i cannot help but notice a shocking parallel between the modern secular conservative “what is a woman” campaign and this excerpt from Alice Schwarzer:
The childbearing capacity…[is] the sole remaining difference between men and women. Everything else is artificially acquired, a matter of how one’s personal identity is formed.
The Small Difference and its Great Consequences
To be honest, I have a lot of empathy/sympathy for the radfem-adjacent criticisms of gender ideology, owing to having followed many who are adjacent to that crowd (perhaps you may find it ironic that I find secular conservatism extremely obnoxious and retarded). The radfem-adjacent "gender critical" tradition I think is very useful for Catholics to draw on, in that it can expose false conceptions of masculinity and femininity and is also very effective at rendering gender ideology "rhetorically impotent" as it were. The emphasis that the gender critical tradition puts on "GNC" men or women as being fully valid biological men or women, and not some "other" entity is important to me as well. A meek, physically weak, chaste man is not "gay", or "femme", or any other kind of "subversion" of masculinity, that's just how he is.
I generally agree with the perception that we can't and ought not to describe as essential to manhood or womanhood any trait that we can't prove as being purely biological in origin; but unlike the radfems I think that behavioural inclinations are not purely socially constructed. Whereas the radfems deny that there is any connection between behaviour and biology, I think that there necessarily must be several such connections, but that doesn't mean we can empirically verify any given trait to be purely biological in origin, any more than we can verify it to be purely societal in origin. Hence I think that one should be cautious about trying to tie manhood or womanhood of necessity to specific behavioural inclinations, because one could easily counter-argue that said inclination is a result of social influences. Better to keep definitions simple. I like to use a variant of Trent Horn's definitions: the male is the sex oriented towards spermatization/insemination/fatherhood and the female is the sex oriented towards ovulation/gestation/motherhood.
