Book review: Body Problems by M. Wolff

I really liked Body Problems: What Intersex Priest Sally Gross Teaches Us About Embodiment, Justice, and Belonging by M. Wolff. I read it for the first time in early September, and I left a short review on StoryGraph at the time in part to record my immediate thoughts and in part because I thought that leaving a review might help other people to find the book. It was a sacrifice to the almighty algorithm. The purpose of this review is different. I assume some people who read this review will not have heard of this book before, but others will have heard of the book and are wondering whether or not they should read it, or if it is relevant to their field of interest. So I will do my best to summarise what this book is about and what I think makes it worthwhile.

Body Problems is a biography told in a cyclical manner, iterating over the life story of Sally Gross multiple times to draw out different narratives. Wolff describes this as facilitating “an organic type of knowing”, different to what can be achieved through the presentation of a timeline or a map. I don’t know how true this is: I found it somewhat difficult to keep the order of events straight in my head. Nevertheless, I don’t think a strictly chronological telling would have been suitable. Gross’s life was multifaceted and complex. She was a Jewish anti-apartheid activist who fled South Africa to Botswana as a refugee, and then from Botswana to Israel. While in Israel she studied with Palestinian students and became involved in activism supporting their rights. She later moved to England to join the Blackfriars, an order of Catholic priests, where she carried on her activism.

After her decision to embrace her intersex identity and live as Sally rather than her birth name, she was placed on leave by the order in Eastbourne, a town where she would ostensibly have privacy–though this seems to mainly have had the effect of isolating her from the community the order provided. Despite this, journalists found out, and wrote tabloid articles about her with titles like “Priest in Sex Swap.” Gross was clear that her priesthood had never been legitimate as she had never been male and refused to act as a priest even in extremis as this would be to act as though she was in some manner not a woman. After all of this, Gross returned to South Africa as the African National Congress had been unbanned and she was able to regain her citizenship, albeit with years of legal difficulty as the South African government initially “determined that they could not issue Sally identity documents under any description” due to her being intersex and being rightfully unwilling to undergo “disambiguation” surgery. After her return to South Africa, Gross became involved with land restitution efforts that aimed to return lands that were appropriated from Black South Africans during apartheid. She did this through working in the government department that was in charge of this. Later, she founded Intersex South Africa, an advocacy group that aimed to build community among intersex people as well as advocate for their legal rights.

All aspects of Gross’s life informed and complicated each other, and Wolff’s approach illuminates this well. I don’t want to try to summarise Wolff’s analysis of the evolution of Gross’s religious beliefs. However, it seems worthwhile to note in this review that Gross was a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). She attended Quaker meetings in Eastbourne and held the role of co-clerk. While there, she instructed a course at the meetinghouse called “Male and Female God Created Them”, wherein she screened a film produced by the Intersex Society of North America, Hermaphrodites Speak. She also served on the executive board of the Quaker Peace Centre in Observatory, Cape Town. In their discussion of this aspect of Gross’s religious life, Wolff quotes her as saying “at some level I think I’ll always see myself as a priest and as religious”, though they also state that after leaving Eastbourne, Gross’s faith “withered and died”. It isn’t clear to me for how long Gross maintained her affiliation with Quakers in South Africa: it sounds from the book like her physical health problems prevented her from continuing to attend Meetings, with an interviewee expressing regret for not trying to find out why Gross had stopped attending, as it might have been possible that the Quaker community could have done more for her.

I do have to say that it surprises me that I had not heard of Sally Gross before I had found out about this book considering her involvement as a Quaker. I also recently read Pushing at the Frontiers of Change: A Memoir of Quaker Involvement with Homosexuality by David Blamires, which with its exclusive focus on homosexuality perhaps would never have mentioned Gross, who was an asexual intersex person. It is difficult to criticise Pushing at the Frontiers of Change on account of it being a memoir: it is possible Blamires never heard about Gross and also possible that he does not recollect any other intersex people (or bisexual people; or transgender people; or indeed asexual people). However, reading that book had left me with the impression that perhaps they had been absent throughout much of the time period covered. So I think that, though it would be remiss of me to reduce Gross’s religious life simply to that of a Quaker, this book adds important context to the history of queer people in Quakerism. This is especially worthwhile because intersex people seem to often only be brought up in the context of arguments centered around transgender people: intersex struggles are not given the time of day in their own right. So Body Problems can be a step toward a more expansive understanding of Quaker history and away from intersex erasure.

In Body Problems, Wolff paints a detailed picture of Gross’s theology and how it evolved over time. Wolff describes Gross as having “interreligious commitments” to Judaism and Catholicism, as well as to a lesser extent Buddhism. Wolff’s analysis of Gross’s sermons sees her to relate her position as a Jewish Catholic priest to the Jewish Christians of the early church. Gross sought to relate Jewish practices with Christian ones in an attempt to underline and mend the relationship between her religious communities. Wolff writes that it is possible that Gross viewed Jesus as one of many admirable rabbis and not as a personal lord or saviour, and this would make sense to me as an explanation for her blending of traditions. Gross did not see her Christian identity as superseding or replacing her Jewish identity, and seems to have resented insinuations from family and others that it did or should have. I am dubious of encouraging gentile Christians to take on Jewish practices such as observing the Sabbath. There is a line between cultural sharing and encouraging cultural appropriation that I think it is worth being wary of. However, I can see how, for Gross, opening these practices up would have been personally important.

Gross eventually renounced commitments to ‘Abrahamic faiths’, considering them to be positioned as to give justification to ’the extermination of certain other nations.’ This isn’t something that I can agree with her on: I think that while it is possible to give religious justifications to genocide, there are religious objections that are at least equally as strong. I do wonder, however, whether rejecting ’the covenant of Abraham’ as Gross phrased it meant that she was giving up on spirituality. It isn’t the phrasing of someone who has given up on God. It is the phrasing of someone who believes that there is something that exists that can be rejected. Gross would continue on to be an ‘outspoken atheist’ during her time working at the Land Claims Commission in South Africa. Despite this, she maintained an interest in theological discussions and Buddhist meditation. I would have liked to know more about the manner in which she was an atheist and what she was outspoken about, because I think that Body Problems privileges an understanding of her earlier theological standpoints than her later ones. Similarly, I would have liked to have known whether her Quakerism and her atheism were concommitant.

Body Problems is made both accessible and difficult to analyse by its spiralling structure. Its focus on highlighting one narrative thread at a time makes it easy to read and understand, but difficult to find information in after the fact. It is also necessary to read the book from beginning to end to understand its subject matter fully: perhaps this is another reason why Wolff did not write it chronologically. Wolff would like us to get to know Gross as a whole person, insofar as that is possible. Following that, this book does not contain a response to Gross’s theology or politics and instead seeks to make them comprehensible in a respectful way. It has left me with a lot to think about for myself, and I think that others will find this to be the case too. I would recommend it to anyone who likes a good biography or takes an interest in the history of queer people in religious spaces.