NATURE IS A LANGUAGE, CAN’T YOU READ?: So people are talking about the Vatican’s latest salvo in re boys and girls, ladies and dudes. I haven’t read it, so I won’t address specifics. I do, though, want to talk about a way of discussing gender differences that I think obscures much more than it reveals.

This is the “feminine qualities” discourse. Chicks have this special gift for certain qualities, like nurturing, or mercy, or I don’t know, cleanliness. There are several bizarre aspects to Catholic authorities trying to promote this notion in the contemporary context:

1) Um. Isn’t everybody supposed to be nurturing, merciful, and I don’t know, clean? If these things are easier for the ladies, shouldn’t we spend our time presenting these qualities in a way that is especially attractive to men, rather than just buttering up the chiquitas?

2) Amy Welborn and Lynn Gazis-Sax have already noted that in this kind of gender discourse, men never seem to have special “gifts.” Their spiritual talents and preferences are assumed. It’s only women who need special praise. One cannot help but feel that this is condescending–“Oh, honey, why trouble your pretty little head with courage or intellectual acuity? You’re so sweet!”

3) It’s perfectly obvious to anyone who observes the human scene, or even just reads about it, that men and women come to different crossroads in their lives. But to talk about those differences, and the different kinds of moral choice that they require, you need to get very specific. You need to say stuff like, “If you’re the one carrying the child, pregnancy–whether it ends in birth, abortion, or miscarriage–means something different to you than it does to the father. And vice versa.” You need to get down in the visceral messy matter of human sexuality. I don’t know that philosophy is especially well-equipped to do this; literature seems to me much better suited for the task, much more adept at balancing individuality and the reality of gender differences.

So let me propose an admittedly very imperfect metaphor: gender as language. Languages differ. Translation is hard. Translations can cause hilarity (“I am a jelly donut”) or misrepresentation. People who know more than one language well will often tell you that full translation is simply impossible. We can talk about characteristics of languages: English, perhaps because of the frequent invasions of the sceptred isle, has a wealth of subtly shaded synonyms that few languages can match; Latin allows a grammatical compression that stands like a crisp marble image of taut perfection.

And yet the most important things can be translated. There is no language, I believe, in which freedom, Christian love, justice, or mercy cannot be communicated.

Similarly, men and women can each demonstrate every moral quality. Some qualities may require more baroque expressions in one sex or the other. Some qualities may be swiftly expressed in compressed and easily-understood gestures, whereas others must be fought for and discussed at length before they can be really understood.

I always approach the question of gender differences as a reader and a writer. The story I’m working on now, “Ship Comes In,” has a woman as its main character. Her strongest character traits are, in about this order, heroic courage; wrath; vengefulness; envy; and cattiness. Only the last trait is often coded as “feminine.” And yet it’s very easy to write her as a woman, and it’s obvious to me that she would express all these traits differently if she were a man. La differance is one of the key themes of the story, and yet it has nothing to do with these rather silly and irrelevant categorizations of moral traits that come easier to women.

Men and women are courageous, merciful, gentle, fierce; they love, hate, envy, need, crawl, capitulate, and resist. But they don’t do it the same way. If you’ve written a character that could be interchangeably male or female, it is hard for me not to suspect that you’ve written a cipher, or a trick, or an ideological construct. I write men and women, not “people”; but I don’t write concatenations of gender-linked traits. I write people who are often more constrained by gender than they might want to acknowledge; the heroic choices and sublimations and venal refusals women make look different from those made by men. But heroism and sublimation and venal refusal are equally available to either sex, and that too is an important point.

It has the added advantage of being true.