"Is It a Boy or a Girl?"
A review essay by Elizabeth Bowman, M.D.

Reviewer Elizabeth Bowman's assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the book Omnigender:

This book's strengths

1. It points out one of the deepest most invisible sources of gender oppression and discrimination -- the assumption that there are only two sexes and that one is then automatically better than the other. 

2. It raises consciousness about the oppression and abuse endured by `gender outlaws' such as homosexual, transsexual, intersexual, and cross-dressing persons. 

3. It provides helpful consciousness-raising education on the existence of intersexual syndromes and conditions. This is not information that is easily accessible. The author went to great lengths to research, describe and reference intersexual syndromes, 

4. It provides references for support organizations for intersexual persons. 

5. It provides definitions for numerous terms for gender-related and sex-related conditions other than simple male or female, or the three most common sexual orientations. 

6. This book provides some delightful examples of the utter subjectivity of "proper" gender characteristics by demonstrating how different cultures adopt opposite gender ideals. 

7. The theological call for unity in advocating justice for all people is a spiritual highlight of this book. The gay and straight religious communities are chided equally for abandoning transpeople in their fight for dignity and justice. This struggle is placed on firm grounds in the teachings of Jesus. 

8. Dr. Mollenkott provides numerous well-referenced interpretations of the passages of scripture that have been used most frequently to oppress gay, cross-dressing and intersexual persons. These interpretations are a precious resource for people dealing with religious gender intolerance. 

9. The hermeneutical discussion of scripture passages used to condemn transpeople is enlightening and filled with references. Here, English professor Mollenkott is in her element -- interpretation of literature -- and it shows in her skilled handling of these passages. 

10. This book's rich catalogue of transgendered persons in historical and contemporary world religions is fascinating and highly educational. It serves as a powerful antidote to the poison of parochial American conservative religious thinking. 

11. The most powerful parts of this book are the theological positions, the detailed examples of how gender is socially constructed, and the fine overview of scriptural hermeneutics on this topic. 

12. This author is to be commended for her incredible courage in writing this book. Her ideas are on the cutting edge of a new paradigm and will likely reap scorn and disbelief. Like Jesus, she has had the courage to stand up and renounce evil in a way that is not likely to win friends in the Christian community.

This book's weaknesses 

1. While denigrating the medical pathological viewpoint, it fails to address the powerful and commonly used argument (indeed the fact) that most intersexual conditions represent genetic errors of some sort. This book treats anomalies of sex chromosomes as variants along a normal continuum but ignores the fact that similar abnormalities on the other 22 chromosome pairs are invariably recognized as pathological if not fatal conditions. Ignoring logical contradictions is a kind of double-speak that is this book's greatest weakness. Unfortunately, it weakens the overall impact of this author's magnificent theological and hermeneutical arguments for the Christian mandate to accept all transgendered people as people of worth and dignity. 

2. This book focuses on the social construction of gender, by downplaying biological arguments about sexual bipolarity. The author then turns to biology (genetic intersex conditions) to bolster the argument against rejection of intersexuals. This apparent contradiction is not addressed. 

3. The author dismisses the common argument that bipolar sexuality is normative because it is the overwhelmingly most common human condition. Her focus is exclusively on the existence of intersexual or other conditions in about 1 in 200 people, but fails to grapple with the significance of the other side of these statistics: that 199 of 200 people do not have these conditions. Scientific and Christian honesty demands taking into account the other side of the argument. If 1 in 200 proves gender diversity, what does 199 of 200 say about norms of human sexes? 

4. Dr. Mollenkott tacitly conflates arguments for the normality of developmental pathways (such as heterosexuality or homosexuality or relatively "masculine" or "feminine" personality traits) with arguments for the normality of chromosomal or physiological anomalies (such as XXY, XYY, or androgen insensitivity syndrome). This is understandable in light of her desire to counter vicious hate-filled attacks upon homosexual, intersexual or bisexual persons who are labeled as biologically abnormal persons. However, the biological normality of developmental pathways that depend partly on post-natal events is not the same issue as the normality of anomalous chromosomal configurations (a strictly genetic process). Confusing the two issues weakens her argument. 

5. The term omnigender is somewhat unfortunate because it is more confusing than easily understood alternatives such as gender continuum. 

6. This book barely mentions recent work that links variations of gender development with the timing of the brain's exposure to various sex hormones during fetal development. This scientific information is too important to be ignored in this debate since hormonal effects on brain organization and behavior are more likely than chromosomal anomalies to be used in the future to argue for or against the "normality" of cross-dressers, homosexuals, bisexuals, or transsexual persons. This is one of a number of issues that are potentially damaging to Dr. Mollenkott's thesis that are ignored in this book. 

7. The author overstates the flexibility of human gender in calling it fluidity,a term that I find overstated. If gender is really so fluid, bisexual or gay people could become heterosexual, couldn't they? This is exactly opposite the author's position but is a corollary of her terminology.

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© 2001 Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus