Self-creation only Dehumanises us
By Joel Looper, First Things.
Begotten or Made? by Oliver O’Donovan, Davenant Press, 143 pages.
Think about it,” my friend said, his voice tinged with aggression. “Why did you become a man? Because you didn’t have any other option socially. Wouldn’t it be better if kids didn’t have such constraints on who they could be?”
My friend (let’s call him Jim) had a preteen with no history of gender dysphoria who had recently come out as nonbinary. Jim was supportive, even enthusiastic. He shared his story with local news and invited questions and dialogue from our small church. So I asked him over to my home to hear more and, when the moment seemed right, express my fears for his family.
Which is undoubtedly why Jim preempted me by asking why I chose and continued to choose the male gender. To reply that, lacking power to swap my male gametes and DNA for female, I had no such choice would have cut too quickly to the heart of the matter. So I deflected the question.
Biding my time did nothing to assuage Jim’s anger. For him, expressing or even implying concern with his parenting choices or his child’s decisions was out of bounds. By voicing that concern, which I eventually did more explicitly, I made him and his child “unsafe.” He seems, in fact, to have experienced my fear for his child as tantamount to assault. Our friendship was over.
……………………………..
Happily, these forty-year-old lectures have been reissued in a slim volume that includes a new introduction by Matthew Lee Anderson and a retrospective by O’Donovan. Begotten or Made? remains relevant for its clarifying theological analyses of abortion, in vitro fertilization (and the concomitant disposal of embryos), surrogacy, contraception, marriage, and more. O’Donovan begins, however, by addressing what in 1983 was called “transsexual surgery,” a topic his original audience might have thought a waste of time but will strike no one that way today.
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