderism not merely plausible but likely. The disintegration of communal belonging and the personal isolation that this system perpetuates make the need for an identity all the more acute. The assumption of growth which makes the search for new markets endless lends itself to the exploitation of the human body as a “meat commodity” and to the cultivation of gender-distressed people and autogynephilic males as consumer cohorts ready to purchase everything from binders to high heels to surgeries. The expansion of medicine from the healing of disorders to the creation of bespoke identities through à la carte interventions is merely the response of healthcare to market incentives. If capitalism as a path to personal liberty is baked into the American experiment, then the problem of gender ideology is as American as apple pie. Identity is what the market sells back to us after destroying the belongingness that subsistence made inevitable, ^{forcing us to buy what our ancestors had for free.}

We created a historically novel environment in which sexed bodies and sexed boundaries were a problem, and we’re adapting to what we made. As Illich explains in his book Medical Nemesis:

An advanced industrial society is sick-making because it disables people from coping with their environment and, when they break down, substitutes a “clinical,” or therapeutic, prosthesis for the broken relationships. People would rebel against such an environment if medicine did not explain their biological disorientation as a defect in their health, rather than as a defect in the way of life which is imposed on them or which they impose on themselves. (169)

Our culture imposes the sickness of gender dysphoria through a thousand pathways—technology, porn, abuse, envy, social contagion, homophobia, sex stereotyping, endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our environment, to name just a few—and then does the two things our culture does best: come up with an exciting new market “solution” and hallow a new group for civil rights protections. We do these things compulsively, because America has its own collective identity which needs shoring up: the freedom of the market and the freedom afforded through the expansion of rights helps us know that we’re still good Americans, we’re still facilitating everyone’s pursuit of happiness through free choice (and as goes America, so goes the Western world).

Liberalism’s dream of individual autonomy requires technology that replaces relationships and nullifies gender, maiming our mutual need for one another and turning reciprocity into competition. The gendered dance has become a manic every-human-for-itself rave, one underwritten by technology. That space of meaningful cooperation which works within physical limits outside of the market is the only space where gender (in its original sense) can grow. To help people accept their sexed bodies as they are, we will have to upend long-standing American assumptions that are shared across the political spectrum.

We can begin by questioning the ubiquity of the market and the allure of the freedom it promises. We can question the way new technology generates entitlement to certain outcomes and lifestyles, which are then framed as positive rights—rights which aren’t just freedom from interference, but are rights to certain benefits which others are then obligated to provide for you. “If someone claims a right and it proves difficult to find a corresponding duty or good that it protects—if there is no reason for the ‘right’ other than freedom for its own sake—we should be on guard,” Frank Devito cautions in his Front Porch Republic essay “Rights and Duties.”

Technology generates its own post-hoc moral justification: by inflating our sense of what is possible, technology expands the domain of our desires, and increases the sense of what we ought to be free to do or have, and what society supposedly owes us. The Pill generates the “right” for a woman to have sex without pregnancy (just like a man). The drug PrEP, which shields gay men who have frequent unprotected sex from acquiring HIV, generates the “right” to an identity based on promiscuity (which is now rendered as harmless as straight monogamy). IVF, sperm donation, and surrogacy generate the “right” to parenthood for the infertile, for LGBTQ couples, and for singles. Cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and genital surgeries generate the “right” to a gender identity that differs from one’s biology.

But these are not rights, and they have no corresponding duty. Hormonal contraception, pre-exposure prophylaxis, assisted reproduction, and “gender-affirming care” are transhumanist technologies advertising themselves to us through the appealing language of “equality,” preaching a new gospel: There is neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight, neither fertile nor infertile, neither “cis” nor trans, for we are all one in the fulfillment of our desires, having equal outcomes through the grace of Science. We have become dependent on the technological and the transactional for our identities and happiness. ^{Instead of learning to cope, adapt, connect, and grieve—to grow moral muscle through reality’s resistance to our desires—we pay for a workaround and remain fragile and alone. Virtue is replaced with technique.}

We need to reorient our dependence away from the medical market and towards one another. The Machine is on a mission to colonize and commodify every single aspect of our lives, promising to increase our personal control and minimize unpleasant obligations: the framework of positive rights opens wide the door for this intrusion. It might feel good to blame the Left for our society’s sexual ills, since they’re the ones who hesitate to say out loud what a woman is, but we’re all stuck in the same economic boat. Being able to define a woman with words is worthwhile, but it’s not the same thing as fostering the conditions in which women and men can actually live together in cooperation and conviviality instead of competition and hierarchy. “Illich was looking not to restore the patriarchy,” writes Brian C. Anderson in First Things, “but to show how the economic logic of scarcity could be kept within limits, with the hope, again, of defending a realm of convivial life.”

I’m not advocating a return to universal yeoman farming, or the exclusion of women from the work of their choice in some misguided effort to enforce top-down in the post-industrial world what historically emerged ground-up in the pre-industrial world. We can’t simply roll back the clock. We have to start with where we are (which has its benefits) and move forward. We must be honest with ourselves about the conditions that neuter us, that pit men and women against each other, that value “free to be me” and “you do you” over fruitful bonds that last. This requires understanding the past as something other than a dark age we’ve dusted off our feet, steering clear of both chronological snobbery and rosy nostalgia. As C.S. Lewis observed about those from previous eras, “People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.” Whatever we create to cope with the unsustainability of the present will not be a mere repetition of the past but something new.

Ivan Illich’s book is a history of the annihilation of gender by economic forces, and as such, it is a eulogy: “We must face the sad loss of gender,” he wrote. “I have no strategy to offer. I refuse to speculate on the probabilities of any cure” (179). When he wrote Gender in the early ’80s, he saw clearly the ways that women’s wellbeing was sacrificed for the sake of a sexist economy. He didn’t foresee the explosion of the gender identity market that took off ten years ago, though his critique of sexist economics and medical iatrogenesis (of which gender-affirming care is the epitome) provides a framework for understanding why it happened.

Illich appears to share the tragic vision of economist Thomas Sowell: because humans are deeply flawed, there are no solutions, “but only trade-offs, that still leave many unfulfilled and much unhappiness in the world” (113). Are the social and sexual trade-offs of The Machine still worth it to us? Are gender-distressed, iatrogenically sterilized youth and plummeting marriage and birth rates an acceptable cost for maintaining the economic status quo of endless growth? We are not the first civilization to sacrifice our children to Moloch, but we may be the first to call such sacrifices “healthcare” and to claim our children have a “right” to it.

Illich exhorts us to austerity, clear-sightedness, and a willingness to renounce the comforts of our neutered economic system for the sake of recovering the commons (where gender once grew). Illich invites us to think in terms of “limits that would restrain professional expertise at a politically determined line and allow an opposing space for what he called the vernacular or the homemade” (24). Rather than laying out a plan of action, he describes the crisis and puts the ball back in our court. In his book’s final line, Illich says our hope lies in the rejection of sentimentality and in openness to surprise.

I can’t help but think of the surprise of Christ in the temple courtyard, face stern and pitiless, overturning the money changers’ tables, disrupting business as usual, shocking the disciples. In his zeal for the temple, Jesus forcefully expelled profit from a place where it did not belong. The human body is a temple too (1 Cor. 6:19). Can we not drive out those who exploit such sacred space for private enterprise? Must even the human body—its sexual development and potential—be open for business as a “house of trade” (Jn. 2:13-22)?

During Lent this year, my priest encouraged the parish to “befriend our obligations.” That phrase stuck with me. It’s a first step towards an answer to my opening question: Why must we buy what our ancestors had for free? The truth is, we don’t have to. If we choose to befriend our many obligations—to connect with other people, to love, to serve, to create, to borrow, to lend, to repair, to celebrate, to support—instead of buying a product or a service—then we are cultivating fertile ground for a healthy form of gendered cooperation to (perhaps) re-emerge. We need a sphere in which the state and market are held at bay, so that community and culture can take root.

To do this we must reaccustom ourselves to what Illich called “the art of suffering and dying,” the cultivation of virtues that only grow when it hurts—virtues we nip in the bud by habitual tech use to annihilate pain and inconvenience. We are overdue for a Luddite revival of the sort Wendell Berry embodied when he criticized the “rootless and placeless monoculture of commercial expectations and products.” We need to recover the “local ways and conditions” of an “authentic community,” which Berry says is “made less in reference to who we are than to where we are” (125-173). Belonging to one another in a gendered way will necessarily involve belonging to a particular place and to the people nearby, because gender is a homespun cloth cut to suit, not a one-size-fits-all abstraction (such as “biblical manhood and womanhood”). That being said, gender always involves limits, and we are conditioned to view limits as antithetical to freedom rather than as freedom’s blessed foundation. As Illich said, “‘Blessed are the poor’ who voluntarily set community limits to what shall be enough and therefore good enough for our society” (92).

The virtues of befriending and belonging are already growing in many households, churches, and neighborhoods which offer non-transactional mutual support: tool-sharing, casserole-giving, block parties and potlucks, free babysitting, hand-written notes, the loading of the moving truck, the shared cups of coffee in the kitchen, the mowing of an elderly neighbor’s lawn, the gathering of friends for the sheer joy of one another’s company—all the things we do for people within arm’s reach simply because we care. As Mary Harrington describes, these quotidian activities are “bulwarks against the voracity of a transactional worldview that would commodify even our deepest social instincts.” These things center around the same things gender was originally concerned with—belonging and usefulness.

These moral muscles are flexed in homes where husbands and wives divvy up tasks not according to sex stereotypes or some 50/50 faux equality, but according to what works best for them as a couple, a practicality that is at the very heart of gender’s ambiguous complementarity and its respect for conditions on the ground. Dividing life’s tasks into sovereign spheres of expertise which create productive interdependency is the most immediate experience of something akin to a gendered world (in microcosm) that any of us in the industrialized West are likely to enjoy, although it will remain fragile in the absence of extended family and well-known neighbors. Vernacular gender must of necessity be bigger than any one home, but smaller than a whole country: it thrives on local connections.

Such arrangements make clear that gender is not an individual identity, a way to “put women in their place,” or a sex-specific list of biblical virtues, but a matter of provisional and prudential custom. Gender is a purposeful group project—a way to get stuff done. The home can once again become a place of cooperative production and not merely isolated consumption, argues Josh Pauling, “bring(ing) the family back together and restor(ing) sovereignty and security that for generations defined the traditional household—the oikonomia.” Perhaps if we gave our young people more genuine responsibility, if we actually depended on them, they would be less tempted to fall down the internet’s self-harm rabbit hole by “discovering themselves” on TikTok, and would be less drawn to the veneer of usefulness and belonging that activist groups promise.

Forrest Smith is a young man who was manipulated into medical transition (including the removal of his testicles), despite many misgivings along the way. Within a month of surgery, he was suicidal with regret. He detransitioned after he was forced by a COVID infection to return to his parents’ home where they cared for him. He then reconnected with his elderly grandparents and became their caretaker until they died. As his health improved, he re-entered the workforce at a business that had connections with his family. Forrest began to recover from the trauma of transition by giving and receiving bodily care, by doing rewarding work near home, and by being trained at a community college to work with his hands. He rediscovered that he belonged, and he got to work being useful to his family and community. Forrest is finding his footing as a man even as he continues to grieve and work through traumatic flashbacks related to his medical abuse. His story exemplifies the very things that Wendell Berry said would bring restoration to someone in an identity crisis: “(T)he lost identity would find itself by recognizing physical landmarks, by connecting itself responsibly to practical circumstances; it would learn to stay put in the body to which it belongs and in the place to which preference or history or accident has brought it; it would, in short, find itself in finding its work” (115-16).

Learning to live within our own bodies’ limitations is a component of renewing the possibility of vernacular gender and undermining gender ideology. Medicalized gender dysphoria isn’t the sole symptom of our social sickness. Overeating, burning the midnight oil, workaholism, watching porn, getting lost in our smartphones, tipping back a few glasses too many—these are examples of blowing past natural bodily limits to alleviate psychological suffering just as much as cross-sex hormones are. We all need help living within limits, especially when technology promises us an end to suffering, a path to happiness, a “true self.” Embracing limits is the same virtuous effort to which our gender dysphoric neighbors are called: to befriend our bodies as they are and to treat ourselves with a proper balance of gentleness, humor, and self-control.

The whole burning question of identity will begin to fade into the background only when we find a way to belong to one another, to be useful to one another—in the flesh, in a particular place—a decidedly communal and local solution rather than an individual or virtual one. Identity is not discovered by self-examination and then concretized by our purchasing power and verbal declarations; neither is it guaranteed to us by the state (and provided through the market) as a “right.” Identity is first received from the bodies we belong to and from our families who love us into being; it is subsequently forged by one in-the-flesh connection at a time, in the most ordinary of ways, and in the physical place that we find ourselves. Identity is less of a revelation than a slowly built, context-dependent habit formed by love. And because we are our bodies—fearfully and wonderfully made by an incarnate God—identity is cultivated by “body-affirming care,” both given and received. It cannot be bought.

When we befriend our obligations and embrace our embodied limits, the answer to the question, “Who benefits?” becomes clear. We all do.

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1. Genspect. “There Are Two and ONLY Two Sexes — Heather Heying,” January 4, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SVbN6tIySc. Starting at minute mark 38:16, Dr. Heying explains anthropological research showing “what sex does what task” in 185 different cultures. The study she references is: Murdock and Provost 1973. Factors in the division of labor by sex: A cross-cultural analysis. Ethnology, 12(2): 203-225. ↑

2. Many thanks to Jessica Otey for these words, and for all of her insights on Ivan Illich and transgenderism. I couldn’t have written this piece apart from our friendship and the countless hours of conversation she and I have enjoyed. ↑

3. On the connection between positive rights and dependence on the market to provide us an identity or service to which we feel entitled, listen to the Read Fems podcast episode 13: “On being for our children” (time stamp 40:37). ↑