The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory is a beautiful, complex work, as much a meditation as an argument. Abigail Favale weaves robust logic and up-to-date research with personal narrative and a deep awareness of the goodness of creation. As she presents an analysis of the gender paradigm from her perspective as a Catholic theologian and gender studies lecturer, Favale stops along the way to marvel at the intricacies of the body and the organic nature of one’s journey through life. It is this literary pacing which makes this book a refreshing offering amidst the current Christian responses to the transgender challenge. Rather than rushing off to battle her opponents after a few cursory remarks on Genesis 1–2, Favale has the confidence to revel repeatedly in the dignity and physicality of God’s good design of humanity. This imbues her arguments with an earthiness which lends them weight as well as provides a constant reminder of what is at stake in the gender debate—the rejection of something that is very good.

One has only to turn to her chapter titles (‘Heretic’, ‘Cosmos’, ‘Waves’, ‘Control’, ‘Wholeness’, ‘Gift’, to name but a few) to recognise that Favale has a mind capable of perceiving universals amid the particulars. That is to say, while her argument includes her own personal experience of womanhood, pregnancy, and mental health, as well as the friends and students she has encountered along the way, she never loses sight of her main thesis: ‘the gender paradigm is feminism’s offspring, and it has proven … to be an Oedipal one’ (p. 32). A rigorous academic, Favale’s conviction on this matter is also a personal one. Prior to her conversion (detailed in her first book, Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018]) she dabbled in manifestations of feminism which led her naturally and inevitably to embrace the gender paradigm, which argues that ‘“woman” and “man” are language-based identities that can be inhabited by anyone. Because truth is just a story we tell ourselves, all self-told stories are true’ (p. 31). It is here that she balked—and it is here that we can learn from her journey.

In ‘Cosmos’, Favale points out that the man in Genesis 2 recognises several things about the woman simply from her body. He notices that she is similar to him, different from him, and also that together they are able to unite in a unique way, making a whole (p. 39). Not only is this a moment of rapturous dignity, but for Favale it holds out a principle which the gender paradigm disregards: the body reveals the person. And what sort of bodies has God made? Bodies that, although contrasting, together create a union which trumpets inclusivity—at its very heart, a binary view of gender is not one of sterile, defensive survival, but life-producing expansiveness. She goes on to point out that it is only once Adam sees Eve that he renames himself as man: ‘it is through encountering her nature that he is able to truly understand his own’ (p. 43). Thus, the gender paradigm and the Genesis paradigm stand in stark contrast: the former argues that reality is created by human words, the latter that human words describe what God has already spoken into existence. It is no surprise to Favale that many of us today are at war with ourselves, for we have ‘lost sight of the truth that to see a body is to see a person, a person made in the image of God’, and so we can be tempted to try to erase ourselves (p. 46, emphasis original). What fig leaves once sought to accomplish (Gen 3:7), surgical knives now seek to effect.

‘Waves’ is an insightful overview of the various waves of feminist thought. ‘Control’ argues that for many the culturally valued ideal of ‘autonomy’ is threatened by feminine ‘bodily fertility’, and so the latter is feared and suppressed (p. 111). Indeed, as a central tenet of modern feminism, Favale argues, autonomy has contributed to a rise in ‘consumer sex’ (p. 110). Ultimately, however, this ideal of bodily autonomy ‘is fashioned from the norm of male embodiment’; autonomy becomes the ability to have sex without falling pregnant (pp. 112–13). It has also had the consequence of altering ‘a woman’s sense of herself as a fertile being, cultivating instead a consciousness of assumed sterility’ (p. 104). This alteration of the idea of what it means to be female, alongside the separation of sex from procreation, has ‘prompted a cascade of disconnection that has brought us to the gender bedlam of the present. Biological sex has been split off from gender, woman from female, man from male, body from desiring will’ (p. 114). Wherever one lands on the topic of contraception, and Favale holds the traditional Catholic view, it is difficult, after reading this chapter, to argue that the ensuing bodily disconnection has done society much good.

In a chapter entitled ‘Sex’, Favale gives her answer to the question, ‘What is a woman?’ A woman, she argues, is a human with the potential to gestate (p. 128). By focussing on potentiality rather than ability, she holds that a woman is more than a function; she is a person. This might seem obvious, but Favale rightly recognises that this way of thinking is a bulwark against the ‘fragmentation’ and ‘Potato Head doll’ thinking offered by the gender paradigm (p. 122). If someone’s biological sex is inextricable from their personhood, it cannot be changed or rearranged; a person cannot become another person. For Favale this is tied to her understanding of the body as a sacrament, where ‘the visible reveals the invisible’ (p. 136), and while her language may be distinctively Catholic, all Christians should indeed seek to see ‘every human being, through the illuminating mystery of the Incarnation’ (p. 139).

In ‘Gender’, Favale examines the way in which the word ‘gender’ has become something subjective, something with which one can identify based ‘on how one “feels”’ (p. 155). She argues that when this happens, individuals are actually identifying with a collection of stereotypes (p. 158). It has to be this way, because a man cannot know what it is to feel like a woman, and so he can only ever identify with what he imagines it feels like (p. 157). This, in turn, simply solidifies existing stereotypes, which leads to further confusion. Characteristically, Favale ends her chapter in a celebration, here of the beauty of female-only spaces (like the women’s locker room at the local pool), where women can see other women’s bodies in all their diversity, a ‘concrete image that can contradict the harmful fictions displayed everywhere else’ (p. 163).

The final three chapters linger over the importance of embracing one’s humanity and, in particular, one’s sexed embodiment. Viewing the largely female phenomenon of rapid-onset gender dysphoria as a form of protest against hypersexualisation, Favale states that ‘the better rebellion, and the more difficult one, is learning to see one’s beauty and dignity as a woman amidst a culture that denies it’ (p. 174). Even more important, however, is realising that to be embodied is to be the recipient of a divine gift (p. 239).

There is much to applaud in Favale’s book. While Protestant readers may find the emphasis on the sacramental and the iconographic aspects of the body unfamiliar, her arguments are lucid, up-to-date, and retain a sense of beauty and wonder that is much needed in the Christian response to the transgender phenomenon. I thoroughly recommend it.

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