In Steiner's account of human evolution, the division into male and female bodies arose at a particular stage of humanity's development. It therefore has both a history and a future.
When mentioning the eventual disappearance of physical gender and sexual reproduction, this not saying that male and female are "outdated" categories.
That would miss the point almost entirely.
Male and female are profound realities of our present earthly embodiment. Sex reaches deeply into the constitution of the incarnated human being: into the body, biography, temperament, relationships, karma, and inevitably into the way we experience ourselves as personalities.
This is precisely why the subject immediately becomes so emotionally charged.
An observation concerning the future evolution of sexual differentiation can easily be heard as a judgment upon someone's present identity. But these are two entirely different things.
Childhood is real, although we grow beyond it. Our present physical constitution is real, although Anthroposophy does not regard it as the final form of the human being. Earth itself passes through metamorphoses.
And so does sexual differentiation.
In Steiner's account of human evolution, the division into male and female bodies arose at a particular stage of humanity's development. It therefore has both a history and a future. It was not always as it is now, and it will not remain as it is indefinitely.
This places the question on an entirely different level from contemporary arguments about whether gender is socially constructed, whether traditional definitions are "outdated," or which political position one ought to take.
What in me is actually male or female?
The physical body certainly is sexually differentiated. The incarnated personality is profoundly formed through that embodiment.
But the spiritual individuality passing through repeated earthly lives cannot ultimately be either male or female in that same sense. If the same individuality incarnates through both sexes over the course of its development, then neither sex can exhaustively define the being who passes through those incarnations.
This does not make our present embodiment an illusion.
It means that the human being is greater than it.
And here lies, it seems, much of the difficulty in discussing this subject.
We naturally identify very deeply with the form through which we presently experience ourselves. Therefore, when someone speaks about humanity eventually leaving sexual differentiation behind, it can sound like an attack upon something extraordinarily intimate: "You are telling me that what I am isn't real."
The point is that what we presently ARE is itself undergoing evolution.
Within Steiner's evolutionary chronology, this is not merely an abstract statement about some unimaginably remote future. He gives definite milestones, including the future cessation of ordinary physical reproduction. Whether one accepts such spiritual-scientific observations is another question, but within Anthroposophy they belong to a much larger account of the gradual transformation of the physical organism and humanity's relationship to the etheric.
One may even look at contemporary developments surrounding fertility, assisted reproduction, declining birth rates, Caesarean birth and increasingly technological intervention in reproduction and ask whether these phenomena have any relationship to much longer evolutionary changes.
The eventual transcendence of sexual differentiation does not mean that sex is obsolete today. It means that we have to fully inhabit the human form through which I have entered this incarnation — while gradually discovering that my deepest being cannot be confined to that form. Seen this way, the question of gender is not primarily a political question.
It becomes a question of human evolution, incarnation, and ultimately freedom.
