Susannah Cornwall

LAST MONTH, we discussed the publication of two disturbing articles by British female academics. The ethicist Francesca Minerva argued in an academic journal that it is not immoral for parents to put to death newborns with cognitive problems. And, another ethicist, Anna Smajdor, wrote in a prestigious journal that because pregnancy is unfair to women and prevents them from attaining equality with men, the development of artificial wombs is necessary and good.

Now, as if all this wasn’t enough to prove the bankruptcy of British intellectual life, another shallow, unprincipled, and hopelessly juvenile feminist professor makes her mark.

Susannah Cornwall, a theology professor at Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute, argues in a lengthy paper for the Centre for Religion and Political Culture that there is no proof  that Jesus was a man. He may have been an “intersex” person, neither fully male nor female.

Cornwall, (I know she looks like a waitress at the local sports bar, but she is a certified theologian), writes:

[I]t is not possible to assert with any degree of certainty that Jesus was male as we now define maleness. There is no way of knowing for sure that Jesus did not have one of the intersex conditions which would give him a body which appeared externally to be unremarkably male, but which might nonetheless have had some “hidden” female
physical features. He might have had ovarian as well as testicular tissue in his body.

The events as described in the Gospels — Jesus’s circumcision, his identification by many people who saw him as a man, his repeated reference to himself as a man, his crucifixion and the removal of his clothing during his crucifixion, the preparation of his unclothed body for burial — are not evidence enough to prove that Jesus was not a hermaphrodite. Cornwall considers the possibility that Jesus possessed internal female organs. Thus there is no way to refute her bizarre claim.

Cornwall’s intention is not merely to support the Gender Confusion Movement. She wants to prove there is no reason to deny women the priesthood on the basis of Christ’s maleness. She makes no pretense of unprejudiced intellectual inquiry. She comes right out and says she is looking for a reason to justify women in the priesthood against orthodox claims to the contrary.

In her paper, which I have read, she writes under the popular delusion that it is possible for a human being to be both male and female. Such a thing has never been recorded in all of human history. There has never been a person who had the fully functioning reproductive organs of a male and a female. A person is either male, female, or a defective who is sterile. Some human beings have physical attributes of both sexes, but none combines both sexes.

Therefore, there are only two sexes, contrary to the rhetorical gambits of people like Cornwall and other radicals who wish to prove that it is nonsensical to divide the humanity into male and female. Let me help Cornwall with this exercise. If a person has the reproductive organs of a man, organs which when functioning properly can impregnate a woman, he is a man. If a person has a womb and ovaries, even if not fully functioning or complete, she is a woman. If a person has physical anomalies so that he or she cannot reproduce as a man or woman, and has characteristics of both sexes, he is a defective man or a defective woman. These conditions in their most extreme manifestations are extremely rare and involve sterility. Hence they are biological mutations that will always remain highly rare.

The now popular term “intersex” is used in a deliberately misleading way by political activists. There are not intersex individuals who, as Cornwall insists, are both male and female.

She writes:

Sex (biological, physical attributes of someone’s body) and gender (someone’s sense of being a man, a woman, or something else) are not the same thing. [Sorry, Susannah. A person can believe he is a horse or believe he is a starfish, but that does not make him a horse or a starfish. A man who believes he is a woman is deluded.]

Whilst most people who are biologically male also identify as men, and most people who identify as men are biologically male, this is not universal. [Men who do not identify as men are psychologically disordered, perhaps through no fault of their own. Their sense of disorientation affirms the reality of innate sex.]  For one thing, there are transgender people whose gender identity does not “match” their physical sex in the way we usually expect. [And there are women who believe they are theologians when they are not. Truth is not subjective.] For another thing – and this is the point I make in my paper – there are many people who identify as men but who have some intersex variation in their physical sex. [No, there are not many people who have pronounced characteristics of both sexes. In the Journal of Sex Research, Leonard Sax wrote that the incidence of intersex “restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female” is about 0.018% of the population.]

About 1 in every 2,500 people is born with an intersex condition which means that their body varies from the typical male or female pattern. [Cornwall obviously includes in this very high number people who have some attributes of the opposite sex – for instance, a man who has enlarged breasts.]  Whilst some people have intersex conditions which manifest in genitals which look unusual, other intersex people have no external visible ambiguity. It’s therefore possible that Jesus – in common with many other people whose sex is never called in question – had a hidden or “invisible” intersex condition.

Why is this paper of interest? We already know that the academic establishment is deeply alienated from reality and adolescent. But this paper does show the lengths to which feminists are willing to go to destroy sex distinctions.

The purpose of Cornwall’s claim is entirely political and she is upfront about that. Her article is in response to an evangelical think tank’s publication titled The Church, Women Bishops and Provision: The Integrity of Orthodox Objection to Women Bishops. She writes:

There is simply no way of telling at this juncture whether Jesus was an unremarkably male human being, or someone with an intersex condition who had a male morphology as far as the eye could see but may or may not also have had XXchromosomes or some female internal anatomy. The fact that, as far as we know, Jesus never married, fathered children or engaged in sexual intercourse, of course, makes his “undisputable” maleness even less certain.

I would argue that it does matter if Jesus’ undisputed maleness is deemed crucial to his Christness, to his sacerdotal function and the sacerdotal function of the priests and bishops who minister in his stead – which the authors of The Church, Women Bishops  and Provision insist is the case. But that Jesus was male is simply a best guess – a kind of sexual docetism on which ecclesiological truth and essentialist ontology is now being made to rest. … Even leaving aside the issue of transgender, intersex shows that pinning gender identities on sex characteristics does not always “work” unproblematically – so the question is whether, in the case of women bishops, it is their sexes or their genders which are significant.

If it cannot be proven that Jesus was male, the traditional arguments against women in the priesthood do not hold water. Cornwall began with this premise – women should be priests – and proceeded to the conclusion that Jesus was not necessarily male. She goes so far as to suggest she is a prophet of a new age. She writes:

A different reading [of the Bible], however, might be that the  Holy Spirit all through time has acted to make a minority of people prophets who, in dialogue with the mores and assumptions of their times, come to believe that divine promptings for justice mean that certain norms can no longer be justified.

Instead of proving that women should be priests, Cornwall has provided disturbing evidence for why they should not be priests. Or theologians.

— Comments —

Jewelled Cranberry writes:

I was dumbfounded to read the article about Susannah Cornwall’s theory that Jesus was not necessarily a man. I chuckled when I read this quote from her article: “The fact that, as far as we know, Jesus never married, fathered children or engaged in sexual intercourse, of course, makes his “undisputable” maleness even less certain.”

Really, not marrying or fathering children means uncertain maleness? I know a few men who have never married or fathered children who are, nonetheless, certainly male. Whether by choice or simply the slings and arrows of fate, these men simply did not follow the marriage and family route. Some are priests, others are devoted to their careers. But if marriage and family is the new barometer for measuring maleness, then perhaps we need to re-classify all “men” as something new until they get locked into a wife and have a few kids. Gay males are no longer men, either; neither are males who have not yet found a wife or fathered children.

Ms. Cornwall is no theologian if she does not see or comprehend Jesus’ sex. I wonder if she would also assert that Jesus was probably homosexual, since he hung around with twelve other guys all day, loved his mother, and befriended Mary Magdalene rather than having intimate relations with her. No, she does not know Jesus at all, nor does she comprehend the lessons of devotion to a higher power and a higher level of humanity, of discipline and chastity to cleanse the body and spirit, of the masculine power to preach and draw in multitudes at a time when the people to whom he preached were experiencing political and spiritual strife. I have known no women, at all, who had the kind of discipline or charisma attributed to Christ, nor any women who would be capable of withstanding the considerable physical torture endured during the Passion and crucifixion.

Laura writes:

Ms. Cornwall only recognizes innate psychology when it comes to those who suffer from gender confusion. In that case, she asserts, there is something unchangeable about the character and outlook of a person. But when it comes to the intangibles of male and female – the fact, for instance, that only a man is able to lead large crowds the way Christ did, that only a man could have expressed anger in the Temple and overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the way Christ did, that only a man would have commanded and preached with the authority that Jesus had — Cornwall reverts to biology and says that only biological traits are real.

Lawrence Auster writes:

I think you focus too much on the particular historical person, Jesus, of whom Cornwall says that we cannot know if he was a man or some kind of intersex being, and your are reacting to that claim, and thus miss the real import of what she is saying. Beyond her immediate explicit purpose, which is to undermine the connection between maleness and the priestly function, it seems to me that the most significant thing about her theory is not that she says specifically that we cannot know if Jesus was not intersex, but that she’s really saying that we cannot know if any historical person was not really intersex. Let us leave aside the fact that particular historical persons were married and had children. That proves nothing. Their marriages might have been false fronts to conceal their ambiguous sexuality. Their children might have been adopted. The point is that by Cornwall’s logic, we cannot know if Moses was not intersex, or Jeremiah, or Plato, or Cincinnatus, or Julius Caesar, or Muhammad, or Alfred the Great, or Pope Gregory VII, or Thomas Aquinas, or George Washington, or anyone before our own time. We just don’t know.

Just as homosexualists love to assert that various prominent historical figures were “really” homosexual, the aim being to show that homosexuality is far more widespread than “we” want to recognize and that our ideas of normality are false, Cornwall is asserting that intersexuality or transgenderism (or whatever the word is) is far more widespread than has been recognized, and therefore our ideas of normality are false.

Laura writes:

Wow, that’s a great point.

Lydia Sherman writes:

Susannah Cornwall may have a cognitive problem. If she reads the Bible at all, she should be aware of the many references to Christ as He, and as the Son.

Isaiah 53, verses 3 and 4 calls the Messiah a “man” and a “he” several times:

“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”

Jesus is called the Prince of peace in Isaiah 9:6, and Lord in the New Testament. These are both male terms. The female equivalent would be princess and lady.

Laura writes:

But to her, all this is evidence of the gulliblity, and the sheer stupidity, of the authors of the Bible. They simply rushed to conclusions when the Holy Spirit told Mary that God was sending her a son. They were operating under the ancient assumption that male and female exist.

Cornwall, remember, considers herself a prophet. She said as much in her paper. So as a prophet, she is entitled to overturn virtually the entire Bible.

Never has a prophet appeared in so unlikely a form.

John writes:

And I guess there’s no way to prove that Jesus wasn’t a Martian either.

Daniel S. writes:

Wait, I am confused. Wasn’t the liberal media establishment all abuzz a few years back with the plagiarized theory of a talentless, hack writer that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and fathered children with her, and that she was his truest follower and successor and that the evil, misogynistic Catholic Church was covering up this secret? So Jesus went from being a radical feminist to being an actual woman? Different theories, same liberal gnosticism.

[The discussion continues here.]

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