Review: “Gender in a Big Beige World”
Everywhere is beige. The same beige houses, the same big box department stores, even the exact same food is served everywhere all across the country. What has this monotone sameness done to produce our cultural moment — one that seems to glorify diversity on the one hand, but ship it out en masse with the other? Join Marc Barnes and Maria Brandell as they explore our desaturated modern world and why we look to gender for the way out.
That’s the description of a New Polity podcast episode that premiered on YouTube just over two months ago. I’ve rewatched the video several times now, where I knew the first time I watched it that I would need to rewatch it. So here I am, two months later, blogging why I have finally found a Catholic resource responding to transgender issues, that I am satisfied with. As satisfied as I can be.
As a trans woman, it has been a frustrating journey, trying to locate a satisfying resource (on YouTube that isn’t Matt Fradd-cringe), as you probably can tell from my blog post “Critique of Christian resources responding to transgender issues” last year. When I finished listening to Mark Yarhouse’s Emerging Gender Identities, I still felt something was missing. You know you’ve finally found ‘the one’ when one of your first reactions post-watching is to feel open to flying to Steubenville, Ohio (it’ll take almost a day from Sydney, Australia) to meet Marc and Maria!
Both Marc and Maria (M&M) maintain a Catholic position on trans issues, so why do I highly recommend “Gender in a Big Beige World” anyway? It’s not the first time both podcasted on trans issues, so why this episode?
The reasons for why I returned to the (small-c) catholic faith are complex and many, but I think Maria summed it up nicely in one sentence, which I will now paraphrase: my world has always tasted like rice crackers, but it was only one day later in life did I finally realise this, and from that day onwards, I wanted more than just rice crackers (no, the Eucharistic host isn’t a rice cracker). That was M&M’s first step in speaking deeply to my soul.
A Maccas meal looks beige, does it not? And yet it’s a profitable business. Why do people allow beige junk food to be a pervasive business? As for ads, we know there’s nothing deeply special about what they’re trying to sell, and yet we fall for the false enchantment anyway. The emperor has no clothes, just a beige birthday suit, yet both M&M challenge the shallowness of the cringe one-liner: “kids are just bored these days and that’s why they’re doing this transgender thing”.
We live in a globalised consumptive culture, the genesis (no pun intended) of which lie in our transition from intradependent-household life of subsistence to a life of waged labour (single breadwinner per household at first). I do sometimes wonder, if I was alive centuries ago instead, how much of my gender dysphoria (that came from within) I’d be conscious of. Indeed, the transition to waged labour life was the first step in systemically transforming the relationship between man and woman to the point that modern sensibilities would see as ostensibly sexist. And now you know where gender stereotypes you’d regularly love to hate come from (no, not from centuries ago).
Maria makes the point that during this revolution, women felt the infantilising sexism the most because it was women who were the most affected by the swing in production requirements, thereby tipping the power dynamics between men and women. Indeed, Marc made the point earlier that this is how ‘spinster’ became a derogatory term during the early 18th century — at least ‘spinning’ done by women was in earlier times something that was societally considered productive. Wouldn’t it be nice if St John Paul II (JPII) expounded Theology of the Body for dissemination during the 17th century.
As we trotted along this revolution, and tried to rectify the sexism in recent times, we are now, in Marc’s words, all ‘women’ in the consumptive economy. According to JPII in Laborem Exercens, labour really is the way that man’s creativity shapes the given creation and it’s the way that man objectifies himself in creation. And like men, women also see their presence in creation (eg creating pottery) — work and gender are related in that we do learn a lot by observing our sexed work (manifesting from God’s design of man and woman) and the objects of our work.
But in the modern economy, men and women can do most jobs, because most jobs now are sexless — a lot of jobs (paid with sexless money) are bureaucratic, and it’s not clear if they produce ‘real sexed things’, as they’re cogs that can get lost in the system. Think never-ending intangible projects. You could be gender-critical cringe and ask, “What is a (biologically reduced) woman?”, or you can admit that what a man or a woman is today is much less distinctive than the times of pre-Industrial Revolution.
A beiging distinction that blurs the production-consumption cyclical routine, all because mass production started out as a very high risk business that needed to be paid off through enough consumption of the mass production. Marc calls it a death trap, and JPII talked about a culture of death — the industrial Rubicon has indeed been crossed.
It’s no wonder I got fed up with rice crackers and went to Notre Dame in Sydney to do my Master’s in theology, it’s near impossible to go back to the life of subsistence where (self-owning) production and consumption are less separated. To prove the point, if everyone in the world suddenly stopped buying more than they need, the Tower of Bable that is the global economy would just collapse. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, for subsistence is a source of subjective difference.
We can’t have a resting people, and have our economy function simultaneously. Whilst I studied God, others played competitive sports, go on DIY adventures etc — you can only be bored for so long in a world of satisfying-creating-more-dissatisfaction consumables. We consume for salvation, or at least we think we do, and we as a people are generating less children overall, a sign that we’re now less affirming of life being good.
And ironically, we are generating throwaway consumables far greater than ever foreseen, the ads for which are not (if we’re honest with ourselves) morally neutral, and are legitimised as a ‘choice’ outside the village. The upkeep of the beige world requires commodifiable novelty derived from the zeitgeist, even scraping the barrel to reach ‘simplicity’ such as age-old décor — this is why globalisation is mass individualism. The Goods News however is that (historic) Christianity is eternal.
So are the kids really merely bored these days? In a consumptive world, there’s only consumption for identity production, where one can be terrified of others realising that one is the emperor/empress that has no clothes. The emperor is no longer a mere conventional politician, the emperor is an identity politician, where conventional politics aims for concrete goals, and identity politics tries to heal the relational wounds the self experienced, such as atomisation, alienation and loneliness.
Destroy the family? Well, it’s more like, the family has been destroyed, so let’s create a new one based on self-identity. The ‘Family’ Sedan then The Pill only accelerated the Revolution. Who am I? Am I, in Marc’s words, “the daughter of this man and his wife”? Am I, “a son, a brother to a sister, or a brother to a brother”? Am I, “friends with these people” who “belong to this place”? I am a woman to the people walking down the street who see me (this is the first image they see of me), but I was never always my parents’ daughter, but I was their child, still am their child, and will continue to be their child.
It’s more ‘normal’ these days to not know who your (biological) parents are, yet children in this situation may still desire to know. The extended family continues to de-web, coupled with a declining birth rate overall. This phenomenon is constraining the collective experience of relational difference of different types. In Maria’s words, these relationship types are “almost like [stabilising] nodes of attachment”, and they are disappearing. So who does one look to, to figure out oneself?
It seems that gender is an received image within ourselves reflected in others (inter-role modelling), not just measurable biological sex. And if gender is not weaved by the village, it will be weaved by identity movements instead. The so-called (online) communities where people don’t necessarily share a meal with each other. Shallow therapy really, especially when mixed with enmity-based politics, making it an upgrade from moralistic therapeutic deism to ‘smash the fash’ (whoever the ‘fascists’ are this month or the next).
As for me, I transitioned genders, in spite of whatever socio-legal constraints I faced, and what a relief that was to have reached concrete-ish goals and move on in life without seeking the next fash to smash. I knew my limitations in this regard, and for that reason, I never consistently connected with the LGBTQ ‘community’. So it should come as no surprise that a non-woke trans woman years later has a Prodigal Daughter (not Son) moment. Accordingly, Marc was careful to make clear that the detransitioner’s need for ‘online community’, and the associated (potentially deceptive) language of healing, doesn’t sufficiently explain transgenderism overall.
I am reminded of a National Geographic YouTube video I watched years ago called “Growing Up Transgender and Mormon | Short Film Showcase”. The parallels between Eri Hayward and I are, well, somewhat unsurprising, because even in the face of a broken temporal culture, Christendom remains eternal. Because here I am still, a trans woman of the faith and in communion with the Church. It has been so long since I started my gender transition that my life prior to transition is now simply a distant memory (what is a man?) — this is no doubt a stark contrast to the detransitioner’s story.
I am financially well-off, but as I dived deeper into theology these past few years, I find myself rejecting the image-controlling consumptive culture around me more often (and taking less selfies). Not an easy thing to do, but my re-enchanting journey has made that easier for me in recent times, and yet I still have no desire to detransition. I don’t say that defensively, and as I’m listening to M&M, it’s now apparent to me that I’m experiencing life as a mundane post-trans cisgender (but still trans!) woman? Sounds confusing, but it might explain a few complex things about me.
Nature takes its course through sex and by extension puberty, which is the antithesis of image control. But it’s clear to me that having undergone puberty twice for the ‘right’ reasons, which is in contrast to the Catholic position that I have closely studied, it’s not that I feel I am less ‘right’ as a result, it just now feels like my trans life is mysteriously, just is. The only surgery I’ve had is sex reassignment surgery, where I didn’t have any expectations of what my new vagina should look like (and I still don’t), and what my oestrogen implant does for me, well, I don’t really have any control over that either.
The beige world that I live in as described by M&M, reminds me that my unique transness is in the world and not of the world thankfully. M&M have not affirmed my gender, they have just provided a deep perspective that haven’t rung any alarm bells for my reasons for transition. Perhaps there are looming alarm bells for other cisgender people instead (the Andrew Tate and trad wife projections come to mind), and we’re all in need of examinations of conscience.
Ultimately the questions M&M inadvertently raised for trans people is: why did you really transition genders in this beige world? Did you receive your trans self-identity, or did you construct it to make meaning out of life’s circumstances? Marc established the rule in a world of love as opposed to objectifying consumption: “you remain you and I remain I and let us look at each other and speak to each other” on these terms of love based on difference.
It’s true that I’m guilty of vanity (like everyone else) and projecting gender stereotypes due to my metaphysical desire for womanhood in a vague healing good-enough sense (as opposed to a specific (type of) woman), but it’s not clear that I’m worse than most people in this regard. I believe that I received my trans identity from a gender dysphoria that mysteriously came from within at an early age. Thanks in part to the comsumptive world of medical technology, I skipped carrying one cross, but I haven’t backed out from carrying other crosses.
Marc reported that he’s been asked, “What’s it like to be [a] male [object]?” To which he would response, “Well I don’t know, because I am [subjectively] male… because within my experience, I can’t abstract maleness into an object, apart from subjectively living it.” Maria confirmed that he doesn’t get to be an observer of his gender, because he is his gender.
So what’s it like to be a trans woman? That is, what’s it like to be a woman who transitioned from manhood? Well, I too am not entirely sure, I just had a strong sense of being a woman which manifested as gender dysphoria when I living as a boy, and in order to relieve the dysphoria I abstracted femaleness into an object for the purposes of transition. And now that I have subjectively lived what I think is womanhood for so long, I don’t know what’s it like to be a man or a woman. But I can still abstract transness into an object because I self-observed the transition process I underwent.
I first and foremost achieved dysphoria relief, I didn’t achieve womanhood as the gender-critical may have you believe. It’s just that as a consequence of the relief I just assimilated into womanhood without putting in objectifying effort to perform gender (this is not a theft of femininity). Okay fine, I do play into female stereotypes, but so do other women so it’s not fair to just point the finger at me. And of course there is the complication that other women may be influenced by the consumptive culture, and whilst I’d like to think I’m not really influenced by the same, how sure am I about this really?
Either way, I envied women because I wanted to get out of my dysphoria situation, not because I was bored and in need of chauvinistic gratification (gender consumption). Both male stereotypes and living as a boy/man just felt wrong, and I still don’t know why that God-given image felt really wrong. But maybe it’s not a surprise that I still don’t know because even Marc doesn’t know what it’s like to be a man so to speak.
I may not have the subjective experience of being a woman because I wasn’t born a girl, but isn’t it interesting that I assimilated into womanhood without putting in objectifying effort to perform gender. It may appear that my imagined womanhood was my salvation, but my ultimate salvation was dysphoria relief. Two separate but related priorities.
My transition journey was so long ago, maybe I now do have the subjective experience of womanhood after all. Maria comments that “instances where you do feel like a woman [is] always in relation… identity comes from relationships with other people”. As I said earlier, at the surface level, I am a woman to the people walking down the street who see me, because this is the first image they see of me. I understand this whole gender thing sounds complicated, but crossing the gender Rubicon is no straightforward feat, despite what the current culture is telling us.
M&M is right in saying that we currently live in “a very strange world” with no “quick solutions”, only ostensibly boring ones. Too many Rubicons have been crossed, and unfortunately I can’t be of any more help. But thank you M&M for going really deep into a subject that’s very close to my heart. It seems the way forward, is to take the conversation deeper.