RyanIrmick

When a woman experiences masculine excellence, does she not recognize by the beauty of that expression that the category of man belongs to soul and not flesh?

Spiritual life begins in pursuit of the divine. Woman pursues the divine through relation. Like water, she receives a shape and relates to it, soft and flexible. Man pursues the divine like a hunter. Symbolized in the sexual act, he attempts to penetrate the divine with an unwavering will, hard and inflexible; he will not relent. This spiritual seriousness brings her to the task, gives her the courage to stand for love even when it alienates, and, above all, teaches her discernment. 

Man is Judah. He is given the sceptre. He anchors the divine to categories—laws, temples, kings. He learns and grows herein, but in binding himself to categories, he will punish a man for fishing on the sabbath, for blaspheming a pile of stones, and for refusing an unjust king’s command. Woman is Ephraim. The crown belongs to her, yet she remains powerless. She worships not in temples, not through laws, not in allegiance to a king, but as the tabernacle of witness, movable from point to point. She worships alongside rivers, on hilltops, among the trees, in relation, absent an order of priests, for all are priests. But she is a cake not turned. Mixed with nations, strangers devour her strength. She is right that the categories bind and blind, that the path is through relation, but more often than not she surrenders to whim and fancy, mistaking it for love, for she lacks the discernment that categories teach.

I am a man, not because I have a penis, not because of genetics, but because of spiritual polarity. If love were the ocean, and the kingdom of heaven were Atlantis, woman teaches me to swim, but I guide the way. She teaches me relation as I dissolve myself into her great waters, but it is my sacred duty to carve the channel, not to confine her there, but that we may flow through it. I am a man in a man’s body, but as it is for me that love is everything, and the body comparatively nothing, gender being defined by spirit is nothing strange.

Those who criticize what they call transgenderism reveal something scandalous about themselves, namely that they have no passion for the categories as applied to spirit. Many of them claim to be spiritual. They claim belief in the soul. They claim that we are more than flesh, that God made us in His image, that there is an eternal dimension to human existence. But then a transgender person stands before them and says: “My soul doesn’t match my body.” What do they say? “Look at your chromosomes.” “Look at your anatomy.” They appeal to matter. To biology. To the very materialism they claim to reject.

But if the soul is real, if it’s primary, then why does the body have the final word? Why does flesh override spirit? Why do the categories of male and female not fall upon the all-important soul? Their tradition has spent millennia arguing that the body is fallen, temporary, a vessel. That the spirit is what matters. And then, on the transgender issue, they become strict materialists.

The mismatched soul possibility—that male souls can exist in female bodies and vice versa—forces them to confront what they actually believe. And what they actually believe, when pressed, is that the body is truth. That matter determines identity. That the soul, if it exists, must submit to flesh. Do they follow Jesus with this view—he who said, “The spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing”?

If the mismatched soul possibility were brought to the forefront, their preprogrammed defenses would no longer work. Will they deny that the flesh counts for nothing? Will they argue that the soul isn’t gendered? That God made us male and female by flesh and not spirit, by the lower and not the higher? That the natural love of man for woman is for her flesh and not her soul? Sure, they could argue that the gendered soul always finds the corresponding body, but what proof can they conjure up of something knowable only inwardly?

There is a flower going by the name everlasting and yet it is perishable. During its bloom its colorful splendor may entice you to believe in it, that it may win eternity, but alas it will not. Is the hope we place in love just the same? If so, should love not be eternal, then there is no such thing as love. For that which is not eternal, that which is not set aside in blessed independence from time, is always transforming from one state to another. Each interaction leaves it changed, and thus it cannot be. How can the beloved be if changed with each experience? How can love be if feeling in flux?

Consider the beloved. If they were mere brain, defined by the impressions left upon them, then they would be changed with each new stimulus. Every moment would yield a new self. It would thus be senseless to speak of loving them, for just as no man steps in the same river twice, the beloved, as they are, will not be loved again. How irrational then is unconditional love, I speak now of love’s immunity to being changed by wrongdoing, for any new error on the beloved’s part is closer to them than any beauty they have previously manifested. In the absence of eternity, what can this sentiment be except an accidental fantasy? Such irrational feelings cannot have the confidence that comes from changelessness. They cannot find protection from the peril of whim. How then does one not become fiercely jealous, desperate in trying to preserve what cannot be preserved? Such is our plight as those living in an era characterized more so than any other by unbelief in the eternal.

The question at hand concerns our nature. Philosophy begins with a question. Who am I? In modernity it has become increasingly common to believe the negative, that there is no such thing as self. What could be more foolish? By way of love do we not know ourselves and our beloved? Or else, what is loved except an illusion? And what remains to I love you if stripped of knowing the beloved? But does one really know? Can not new love reveal more knowledge yet, like how a new friend reveals a new dimension to oneself? Is not the freshness of love dependent upon mystery? Still, the feeling of being known and of knowing is characteristic of love. Think of yours. Do you not feel like you know yourself in their presence? Is not mutual genuine understanding the great joy of this relation, the feeling of overcoming solitude? 

Do we not know our beloved so clearly? We cannot simply say that we have seen them, for how much have we seen? Can we both know and not know them? Perhaps it is possible. Perhaps they are like the sun. We cannot stare through to discover how they are, lest we blind ourselves, but still they are known by their illuminations. Are they not splendid illuminations? Are we not blessed? How terrible it would be to be unknowable, to be confined to an impenetrable solitude! How terrible it would be to be known, to be without mystery! To be known and not known, praise be for this inexplicable perfection! Shall I spurn this faith, this conviction, in my beloved because I cannot discern so clearly? As I sit here gripped by a beauty I cannot help but believe in, shall I bemoan my helplessness in giving her my faith?

Absolutely not! I am quite capable of being deceived, and perhaps I have been, but when love gives forth her fruit so consistently, so magnificently, if only I should listen, how foolish I would be not to trust her! There is a place in the human heart whence love issues forth her commands. When the eye of the mind gazes upon her, appreciative of how readily she can be obscured, is one not filled with a blissful strength? Either I am deceived or I am not, but how judicious and how wise the orders are that flow forth! It is easy to believe in love should you walk in her ways, and just as easy to believe in the beloved should they do the same. So let us believe. Let us believe that even though we see only in part, that this part describes the whole, for it is a beauty too beautiful to be negated by another facet. It is a beauty too beautiful to be dreamt by the deceptive, and thus we shall believe.