If God is a person and is gender neutral – is not permissible for all persons to be gender neutral – including humans?
In his book ‘Coherence of Theism’ Richard Swinburne discusses God’s ‘personhood’. For Swinburne, ‘personhood’ is a mental substance – it is what gives us our perception, allows us to act with intentions and moreover, personhood is experienced only by us. That said, we can recognise its presence in others. There is an argument that it is your ‘personhood’ that means we shouldn’t treat you as means to end – you are an end in yourself.
I hope that was the nicest thing you read about yourself today.
Put plainly, your personhood gives you a value beyond simply being of use to others. For example, a waiter in a restaurant is providing a service to you – that is his purpose…but only as a ‘waiter’. He is also a human with inalienable rights that guarantee his individuality and personhood. Animal rights activists claim personhood for animals when arguing for greater treatment of animals beyond ‘what they do (or is done to them) for us.’ However, for the benefit of my post – it should also be noted that for Abrahamic faiths too– God is a person – God possess the mental substance that I have just been discussing.
In contemporary thought – a distinction has been drawn between a person’s ‘sex’ and their ‘gender’. For the human being, as a mammal, the presence of a penis confers the biological and thereby physical ‘sex’ of male and where there is a vagina – female. However, the gender prescription of how a male ‘acts’ and what a male actually is – is linked not to their anatomy, but to their own perceptions of self, through the application through their mental substance. Arguably, the penis is a physical substance entailed in the description ‘male’ but the concept of ‘what is a man’ is far more complex than our physical bodies – it requires our mental capacity to ascertain – our personhood.
Therefore, I can be identified as male by a physical examination – but my gender, my sexuality, is a mental construction and…well…that’s jolly well up to me. For me I am both physically male and my gender is ‘man’ – and that was my choice.
And this is a problem for many – but why should it be a problem for the theist? After all their God is the original ‘gender-neutral person’.
For thousands of years, since prophets and chosen persons brought into our collective minds the revelation of a single divine being – it has been written that this entity is a man. ‘Father’ ‘He’ ‘Him’ ‘Lord’. And yet the clear paradox is that this cannot be verified either empirically (by observation) or through logical deduction. Yet read any of the Abrahamic religions scriptures and God’s ‘sex’ is only visible in a prescribed (by men) pronoun and to a greater yet still controversial extent – visible through incarnation. However, God’s gender – is clearly…neutral. He cannot be male or female and to say that God is would cause you all sorts of messy contradictions that could probably end up in Them popping out of existence.
I would also argue that our mental substance should have supervenience (a greater say) over our physical substance. I am aware that the theist may draw a line here as will the non-dualists among you – but where a person identifies as a gender, they have the right to align their other essential property – their body – with that gender choice.
Conclusion…
If the theist accepts God’s personhood and gender neutrality, then why not gender neutrality or non-binary in persons who are human. It seems logical that where a person has a conscious mind and mental capacity of personhood that they choose their own gender. There is another argument from Free Will (God’s gift to humans that gets Her off the hook when it comes to evil in the world) wherein it is through our Free Will that we choose our gender. Our capacity to choose our gender is through the grace of God. Either way – gender is fluid and constructed and there should be no issue with such a position.
StoatAubergine 