Brass Heads from Ife (aka Ile-Ife). An ancient African city which flourished between the 11th and 15th century CE in what is today Nigeria in West Africa.
Preamble: What McCabe Gets Right
There is something undeniably moving and well intentioned in Pat McCabe's essay. Her indictment of the "power-over paradigm" is incisive. Her recognition that patriarchy has mutilated masculinity as surely as it has oppressed femininity is rare and valuable. Her compassion for men - for the hijacking of "noble instincts" by systems of domination - is a corrective to discourse that treats all men as perpetrators and never as casualties. And her central question - "What are we really talking about when we say 'masculine' and 'feminine'?" - is exactly the right question.
But it is a question she does not actually answer. Instead, she replaces one essentialist schema with another. She swaps the Western patriarchal story of rigid gender for an indigenous-coded story of rigid gender, rendered sacred. And in doing so, she commits several errors that deserve careful, respectful examination - because the stakes of getting this wrong are considerable, and because (within my admittedly limited and largely indirect experience), her own tradition contains within them far more complexity than she allows for.
The Biology Is Wrong: What Sapolsky Actually Shows About Testosterone
McCabe's essay pivots on a personal experience of testosterone - a hormonal surge during perimenopause that she describes as a "massive" and "molten blaze" of undifferentiated desire. From this single subjective experience, she extrapolates a theory of masculine nature: that testosterone is a "Sacred Fire" that men are uniquely designed to carry, that women are "just not up to holding such a fire," and that this fire is an essential, sex-specific Medicine requiring initiation and reverence.
This is a compelling personal narrative. It is also flatly contradicted by decades of endocrinological research.
Robert Sapolsky, Stanford professor of biology and neurology, has spent his career demonstrating that the relationship between testosterone and behaviour is almost nothing like popular mythology suggests. In The Trouble with Testosterone (1997) and more comprehensively in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017), Sapolsky demonstrates that within the normal physiological range, individual differences in testosterone levels do not predict who will be aggressive, who will be sexually preoccupied, or who will behave in any of the ways McCabe attributes to the hormone's “Sacred Fire.”
Sapolsky argues, and I believe offers ample experimental proof of, that testosterone amplifies pre-existing tendencies - and more precisely, it increases whatever behaviour is needed to maintain status in a given context. In a context where status is won through aggression, testosterone will amplify aggression. But in a context where status is achieved through generosity, testosterone makes people more generous. This was demonstrated elegantly in the Ultimatum Game study by Eisenegger et al. (published in Nature, 2009, and highlighted by Sapolsky): women given testosterone unknowingly made fairer offers than those given a placebo, while women who believed they had received testosterone - but hadn't - made less fair offers, demonstrating that cultural myths about testosterone are more behaviourally potent than the hormone itself.
As Sapolsky puts it: the trouble is not that testosterone causes aggression; the trouble is that we reward aggression with status so readily.
This fundamentally undermines McCabe's framework. If testosterone does not produce a distinct "fire" that is essentially masculine, but rather amplifies whatever the social context rewards, then it cannot serve as evidence for a biologically ordained Sacred Masculine. The "fire" McCabe experienced was real, but its meaning is culturally constructed, not biologically destined. A woman experiencing a testosterone surge in a different cultural context might have experienced intense creativity, competitive focus, heightened confidence, or - as the research shows - increased prosocial generosity. The hormone doesn't dictate the meaning; the paradigm does.
This is, ironically, exactly what McCabe herself almost says when she observes that we only know how the masculine "behaves when it is plugged into a power-over paradigm." But she then immediately re-plugs it into a different paradigm - her own - and treats that re-plugging as revelation rather than as another culturally specific interpretation.
The Anthropology Is Selective: Indigenous Traditions Are Not Uniformly Binary
McCabe draws on Diné (Navajo) and Lakota traditions to construct a framework of complementary gender polarity: Men's Nation and Women's Nation, each with sacred and distinct roles. She presents this as representative of "ancient culture" and "Earth-based culture" broadly.
But this is a profound selectivity. Many of the world's oldest and most sophisticated indigenous traditions organise gender in ways that are radically different from McCabe's binary complementarity - and some of them come from the very traditions she claims kinship with.
The Diné themselves recognise more than two genders. The nádleehi - a term roughly translated as "one who changes" or "one who is transformed" - occupied a distinct gender category in traditional Navajo culture, as did the dilbaa (masculine-presenting people assigned female at birth). The Lakota had the winkté, people recognised as having both masculine and feminine spirits. Over 150 pre-colonial Native American tribes recognised third or fourth genders, and more than 130 have documented roles for gender-diverse individuals. The Two-Spirit tradition - a modern pan-Indigenous term adopted at the 1990 Third Annual Intertribal Native/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference in Winnipeg - attempts to honour this diversity, though many nations have their own specific terminology.
McCabe's own traditions, in other words, contain precisely the gender fluidity and multiplicity that her essay erases.
Yoruba cosmology goes even further. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, the Nigerian gender scholar, argues in The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997) that the very concept of "woman" as a social category did not exist in pre-colonial Yorubaland. Social organisation was determined by seniority and age, not by gender. Yoruba third-person pronouns (ó and wọ̀n) are not gendered. The body was not the basis for social roles. The imposition of Western gender categories was, in Oyěwùmí's analysis, itself a technology of colonisation.
The Yoruba Orishas further complicate any tidy binary: Obatalá, the creator deity and eldest of the Orishas, is androgynous - sometimes described as male, sometimes female, sometimes neither. Olódùmarè, the supreme being, is beyond gender entirely. Èṣù, the trickster deity, is depicted as simultaneously possessing masculine and feminine traits. Logun Edé spends half the year embodying the traits of his mother Oshun and half embodying those of his father Ode. The Yoruba system does not organise cosmic energy along a masculine-feminine axis at all, but through the concepts of ìtútù (coolness - wisdom, calm, patience) and gbóná (hotness - force, movement, passion). These are spiritual attributes available to all people and deities regardless of sex, distributed by energetic resonance rather than anatomy.
The Dogon of Mali hold that the perfect human being is androgynous. The Dahomey creator deity Mawu-Lisa is a dual being with masculine and feminine attributes unified. Similar gender-fluid, androgynous, and non-binary spiritual figures appear across the Akan, Zulu, Handa, Konso, Lango, Nuba, and dozens of other African cultures.
McCabe claims to speak for "ancient culture" and "Earth-based" wisdom. But she is speaking for a specific reading of specific traditions - a reading that flattens the extraordinary diversity of indigenous gender cosmologies into a binary complementarity that looks, frankly, rather familiar to the Western mind she claims to be challenging.
Eisler Already Solved This: Partnership vs. Domination, Not Masculine vs. Feminine
Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987) - now in its 57th US printing with 30 foreign-language editions - offers a framework that does exactly what McCabe claims to want, but without the essentialist trap. I cannot speak more highly of this book. It is essential reading and has been the only text that has convinced two men I know that feminism is not stupid, one confessed when he had read it that ‘He’d always written off feminism, but had never read any’. Face palm. Anyway, I digress…
Eisler identifies two fundamental models of social organisation: the dominator model (ranking of one group over another, rigid hierarchies maintained by force or its threat, equation of masculinity with dominance) and the partnership model (egalitarian structures, hierarchies of actualisation where power empowers, gender equity as a foundational organising principle). Crucially, Eisler does not use the terms "patriarchy" and "matriarchy" as opposites, noting that rule by mothers and rule by fathers can both be expressions of dominator logic. Nor does she attribute partnership values to the feminine and dominator values to the masculine.
This is a vital distinction. McCabe's framework reifies the very categories it claims to heal. By assigning "Life Bringer, Life Bearer" to the feminine and "Protector, Provider, Sacred Fire Keeper" to the masculine, she reproduces complementarian gender roles - roles that, however beautifully articulated, still depend on the premise that biology is destiny and that the sexes have fundamentally different spiritual architectures.
Eisler's partnership model suggests something more radical: that the qualities McCabe attributes separately to masculine and feminine - nurturing, protection, creativity, fierce generosity, visionary dreaming, pragmatic action - are human capacities distributed across all bodies, and that the work of liberation is not to "restore" an imagined original polarity but to dismantle the systems that restrict any of these capacities to one sex.
Eisler draws on extensive archaeological evidence from Minoan Crete, Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (where excavations by Ian Hodder found no evidence of gender-based status differences), and other Neolithic sites to argue that for the longest stretch of human prehistory, societies oriented primarily towards partnership, with gender as a difference that did not imply hierarchy. The shift to domination, she argues, occurred between five and ten thousand years ago - a drop in the evolutionary bucket. The current arrangement is not natural or inevitable; it is a choice among many choices, to use McCabe's own teachers' phrase.
The irony is that McCabe quotes this exact insight - "that paradigm is a choice, among many choices" - and then immediately constructs a new paradigm that is equally prescriptive about what masculine and feminine really are, just with prettier descriptors.
The Menstrual Synchrony Claim Has Been Debunked
McCabe writes: “the fact that Women's Nation, if they live together for any length of time, all begin to move into the same menstruation cycle, should be a big clue for us, that something is supposed to occur, some possibility is available to us, at that time.”
This is not a fact. It is a popular belief based on a single 1971 study by Martha McClintock published in Nature, which has been extensively critiqued and largely debunked in the decades since.
Systematic reviews published in 2006 and 2013 concluded that menstrual synchrony likely does not exist. As a review in Human Nature noted, after more than thirty years of intensive investigation, there is still no conclusive evidence for the phenomenon. Multiple studies found no synchrony in college dormitories, lesbian couples, close friends, office colleagues, or athletes. Nearly half of all published papers on the topic find no evidence whatsoever. The studies that did report synchrony have been criticised for methodological errors, including biased statistical analyses and failure to account for the mathematical probability of overlap between cycles of different lengths. Even McClintock herself eventually acknowledged that strict synchrony is a myth, though she maintained interest in subtler pheromonal effects that remain unverified.
When McCabe uses a debunked biological claim as spiritual evidence for what "Women's Nation" is designed for, she does exactly what she criticises the dominant culture for doing: reading a predetermined meaning into female biology and calling it nature.
The Deepest Problem: Replacing One Cage with a Beautiful One
The most significant problem with McCabe's essay is not any individual factual error but its structural logic. She begins by asking the right question - what do we really mean by masculine and feminine? - and then answers it by constructing an elaborate new set of essential characteristics assigned to each sex: women are Life Bearers, lucid dreamers, spiralling and circular in their thinking, fountains of care, agencies of the Mother Earth. Men are Protectors, Providers, Sacred Fire Keepers, with "laser, at times singular, focus" and the capacity for external architectural vision.
This is gender essentialism dressed in sacred language. The fact that the language is beautiful, the intention is healing, and the source is indigenous does not change the structural operation: people are being told what they are made to be based on their reproductive biology.
What about women who experience no connection to "spiralling" consciousness or "lucid dreaming with the Mother Earth"? What about men who have no "Sacred Fire" of the kind McCabe describes? What about intersex people, whose biology defies the binary? What about trans people? What about the non-binary and Two-Spirit people who exist within McCabe's own Diné and Lakota traditions?
McCabe writes: "I cannot be who I am made to be, without you being who you are made to be." This is presented as a love declaration, but its logic is concerning: it makes each person's self-actualisation contingent on the other performing their gendered role correctly. This is the structure of codependence, not partnership.
What the Traditions Actually Teach When You Listen More Carefully
The strongest version of what McCabe is reaching for exists - but it exists in traditions she does not cite, and in aspects of her own traditions she does not foreground.
The Yoruba concept of àṣẹ - the force of life, of becoming, of generative power - is not gendered. It flows through all beings. The Yoruba system invites each person to discover which Orisha resonates with their energy, regardless of their sex. A man might carry the cool waters of Yemaya; a woman might burn with Ṣàngó's lightning.
Eisler's partnership model invites us to ask not "what is my gendered design?" but "what systems make it possible for all humans to access their full range of capacities?"
Sapolsky's research invites us to ask not "what does testosterone make men?" but "what social contexts would allow testosterone to amplify generosity, creativity, and care rather than aggression and domination?"
These questions are more radical, more genuinely decolonial, and more useful than the ones McCabe poses. They do not require anyone to be a particular thing because of their body. They ask us to build worlds where every body can become.
Honouring the Impulse, Refusing the Framework
Pat McCabe's essay comes from a place of genuine spiritual inquiry and deep concern for the world. Her compassion for men is rare and valuable. Her recognition that the "power-over paradigm" distorts all who live within it is correct. Her call for a form of activism rooted in wholeness rather than opposition is wise.
But her solution - a re-sacralised gender binary - replicates the very logic she seeks to undo. She tells us that "The Hoop of Life only understands 'We'" and then proceeds to divide that "We" into two Nations with fixed, biologically ordained roles. She claims to speak for "ancient culture" while ignoring the Two-Spirit traditions within her own nations, the non-gendered cosmologies of West Africa, and the archaeological evidence for partnership societies that did not organise themselves around gender complementarity.
The Hoop of Life, if it is anything, has more than two points on it. And the path to healing the damage of the dominator paradigm lies not in constructing a more beautiful version of biological destiny, but in dismantling the assumption that biology is destiny at all.
As Eisler writes, and as McCabe's own teachers seem to understand: the paradigm is a choice. The question is whether we will choose one that truly frees us - or one that merely feels better while it constrains.
Sources Referenced
Robert M. Sapolsky
The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997). Simon & Schuster.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017). Penguin Press.
Huberman Lab Podcast interview (2021): "Science of Stress, Testosterone & Free Will."
Riane Eisler
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987). Harper & Row. Now in 57th US printing.
Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body (1995). Harper.
Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (2019, with Douglas P. Fry). Oxford University Press.
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997). University of Minnesota Press.
Christoph Eisenegger, Michael Naef, Rosemarie Snozzi, Markus Heinrichs, and Ernst Fehr
"Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behaviour." Nature 463 (2010): 356-359.
Menstrual Synchrony
Martha K. McClintock, "Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression." Nature 229 (1971): 244-245.
Anna Ziomkiewicz, "Menstrual synchrony: Fact or artifact?" Human Nature 17, no. 4 (2006): 419-432.
Anna L. Harris and Victor J. Vitzthum, "Darwin's Legacy: An Evolutionary View of Women's Reproductive and Sexual Functioning." The Journal of Sex Research 50, no. 3-4 (2013): 267-246.
Indigenous Gender Diversity
Will Roscoe, "How to Become a Berdache: Toward a Unified Analysis of Gender Diversity," in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (1996).
Walter Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (1986). Beacon Press.
J.D. Peel, "Gender in Yoruba Religious Change." Journal of Religion in Africa 32, no. 2 (2002): 136-166.
Randy P. Conner, Blossom of Bone: Reclaiming the Connections between Homoeroticism and the Sacred (1993).
Archaeological Evidence
Ian Hodder, "Women and Men at Çatalhöyük." Scientific American (2004).
Marija Gimbutas, The Civilisation of the Goddess (1991). HarperSanFrancisco.