Introducing the ‘Gender Accompaniment Project’ — Part 2, with Abigail Favale

From the McGrath Institute for Church Life and OSV Podcasts, this is Church Life Today.

I'm Leonard D. Lorenzo.

In this episode, I continue my conversation with Abigail Favalle introducing

the new podcast series she created and hosts called The Gender Accompaniment Project.

If you miss the first part of our conversation, you can link to it in our show notes or just see

the episode that posted immediately before this one in our show's feed.

We're going to talk more now about Abigail's scholarship and her encounter with the people

featured in her new project, and we will eventually end up talking about what is required for conversion

in Christ for all of us. Abigail, thanks for joining for a second conversation.

Introducing the Gender Accompaniment Project.

So, Abby, in our first, the first part of our conversation, we gave something of an overview

of this project, talk about the emphasis of not only understanding, but of encounter and

attending to the other and how to do that well and providing a model for doing that, hopefully,

through this podcast project, specifically walking with and learning from and encountering

people who experience some form of gender discordance as you introduced us to that understanding.

But I find myself also wondering about, basically, you in the midst of this project. You were the first

among us to go and seek out this particular form of encounter with this particular

group of individuals who we encounter through the podcast. And so, you've kind of gone first where

you're hoping for the rest of us to go to seek out this encounter with you. The encounter amount

matters. You encountered you soft faces, you heard voices, you listened to the stories. I'm

wondering just sort of broadly, if you can speak to what kind of impact these conversations and

attending to these stories of these particular persons had on you. Yeah, that's a great question.

Yeah. Well, let me start by kind of going backward a little bit. So I've been, you know,

I'm a Catholic Convert. I've been Catholic for, geez, what year is it? I'll be 12 years this

Easter. It is 2026 for the listening to this podcast episode well into the future.

Yeah. And, you know, before I became Catholic, I was, I was coming into Catholicism from

a pretty secular form of Christianity. And I was really focused in my professional life and

personal life on questions of gender and feminism. So I spent years studying gender and feminist

theory. And then when I became Catholic, I kind of entered into this whole new way of seeing all

of those things. And it was very disorienting, I will say. So like the first three or four years,

I didn't write much because I was like, what's happening? But then once the dust settled,

I really thought, okay, I'm still interested in these questions. But I want to write about them

from a deeply Catholic place, from kind of Catholic premises and a Catholic understanding of reality.

And, but I want to engage with the theories, the secular theories that I know so well in ways

that can help other Christians kind of navigate some of these questions and debates. And so I

began writing about it. And I wrote a book called the Genesis of Gender, which came out in 2022.

And that book actually started out as a book on, I wanted to write a book about Catholicism and

feminism. Yeah. But then when I got to the chapter on gender, it just kind of kept growing and growing

and growing, you know, and I think when I was writing it, it was probably maybe late 2019 or

early 2020, just to kind of, so that was really when a lot of, you know, the transgender issue was

really heating up. That's when you first started to see some of the initial D transitioners. So

there, you know, there was kind of this big demographic shift when it came to gender transition

that really started to become obvious around, like say, right about the time I became Catholic,

honestly, like 2014, 2015, 2016 where more and more young women were seeking to change their gender

and to medicalize, which was really unprecedented in novel. So all those things were kind of happening

when I started to write about it. That was sort of in full swing. And so I realized like, oh,

there's actually a lot here, a lot to say about gender. And that kind of grew into into that book.

And so then when I came, I came to the McGrath Institute the same time, basically that book came out

in 2022. And I started, I mean, I had gone into that again with more of a kind of like philosophical

intellectual theological formation, right? But I also do tell stories in that, like a stories of

people who are actually having this experience because I think there's a temptation, which I feel

a lot, which is that I want to ignore the stories that are intention with what I believe to be true.

Yeah. Right. Or I only want to tell the stories that are, that harmonize well with what I believe

to be true. Right. And I, I didn't want to make that mistake. Right. Yeah. That's the way I use

sociological research as a theologian of like, this supports my point. I'll go. Exactly. Right.

It's very tempting to do. I think and we people do it all the time, right? Like people, people fall

into that all the time. But when I was, when I came here at McGrath, which is very much like a

theological and a pastoral institute, right? I feel very comfortable on the theological side.

Right. Like I know this, I know this what's going on really well in terms of kind of theological

and philosophical ideas at play. But I don't have a lot of pastoral experience, right? I mean,

I have experience as a professor and mentor a mother. So I have a lot of relational experience

with people. And before I became Catholic, you know, I was the advisor for like the LGBT student

club on campus where I was or it wasn't an official club. But so I also have a long history of like,

you know, having gay friends and gay students and knowing students who are wrestling with gender

and loving them. And so that's part of my story too. But I felt when I came here, like I didn't

know how to bring those two together, you know, and I really struggled the first year so that I was

here at the institute because I was getting asked because the book was out. I was getting asked to

come speak to like diocese on this question. And the questions they want, like the questions I felt

most equipped to address with the questions of theology, anthropology,

were, you know, that was important. But like what people really wanted to know were the pastoral

questions. Like what do we do, you know, when someone comes into our CIA who's clearly transgender,

right? Or what do I do when my 14 year old student wants me to use their pronouns, you know,

what do I do when my, you know, 16 year old kid is telling me that they want to go by a totally

different name and they want hormones, right? Like those are the questions that, like that's where

people needed the most input. And I felt kind of out of my depth, honestly. And so the first year

I was here, toward the end of the year, I gathered a group of, I mean, included teachers,

psychologists, catechists, people who work in the ministry, like basically like pastoral

formators, really. And we did kind of a think tank session, you know, and really wrestled through,

like just talking about some of these, like kind of thorny or practical questions, a lot of acid

with language, right? And pronouns and, you know, all those sort of really tricky questions. And

and so I could tell that like that's where the need really was, but I also felt, you know, like I

don't am I the person to do this or whatever. But I think what then clicked eventually was like,

but I'm also a storyteller, you know, and like that's part of what I can bring. And maybe what's

missing is that, you know, a big piece of what's missing is that we, we just want these kind of like,

we want these like how-to manuals, right? On how on these kind of abstract codes, right, that

are kind of divorced from maybe what an actual person is experiencing. And, and so I thought,

that's something I can do here, right? Because we need to be able to kind of relearn

like how to just meet people where they are, how to encounter someone who's having a very

different experience than I am and who may be interpreting their experience very differently than I do,

right? But who nonetheless is, you know, a beloved child of God and who is earnestly seeking after him.

And so that's kind of where I leaned in. It's like, all right, I can you can tell these stories,

but not in a way where it's just you could do something like that where it kind of ends in this

like relativistic place, right? Where it's like, and what you have learned is just that everyone has

different experiences and there's no way to kind of discern like what's true or not true more

broadly about these questions. And so the end, you know, I didn't want to end there, right?

And so I wanted it to also be to provide theological formation, right? So kind of weaving that through

even though certainly the podcast has much more of a pastoral accent to it. I wanted it to also have

some theological depth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense. What do you think together about

what you're saying here about storytelling? This is something else I was planning to talk to you

about. So I'm glad you brought it up. Storytelling is so important to this this podcast series,

right? Like that's the backbone of these stories. And as we reflect, if we take a step back and we

don't want to take, you know, too far of a step back to see this, like the capacity for storytelling

among most people today is greatly diminished. We get lots of little elements or like fractals of

stories, little TikTok stories, this little glimpse, this thing, this thing, this thing. But in order

to tell a sustained story that actually not only has a point, but there's there's a heart to it.

There's something about the person. That's a that's a craft that has fallen on tough times to

say the least. And there are many reasons for that that we could diagnose and it would take us

well beyond the parameters of our conversation here to do that. But in a in our modern culture or

cultures that have deemphasized the importance of story of being able to claim a testimony,

to hand it over and also at the same time to be able to receive story. Well,

there does seem to me something potentially healing about what's going on here. Like it's an

element of it. It's not going to solve all of that, but it gives a dose of good health. Like,

oh, as a listener, if I if I attend to this, and there's plenty of reason to because it's

it's enticing and it's so well done, the quality is there. I'm actually learning how to take in

story better. But at the same time, as you said earlier, like it's modeling what it's like to

not only attend a story, but to give to give a story. Can you, I mean, because, you know, a part of

your professional profile is as a storyteller, she said, as a professor of literature as a novelist.

What do you see in terms maybe as we take a step back in terms of our loss of the capacity for

storytelling and how might that be important to the reclaiming and sometimes the battle of our

humanity? Yeah. That's a great question. Yeah. Yeah. I like time to hear it to be like,

well, in the enlightenment, it's just a very obvious sort of point. But, you know, I think in the

kind of turn into modernity, like we really want, we want kind of our truth to be disincarnate.

You know, we want, we want a code, we want a list. You know, just tell me how many hell

mirrors I have to say for this and, you know, and so I think there's, and there's not, that's not

all bad, right? I mean, that's the thing. It's always, it's always the both hand with Catholicism,

right? Because again, you can go the other way where it's like, there's no code, there's no laws,

you know, it's just story, you know. So I think you do both, right? But I do think that,

yeah, that, that we, we need to also as part of our kind of, I don't know, palette, I guess, of

spiritual formation and intellectual formation, we need the kind of conceptual stuff, right? But we

also need, we need stories that show how those truths become incarnate and embodied in the world.

I think we need nonfiction stories and fiction stories that do that, right?

But especially when it comes to, I think, I don't know, even evangelization or certainly

formation, I mean, we tend to just think about people as, you know, I think I said this in the

last episode, but like extensions of ideologies, right? Rather than really complex, unique,

unrepeatable, wrestling with things that we'll never have to wrestle with, right? And the way that

I think, we go, God sees the person in a way that like God is so, you know, I just think about

like the intimacy that God has, like God is singing each person's story into being at every moment,

as well as like our collective story is in terms of humankind. But so I think we need reverence

for that. You know, I think we need reverence for story. If you look at scripture, I mean, so much

of it is narrative. You do have books of the law and books of codes and things that wait in

there, but you have poetry, you have narrative, you have story, you have analogies, you have allegories,

you know, you have so much more of a kind of incarnational approach to conveying truth.

So yeah, back to the both end. Yeah. You know what I was thinking of as you're speaking of,

that was actually a book that I know was important for you. And I love to, it's Christian Laughan

Stutter, like to actually have, yeah, it's a challenging portrait. And it's a, it's a journey

of conversion and it's gritty and it's embodied. And it speaks of many of the things we would want

to claim and teach. And yet at the same time, the teaching itself would never get you what

Christian Laughan Stutter gives you. So in this case, like the literature as a kind of

beacon for the embodied person, you're right, like what they give you, that's different than

just what can be taught. Yes, exactly, exactly. And in fact, like I think when stories become

overly didactic, they kind of lose their power. Oh my gosh. So yeah, there's a, and I think

that's because story can get at the heart in a way that more kind of conceptual, which isn't

necessarily true. I mean, I can totally bliss out on reading really good theology. And

sometimes I can bliss out before great. You know, like just give me some synodionisus and

like a cup of coffee, you know, and I'll be up there with the divine names and stuff, you know,

I love it. But at the same time, I do, I do think there's something to the power of story

that that really matters. And it, I don't know, like stories kind of like express, but like they

give you back your humanity in a certain way. I mean, I felt that listening to these stories too,

just kind of in awe of how God is always doing this like intricate dance, this hidden dance,

and like the terrain of the heart that we, that is so often not just close to us, you know,

like if I think about just like going to mass and looking around, just looking around at

everyone who's there, like there's a hundred people or something. And I don't know really anything

that's going on inside their hearts, but like they're, unless they just close it to me, right,

unless it kind of gets cracked open. And so there was something, I felt so grateful, but also a

little bit like, I'm kind of on sacred ground here when I was doing this podcast and interviewing

people who were willing to like publicly tell about this like very intimate experience experiences

that they have. And especially in a climate where what they're going through is like a political

lightning rod, you know, I mean, and that's what's, I think what's unfortunate is that

because we're in such a fraught of climate that our fellow Christians who are like in the church

with us, like this is another kind of misconception that, oh, people who struggle with gender are like

out there in the world or something, right, when they're like, no, there are brothers and sisters

as well. And they're afraid to say anything. They're afraid to admit it. They're afraid to share their

story because they might be misread as, you know, some kind of ideologue or people might get freaked

out or you know, you just, it's so it's, it felt, I felt very like, honored to be able to be

kind of handed a story to tell. That's not even necessarily mine to tell, right? And wanting to

to do justice to that, because I think it is, there is something really sacred about hearing

someone's story, something so powerful. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know the point that you make that,

you know, we often want to think or we do think that, oh, these kinds of stories are people that

are out there. But part of the, maybe it's part of the discomfort that you bring in this podcast

these are actually people at the end of your pew. So we talked last time about Gene who's featured

in the first episode. And just tending to his story, listening to it, I can imagine actually,

I had some of this feeling too, like, oh, those assumptions I would have had, they're not going to

hold, right? This is a faithful Christian person. This is a kind of like, this is a husband. This is

a father. This is someone who says, my wife loves me for who I am, not for what I have to project,

like she knows me as me, the things that I'm sharing with you in the story, she loves me, right?

And so we talked in the in the last episode about the risk of discomfort that's for anyone to attend

to these stories. And then I think you're rightly telling us, like as a listener to this podcast,

that's the sort of price of admission. It's like, you got to risk a little discomfort.

But it also makes me think about conversion, like conversion without cost is no conversion,

like there's always a cost in conversion. And for listeners here, for any of us, like,

there's also a call to conversion, like to go beyond the mind you have, the Greek meaning of

conversion, metanoia, to go beyond the mind you have to encounter Christ who is beyond you.

And in this case, maybe beyond you in the embodied stories of the other who are not you.

Right? So I suppose like, maybe this is a place we can start to bring this in, is

in what way does that, does that fit with how you might think about this, that the gender accompaniment

project is also a sort of mutual call to conversion? Oh, yeah. It is. And conversion stories are

the best stories, I think. I mean, that relates to what we were talking about because a story of

conversion is a narrative that in many ways, almost like the prototype story, the story that

humans love the best, the story of conversion. I mean, you just think about like the Odyssey or

whatever, like the real drama that happens is the drama that happens like within Odysseus as he

has to kind of go through this conversion to be able to come who he really is and reclaim his

home. So we love telling stories of conversion. And that is ultimately, and even accompaniment,

that's what accompaniment is about, is walking with someone in the process of conversion

and being attentive to your own conversion in the midst of that, to not have this kind of attitude

of condescension. Well, I am a completed project, but since you have to have some issues, I will

walk with you. Thank you for making me. Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's almost like we've

been taught that. Yeah, it's like the best parable. It's such a good gotcha. Yeah. So I think

attending to one's own conversion and hearing these stories, which are conversions that are

unfolding, right? Like in process, conversions in process. So I think sometimes there's

maybe even because again of the climate that we're inhabiting right now, there's a little bit

of a pressure that we like conversions that are done. Like we want people to kind of be perfected,

almost before they get allowed into the church. And I think that's a huge temptation, right?

There's like, especially coming into the church is the advent of that conversion process,

right? Like there has to be this sort of initial yes to the church, but to expect that to be

already complete, you know, I think is not a good expectation to have. Yeah. Well, when you

when you shared the story of your own conversion and your previous book, the

into the deep, I think it was like page 72 where you came into the church. Yeah. I think it's

actually page 72. That's amazing. But the book is like whatever it is, 1460 pages. So it's like

where you would expect the story to end. You're like, no, that's halfway. Like the real conversion,

as you told your own story, was like actually being transformed within the body of the church,

which had all kinds of subtle and hidden changes and pains and accommodations and reorganizations

of life. Yeah. Yeah. I think if there had been someone standing kind of at the church door,

like, oh, we're so glad you want to become Catholic. But let me just check off and make sure that,

you know, I think I would have walked away, you know. But I think the fact that I was allowed

to continue to wrestle with things like questions that I really wasn't sure. Like I was willing

to kind of take a leap of faith and sort of trust the church, but I was not convinced about,

you know, certain things when I when I became Catholic, I was still figuring it out, you know,

and that takes time. Like it takes time. It takes prayer. It takes discipleship. And so,

yeah, I think that's also part of like the that I'm hoping will be some of the fruits of the

podcast is, you know, helping us think about what the church even is. You know,

and what it means to belong to the church and to be welcomed into the church. The last episode

of the podcast really dwells on this question I think in like a profoundly beautiful way.

So gotta listen to the whole thing. You gotta listen to the whole thing so it has its impact.

Well, it'll be Woolworth your time friends to listen to the gender accompaniment project.

We'll load up the show notes for this episode along with the previous one with some additional

resources, including ways to connect with this new podcast, the gender accompaniment project.

Again, 10 episodes hosted by Abigail Favalli. I feel a little bit this is like totally over,

overblown, but I feel like this American life and now serial, like I can't introduce serial,

serial, it's like becomes the mega thing. So this is fun. But yeah, check out the show notes.

We'll link you to all the things that you'd want to see and be on the lookout if you haven't

already seen it and listen to it for the gender accompaniment project from Abigail Favalli

and the McGrath Institute for Church Life. Abby, thanks so much for the double conversation.

Yeah, thank you for having me. And thanks to all of you for joining us on Church Life today.

This has been a production of OSV Podcasts. To learn more, visit osvpodcasts.com.