“Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the leper” (Mark 1:41).
I want to change how we speak and how we think. I want to change the sets of concepts and the corresponding language that are standard in contemporary American culture for describing and categorizing people in terms of sexual orientation, biological classification by sex (male, female, etc.), and gender. This essay cannot do this task thoroughly, of course, but I hope these reflections will be sufficient to make the continued use of the standard concepts and terms uncomfortable for my readers and therefore a subject for caution and careful reflection.
For the sets of concepts and words that we commonly use to refer to sexual orientation, biological classification by sex, and gender exclude large numbers of our fellow human beings altogether. By excluding these persons conceptually they also exclude their concerns and interests, the good or harm done to them, their rights, and the respect due to them as persons from counting at all in our reflections about how people ought to act toward one another. Indeed, our standard concepts about these matters exclude large numbers of people from being counted in the human family at all, even by people who care very much about being inclusive. This is the most radical form of exclusion, that the persons excluded do not so much as exist in the minds of others.
To explain this claim I must first tell a story. Six years ago I learned that someone who is a very close friend of mine is transgendered. He is someone I knew as happily married, the father of six children grown to adulthood, an active, successful businessman, a good and valued neighbor, a leader in the life of his Catholic parish. In a moment of special candor he shared with me the reality that he is transgendered, not by being a transsexual, which is the form of transgendered experience with which the public are probably most familiar, but as a heterosexual male cross-dresser; or more accurately, as bi-gendered. I will explain this way of describing him more fully in a moment.
The conversation in which I learned my friend is transgendered was a very moving one for both of us. Good friendships do not exist solely for powerful moments of revelation, but they do facilitate them and can grow greatly as a result. Because he is my friend I wanted to learn more, and he is a good teacher. In fact, over the last three years my friend has spoken to several classes of mine and of other professors at my university and at other schools in his feminine persona. Both faculty and students who have met my friend in this way concur in what I already knew, that the person whose femme name is Amanda is a very impressive person.
My friend and I have talked a lot. I have also studied a lot; and we have talked more. I also asked if I could meet other members of my friend’s support group, which is called Tri-Ess, for “Society for the Second Self.” This is a support group specifically for heterosexual male cross-dressers and their spouses and significant others. One of its principal missions, besides providing a strong base of mutual support for each member and a monthly opportunity for the members to cross-dress in safety, is to help marriages and other relationships between the members and their significant others survive and grow. Obviously the ways in which male cross-dressing is conceptualized in contemporary American culture, together with the powerful stigma against it, mean that the male partner’s need to cross-dress makes for powerful challenges to the stability of a heterosexual relationship. In fact, so powerful is this stigma and so deeply internalized in most men of our culture that many men are afraid to reveal this aspect of themselves, even to their wives in otherwise exemplary marriages. From what I have observed in now knowing a number of members of the support group, such groups do a great deal of good.
Before long I also saw a connection between what I was learning about gender—and especially about gender-identity, as I shall explain —and the underlying theme of most of my scholarly work for the last thirty years. What I have chiefly studied as a moral philosopher are the ethical standards that operate within complex social systems. I have studied and written about property relations, law, professions, and other important social roles, business and health-care organizations and other social systems. I have explored how the set of concepts that defines such a system and its component roles and relations is typically used in turn to justify the whole system and its activities within the larger society. I have observed how the concepts that define most social systems are ordinarily learned and employed by persons within these systems without careful examination of their presuppositions or implications. The view of the world that these concepts shape and limit is typically accepted as simply how-the-world-is by those living and interacting within that system.
It is certainly not an original insight to say that gender roles constitute such a system. But personal contact with transgendered people has taught me something that I have not heard proposed before. It is now clear to me that those of us who have not experienced a mismatch between our gender—that is, between the gender role with which we identify, what I will call our gender-identity—and other aspects of ourselves —for example, how others assign or conceive of our gender—may have to listen to those who have experienced this mismatch in order to understand not only the experience of mismatch, but even what is involved in identifying with a gender role, in “having a gender identity,” in the first place.
So I have both personal and professional motivation to learn more about and especially more from my transgendered friends and to support my friend and others in the support group as they deal with their difficult situation. One aspect of my effort to assist them has been to apply the skills that come from my years as a philosopher in the development of a draft educational document that critiques the standard concepts and terms and articulates a more inclusive set of concepts and terms to describe people in terms of their biology as male, female, etc., their sexual orientation, and their gender-identity. The material offered below on these concepts could not have been written without my involvement in this drafting project.
I should mention that the membership in the Tri-Ess support group cuts across social class, economic categories, educational achievement, race, religion, and ethnic background. I also need to mention that the first rule of the support group is privacy. Members of the group are known to one another by their feminine names, and any question about what a member does for a living or where a member lives, etc., may always be comfortably and appropriately answered with “I’d rather not say.” I certainly can appreciate this. Transgendered people not only live under the deep stigma our society imposes on them, but suffer as well that which comes from their inevitably internalizing that stigma as they are growing up. They are also without any legal protection in most places in the United States if anyone would refuse to serve them or would fire them from their jobs or discriminate against them in some other way because of their cross-dressing. If they are attacked, or even killed because they cross-dress, that act is not even considered a hate crime.
Why is this? The answer to this question restates the central thesis of this essay and is, from a philosophical perspective, very simple. Conceptually speaking, transgendered people and another group of people of whom I will speak in a moment, the intersexed, simply do not exist. That is, they have no standing within the sets of concepts about sexual orientation, biological sex, and gender that are commonly used in our society. It is not just that they are unusual, outliers from the curve. Instead, they have no conceptual standing at all. In terms of the standard concepts we use to understand these aspects of the world these people are excluded from existing altogether.
By far the most efficient way to exclude a class of persons from the realm of ethics and obligations is for our operative system of concepts to have no place for them whatsoever. When that is so, there is no need to ask ethical questions about how to deal with them. There are no ethical questions to ask because the ethical questions about properly addressing their situation cannot, strictly speaking, even be formulated. Their situation is not beneath deserving our attention. Rather it does not exist at all in the system of concepts taken for granted by those judging.
There are three important themes that need to be addressed before we have any hope of reconstructing our concepts, so they are inclusive of all the relevant human experience. The first theme concerns the distinctness of three ways of describing or categorizing human beings. These three ways of categorizing people are: (1) as biologically male, female, etc., (2) according to a person’s preferred partner for intimacy or sexual orientation, (3) according to a person’s gender identity.
The point to be stressed here is that the characteristics of persons that these three categories pick out are distinct from one another in people’s experience. We all know, for example, that persons from both of the two largest biological categories, typical males and typical females, are to be found in all the subcategories of sexual orientation, however that category is subdivided. The same is true of every other subcategory of the three ways of categorizing just mentioned. Every possible combination is to be found in the human family. Consequently, if a society’s system of concepts does not allow for this range of experiences, for example by excluding the possibility of a biological female with a masculine gender-identity, not only is that system of concepts inadequate to describe human experience accurately, but those members of the human family who experience life in the excluded ways have no conceptual standing in that society. And since they do not exist, the question of how we ought or ought not to interact with them cannot even be formulated, much less thoughtfully addressed.
The second theme is that the notion of “two and only two” does not apply to any of these three ways of categorizing. Consider preferred partner for intimacy or sexual orientation. Most people now know that, in addition to persons who are sexually attracted exclusively to persons with typical female anatomies and persons who are sexually attracted to persons with typical male anatomies, there are people who are sexually attracted to members of both groups. Such people are referred to as bisexual.
It is important to remember in this, however, that many persons who experience sexual attraction to both males and females are not equally attracted to members of both groups. They are not all fifty-fifty, so to speak. In the experience of such persons there is a broad range of attraction in the two directions. To use mathematical imagery again, some people are 60/40, others 40/60, some 20/80, others 10/90 and so on. Indeed, it is likely that many people who would describe themselves either as straight or as gay or lesbian are in fact 90/10 or 80/20 in their orientation, but view the admixture of the other element of attraction as a kind of breadth of perspective. In other words, the subcategories of sexual orientation cover a whole spectrum from 100/0 to 0/100 and every combination in between. This is what it means to say about sexual orientation that either/or ways of thinking do not apply.
It is common knowledge that the description of someone as biologically male or female actually involves a number of distinct aspects of human biology, and that people vary considerably in all of them. Among these are genetic and chromosomal characteristics, hormonal characteristics, reproductive physiology, internal anatomy, external anatomy, and possibly the structure of the brain. These matters vary considerably and the notion of a spectrum of subcategories might seem quite appropriate. Yet our culture’s concept system persists in categorizing people into two and only two rigid biological categories, male and female. It might be argued that this is appropriate because there are two and only two body types, or perhaps two and only two ways in which human gonads occur. But in fact there are many persons who have biological characteristics of both typical males and typical females. In fact, approximately one in every two thousand infants is born intersexed; that is, with a combination of external anatomical features associated with both typical females and typical males, or with a combination of external and internal (including gonadal) features associated with both typical males and typical females.
Such persons were once called “hermaphrodites” and “pseudo-hermaphrodites” (these words come from the name of a character in Greek mythology) because nineteenth-century medicine taught that there were only two important subcategories to which all such persons belonged. The more common term today is “intersex.” This single summary term is used in part to recognize that there are more than just two combinations of biological characteristics in this group, more in fact than have been carefully counted or distinguished to date, and that there are many different, and often not well understood, medical conditions that cause such combinations of biological characteristics. Using this single summary term also recognizes the many similar challenges that almost all such persons face in American society, where their condition is widely thought either not to exist at all or to be extremely rare, or to be so different from what is typical as to be defective or objectively disordered. It underscores the fact that persons who have biological characteristics of this sort are certainly full human beings, deserving of respect, affirmation, and support.
For a number of years medical treatment of intersexed infants and children has typically focused on reconstructing their external genitals so they match as closely as possible either typical male or typical female age-appropriate anatomy. Such treatment has been based on two unproved assumptions that are sharply debated today: first, that gender identity is completely formed through early social influences, and second that the intersexed child’s gender identity, formed by the child’s parents and others, will match whatever gender-role is assigned to the child when the child’s external genital anatomy is surgically reconstructed (first as an infant, and then ordinarily through a number of other surgical procedures, hormone treatments, etc.). Many adults who received such surgeries as infants and children are now actively challenging this approach on the basis of their experience. Note that this pattern of medical practice, which is now being challenged from within the medical community as well, depends for its rationale on an either/ or system of biological (and gender) concepts that excludes the experience of many members of the human family.
The third way of categorizing people mentioned above is in relation to gender. This way of categorizing people appears simple to many people, but it is much more complicated than it seems. One thing about it that makes it seem simple is the fact that in contemporary American culture there are two and only two genders or gender-roles.
In this essay the terms “feminine” and “masculine” are used to refer to these two gender-roles when an adjective is needed, and the terms women and men (and girls and boys) to refer to them when a noun is needed. These six words will be used here only to refer to gender-roles, never to biological categories (which will be referred to, as above, by the words male, female, and intersex).
It is important to keep in mind, when thinking about gender, that there are other cultures in the world where the gender-roles are not the same as they are in American culture. It is not only the case that other cultures have masculine and feminine categories that are different from the masculine and feminine roles in contemporary American culture (even though they are similar enough to our masculine and feminine categories that the same words can be meaningfully used to name them). It is also the case that there are cultures that have more than two genders or gender-roles. That is, there are cultures that have more than two divisions in a categorization of people that functions in those cultures in about the same way that categorization of people by gender-role does in ours.
As mentioned, the topic of gender is much more complicated than it might seem. The same word, gender, is used with at least four different meanings in ordinary speech today. The first of these relates to roles in terms of which people in a society are categorized: gender-roles. The other three relate to three different contexts for categorizing people in terms of these gender-roles: gender assignment, gender expression, and gender identity.
First, there are the gender-roles, which are complex sets of human characteristics, behaviors, and expectations that are constructed (gradually, and gradually changed) by a culture so its people can more easily describe one another, assign tasks and statuses within the society, and have fairly stable expectations of one another. As was mentioned above, American culture presently has two and only two gender-roles, the feminine gender-role and the masculine gender-role: women and men.
Some elements of these two gender-roles have undergone significant change in American society in recent decades. For example, some behaviors and tasks that were narrowly associated with only one of these gender-roles fifty years ago—e.g., competitiveness for the masculine role and nurturing for the feminine role—can today be properly undertaken by individuals in the other role, at least under certain circumstances. But these adjustments in the behaviors considered appropriate in the two roles have not changed the reality that there are still two and only two gender-roles in contemporary American culture. The fact that there are people who are viewed as transgendered is itself evidence that there are gender-role boundaries that such people are considered to be crossing. There are many other forms of evidence of the reality and significance of our culture’s two gender-roles.
A second use of the word gender refers to the assignment of a particular gender-role to an individual person by others who interact with that person. This is one of the contexts in which categorization of people in terms of gender takes place: people in a culture perceive and describe one another as belonging to one or other of the culture’s gender-roles, an activity that will here be called gender-assignment.
Assignment here does not refer only to official forms of assignment, as when a newborn is declared to be a boy or a girl. In fact, we all do this assigning all the time, routinely identifying the individuals we encounter in our lives as participants in one gender-role or the other. Using various kinds of evidence (which function as evidence because of their connection to the characteristics, behaviors, tasks, etc. of the culture’s two gender-roles), we identify each other as a participating in the masculine gender-role or as participating in the feminine gender-role, as being either a man or a woman, and then we typically act accordingly in our interactions with and our expectations of the person.
In this connection it is worth saying that the expectation that an infant categorized as a boy will grow up to be a man and an infant categorized as girl will grow up to be a woman is not only or even primarily a biological prediction. It is rather a statement of expectations associated with gender-assignment. Note that in common speech all the words reserved here for gender-roles are also often used to refer to biological categories, and they often are used to refer to biological and gender categories simultaneously, as if these two sets of categories were always paired together in human experience. Thus when an infant is declared to be a boy or a girl, the infant is typically being categorized into a gender-role, as masculine or feminine, and a biological category, as male or female, at one and the same time, lending credence to the mistaken idea that biological categories and gender identity are always nicely matched.
The third meaning of the word gender concerns how we humans express ourselves in action, speech, carriage, dress, ornament, etc. Associated with each of the gender-roles is a complex set of forms of gender expression. Phrases like “looked very feminine,” “sounded like a man,” “didn’t act like a woman,” and “wasn’t very masculine” are common in ordinary speech and always presuppose a set of gender-role-typical forms of speech, appearance, bearing, movement, etc., which the speaker takes for granted as being well understood within the speaker’s culture. Most such statements also imply a value judgment regarding the person’s manner of expressing or presenting himself/herself because, in addition to there being a set of gender-role-typical forms of self-expression, there are also gender-role-based limitations on people’s ways of expressing themselves within a culture. Expressing oneself in ways that are outside those limits usually evokes a negative judgment against the person who does so.
The reason for distinguishing gender expression from both gender assignment and gender identity is that a person’s expression may not be consistent with his/her gender identity or with how she/he is gender-assigned. In some settings, for example, gender expression inconsistent with gender assignment is ordinarily considered acceptable, as when a woman (a person gender-assigned in the feminine gender-role) wears the costume of a man (clothing etc. typically associated with the masculine gender-role), or vice-versa, at a costume party. But in other settings expression inconsistent with assignment may be severely stigmatized, as has long been the case in the United States for males wearing feminine clothing and makeup, unless there are special excusing circumstances like a costume party. On the other hand, if a person’s gender identity was at odds with her/his gender assignment, but he/she engaged in gender expression consistent with assignment, the person could experience conflict and psychological pain by reason of the mismatch between identity and expression. So there is real descriptive value in distinguishing gender expression as a separate concept.
Fourth, the word “gender” is also used to refer to a person’s own identification with the society’s gender-roles. This aspect of human experience will be referred to here as “gender identity.” In this activity the context of categorization is self-categorization. Although there is some disagreement and the matter has not been fully studied, most psychologists who study gender identity agree, and most persons who have experienced a conflict between their gender identity and other aspects of their lives support the view, that people’s experience regarding their gender identity should be thought of as an orientation, in the sense of this word used in connection with preferred partner for intimacy. That is, gender identity is a deeply embedded characteristic of a human being that is present in people from their earliest years of awareness of distinct gender-roles and of themselves in relation to them; and it is a characteristic that does not ordinarily change across a person’s lifetime.
Gender identity is frequently what is being expressed when a person says “I am a woman” or “I am a man,” and then draws a conclusion from this about how to act or react, or about how other persons should act on the basis of this identification. But in ordinary speech, as was mentioned, statements using these words could easily be intended to describe the person’s biological characteristics because the words man and woman are also used in that way in ordinary speech. Or they could be about how the person perceives the gender assignments that others are making about him/her. But such statements are often intended to articulate something about the person’s identity, about how the person perceives or understands herself/himself. They are about the kind of self the person has been, about the kind of self that he/she is trying to become, and about the kinds of actions and reactions that are consistent with or called for by this identity.
Many people now understand that there are persons who identify with one of the gender-roles within the culture, but it is not the gender-role to which they have previously been assigned by others in the society and in which they have lived and which has typically been assigned to them on the basis of their biological categorization at birth. Some persons who experience life in this way choose to live with the conflicts and psychological pain that such a mismatch between identity and assignment (and its consequences in the actions and expectations of others) produces. Others choose to change the way they live in order to live in the gender-role with which they identify. In order to do this they set aside the other gender-role to which they had previously been assigned and in which they have previously lived and take up the gender-role with which they identify. In doing this, because gender-roles pervade so many aspects of human life, these persons may have to set aside many other elements of their previous lives, including possibly very important relationships with other persons if these persons cannot incorporate the person’s change of gender-role into their own lives. Persons who make such a thorough going change, and fully and permanently take up the other gender-role, are now generally called “transsexuals” (even though this term used to refer more narrowly to persons making this change who also seek changes their external genital anatomy).
What is not widely known in American culture is that there are also many people who identify deeply with both gender-roles of our culture, who experience themselves as being both deeply masculine persons and deeply feminine persons. People of this sort will be referred to here as “bi-gendered.”
Those who experience their sense of who they are in this way sometimes describe themselves by saying they “have two genders.” But properly speaking it is cultures that have genders, namely gender-roles. A more precise way of describing the experience of bi-gendered persons is to say that, as stated above, they identify with both gender-roles that our culture provides. That is, with regard to gender identity it is not a matter of either/or for bi-gendered people. For them it is a matter of both/and. Just as our standard system of concepts is mistaken in holding that, in terms of biological categorization, every person is either simply female or simply male, so also is our culture’s system of concepts about gender mistaken in holding that every person’s gender identity is either simply masculine or simply feminine. Some people are deeply both.
It is important to note how dependent these discussions about identity are on the use of the words he/she, her/him, his/her, etc. It has not been easy to avoid these words in the paragraphs just written. But in English these words only come in gender-assigned forms: he/him/ himself/his and she/her/herself/hers. For speakers of English, whenever a word of this sort is needed one cannot avoid assigning a single gender (either/or) to the person referred to. (In some languages there are pronouns that mean simply the person, without gender assignment in the very saying of the words.) In addition, these same gendered words are used, in ordinary speech, to assign persons to biological categories. There would be no problem here, of course, if these aspects of life—biological categorization regarding a person, gender assignment regarding the person, and the person’s gender identity—always matched up perfectly. But they do not always match up perfectly. So the English language has significant potential for describing people incorrectly and supporting a set of concepts that systematically excludes large numbers of persons.
This fact about the English language is not only a matter of inconvenience for speakers who want to speak accurately. It also shapes people’s thinking in English-speaking cultures, leading them without noticing it to believe that everyone’s gender identity is either masculine or feminine and that, in regard to biological characteristics, everyone is either simply male or simply female. No matter how much these patterns are taken for granted and seem supported by our use of English pronouns, however, neither of these either/or patterns is accurate.
Among bi-gendered persons, some strongly identify with the gender-role different from the gender-role in which they ordinarily live and to which they have been assigned by others throughout their life (which gender-role has typically been assigned on the basis of their biological categorization at birth). Other bi-gendered persons genuinely identify with the other gender-role, but not as strongly. That is, not all bi-gendered persons are 50/50, so to speak. In a manner that parallels what was said earlier about bisexuals, some bi-gendered persons are 60/40, others 40/60, others 20/80, others 90/10, and so on.
Among the bi-gendered who strongly identify with the other gender-role, some choose to live with the conflicts and psychological pain produced by the mismatch between this aspect of their identity and their actual life. Others choose to change the way they live in order to participate in the other gender-role as well as continuing to participate in their assigned gender-role. But it is not possible to participate to any full degree in both gender-roles simultaneously in a society with two and only two definitely distinct gender-roles. So typically such a person lives the majority of his or her life in one gender-role and spends briefer amounts of time and engages in a more limited range of activities and relationships in the other.
Obviously, change of gender-role includes changes in gender expression. When a bi-gendered person changes gender-role, this involves expressing the other gender-role with which the person identifies. For being in a gender-role includes being assigned that gender-role by other persons, and it certainly includes self-assignment of that gender-role. Gender assignment is significantly dependent upon gender expression; our culture’s system of concepts is not open to assigning a person to both gender-roles simultaneously. Therefore when a bi-gendered person chooses to express the other gender-role with which he/she identifies, the bi-gendered person will aim through details of gender expression to be assigned by others in that other gender-role, both in order to experience a proper “match” in his/her identification with that other gender-role and also to avoid the negative judgment of others for transgressing gender-role boundaries.
Given the extent to which body-shape and other visible characteristics are used as evidence in gender assignment in our culture, a person changing gender-roles will typically work hard to express the body-shape and other visible characteristics typically associated with the gender-role she/he is adopting. This activity is often called “cross-dressing.” But it would be a serious mistake to think that a bi-gendered person’s expression of his or her other gender-role is simply a matter of clothing, even though many bi-gendered people are comfortable with this term. What is happening here is something far more personally significant than putting clothes on one’s body. It is an expressing of the person’s identity to himself/herself and an expressing of himself/herself to other members of the human family in a manner in accord with her/his genuine gender identity. Note also that the bi-gendered person, because he/she identifies with both gender-roles, is in a certain sense always cross-dressed, always presenting himself or herself to the world in a gender-role that does not express all of his or her identity.
There is another term that deserves a comment, the term “transvestite,” which is simply the Latin word for the same idea. But this term is one that the transgendered community does not care to use because it was invented by and long used by psychiatry as the name of a pathology or mental illness. While the conflicts and psychological pain experienced by many bi-gendered people are very real, neither they nor most mental health professionals who assist them consider their identification with both gender-roles to be a pathology. They experience this aspect of their identity simply as one way of being a human being who deserves respect, affirmation, and support.
One of the hardest aspects of being bi-gendered in our society is that, at least for males, for cultural reasons (some of which are explored in this volume), there is a profound stigma in American society attached to males if they engage in gender expression appropriate to the feminine gender-role, except under special excusing conditions such as a costume party (and many people in American culture do not consider that an exception). This stigma, especially when it has been powerfully learned in youth and has been deeply internalized in the bi-gendered person, as is often the case, creates a profound fear of expressing the other gender-role, as well as profound guilt for even wanting to do so. Bi-gendered persons who feel a deep need to express the gender-identity that does not match their typical gender assignment ordinarily need to muster a lot of courage, and often need the help of counselors or a support group to deal with the power of this internalized stigma.
I began by saying that I want to change how we speak and how we think because the system of concepts that we commonly use in American culture to refer to people in terms of biology, sexual orientation, and gender excludes important groups within the human family. In fact, the most common academic way of referring to sexual orientation, categorizing (most) people as heterosexual and homosexual, presupposes the either/or conceptualization of both biology and gender. Sexual orientation is thus ordinarily conceptualized in terms of likeness and unlikeness, but likeness and unlikeness to what? To typical male and typical female gender anatomy, and to typical masculine and feminine gender characteristics, with the assumption that everyone fits either one category or the other. There is, as in so much of our culture, no conceptual room for both/and, and those who are intersexed or bi-gendered are simply excluded from notice.
What is it like to be without conceptual standing? Consider this analogy. You cannot make your case in court before a judge if you do not have standing in that jurisdiction. If you are a citizen of Illinois or of Texas, even if they would let you into a courtroom in Ohio, your statement of the words of a claim you have about a matter in your home state would have no consequence whatsoever to the Ohio judge. It is not only that your words would not be judged legally sound in that court. Your words would be empty, meaningless, would not count for anything but noise because you lack standing in that courtroom. And in fact, because of this, they would not let you in!
Persons who are excluded by our commonly used concepts are similar, but their lack of standing is more radical. They are not even lepers, who exist but must be shunned and certainly never touched. These persons do not exist. How can their lives, well-being, interests, or rights be weighed when our concepts have no room for them at all? Without standing in the world of meaning, their words and their concerns are empty noise, the words and the concerns of persons who do not exist.
To extend our hand to these, as Jesus did to the leper, we must reject the systems of concepts we are familiar with and construct concepts that include them and their ways of experiencing life in the human family. And to do that well, as Jesus did, we may actually have to touch them.