Disregarding The Body – Podcast
The Crisis of our Time
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art
Companion Posts
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Starting Again
I was born in the sixties. But I am not a child of the 60’s. My family was lower-middle class, and by the standards of the time, traditional in most every way. Dad was a minister. If he or mom had lived into their 90’s they would not have imagined the social changes we have witnessed in the last 20 years. It would be too easy to say the sexual revolution of the 60’s caused all this change, as some conservatives maintain. But the roots of this change go back much further than the swinging 60’s.
So I’m embarking with some misgivings on a survey of cultural history. There are deep intellectual and cultural traditions that have shaped our everyday lives. We’ve come to a point in the Western world where the statement “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” is comprehensible to many public leaders, at least in public. That phrase would be completely incomprehensible to my parent’s generation, in public or private, not to mention every preceding generation. It is still incomprehensible to many, if not most people today. But if you express your bewilderment in public, say at many workplaces in the Western world, increasingly the odds are you will be regarded as stupid, immoral or worse. You may be reprimanded for your irrational “phobia.” You might even have your career derailed. If you broadcast your view on a public forum, say Twitter, expect the Twitterati to pounce with the ferocity of a caged unfed Tiger. In certain parts of the world you may even be charged with a hate-crime for your expressed incredulity at the latest massive cultural shift. (See the following posts, here & here.)
As a 60’s poet might say, “The times they are a changin.”
The tectonic cultural shift in the last 20 years is quite breathtaking. Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, we have gone from year 2000 where the majority of Americans were opposed to gay marriage to today where normalization of Transgenderism is fast approaching.
A long and winding road brought us to this point. I want to offer a thoughtful and hopefully generous exposition, from a Classic Christian point of view, of how we got here. As I go, I’ll be documenting some disturbing current events. (Read my next post). I hope that even those who disagree with Classic Christianity will find here a fair and readable assessment of our state of affairs. (post continues page 2)
Speaking for the Body: Medicine, Identity, and the Voice of the Flesh
What is medicine for?
This deceptively simple question sits at the heart of a fierce debate currently playing out in courts, clinics, and the conscience of a culture. A recent case—U.S. v. Skrmetti—confronts this head-on. The lawsuit challenges Tennessee’s law banning medical gender transition procedures for minors. But beneath the legal arguments lies a deeper philosophical fault line:
Is medicine the art of healing a disordered body, or the tool of sculpting a desired identity?
Two Models of Medicine
During oral arguments, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson asked provocative questions: If a teenage girl says, “I don’t want breasts,” is that enough to justify medical suppression of puberty?
That question exposes two competing visions of medicine:
- The Service Provider Model: The physician delivers treatments to match the patient’s internal sense of self.
- The Restorative Model: The physician diagnoses and treats real pathologies based on the body’s design and function.
If patient discomfort becomes the metric for medical intervention, anything can be labeled disease—including normal puberty.
Desire Is Not Diagnosis
In her article on Fairer Disputations, Leah Libresco Sargeant argues clearly: wanting something gone does not make it a disease.
A young girl may dislike her breasts due to dysphoria—or due to social pressure, trauma, or confusion. The physician’s job is to discern the difference. A culture that teaches self-avoidance should not be allowed to weaponize medicine against the body itself.
“A good doctor must attend to the body, not simply the feelings about it.” – Leah Libresco Sargeant
Feelings matter, but they are not the final diagnostic authority. Medicine must balance compassion with truth.
Listening to the Body’s Voice
Sargeant reflects personally on her own medical journey. As a teenager, signs of PCOS1PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) is a common hormonal disorder affecting women of reproductive age. It involves a combination of symptoms related to hormonal imbalance, metabolism, and ovarian function. were dismissed as normal. It wasn’t until later—after multiple miscarriages—that the condition was diagnosed.
Her body was speaking clearly. No one listened.
This isn’t just a case of delayed treatment. It’s a paradigm failure. Medicine did not fail to affirm her identity—it failed to honor her body’s reality. True healing requires both discernment and humility.
Medicine Must Be Rooted in Reality
When medicine drifts from diagnosis and healing into affirming personal desires, it risks becoming a mirror of cultural confusion rather than a defender of bodily truth.
We see this elsewhere:
- Athletes pushed toward surgeries or eating disorders.
- Cosmetic procedures driven by media-filtered ideals.
- Adolescents offered radical interventions in response to passing anguish.
The question isn’t just what someone wants—but why they want it. And whether medicine should say yes.
Final Word: Healing, Not Hacking
The body is not a blank canvas. It is not raw material for existential expression. It is a living testimony, created with meaning and wisdom. Our job—especially in medicine—is to listen, learn, and heal.
When medicine speaks for the body, it fulfills its sacred calling.
When it speaks against the body, it becomes something else entirely.
SOURCE: “Speaking for the Body” by Leah Libresco Sargeant on Fairer Disputations.
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Stay Human, Speak the Truth
Progressive Feminism vs Body: A False Escape
Why Escaping the Body Isn’t Liberation
There’s a strange twist happening in progressive feminist circles today. In their fight to liberate women, many have ended up sounding eerily like ancient Gnostic heretics—(oh no, he used the H word!) those early critics of Christianity who claimed the material world (especially the body) was evil, and that salvation meant escaping the flesh. Only now, instead of mystical secret knowledge offering the way out, we have the turgid prose of Professor Judith Butler, postmodern gender theory, and a growing discomfort with the stubborn reality of biological sex.
Victoria Smith, in her insightful piece “Why Progressives Fear the Female Body” published on Fairer Disputations, makes this connection powerfully clear. She argues that modern progressivism, in its attempts to reject oppressive gender norms, has ended up rejecting the female body itself. Her critique is not only culturally relevant—it is theologically resonant. It echoes the warnings of early Christian thinkers like Irenaeus and the modern affirmations of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. All three—Smith, Irenaeus, and John Paul II—sound the alarm against a mindset that sees the body, especially the sexed body, as a problem to solve rather than a gift to receive.
This post brings their voices together, not to bury feminism, but to redeem it from the disembodied dead-end it’s wandered into.
Victoria Smith’s Bold Call to Re-Embodiment
Smith begins by analyzing how the female body has been treated historically and culturally. From The Taming of the Shrew to 21st-century think-pieces, femininity has been associated with softness, emotion, and fragility—qualities that society often devalues. Feminists rightly rebelled against the idea that biology is destiny. But somewhere along the way, a noble resistance to stereotypes morphed into a rejection of biology itself.
Enter Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley), the godmother of modern gender theory. Her claim? That not only is gender a performance, but sex itself is socially constructed. The body is no longer a given—it’s a canvas onto which culture, power, and preference paint whatever identity suits the moment. This erasure of biological sex, Smith argues, has led to a bizarre and self-defeating place: a feminism that can no longer define what a woman is, let alone defend her rights.
Smith writes:
“It is not the social role alone that has been rejected, but the female body itself, now portrayed as a problem to be solved, a site of oppression that must be transcended or reshaped.”
This isn’t liberation. It’s the ancient Christian heresy of Gnosticism in new clothes.
Meet One of the Original Anti-Gnostics: Irenaeus of Lyons
In the second century, Irenaeus of Lyons—bishop, theologian, and one of the most important early defenders of orthodox Christianity—battled a similar set of ideas. He had been a student of Polycarp, who in turn had been a disciple of the Apostle John. That connection gave his theological arguments both apostolic weight and deep spiritual insight. Irenaeus wrote extensively against the Gnostic sects of his time, who believed that the physical world was made by a lower, evil god, and that the human body was a trap from which the soul must escape. For them, salvation was about becoming pure spirit, free from the so-called corruption of matter. Sound familiar??
Based on the biblical evidence, Irenaeus said no. God created the world, and He called it good. More than that, God Himself entered creation—took on human flesh—in the person of Jesus Christ. Far from escaping the body, salvation happens in and through it.
“The glory of God is a living man, and the life of man is the vision of God.” (Against Heresies, IV.20.7)
This is not metaphorical. Irenaeus believed in the resurrection of the body. Not just Jesus’ body, but ours too. Bodies matter—not just now, but forever. To deny the body, or to see it as irrelevant to our identity, is to deny the Incarnation, the hope of resurrection, and the very doctrine of Creation—that the material world, including our bodies, was made good by God and is essential to who we are.
And not only Creation past, but the New Creation promised in Scripture, of which the resurrected Jesus is considered the “first fruits.” As Paul says, God is “uniting all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10), and again, “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption” (Romans 8:21). Paul adds in 1 Corinthians 15:20, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Revelation echoes this hope with a vision not of souls floating in the clouds, but of a renewed, embodied world: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth… and I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:1–2).
And why is the New Jerusalem “coming down”? Because it has always been God’s desire to dwell with His creation, not whisk it away. Revelation 21:3 makes this abundantly clear: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man (i.e. humans). He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” The biblical story does not end with escape from the body, but with its redemption, glorification, and the permanent presence of God with His people in a renewed creation.
Irenaeus—as well as all biblically grounded Christians—would look at today’s “gender is just a social construct” mantra and shake his head. The human person is a unity of body and soul. Tear the two apart, and you don’t get freedom. You get fragmentation. You get the good-book definition of Death.
John Paul II: The Body as Theology
Fast forward to the late 20th century. Enter Pope John Paul II and his revolutionary Theology of the Body. Drawing on Scripture, philosophy, and personalist ethics, he declared something radical in its simplicity: The body reveals the person.
What does that mean? It means that our bodies aren’t just containers or tools or costumes. They are expressive of who we are. They are not incidental—they are essential.
John Paul II insists that sexual difference is not a mistake or a social accident. It’s part of the divine plan for communion and love. Male and female bodies point to something beyond themselves—they are sacraments of self-gift and relationship.
“The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine.” (TOB, Feb. 20, 1980)
Smith’s analysis finds a powerful echo here. When progressives treat the female body as a problem to be solved—something to downplay, flatten, or escape—they are rejecting the very grammar of our humanity.
John Paul II does not romanticize the body or deny its vulnerability. But he insists that it is the stage on which love, meaning, and redemption are played out. To erase the sexed body in favor of some abstract “identity” is to reject the stage altogether.
Feminism at a Crossroads: Recovering the Body
Here’s the great irony. In trying to liberate women from oppressive stereotypes, progressive feminism has come to mirror the very Gnostic impulse the Church condemned: the desire to be pure mind, unencumbered by our material selves.
But real liberation doesn’t come from denying the body. It comes from understanding it rightly. Smith, Irenaeus, and John Paul II all offer that path. They call us back to an older wisdom—one that affirms the goodness of creation, the dignity of embodiment, and the integrity of the person.
This doesn’t mean going back to 1950s gender roles or pretending sexism doesn’t exist. It means refusing to fight injustice by erasing the very thing we’re supposed to be defending: the reality of being women and men.
For feminism to have a future, it must reclaim the body—not as a problem, but as a promise.
Conclusion: Bodies Are Not Obstacles—They’re the Path
We live in a moment where it’s increasingly difficult to say something as basic as “women are adult females.” In fact, some have lost jobs, been deplatformed, or publicly vilified for affirming this seemingly obvious truth—often branded as hateful, transphobic, or fearful of inclusion. It’s not bigotry being expressed but biology, not malice but clarity. Yet we live in a cultural moment where empathy—especially toward ‘the marginalized’—has been weaponized. A false empathy now demands affirmation of delusion as love, confusing emotional validation with moral truth. In this framework, to question someone’s self-identification is seen not as conscientious objection but as cruelty. But empathy divorced from reality is not compassion—it’s capitulation to an ancient deception. And without the courage to speak the truth—‘women are adult females’—our ability to advocate for women’s rights and protections is seriously jeopardized. Sisterhood, safety, fairness in sport, and integrity in health care all depend on recognizing the reality of the sexed body.
Victoria Smith is doing brave work by naming this reality. She’s not alone. Irenaeus, centuries ago, and John Paul II, decades ago, also stood against the spirit of disembodiment in their time. We would do well to listen.
Below are some helpful links to the teachings of Irenaeus and JPII. Those teachings will require a sustained, yet rewarding commitment. At a minimum, please read Smith’s important article.
Because if we’re ever going to move forward—spiritually, culturally, politically—we’ll need our bodies to come with us. After all, they’re not the problem. They’re the very place where the Spirit-empowered purposes of God are meant to unfold—in flesh and in history, not in abstraction or escape.
[Sources: Victoria Smith “Why Progressives Fear the Female Body“; John Paul II Theology of the Body; Irenaeus, Against Heresies.]
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Honor the Body
Fairness First: The Penn Title IX Case Is a Turning Point for Women’s Sports
The U.S. Department of Education just ruled that the University of Pennsylvania violated Title IX — the landmark civil rights law that’s supposed to ensure equal opportunities for women in education and athletics.
Why? Because Penn allowed Lia Thomas, a male athlete who identifies as female, to compete on the women’s swim team. And according to the federal government’s own Office for Civil Rights (OCR), that decision denied actual women their legal rights under Title IX.
This is not a small thing. Title IX was put in place to make sure girls and women had the same opportunities as men in schools — especially in sports. For decades, it has leveled the playing field. But this case is a stark reminder that fairness is under attack, and female athletes are paying the price.
A Line in the Sand
Lia Thomas competed for three years on Penn’s men’s swim team, without much distinction. Then, after a gender transition, Thomas joined the women’s team — and started dominating. It was an immediate, obvious, and predictable outcome. Male bodies, even post-transition, retain biological advantages: greater lung capacity, muscle mass, bone density, and more. That’s just physiology. It doesn’t make someone a bad person — but it does make it unfair.
The OCR’s ruling affirms what so many people have been saying for years but have been afraid to say out loud: letting males compete in female sports isn’t inclusive — it’s unjust.
What Did the Government Find?
The Trump administration’s own Department of Education found that Penn’s actions violated Title IX by denying women “equal athletic opportunity” and “equal access to athletic benefits.” In plain English: women lost out. Whether it was roster spots, scholarships, facilities, or competitive success — they were pushed aside.
It took a federal investigation to confirm what every swimmer on that pool deck already knew.
What Happens Next?
Penn has been told to fix the mess. That means:
- Acknowledging the violation.
- Revisiting records and awards.
- Issuing a public apology to the female athletes who were wronged.
- Making sure it doesn’t happen again.
If the university doesn’t comply? The federal government could pull funding or take further legal action. The Trump administration has suspended approximately $175 million in federal funding to Penn and gave the university ten days to comply with a proposed resolution agreement. This agreement includes actions such as revoking Thomas’s Division I awards and issuing a public apology to affected female athletes.
This Is Bigger Than One School
This isn’t just about Penn. It’s about a nationwide trend where the rights of female athletes are being sacrificed on the altar of ideology. We’re told that inclusion means erasing the biological distinctions that make women’s sports necessary in the first place. That’s not inclusion — it’s erasure.
And here’s the thing: it’s not ‘transphobic’ to say women deserve a fair shot. It’s not hate to say that biology matters in sports. It’s just reality. If we can’t say that, then we’ve officially left the realm of reason.
Time to Reclaim Title IX
This case is a wake-up call. Title IX was designed to protect women — not to accommodate male athletes who identify as female. We don’t need to rewrite civil rights law. We need to enforce it.
So, hats off to the brave women who stood up and spoke out. And credit to the Office for Civil Rights for finally doing the right thing.
Now it’s time for schools across the country to pay attention. Because fairness in women’s sports isn’t negotiable — it’s the whole point.
Do we have eyes to see? And minds and hearts to know?
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Stay Human