Gender, Generosity and Generation

Sunday’s NY Times Style (11/2/08) section had items of interest:
- In the “Modern Love” column, Kate Rood relates the transition of her twin sister Emma into transgendered Eli. Just past twenty years of age, Emma/Eli is torn between conflicting forces: (s) he is taking testosterone injections but she is reluctant to completely destroy her capacity for motherhood.
- Wedding page has prominent pictures of high profile Hollywood figures Erik Hyman and Max Mutchnick with their twin daughters Rose and Evan. They celebrated, just prior to the California referendum on gay marriage, a combination marriage and baby-naming ceremony. The two grooms, in dark suits and yarmulkes, themselves looked like twins. Their daughters were provided by way of a surrogate mother and probably in vitro fertilization. It wasn’t clear who contributed the seed or who sold/contributed the egg.
At the heart of these two poignant stories is the intense, generous desire to pass on life, to generate, to mother or to father another. The Latin root genus means birth and gives us the significant words gender, generosity and generate. The works all refer to passing on of life, to magnanimity of spirit and of body, to the bi-polar and life-giving structure of human nature. Emma cannot avoid her intense maternal passions, whatever her gender confusion; Erik and Max share a passion to be fathers, notwithstanding their sexual proclivities. Emma is feminine and maternal; Erik and Max are both masculine and paternal. Maternity is the end, telos, purpose of femininity, just as paternity is the goal of masculinity. Gender is not a cultural construct, a personal preference, or a proportionality of hormones. Gender is:
- The God-given and God-imaging desire;
- Springing from the depths of the human spirit, infusing every cell, neuron path, muscle;
- To bond with the other;
- And to generously give life.
This gendered and generous desire to engender is irrepressible. Whatever our dysfunctions and confusions, it springs ever afresh like a clear, crisp fountain from the depths.