all-american bitch
A radical new approach to Catholic solidarity.
“Got what you can't resist
I'm a perfect all-American bitch
With perfect all-American lips
And perfect all-American hips”
-Saint Hildegard of Bingen
2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of coeducation at the University of Notre Dame. The people who run Our Lady’s University knew exactly what to do to celebrate the decades of contribution by young women to the university community: they tweaked the lyrics to the fight song to make it slightly more feminist. I stormed the halls of our apartment sarcastically yelling “WELL WELL WELL IF IT ISN'T WOKE-QAEDA COME TO CORRUPT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN” until my wife asked me to stop, but the fact remained: as of June 2022, as revealed as part of the programming for alumni reunion weekend, the final lines of the Notre Dame Victory March, originally “While her loyal sons are marching/Onward to victory” now officially read “While her loyal sons and daughters/March on to victory”. The scansion is a little clunky but workable. Of course, the opening lines of the fight song are “Rally sons of Notre Dame”, which are unchanged today even though you could probably update those as well, but nobody did because they forgot.
Now, June 2022 was also the same month that Roe v. Wade was officially overturned by the Supreme Court, resulting in a massive loss of healthcare access and rights for anyone across the country who would receive gynecological care, and one of the votes to overturn Roe, of course, came from the newest Supreme Court justice who had been a law professor at Notre Dame, and also the president of Notre Dame had been attending the March for Life in DC every year since 2010 because he was trying to prove his anti-abortion cred after inviting Obama to speak at commencement. The women of Notre Dame, like so many across the country, had suffered a loss of life-or-death rights, a loss of safe access to healthcare, and a loss to which Notre Dame had indirectly, but clearly, contributed; the consequences over the past year and a half, as we have seen, have been dire. Notre Dame gathered hurt and worried women together, showed them a partially updated fight song, and said “YOU’RE WELCOME.” There is, obviously, some very dark comedy to be found in this. But it also points to something that happens all of the time with the Catholic hierarchy and prominent Catholic institutions in general: some people at the top try to say the right things and ignore the part where you do the right things. It makes for nice rhetoric without material change. I’m not a fan.
This isn’t a piece about Notre Dame, it’s a piece about Saint Mary’s College (SMC), the small liberal arts women’s college across the street from Notre Dame, which has recently descended into a hellscape of fulsome depravity and sexual violence. I’m kidding: what Saint Mary’s actually did, like four months ago, was update their non-discrimination policy to include gender identity. That policy got a bigger spotlight placed on it in November when the student newspaper noted that this would mean, for the first time, that transgender women and everyone “whose sex is female or who consistently live and identify as women” could be included in admissions consideration.
So you can guess some of the reactions to this, and you'd be correct on all counts. Some people were happy to see the policy change, some cranky alumnae and conservative students were very unhappy that Woke-Qaeda had struck again, and most people wouldn't have noticed if they hadn't seen the article. But of course, I want to take a moment and look at the official response from the bishop of Fort Wayne/South Bend, two chain-restaurant-filled Indiana cities that have each refused to cede sole diocesan naming rights for decades. That bishop is Kevin Rhoades - ugh, a bishop named Kevin - who is also the chair of the USCCB's doctrine committee.
I actually sort-of wrote about Kevin’s work last year - I had drafted a piece in response to the American bishops’ very bad letter on transgender people and gender-affirming care, which went out with Kevin’s signature on it, since he was a member of the USCCB's doctrine committee. My old essay was meant to be a satirical rewrite of the entire letter; the title of the piece - and this should give you an idea of the tone I was going for - was “Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body But Also Teen Girls Should Have Dope Ass Tiddies.” Parts of it appeared in my “here is all the stuff I didn’t finish writing” dump last year, and the gist, as you have probably guessed, was that I find it absurd that bishops can declare blanket moral prohibitions on gender-affirming care that keeps people healthy and can save lives, but officially consider more common procedures, like cosmetic breast implants for minors, to be kind of a squishy grey area that is definitely more morally flexible1 than trans healthcare. The piece was really just one joke, and the joke was obviously very crass, because when I get pissed off, I can be crass. And that was really what I was worried about, that I’d be too crass and put people off of my argument, that even if my audience agreed with the point I was trying to make, I wasn’t sure they would go for the presentation of that point. But Kevin’s recent statement about SMC, and about how we should treat trans people generally, has me starting to think that I haven’t been crass enough.
Kevin’s statement started by expressing dismay that SMC did not consult him before changing their policy, eliding the fact that SMC is not a diocesan organ and thus doesn't need to give a shit about what Kevin thinks, and also that everyone already knows what Kevin thinks about this issue. I imagine that exactly zero Catholics, especially the people who run SMC, were shocked to see a statement from Kevin condemning the college because “to call itself a “women’s college” and to admit male students who “consistently live and identify as women” suggests that the college affirms an ideology of gender that separates sex from gender and claims that sexual identity is based on the subjective experience of the individual. This ideology is at odds with Catholic teaching.” Sure. If you pay attention to this sort of thing, you probably could have guessed those sentences word-for-word. But, Kevin - Kevin, Kevin, Kevin - did something more interesting later in the letter, while trying to establish that no, you see, he was not hateful, he was actually a good person:
“We must stand in loving solidarity with all our brothers and sisters, including those who identify as transgender. However, such solidarity in love does not mean affirming an understanding of sexual identity that is not true. It does mean affirming every person’s dignity as a human person created in the image and likeness of God and as a brother or sister in the family of the Church or in the human family. The desire of Saint Mary’s College to show hospitality to people who identify as transgender is not the problem. The problem is a Catholic woman’s college embracing a definition of woman that is not Catholic.”
Kevin is proposing a truly novel approach to Christian solidarity here. We have to show hospitality to and stand in solidarity with our transgender family in God. However, we cannot accept or embrace the idea that gender is something different than biological sex, and we cannot accept the stated gender identities of our brothers and sisters. It's important, while we show them hospitality, that we constantly remind them that they're wrong about themselves, and that they're not actually welcome in our women's college. Or Catholic schools in general. Or as employees in Catholic institutions. We know from Kevin's earlier writing that he doesn't think that any gender-affirming healthcare is valid, and he thinks that all gender-adjacent social interactors should be based on biological sex and nothing else. He, less than a year ago, told all trans people that they're wrong, kind of disgusting, lying to everyone and themselves, and they do not belong. But now he's kind enough to tell them that other than that, yes, here's all of our hospitality, and you're welcome by the way. Thanks for the nice words about solidarity, Kevin, next time can you at least attempt an awkward fight song re-write to go along with it?
What does Kevin think “hospitality” or “solidarity” to transgender people, an actual material encounter or interaction, looks like in practice? Is there any room for hospitality or solidarity if your starting point is “this person is stupid, lying, and insufficiently feminine?” I'm not trying to out-logic Kevin here, mainly because there’s no room to do that: he didn’t bring any logic the table, he just farted out a statement to the effect of “someone said trans so I have to say ‘bad’,” and then had to scramble to add “but I would prefer that nobody be mad at me about this”. Like, what do you think is going on with the other ministries in Fort Wayne/South Bend? Do you think that when parishes welcome migrants and asylum seekers, they say “we're here for you, and we would love to hear about your experience poisoning the blood of our country”? When a crisis pregnancy nurse delivers a baby, does she say “welcome to the world little girl, your mommy didn’t want you”? Does the local Catholic Charities hand out coats to the unhoused while saying “you know, if you were willing to grind a little bit harder, I wouldn't have to do this, and you're welcome by the way”? Maybe they do. Because it turns out that SMC just reversed course.
As reported by NCR on December 21, the university president and board chair at SMC signed a letter to the student body explaining that they would be once again removing gender identity from the protected classes in SMC’s non-discrimination policy, writing that “[We originally changed the policy] as a reflection of our College's commitment to live our Catholic values as a loving and just community. It is increasingly clear, however, that the position we took is not shared by all members of our community.”
Look, I think this is bad. All of it. Nobody’s asking me to write policies for SMC, and hey, having community input inform policies is often a good thing, but I feel like the non-discrimination policy is one you should not open up for feedback, because you’d be surprised how many people are big fans of discrimination. For example, the leading Republican gubernatorial candidate in Indiana is a proud Catholic and sitting US Senator who has expressed openness to banning interracial marriage! Should SMC get his input on who it’s okay to discriminate against? That’s a rhetorical question; SMC may soon receive that input whether they want it or not.
Again, nobody’s asking me to write the school policies. There is something people do occasionally ask me though, which is “does the Catholic church have any idea what they’re talking about or doing, literally any of the time?” And the answer, tragically, is no. The head of our doctrine committee is saying “show solidarity to trans people but don’t let them into your school or acknowledge they exist”. A Catholic school is saying “we will narrow our non-discrimination policy if enough people yell at us”. This is bleak, guys. The people who are running things are just pulling anything and everything out of their asses so they can make already marginalized people feel more unwelcome. I’m so sick of this shit. The way I see it, SMC might as well take that last step: if there are unacceptable physical ways to be a woman at SMC, they need to put policies in place making sure that the “acceptable” physical ways to be a woman are as precise, prescriptive and uniform as possible. Put another way: if there’s only one way to be a woman, and if only one type of woman is welcome at Saint Mary’s College, the least that they can do is make sure that this particular type of woman is absolutely stacked and also puts out.
Now, speaking as someone who went to school across the street from SMC: I will acknowledge that this kind of already exists as a stereotype. Notre Dame, remember, went co-ed fifty years ago. Before that happened, ND and SMC were two small-ish single-sex liberal arts colleges across the street from each other. But ND went co-ed and ended up expanding rapidly and investing heavily with the deliberate goal of being a nationally renowned, highly selective, academically rigorous research university, while SMC continued catering to a smaller audience and developing as a small single-sex liberal arts college - a good one, to be sure, but one operating on a very different scale than Notre Dame. As a result, for the past fifty years, SMC women have had a reputation for not being as academically sharp as ND women. I don't like that SMC has this reputation - I marched alongside SMC students in the band and made friends with them in my Catholic fellowship group and they were smart people and wonderful friends - but that academic reputation has, in turn, fed a different reputation: because everyone assumed SMC wasn’t as selective academically and across the street from this campus of eligible bachelors, they then extrapolated that these less-bookish SMC women were generally hotter than ND women, and also - to use a complex term from Catholic moral theology - sluttier.
Now, we don’t need to go into various anecdotes from my college days that would explore how much of that stereotype is based on “things that SMC students did to actively encourage this reputation, and then Notre Dame men would joke about it in return because in the 2000s sexual harassment was a big joke to everyone”. What we need to go into is the complete overhaul of SMC’s admissions policies that they should undertake as long as they’re doing their second rewrite of the non-discrimination policy in four months. SMC is a private Catholic institution and technically free to discriminate against whomever they’d like, why not prudes or uggos? Why not lean into the reputation that's already there? Have the students submit their measurements on the application, I want Sydney Sweeney proportions on these girls before anyone so much as gets waitlisted. Existing students with small tits don’t get grandfathered2 in to the policy, they either get implants bolted on immediately or face expulsion, because in this school, 34Cs get degrees. Hell, throw in some lip fillers while you're at it, we need our students to be well-rounded figuratively and literally. Not only will this bolster the work of solidarity - it saves so much effort when the people practicing solidarity all look exactly like one another - but it will serve to further clarify the mission of the college. Any man who sees any SMC student from a distance of up to 750 feet will be able to say immediately “that is a woman, and I know because I want to fuck it.”
But we need to know more about prospective Belles than just how they look. We need to test their fertility as well. These girls are prime childbearing age, and we know what the holy magisterium teaches about the role of women: we use them to cook our babies. If a woman applies to SMC, and it turns out that she's not able to bear children, should we really allow her the privilege of a Catholic education with a Catholic community? Can we even really call her a “woman”? Is there a more theologically accurate term we can use, perhaps “husk” or “shell”? It may seem invasive and icky at first glance. But SMC and Kevin have told us that the school’s Catholic identity apparently requires that the SMC board sign off on every student's pussy anyways, so they might as well make sure those things are running like Swiss watches.
Which brings me to my final proposed change, this one to the student life policy. Again, it uses some complex terms from moral theology, but: SMC students should be required to let you hit raw. We'll have stacked the campus with about 1,500 nubile and fertile young women, and they're gonna need to get dumped in. SMC is already meeting me halfway since they don't have condoms readily available on campus, and all you need is some regular blood testing to make sure nobody is on birth control and you should be all set. I don't care who does the unloading: ND students, Holy Cross students, South Bend townies, seminarians at Moreau with the larger community of Holy Cross priests and brothers, Samuel Alito after he's done giving a guest lecture to the ND law students3. What matters is that these women are getting filled up like a goddamned éclair. This is what solidarity to women looks like, solidarity to one very specific type of woman who is only good for one specific thing, and our Catholic institutions should openly proclaim that this is in fact the only type of woman that anyone should care about.
But I’m also trying to practice another type of solidarity here: I spent four years at Notre Dame, and while I don't donate money to the school and haven't been to a football game in several years and in fact find it very easy to make fun of the school, I still feel invested in making sure that the students of that community have an enriching experience during their own four years. At the very least, I can work to make sure that the men of Notre Dame have more sex and better sex than I did, AS LOW A BAR AS THAT MIGHT BE. If SMC is in the business of circumscribing a non-discrimination policy based on community feedback, the least they could do is implement these recommendations as well. These may be crass, but they're far more intellectually and morally coherent than this other approach. Kevin and SMC are trying to tell us something about hospitality and solidarity and quite frankly, I think I’ve put more thought into their message than they did.
You can donate to The Trevor Project and Trans Lifeline to support crisis counseling, resource referrals, and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth. As I often have to tell myself: donating is like posting except it does something.
Not unlike the flexibility and squishiness of a teen hottie with gigantic cans.
Grandmothered? Ugh, everything is so fucking woke now.
In a truly Chestertonian paradox, Samuel Alito is a biological male while also being a cunt.