Gender: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?

Gender: What Is It and Why Does It Matter? | Maria Fedoryka, Ph.D. | Homiletic & Pastoral Review


We Americans face a state of affairs relating to marriage and family … (where we) must now attempt to show why the divinely-instituted laws of marriage and family are binding not only for Christians, but hold true for everyone.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are
hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to
notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real
foundations of his inquiry do not strike a person at all….And this
means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and
most powerful. 1

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words here apply to the man-woman difference:
in the reality of marriage in its entirely self-evident and foundational
character, as well as in its absolute centrality to human existence.
Not long ago, the idea of having to explain them would have seemed absurd to most. 2
This distinction between man and woman, the magnificent reality of
romantic and spousal love, the permanent and devoted union of marriage
for which this love yearns, and its happy “overflow” into the creation
of a family, has so deeply structured our understanding of the world,
and the human person, that it would never have occurred to us to think
about the “why” behind them.

We Americans face a state of affairs relating to marriage and family
that has forced us to “(lose) the innocence of taking man and woman for
granted.” 3
We must now attempt to show why the divinely-instituted laws of
marriage and family—which, until recently, was taken by all simply as a
given—are binding not only for Christians, but hold true for everyone.
There is, however, a certain difficulty in the task, since the
“invention” of man and woman, and of marriage, are precisely that: an
invention proceeding, as it were, from God’s creative imagination. That
is, they cannot, in a mathematical sense, be shown to be necessary. A
different system would have been possible—as indeed, some created,
rational beings have no gender (angels), and do not enter into marriage.
But, that God has invented the reality of marriage in no way implies
that it is arbitrary or meaningless.  On the contrary, there is a deep
intelligibility underlying the division of humanity into two genders,
and marriage as the unique union possible only between a man and a
woman.

Some preliminary reflections on the nature and meaning of gender,
generally speaking, are offered here as possible a groundwork for
further considerations on the Church’s teaching on marriage as founded
on the union of man and woman. For only if we understand the
metaphysical constitution of masculinity and femininity, and their
centrality to the being of man and woman, will we be able to defend
marriage against the current onslaught that would all but destroy it.

The creation of the human person as male and female is the most
central feature of the visible world. It is also at the very center of
God’s plan for humanity. This plan originates within the being of God
himself, and it is where we must begin if we are to discover the meaning
of gender.

Gender and Its Primary Significance 4

For all the impressive knowledge of God to which pre-Christian
philosophy attained, God reveals, in the New Testament, what was
completely unimaginable for the Greeks: that God is love. Not only that
God loves, which would have been absurd enough; but that God is love. How can this be? How can a being be love?

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