44
evidence, logic, and observation. Despite the claims of critics, such as Joan Roughgarden, the human
body is designed to be either male or female. All seeming counter-examples, such a Roughgarden’s
threshold problem from the first section, simply prove that biological structures are fragile.
Impediments to natural development, such as genetic defect, reveal this fragility. Kohak’s reflections, as
depicted in the third section, on the moral sense of nature showed that the human experience of living
in this world is more often than not a partial experience of what embodied life ought to be. Human
beings have the capacity to intuit that sickness and genetic defects, for example, are impediments to a
universal design of the human body.
This universal design is human nature evident in the body via functional concepts. As one of its
primary purposes, this thesis defended the teleological principle and grounded gender in the human
body by defending functional concepts and human development. Functional concepts in the human
body are essential for human life. They give meaning and purpose to discrete portions of the body.
Furthermore, the human person is truly said to develop by way of functional concepts. This is important,
since bodily development is one of the few trustworthy criteria for determining human nature. Human
beings necessarily come to know each other through their bodily development. For, human
development and the means by which human beings are born reveal human nature, which in turn is
telling of the human person.
How people view the human person greatly affects the significance ascribed to the sexed body.
What does it mean to be embodied? Are human beings largely minds that command bodies? Are human
beings equally mind and body? This thesis defended an affirmation to the latter question. This thesis
also criticized the popular understanding of gender and its foundational concept o f body schema as
philosophically inconsistent, because the popular understanding of gender claims that the physical body
is objectively important for the human person (affirming embodiment), while concurrently denying
inherent meaning in the physical body. Therefore, the popular understanding of gender denies the
objectivity of human nature as embodied, as if the importance of the physical body were solely
relational and subjective.
The human person is, however, not a purely relational being, only important insomuch as the
human person reduces to relations to others. Human beings are metaphysically concrete entities.
Human beings are substantial (discrete beings and metaphysically robust) and relational, and the sexed
body testifies to this state of affairs. As a final note, Cardinal Sarah’s words should not be forgotten:
“The idea of a constructed identity actually denies in an unrealistic way the importance of the sexed
body.” 148 The popular understanding of gender can be shown to deny the significance of the human
body for life and love.
148
Robert Cardinal Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith with Nicolas Diat, trans. Michael J. Miller (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), 164.