Dr. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott's Response 
to the review of her book Omnigender 

To the Editor:

Thank you for sending me just-off-the-press copies of the Spring EEWC Update containing Dr. Bowman's review of Omnigender. I very much appreciate your giving so much attention to the book, and Dr. Bowman's spending so much time and energy evaluating it. 

At the same time, I want to respond to several of Dr. Bowman's critiques, the ones that seem to me to do injustice to what I actually said in Omnigender. Concerning my sources, I think that Alice Dreger, Suzanne Kesler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Donald E Tarver II, Susan Menking, Louise Kaplan, Ralph Blair, and other holders of earned doctorates would be surprised to be dismissed as "nonmedical" or "lay press" sources. 

I do not believe I "disregard" childhood harassment as a reason for early operations on intersexual children. I myself was mercilessly taunted for other reasons as a child--not just by other children, but by my older brother and even certain adults in my family and in the schools I attended. I know the severe psychological damage that results from taunting, having struggled to transcend it for most of my 69 years on this planet. But I still say avoiding possible harassment is not an adequate motive for performing cosmetic surgeries on babies and children. They will be harassed for being different anyway; such harassment will be a fact of life until our society ceases to permit it. Apparently Dr. Bowman agrees with me that "intersex conditions that are not health hazards or life threatening should be left alone" until the patient is old enough to decide for him/herself. Why then does she ask that I re-think my position? 

Clearly, Dr. Bowman wishes I had written Omnigender as a specialist in neurobiology or at least from a psychiatrist's perspective. As I explained, and more than once, I was addressing a general audience and supplying only enough medical detail to establish the social justice and theological points that are my chief concern. Even so, although I quoted an M.D. concerning prenatal influences on the developing brain as being the basis for transsexual feelings, and quoted a highly scientific transsexual on the same topic (p. 56), Bowman still wants "even one paragraph" on the subject. Sigh. 

As for flexibility versus fluidity, I think I made clear that like many other people, I find my own gender identity to be fairly fixed but also respect others who claim that theirs is more subject to change. I used the term gender fluidity not so much concerning individuals as concerning social constructions of gender, as witness my entire chapter concerning "Precedents for Increased Gender Fluidity." The fluidity under discussion is a society's ability to accept or even affirm a sex and gender continuum, not an individual's constantly changing orientation or gender expression. The latter is, I think, relatively rare in mature adults. 

As for Dr. Bowman's third listed weakness of my book, I flatly deny that my focus is "exclusively on the existence of intersexual or other conditions in about 1 in 200 people," failing to grapple with the fact that "199 of 200 people do not have these conditions." Absolutely untrue! Again and again in Omnigender, I pointed out that to one degree or another, almost everybody violates some aspect of bipolar genderednes and suffers for it. I stressed that many heterosexuals, and "feminine" women, and "masculine" men are gender-violators in one way or another. Dr. Bowman herself admits that she has suffered gender discrimination both at church and in the academy. Why? Because, according to the binary gender construct, women are not supposed to be leaders in the public spheres of religion and medicine. As I thought I made clear in what Bowman calls my "most convincing" chapter, everybody loses from the bi-gender construct: not just one person out of 200, but everybody! 

I rest my case. 

And again, I express my gratitude for being taken seriously by my sisters. Omnigender is my labor of love, the book I was born to write. Anything anyone can do to help get it into the hands of the folks who need it, I will deeply appreciate. 

Warmly, 

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

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© 2001 Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus