I read Patterson's The Forgotten Creed. Thanks for the recommendation. At the outset, I thought I might write an article about it (depending on what it turned out to be about), but I don't think I have much to say, in large part because I'm not Christian and so am not invested in the exact meaning of Paul's words.
Regarding Galatians 3:23–28, Patterson says: “So here was the heart of the original creed. There is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female. Even though human beings very typically make distinctions based on race, class, and gender, they in fact do not rest on anything real. Gender is a construct; class is a conceit; race is not real.” He observes that “these three dyads" each "involve a differential of power.”
However, he notes: “The problem is that we are not all the same in every respect. Are Jews and Greeks the same? Are women and men? * * * ‘You are all one’ should not mean, then, ‘You are all the same.’ It works for ‘slave and free,’ but for ‘Jew and Greek’ and ‘male and female,’ it’s a disaster.”
Patterson's distinction is clear to me: Every human is unique, but none of us should have superior social status to anyone else on the basis of gender, class, or race. Though we aren't the "same," we're "one."
The false equivalence of "sameness" is frequently made in transphobic arguments. Someone with transphobic intentions will ask: Do you admit that cis men are different from trans men? Well, yes, that's the point of the classification; we observe our differences and label ourselves accordingly. But that shouldn't imply any power differential. At a minimum, cis people shouldn't control trans people. We're different, but we're all one.
Gender is a construct, which doesn't mean it's meaningless vapor or babble; social constructs have recognizable meaning. We can label ourselves "accurately" according to one gender construct or the other, based on common discourses, our own arguments, or both. But again, there's no need for one person to have power over another on the basis of gender. Their concept of gender might imply a power differential, but there are egalitarian gender constructs.
I fully accept that one can recognize gender (as well as ethics, and perhaps everything else) as a construct rather than an essence. Anti-essentialism, pragmatism, relativism, etc. don't imply nothingness. We can have gender and not be essentialist about it. This has never been confusing to me. Transphobes pretend to be confused by it, so I find it useful to have solid, brief philosophical explanations lying around. However, this isn't Patterson's topic.
