In last week’s column, we spent some time on LB89, the “Stand With Women Act.” This week, we return to some of the foundational themes touched on in that column and explore them in a little further detail.
Thanks be to God, we are not lacking for good recent books on human identity, human dignity, and human sexuality. One such book is “Sexual Identity,” a compilation of essays by six authors published in 2022. These authors approach the topic of “sexual identity” from various disciplines: biological/anatomical/molecular; familial/social/cultural; psychological; metaphysical; and theological. It is a fascinating set of essays and well worth reading for any person who wants a fuller understanding of what it means to be a human being, which of necessity includes a deep reckoning with the gift that is every person’s maleness or femaleness.
Before we dig into sexuality, we must affirm with wonder the most fundamental thing distinguishing the human person, which is his humanity itself—nothing is deeper, more important, or more distinct about human beings, male and female, than our creation in God’s image and the fact of our rational nature.
Maleness or femaleness, for its part, is second only to our humanity itself as a person’s most fundamental and distinguishing characteristic. As Pope St. John Paul II says in “Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body,” a person’s sex is “constitutive for the person”—far deeper and more revealing than simple “attributes of the person” such as height, eye color, and skin complexion.
Masculinity and femininity are gifts that, like our humanity, give meaning and coherence to each of us in our individuality. Our culture, to its benefit and strength, recognizes a great good in the affirmation of the individual, his capacity for creativity, and in the encouragement of the free development of natural gifts. But we often fail to remember that our individuality is indeed a gift and that we are relational creatures. My particularities, temperament, and my very life are gifts—to myself, my wife, my son, and to the whole world. In their fullness they can be offered back as gifts to the good and generous giver Himself. Likewise, your life and your individual talents and capacities are gifts to you, to me, and to all of creation.
Just as individuality is a gift, so a person’s sex is a gift to himself and to others. One’s maleness or femaleness is no less a gift than any other characteristic of the whole person. We already recognize that each individual has things to offer the world that no other person does. The same is true, writ large, of sexuality. The masculine and feminine offer gifts to the world, especially to each other and to children, that the other cannot give. There is no shame in that. It is no limitation, no restraint on freedom or full expression of one’s true personality, to recognize the gifts of the female or the male as unique and irreplaceable. This is just as true as our recognition of the unique and irreplaceable gifts brought to the world exclusively by individual persons. We glimpse the glory of the individual. Can we recognize the glory of man and woman?
A short column like this one is not sufficient to flesh out the specific gifts of the masculine and the feminine, how they color and contour our individuality, and how our individuality gives unique expression to the masculine, the feminine, and the human. I encourage you to read “Sexual Identity” for that, and perhaps it will be the topic of another column. But it must suffice to say here that the male and female are two distinct, complementary, and mutually self-giving ways of being a human being. This has implications not only for reproductive function but for our entire lived experience. Male and female bodies, brains, psychologies, and relationships work differently. Individual males and females give these realities infinite variety in expression.
Our social customs around male and female are built around our intuition of these realities and our recognition that maleness and femaleness are different, enrich each other, and need each other in ways that are not reducible only to reproduction.
These gifts—of one’s humanity, maleness or femaleness, and individuality—are neither to be exploited as resources for oneself or the collective nor to be despised and rejected as irrelevant. They are to be received with gratitude. This attitude of the joyful reception of gifts is the only attitude that allows for the possibility of individual, familial, and social flourishing. Our rejection of them is the cause of much individual, familial, and society-wide suffering. Let us not reject our gifts, but receive them with honor, humility, and joy.
