10
death. Third, human sexuality is best understood from an interdisciplinary approach. 33 These principles
describe why gender follows a spectrum.
To be natural is to simply behave as most humans do, which in the case of gender and sexuality
follows a spectrum. Human beings tend to display gender in a myriad of ways, such that fitting into a
spectrum means to be unlimited or without bounds. For example, gender theorist Susan Stryker briefly
describes the wide range by which humans live as gendered beings:
Historically and cross-culturally, there have been many different systems of organizing people into
genders. Some cultures, including many Native American cultures, have had three or four social
genders….In some cultures people can change their social gender based on dreams or visions. In some
they change it with a scalpel. The important things to bear in mind are that gender is historical (it changes
34
with time)…
Gender, for human beings, does not derive from the body alone, so much as gender derives from many
factors. It is part of human nature to be a highly unique sexual being, since human beings express their
sexuality in a myriad of ways. It is natural for human beings to display themselves with a kind of
amorphous sexuality, and for “felt” experience to carry itself in a fundamentally amorphous manner.
If human gender and sexuality fits a spectrum, then no gender or sexual expression can
contradict natural law, since human nature appears to be intrinsically non-specific in expression. Some
gender theorists claim that supposed gender and sexual aberrations fit perfectly into natural law.
Natural law in scholastic philosophical tradition refers to a deeply teleological structure active in the
physical world. 35 This general concept of natural law is not the specific sense of natural law criticized by
the popular understanding of gender; the popular understanding of gender criticizes a biological-
reductionists variant of natural law. This variant over-emphasizes the moral significance of primary
biological functions: for example, the genitals may only be morally used for reproduction. Yet, biologists
can and do show that many animal species use genital acts and exhibit trans-like behaviors as secondary
biological functions. Such observations reveal that general natural law anthropologies – as developed in
the Theology of the Body, for example – ignore the “actual material reality of concrete human bodies.” 36
The physical body exists across a spectrum, and that spectrum is “lived” by many people, and “felt” by
many people.
33
Ibid.
Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal Studies, 2008), 11.
35
Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy: Basic Concepts (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009), 159.
36
Stephen J. Pope, “Social Selection and Sexual Diversity: Implications for Christian Ethics” in God, Science, Sex,
Gender: An interdisciplinary Approach to Christian Ethics, eds. Patricia Jung and Aana Marie Vigen (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2010), 189.
34