Why Aquinas’s Metaphysics of Gender Is Fundamentally Correct: A Response toJohn Finley

摘要

In an important article, John Finley suggests a correction to Aquinas’s understanding ofgender distinction. Disagreeing with Aquinas, Finley proposes that gender distinction(male and female) stems from the soul rather than from the body. In this essay, I willshow that this is not a tenable position because it does not fit with either what we knowabout the physical development of sex differences or the unity of man and woman as asingle human species. I will defend Aquinas’s fundamental insights into the root of genderdistinction without defending his biological understanding of the process itself. I willargue that there is a single generic generative power in the soul that is determined bythe matter to which the soul is united, to be expressed as either male or female. Thisparadigm, I believe, copes better than the one offered by Finley with phenomena such asintersexed persons and sex reassignment surgery. While I do not accept the idea of afeminine or masculine soul, the paradigm offered here does lead to the notion of the soulbeing feminized or masculinized on account of the matter that it informs.