They Are Taking Over the Earth!
Peter Harper, Smoke Signals #23, March 1997
I am sure that you are as troubled as I am to hear the reports that the UN are to call an international conference on "Male Infertility". Well, it seems that we males are not the men our fathers were, that our sperm counts are way down by 50%, and that our testicles are shrinking. We intuitively knew that somehow we were not up to par, but we thought that it was all psychological or psychosomatic and due to the castrating effects of the shrieks of radical feminists, and we believed that a little closer male bonding would make it all better. But to make it all even worse, it appears that there are fewer males being born. God in his wisdom always allowed a small surplus of boys, probably to compensate the reckless streak he put in adolescent males that prods them to acquire motorcycles or to join the army. Well, how wrong we were! It's the tainted food we eat and the water we drink that is doing us in: our intake of organochlorides has increased through eating fruits and vegetables laced with insecticides and drinking water from PVC pipes - so much for the "better living through chemistry". The problem is that organo-chlorides mimic the female hormone oestrogen, so that we males are all slowly but surely becoming feminised. Just think, we are to be the last generation of the "big-balled" men... We are hit where we are the most vulnerable. It's all downhill from here. The women will have to find a way to make kids without us (and that entails parthenogenesis!)... so the feminist dream will come true after all… a world without sexism, machism, patriarchism, paternalism... and without men.
Human society would be, God forbid, like a nunnery!
So the Church in her wisdom should start ordaining women as fast as it can. Follow the Anglican lead; the Spirit bloweth where she listeth and sometimes a little breeze comes our way. But, what about the Pope, you say? Here, I have a problem for the Pope.
As a biologist and otherwise,… I am, as are most people, intrigued by the whole business of sex and gender. Despite what you may think, this question of why most animal and plant species waste half of their resources making males who actually are of little use except for reproduction remains largely unanswered. The current theory is that the presence of males and sexual reproduction increase genetic variability, which protects us from pathogens and disease...
Getting back to gender, the Pope refuses ordination to women on the basis of their gender. That seems straightforward, but it is not as simple as it may seem at first. But, you say, each of us has a gender, male or female, which makes some of us potentially ordainable and others not. But, think about it a minute: where did you get your gender from? it is based on your parents' opinion when they first cursorily glanced at you on the delivery table. That is OK, I guess, because most parents know enough about the topic to place correctly most of the children they make, but obviously not all of them.
There are various definitions of gender:
Chromosomal gender: males have a smaller Y chromosome as companion to the X chromosome on the 23rd pair, while females have two X chromosomes. That is why in past Olympic games, the stockier USSR or East German female athletes were asked to submit cells from the skin of their mouth for the tell-tale heterochromatin test and then sent to play with the other boys.
Gonadic gender: males have testicles and females ovaries, right? Well, in principle, that is a good criterion, but it does not always work.
External gender: males have a penis, while women have a vagina and breasts, again criteria which are usually pretty good, but not fail-safe.
Psychological gender: and what about the gender of the brain? What about those people who see themselves imprisoned in a body of the wrong gender?
So when Holy Church decrees that no member of the female gender can be ordained, to what gender criterion is she referring to? In most cases, there is no problem since all four criteria for gender determination coincide in a given person. But, what if they don't; let me use an example.
The fictitious Marylin is a devout 20-year old Catholic girl; she is stunningly beautiful, with a great mane of hair and has all the right curves in the right places. She has, however, little or no body hair and has never menstruated. One day she complains of a lump in the groin... which proves upon examination to be a descending testicle! (She) is eventually shown to be a male suffering of the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a recessive disorder on (her) sole X chromosome. Genetically, she is a male with the typical XY karyotype (criterion 1), which is the cause of her descending testes (criterion 2), but although the testes produce the male hormone testosterone which normally brings about criteria 3 (external male sexual characters) and 4 (male brain), her receptors cannot accept the male hormones (androgens), so the process is interrupted, and she develops as a female, and exteriorly quite an acceptable one too ("voluptuously feminine phenotype" as the medical textbooks put it). And I am told, many such "males" enter the modelling business, where their generous bosom allied to their narrow hips and long legs give them a definite edge over competing and real females. And just think of the otherwise homophobic males who drool and lust in their hearts after such pseudo-females and even bring them into their beds; they would die if they knew what they were actually doing ("Forgive them for they know not what they are doing"). But I am digressing... again.
So what we need is for the imaginary Marylin to ask to be admitted to the priesthood on the basis of his (her) vocation and his (her) genetic and hormonal analyses. It would be fun to see the Curia deal with this one; they use such reductionist criteria for everything relating to sex, that they would be caught unless they ditched their usual narrow view. I bet they would refuse on the basis of the absence of a penis - but who can tell where a clitoris ends and where a penis begins, the two organs being completely homologous. Methinks (s)he should be ordained on the basis of his(her) testicles.
Nature being so bountiful, the converse situation also exists: some genetic females with an XX chromosome possess a masculinising gene, and hence develop as apparent males. And I am sure some of them must have been ordained in good faith in the past even in the Roman Church, and there must be some of these unknowing priestesses around somewhere celebrating Mass, quite unaware of their condition. Perhaps search committees should require a genetic test from applicants, lest they unwittingly hire a priestess. (Don't fret, the fathering of three children will do as a genetic test!)
So it is perhaps time that the Church and the Pope do away with all this nonsense and remember that in Christ there is "neither male nor female" and that this is sometimes true in nature as well. To reduce the world to black and white, male and female, is essentially Manichaean and dualistic and ultimately contrary to the "catholic" world view which is to be in theory all encompassing. Actually, I personally have rather little difficulty with male or female priests per se; what I really have problems with are liberal priests who degrade their priestly character and Protestant priests (quite an oxymoron!) who have never realised they had a priestly character at all.
Another interesting point about this gender business is that it is obvious that the female is the basic gender in humans; it is also the default gender. Any person not having a complete "male kit" will therefore develop into a female. This only reinforces the old prejudice that females are incomplete and imperfect males, as Aristotle and St. Thomas so clearly thought. Perhaps, that is really why only "real" men can become priests, because only they are perfect. That is probably also the reason why the Church traditionally would not ordain eunuchs. That, to me, is a classic example of sexism, the consequences of which we sometimes pray to be delivered from at the Great Intercession during Mass. The bees have a more realistic attitude. Male bees (drones) come from unfertilised eggs, so the queen bee can produce them at will. Males are therefore kept and fed as long as food is plentiful, although they do not do any real work around the hive and just hang around until needed to fertilise a new queen. But as summer ends and food becomes scarce, they are killed and thrown out. By comparison, our females don't actually treat us so badly after all.