Put so bluntly, such a view should seem risible, especially in connection with the complex scripts that order the performance of gender. In fact, it’s not that my actions show something about me. They don’t disclose an identity I’ve discovered through introspection—trans, cis, gay, straight, bi, queer (though that word has a lot to be said for it just because it need not be an identity-word; it can also be a positional term that undercuts gendered identity-talk—a good Christian word, that is, when so used), or what-have-you. No, it’s rather that my actions are me: whatever the range of gender-signifying actions is, my performance of them exactly is my gender. There’s no glassy essence that underlies or informs them; no identity to be discovered, owned, and disposed of at will; nothing, in the sphere of gender, that I am, but plenty that I do, some of it deep-down lovely, and some of it violently damaged. And the same is true of you. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. And gender identities, especially introspectively garnered and owned ones, are very much beyond necessity.
For those who care about genealogy, what I’ve just written is good Wittgensteinianism, a fact I mention only because Walden appeals so often to Herbert McCabe, himself a good (subtle, elegant, careful, witty) Wittgensteinian. Walden, by contrast, shows himself to be a Lockean essentialist (self-ownership is the tell)—an identitarian, that is, with respect to gender.
Why does speaking about gender correctly matter, and by so doing avoid identitarianism, the thought of self-ownership, and the appeal to the authority of introspective and self-enclosed experience? Because, for all of us, but especially for Christians, speaking in those ways blinds us to what really matters about gender performance, which is that for human creatures—perhaps for other creatures, too, but certainly for us—it is one of the two most important ways we have of giving and receiving gifts. (The other is prayer.) To be given the gift of flesh we must caress and be caressed. We receive our gendered lives as gifts, and only as gendered persons, so gifted, can we give to others the gifts we’ve received. There are endless ways of doing this, of exchanging fleshly gifts, as endless as, and closely related to, the ways in which flesh can be clothed—all of them highly and locally scripted, and all of them the usual mixture in this fallen world of the gorgeously ordered gift-exchange, on the one hand, and the violently expropriative grasp of what’s not given, on the other. (About this last point, I expect, Walden would agree.)
Gender is a scripted performance with lots of room for improvisation. In performing, we don’t show our gender; the mode of our performance is our gender, which is what we should expect, since we are imago trinitatis, and the identities of the Trinitarian persons are, without remainder, the relations they bear one to another. There’s nothing further to discover, nothing further to have authority over, nothing further to appeal to. So also for us and our genders. That’s gender freedom; it’s queering identities, improvising on scripts, lipsticking mustached lips, dissolving the rigidities of local gender orthodoxies, hard and ungiving and violent as they often are, into the blood of Christ. It is not, emphatically not, opposing one form of owned gender-identity (mine, the one I’ve discovered, who I really am) to another (the locally prescribed one to which conformity is required on pain of violence). Walden’s essay fights on a battlefield he should have turned his back on, and if he should win, the victory would be worse than pyrrhic because a Christian mode of thinking about this matter would be made still less visible by it.
