Metaphysics and Gender: The Normative Art of Nature and Its Human Imitations

by Michele M. Schumacher

The emergent "science" of transgenderism and related philosophies of gender propose a full-scale inversion of the understanding of God, man, and the created order articulated in classical metaphysics, undermining and parodying both the causality and ontology voiced by Genesis 1:27 ("God created man in His own image,…male and female He created them"). Whether through subversive performative identity or by surgical sex change, the divinely made human person is now threatened with abolition and replacement by the self-made man and the man-made woman. In Metaphysics and Gender , Michele M. Schumacher offers a corrective to this distorted and distorting outlook, calling for the recovery of an anthropological vision rooted in recognition of the normative divine "art" of nature and of the likeness—and far greater unlikeness—between divine and human causality. Surveying contemporary transgender trends, Schumacher identifies and excavates their conceptual and ideological foundations in the gender theory of Judith Butler, the existentialist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, and the atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. To the erroneous philosophical presuppositions of these thinkers Schumacher contrasts the metaphysically grounded thought of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, advancing their positive account of the good of creation and of the meaning of ethical norms, human freedom and natural inclinations, and embodiment, and mounting a timely and trenchant defense of the divinely created human person.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy

208 pages, Hardcover

Published February 17, 2023

Reviews

[David Haines · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must read for anyone interested in recent gender theories, transgenderism, or related topics. This author provides one of the clearest and most helpful analyses and explanations I have read to date, of the thought of Judith Butler, with whom the author interacts extensively. The author comes at this question from an angle I have not seen elsewhere, arguing that though there are similarities between God and man (as concerns knowledge and art) there are also significant (major, mind blowing) differences between God and man on these levels. Confusing or inverting these realities, creates the very illusion that is rapidly becoming the bedrock of contemporary society, law, education, and morality. Humans have made themselves the ungrounded grounds of their own existence and experience, and made themselves into little gods of a universe which, claiming to be reality (one’s own), is entirely detached from reality (though reality sometimes pokes its head in to remind us of our limits).
Drop what you’re doing and read this book.

[Sam Nesbitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A welcome and insightful installment in Christian theological scholarship on the contemporary issues surrounding gender and transgenderism. Schumacher frames her work with two competing anthropologies and philosophies of gender: the existential, self-creationist thought of Sarte, Beauvoir, and Butler, and the natural, imitative thought of the Christian, Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. The latter draws a sharp line between Creator and creature and finds the natural forms of the created order to be intrinsically good as created by God. To achieve human flourishing, humans ought to conform to the natural order that God has so substantiated and fitted for humanity. The former, on the other hand, totally rejects the Creator-creature distinction and finds supreme value not in imitation or conformity to a true and good reality, but rather in supreme autonomous freedom from all bonds. The transgender movement is thus an extreme manifestation of this kind of freedom wherein one’s body is seen as something not given, but something pliable and produced from one’s own sense of self.

This work is illuminating and provides a helpful Thomistic approach to the issue of gender. Although the number of citations are pretty heavy, it is overall a good read and is worth numbering amongst Carl Trueman, Abigail Shrier, and Nancy Pearcey.

[Jessie Wittman · Rating 5 out of 5]

So helpful. Schumacher draws threads together that I have heard elsewhere, but ties them up definitively.