Self-Creation Only Dehumanizes Us

Begotten or Made?
by oliver o’donovan
davenant press, 143 pages, $26.95

Think about it,” my friend said, his voice tinged with aggression. “Why did you become a man? Because you didn’t have any other option socially. Wouldn’t it be better if kids didn’t have such constraints on who they could be?”

My friend (let’s call him Jim) had a preteen with no history of gender dysphoria who had recently come out as nonbinary. Jim was supportive, even enthusiastic. He shared his story with local news and invited questions and dialogue from our small church. So I asked him over to my home to hear more and, when the moment seemed right, express my fears for his family.

Which is undoubtedly why Jim preempted me by asking why I chose and continued to choose the male gender. To reply that, lacking power to swap my male gametes and DNA for female, I had no such choice would have cut too quickly to the heart of the matter. So I deflected the question.

Biding my time did nothing to assuage Jim’s anger. For him, expressing or even implying concern with his parenting choices or his child’s decisions was out of bounds. By voicing that concern, which I eventually did more explicitly, I made him and his child “unsafe.” He seems, in fact, to have experienced my fear for his child as tantamount to assault. Our friendship was over.

I have no doubt that Jim’s motivation was to protect his family. But he had been seduced by a culture-wide mass movement bent on “the quest for freedom from natural limits,” as the English theologian Oliver O’Donovan described it in a series of indispensable lectures when Jim and I were still in diapers. That movement wishes to dispense with human nature especially with regard to sexual difference and sexuality. Nature, after all, implies limitation. “To hate one’s own flesh is the limit of self-contradiction to which our freedom tends,” O’Donovan said. “It is the point at which our assertion of ourselves against nature becomes an attack upon ourselves.”

Happily, these forty-year-old lectures have been reissued in a slim volume that includes a new introduction by Matthew Lee Anderson and a retrospective by O’Donovan. Begotten or Made? remains relevant for its clarifying theological analyses of abortion, in vitro fertilization (and the concomitant disposal of embryos), surrogacy, contraception, marriage, and more. O’Donovan begins, however, by addressing what in 1983 was called “transsexual surgery,” a topic his original audience might have thought a waste of time but will strike no one that way today.

“The great intellectual challenge that faces our age in view of these innovations is not to understand that this or that may or may not be done,” writes O’Donovan, “but to understand what it is that would be done, if it were to be done.” A careful look at what was considered best practice for treating gender dysphoria stood to clarify for O’Donovan’s Thatcher-era audience where our culture’s quest to shed our natural limits was taking us. Likewise, O’Donovan’s little enchiridion will help today’s reader begin to grasp just what it is we do when we begin IVF treatments, use contraception, undertake surrogacy, or undergo so-called “gender affirming care.”

First, it reveals “our cultural conception of freedom as the freedom not to suffer,” a conception that implies a moral imperative to continually push back humanity’s natural limits in order to overcome suffering. Second, it brings to the fore the accompanying “exclusive importance of compassion among the virtues.” Compassion moves to relieve suffering, he writes, and so “circumvents thought, since it prompts us immediately to action.” All of which means that we have little idea what we are doing in continually pushing back the boundaries of human nature.

“Of course, transsexual surgery is certainly intended to do the patient good,” O’Donovan writes, “but it is not a medical good that it is doing her, but a social good. And to serve that social good, moreover, it adopts a procedure which is not even medically neutral, but manifestly injurious.”

Four decades after O’Donovan wrote these words, the effects of the cultural commitments he describes are obvious in ways his original audience could scarcely have imagined. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender reassignment surgery are all used to relieve suffering—not physical suffering, but the psychological and emotional suffering caused by gender dysphoria. Most feel alleviating that suffering is a moral imperative; therefore, so is allowing these interventions. Few realize, however, that the psychological and emotional burden often remains even after transition.

“That night, in bed at my apartment, I wept,” confesses the male-to-female trans writer Andrea Long Chu of the emotional aftermath of vaginoplasty. “I wailed, actually, the way mothers do in ancient manuscripts.”

My voice, which I have over several years trained myself to lift and smooth, grew raw; at a certain point, it broke, like a woman’s water, and something low and hoarse and full of legs crawled up my throat and out of my mouth. The truth was, I didn’t feel any more like a woman. I felt exactly the same. The pitiless beauty of the operation is that it’s all the same nerve endings, reclaimed like lumber from an old boat. This meant my vulva was alive, full of sensation, but it also meant that these sensations were the very ones I had gone under the knife to escape. The ship would always be Theseus’s, no matter how many parts I replaced.

O’Donovan told us this would happen, because all “gender confirmation” measures do is deploy artificial techniques (in Jacque Ellul’s sense) to shape bodies, forcing them to abide by the dictates of the will rather than nature. They presume that human beings are made by artifice when, in fact, we are begotten.

“That which we beget is like ourselves,” O’Donovan writes—just the thought that led Nicaea to declare the Christ was “begotten, not made.” “But that which we make is unlike ourselves.”

We have stamped the decisions of our will upon the material which the world has offered us, to form it in this way and not that. What we ‘make,’ then, is alien from our humanity. In that it has a human maker, it has come to existence as a human project, its being at the disposal of mankind. It is not fit to take its place alongside mankind in fellowship, for it has no place beside him on which to stand: man’s will is the law of its being. That which we beget can be, and should be, our companion; but the product of our art. . . can never have the independence to be that ‘other I,’ equal to us and differentiated from us, which we acknowledge in those who are begotten of human seed.

One does not have to agree with all of O’Donovan’s conclusions—no to IVF and yes to contraception, for example—to be unsettled by this argument. There is an indignity to much of our culture’s discourse around sexual difference, sexuality, and procreation, an indignity many people have blamed on a lack of choice and control over our lives. So we vest our hopes in technique and uninhibited artifice to allow us to exert our will upon the world, our bodies included. If O’Donovan is right, however, the indignity arises not because our will’s reach is limited, but from our attempts to remake ourselves and others according to an image other than the Imago Dei.

Hence O’Donovan’s deep disquiet about IVF and other methods of artificial fertilization. In the final pages of Begotten or Made? he goes so far as to confess, “I do not know how to think of an IVF child except (in some unclear but inescapable sense) as the creature of the doctors who assisted at her conception—which means, also, of the society to which the doctor belongs and for whom he acts.” O’Donovan cannot bring himself to accept this terrible thought, but neither can he deny its logic. How, after all, could the IVF child be equal to her creator? Further, if the practice of IVF implicitly denies that the child is equal to the doctor, why would Western societies continue to treat her like she is?

The import of O’Donovan’s point can hardly be overstated: when human beings become our own creators, we dehumanize ourselves.

Which brings me back to Jim. Our friendship ended because we both felt the other was failing to treat his child with dignity. He believed, and I presume still believes, that human dignity exists in the unhindered exercise of will, especially through self-realization and even self-creation. From his point of view, my ethical duty was to affirm his child’s choice whether I thought it wise or utterly tragic. Anything less presented an affront to his child’s dignity.

By contrast, I believe the witnesses of Scripture and common sense that we are first and foremost creatures, not creators. When we create, we do so not ex nihilo, but only with the materials of the world—and in the bodies—we have already been given. Our very being is gratuitous gift. How then could the source of our dignity not lie outside us?

Few have ears for such reasoning. Even many in the church find it intolerable. It is nevertheless the great merit of Begotten or Made? that O’Donovan never flinches from his conviction that God, not humanity, is Creator.

Joel Looper is an adjunct professor in Baylor University's Baylor Interdisciplinary Core.

Image by Ted Eytan, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.