Page Summary
- Thinking of man and woman as two options “assigned” at birth makes an unexamined assumption about sex: that there is a base, unsexed “person” on top of which a subsequent “sex” is added.
- The biological, empirically observable factors of sex are inseparable from the underlying metaphysical reality of personal sex.
- Sex isn’t just a “part” of who a person is. It’s determined by the relationship of the whole person to the act of bringing another whole person into existence.
- To reject those definitions would entail a rejection of our parents’ roles in our own coming into existence.
Is biological sex inherent to each person?
Yes. Each person is either a woman, inherently organized to generate new human life within herself, through sexual union with a man, or is a man, inherently organized to generate new human life in relation to a woman, through sexual union with her.
Ok, but what does that mean?
Listen to this article
“What is a woman?”
Danielle had been hearing the question more and more often lately. For that matter, what is a man? She had never really thought about it up until the last few years; she just kind of assumed that she was what it said on her birth certificate. Recently, though, she was hearing about people who didn’t share her experience of fitting neatly into one of the two categories. She didn’t want to impose her way of identifying on other people, especially if it would cause them pain, so maybe “woman” and “man” meant whatever people wanted them to mean?
The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus be a sign of it.
St. John Paul II, Theology of the Body 19
Sometimes people think of man and woman as two options “assigned” at birth. Yet, this line of thought makes an unexamined assumption about sex: that there is a base, unsexed “person” on top of which a subsequent “sex” is added, similar to how dye of a certain color is subsequently added to cloth.
Even those who try to defend the conventional understanding of sex unintentionally assume something similar. There are four options they commonly suggest as non-arbitrary determinations of sex: chromosomal (XX or XY sex chromosomes), hormonal (prevalence of testosterone or estrogen and progesterone), gonadal (internal reproductive organs), and genital (external reproductive anatomy).
But, when they don’t all agree, which one is definitive?
What we mean by biological sex isn’t actually biological at rock bottom. The biological, empirically observable factors are inseparable from the underlying metaphysical reality of personal sex. Those factors ordinarily work together, but on the rare occasion that they don’t, it doesn’t change the fundamental reality of either maleness or femaleness, it just makes the reality more difficult to observe.
But, isn’t it all just plumbing? Why should some body part determine who we are?
It isn’t really accurate to talk about body “parts” in the way that we might talk about “parts” of a car or a Lego set. If a wheel is removed from a car, it remains a wheel. By contrast, if a foot is removed from a human, it ceases to be a foot and soon decomposes. A foot exists in order to walk, but it can’t walk unless it works in concert with an ankle, a leg, blood vessels, a nervous system, and so on. A foot’s very activity of walking depends on belonging to a whole, therefore the whole determines its being. It’s the existence of the whole that actually determines sex. Specifically, it’s the relationship of a whole person to the act of bringing another whole person into existence.
Generating new human life is done by the whole person, not merely a part. It’s more accurate to speak about sex, not so much as a removable part of a person, but as an aspect. If you were to look at Danielle across a room, you would see a different aspect of her than if you were to hear her speaking in the next room. Her “across a room” aspect and her “speaking” aspect are both inseparable from Danielle as a person.
Sex is likewise an aspect of a person. Unlike any other human act, though, generating life involves a total gift of self, including the soul’s highest abilities of knowing and loving. There’s a reason that the word “knowledge” can mean not just the union between a mind and what it knows, but also the sexual union between a woman and a man.
Moreover, sexual union is one act performed by a man and a woman, not two acts, because it has one potential effect: another whole person. This is indicated by the fact that the human reproductive system is the only system in the body that is incomplete in itself. A single person can process oxygen (the proper function of the respiratory system) or ingest food (the proper function of the digestive system), but no single person can procreate (the proper function of the reproductive system) without working in concert with a person of the opposite sex who has a complementary reproductive system.
As such, we can offer the following definitions of the sexes:
Woman– an adult human person whose body and soul are organized to generate new human life within herself, through sexual union with a man.
Man– an adult human person whose body and soul are organized to generate new human life in relation to a woman, through sexual union with her.
If Danielle didn’t believe the first definition was true about herself, she couldn’t believe it to be true about her mother either, without a resulting contradiction. If she rejected the definitions for her parents, she would implicitly reject the necessary conditions of her own coming-into-being as their daughter in the first place. If they had not personally generated her through their respective capacities, then there would be no Danielle to reject the definition at all.
We can adapt the definitions to apply specifically to her parents:
Danielle’s mom– the only adult human person whose body and soul are organized to generate Danielle within herself, through sexual union with Danielle’s dad.
Danielle’s dad– the only adult human person whose body and soul are organized to generate Danielle in relation to Danielle’s mom, through sexual union with her.
If those definitions were false, she would not exist. Therefore, biological sex is necessary to her existence. To reject this would raise a question:
Is Danielle the daughter of two mere bodies, or is she the daughter of two embodied persons? (search keywords: trans, transgender, lgbt)