Metaphysics and Gender: The Normative Art of Nature and Its Human Imitations

Genesis 1:27, which states that "God created man in His own image.... male and female He created them," is undermined and parodied by the emerging "science" of transgenderism and related philosophies of gender, which call for a complete inversion of the traditional understanding of God, man, and the created order. The divinely created human being is now in danger of being abolished and replaced by the self-made man and the man-made woman, whether via subversive performative identity or surgical sex change.

The author of Metaphysics and Gender, Michele M. Schumacher, calls for the restoration of an anthropological vision that is grounded in recognition of the normative divine "art" of nature and of the similarity—and far greater unlikeness—between divine and human causality as a remedy to this distorted and distorting outlook. Schumacher examines current transgender tendencies and pinpoints and explores their conceptual and ideological roots in Judith Butler's gender theory, Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminism, and Jean-Paul Sartre's atheistic existentialism. Schumacher contrasts the erroneous philosophical premises of these philosophers with the metaphysically based thought of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, advancing their positive account of the greatness of creation and of the significance of ethical norms, individual liberty and organic inclinations, and embodiment, and mounting an incisive defensive system of the divinely created human person.