In Search of the Gendered Soul

In this GenderCraft essay I suggest that believing in Gender Identity, and all it implies socially and medically, is a mysticism that is based in and mirrors the belief in an immaterial soul

Gender Identity, in the way it’s commonly used today is best understood as a modern rebrand of the very common belief in a human soul. The soul is a prevalent idea, the majority of humans who are alive, as well as those who have lived in the many thousands of years preceding us, believe(d) in some concept of a soul - a primordial essence from which the “I” emerges. Our predisposition to this belief, I suspect, is an important conduit for the emergence of the philosophical abstraction of a gender identity.

In philosophy this separation between a body and its essence is referred to as Cartesian Dualism or Mind-Body Dualism. It is the belief that the mind is meaningfully distinct from the processes of our earthly body. This isn’t something that only religious people believe. I suspect that if you survey atheists and agnostics, the majority would probably fall on the side of something beyond the body needing to exist to furnish the selfness of the self (what it’s like to be you). Given society’s orientation towards a dualistic understanding of humans, it’s easy to imagine why belief in gender identity (what I’ll be referring to as gender-body dualism) is such a easy mental step. It’s simpler to put a new bumper sticker on an old car that build a new one.

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One of the pillars of Christian apologetics is the claim that the persistence of ethical norms in human societies is evidence of a divinely inspired soul. The logic being: since societies everywhere have come up with similar moral norms, that means that the seeming knowledge we have about what is right and wrong is an innate and universal human property and opposed to arbitrarily invent social ideas. The vehicle of that universal knowledge, the seat of moral intuition and conscience, is an ephemeral and unfalsifiable thing called the ‘soul’ or the ‘mind’.

Similarly, the gender-body dualists comprehend our individual tendency towards “masculine” and “feminine” norms of behavior as a consequence of something essential within us. As one of the prophets of gender identity, the philosopher Judith Butler, puts it:

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.

In the same way that the claim that an immaterial morally imbued soul in all of us produced the moral norms in various societies, so too does the immaterial “imitation for which there is no original” (gender) produce the “notion of the original” (the varied cultural expressions of sexual dimorphism). To marshal evidence for this claim, gender-body dualists often point to various pre-modern and modern cultures that have innovated social categories beyond the reproductive binary. That those social categories were constructed in those cultures, to them, argues in favor of the existence of gender essences from which these categories must have been drawn. Sound familiar?

If it’s not clear that this is a hard dualistic proposition, note how the lazy metaphor “born in the wrong body” has been made literal to the point of forming the basis of a medical diagnosis. What (or who) exists which stands separate from the “wrong” body that requires a medical intervention to fix or realign? What exactly are these doctors realigning people to?

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Both the christian and the gendered conceptions of where ideas come from (in society and in ourselves) rests on a couple of inversions.

First, we are not mediums of disembodied abstract concepts. Eternal other-worldly knowledge (divine or otherwise) isn’t channeled by us into our mortal plane and collective social memory. The development, modification and transmission of beliefs and customs, within and across cultures, is an incremental societal process. This process operates over time and is contingent on material realities. Key amongst them is the physical world we inhabit and observe and the narrow bounds of our evolved bodies with their associated physiological/social implications. Contingency doesn’t imply a teleology, it simply constrains the possibilities of ideological development. We stumble upon, reproduce and then mutate fictions that appear to have utility to us given whatever constraints they exist in. This is true for both moral norms as well categories of social organization (and every other idea and belief for that matter).

Some of these social fictions end up correlating robustly to scientifically testable claims, but most others do not. This doesn’t mean the latter fictions don’t serve meaningful social functions and shouldn’t be maintained, just that there is an important delineation between the two classes of fiction (falsifiable and unfalsifiable) that should be recognized.

Second, we are not born pre-configured with any knowledge and beliefs. Biological reproduction has no facility to encode complex societal abstractions. What is socially constructed can only be reproduced in each of us through social transmission. We are individually and uniquely socialized into a particular set of norms of expression and behavior through the mechanisms of observation, mimicry and social reinforcement (accelerated with ever-advancing social technology such as language, ritual, media, education, etc…). More critically we internalize what we learn about the social interpretation of these behaviors - what social meaning and value our cultural context assigns to them. Our behaviors and feelings emerge from the daily and additive process of social development (an interplay of nature and nurture), our interpretation of those behaviors and feelings (what categories and meaning we assign to them) comes entirely from the social fictions we’re embedded in.

To clarify the distinction between the materialist and the dualist view on behavior and feelings. The materialist would say: “I am behaving/feeling in a way that my particular society happens to interpret as meaning X”. The dualist would say: “I am behaving/feeling this way because I am X”. In the second phrase the two “I”s are different entities: the first “I” is the body, the second “I” the mind or essence - a “ghost in the machine”. What, in the materialist view, appears as an act of interpretation after the fact - contingent on social context - for the dualist, is an innate essence that already exists within us, which precedes and determines behaviors, feelings and beliefs.

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It’s important to note that not all, or even most, people who believe in souls believe in our modern form of gender-body dualism. It’s likely that those who are deeply religious and already have a thick conception of a soul would have room for this novel form of gender identity in their construct. Nor does it mean that people who reject the idea of a supernatural soul intellectually, are immune to its intuitive appeal or are immune to other kinds of fallacious reasoning leading to the same conclusion. For example, some might use the word ‘psyche’ or ‘mind’ instead of ‘soul’ believing they have entered the realm of the scientific through this linguistic swaperoo. The problem is that what they attribute to the psyche, and the impossible implications they draw from their formulation of it, are in all cases identical to those of a ‘soul’ and are equally unfalsifiable.

Generalizing the Concept

Whatever forces and incentives motivate the formation of a novel belief, the form it takes, if it is to be successful, will need to borrow heavily from existing beliefs that already have purchase in society. For example, the successful rise of Christianity within the Roman Empire depended largely on a process called syncretism, the absorption of existing religious traditions, Hellenistic or otherwise, that were deeply entrenched in Roman society. From iconography, festivals and church structure - to more abstract premises like Divine Sonship and the articulation of Christianity as a Mystery Religion all mirrored Hellenistic, Pagan and Near Eastern beliefs. An Epic Remix

So when assessing why gender identity belief (as opposed to any other possible mysticism) appeared and succeeded, the question to ask is what existing mysticism does it most look like. To me, it very much appears to be a specific instance of Mind-Body dualism. This helps us understand the facility by which it spread, and simultaneously, the fragile philosophical and scientific ground on which it stands.