The Dignity of Independence

Some intuitions and open questions/a Christian interpretation of gender essentialism

I’ve been following the ‘Feminization’ conversation with great interest, not because the term itself is especially clarifying, but because the discourse reveals a deeper unease about embodiment and moral responsibility. Those thoughts are still in development, but I just wanted to weigh in briefly on some of the follow-on conversation, which brought up even more unresolved spiritual questions for me and highlighted a subtle tension that I haven’t been able to articulate until now.

I was forced to examine my intuitions more closely upon reading my friend becca rothfeld’s review of Leah Libresco Sargeant’s The Dignity of Dependence. I admire both of these thinkers greatly. Leah’s work¹ and the seriousness with which she treats spiritual and moral formation has long encouraged me, and I also respect and identify with Becca’s allergy to any framework that has historically constrained women’s agency. Their disagreement exposed the unresolved question I feel is at the heart of complementarian arguments, as well as the vacuum I intuit lies at the heart of, I don’t know… gender nonessentialism. I should note that I haven’t yet read The Dignity of Dependence, though I’m familiar with Leah’s broader argument and the theological intuitions behind it. My aim here isn’t to review her book but to think through the moral logic that animates debates over complementarity.

Like me, Leah believes gender is divinely designed and that masculinity and femininity reflect complementary virtues God has woven into creation. Her work highlights the way women’s bodily vulnerability - especially in pregnancy - can form us in receptivity and dependence. I find that framework genuinely beautiful, but I have often worried about what follows from it, or what can too easily be inferred. Traditional complementarianism, at least as I have encountered it, tends to turn this insight into a strong prescription: that because women uniquely experience certain forms of vulnerability, they are morally obligated to embody receptivity and suffering more than men.

Becca shares my intuition that these traits are not uniquely or necessarily feminine. Suffering and bodily vulnerability are human experiences. “Why are gendered pains the only ones Sargeant regards as ennobling?” she questions. I agree. She notes that if dependence is the fundamental human condition, then it cannot be uniquely compulsory for women. Likewise, the claim that pregnancy or labor uniquely trains women for moral fortitude falters on several counts: not all women give birth; giving birth does not reliably produce a durable moral disposition; men, too, undergo visceral embodied forms of vulnerability. And what about women who are called to paths besides motherhood? Are they burdened with a shallower understanding of suffering?

Where I agree with Becca most is in her resistance to the idea that biology can be treated as moral destiny. She is right to call this one of the pillars of sexism. Not that male and female bodies differ, but that these differences exhaustively determine one’s mode of flourishing. This belief narrows a woman’s moral universe to the singular operation of care and receptivity. Becca’s fear, justified by history (justified too by Helen Andrews’ recent writing), is that moralizing gender difference inevitably leads to hierarchy and oppression. I share that fear and extend it: moralizing gender risks flattening personhood and moral life into a mechanical assembly line of virtues.

However, I also fear the inverse: that rejecting essentialism altogether leads to a flat sameness, erasing embodiment and real, beautiful difference. Becca is right to call out conceptual slippage and the reductive moralization of female biology. But I am reluctant to follow her to a place where embodiment loses symbolic and spiritual weight. I do not think gender is arbitrary or irrelevant to ethical life. The danger - not necessarily in her argument as stated, but in the trajectory it can imply - is that male and female, two distinct ways human beings experience and encounter the world, dissolve into an undifferentiated humanism. Under this subtle pressure, it becomes difficult to explain why embodiment matters at all, or why gendered experience shapes anything. From my own Christian perspective, it weakens the drama of the Incarnation. Why would God put us in these sexed bodies if they didn’t mean something?

I keep circling the idea that gender is a clue. An invitation or a symbol that reveals relational truths and perhaps even reflects the shape of divine love. But I do not believe it is a rulebook that dictates how we must behave, at least not in the rigid ways complementarians propose. As much as I harp on objective morality, I feel like my morally authoritarian impulses are curbed by the strangeness of the Resurrection. Nothing is really a rulebook anymore. Not since Jesus. I think often of the verse in Galatians that says there will be no male or female in Heaven. That we are all one in Christ. I believe that is true, and I struggle to see how a strict complementarianism fits within that eschatological horizon. If gender vanishes when all is said and done, then its earthly meaning must be symbolic and provisional, not determinative. I realize this analysis makes the most sense within a Christian metaphysical frame, but even outside that frame, I think the basic intuition is still relatable. Our bodies carry forms of meaning that should be neither weaponized nor dismissed.

Gender vanishes in Heaven, but is a real spiritual and embodied force here on earth. A pattern, a symbol, a medium through which the soul expresses itself in physical form. Becca’s posture can risk trying to bring about Heaven on earth by preemptively erasing the differences that - in the Christian story - are meant to dissolve only at the end of time. Leah’s position, by contrast, can drift toward a mirror error: softly but subtly insisting that symbolic truths must harden into permanent moral structures in the here and now. Within that framing, temporal gender shifts into eternal vocation, erasing the symbolic and confusing the icon for the essence.

I relate to both instincts, but I fear each leads to a different overcorrection. I am pulled between them and trying to imagine a path in the middle, or better yet, a synthesis. Gender as spiritually charged invitation. A thing that shapes us but also a thing that we will outlast. What would that look like?

ADDENDUM (11/17): Becca’s latest Substack post was published as I hit send on this and I didn’t see it until just now (post-publication of this essay). It addresses some of the questions I raise here, and I want to clarify one point in light of it. Becca is not denying sexed embodiment, nor is she reducing men and women as purely interchangeable. She explicitly rejects mind–body dualism and affirms that our bodies shape our vulnerabilities and possibilities.

My concern was never with her explicit claims as much as with the trajectory that certain nonessentialist frameworks can drift toward. The possibility that if bodily differences carry no symbolic significance, they become spiritually flat. That tension remains for me, but it is directed at the broader philosophical arc, not at Becca’s own commitments. I remain grateful for her insistence that anatomy not be mistaken for moral destiny, and my disagreements are offered in that same spirit of shared seriousness.

1. As an aside, I agree with Leah that dependence itself is beautiful. We have largely lost the ability to see the dignity of sacrifice and mutual need, or to recognize that our dignity can be exalted (not diminished) when we bow our heads in service to someone else. There is a form of self-obliteration that enlarges rather than erases the soul. I can humble myself and still love myself. Still see myself as whole. Culturally, we have a long way to go in resolving our discomfort with the specifically feminine modes of dependence and vulnerability, and I am glad she is calling attention to that gap.