ABSTRACT
Some contemporary views of gender, like Sally Haslanger’s, entail that a fully just society won’t have the genders of men and women. In this chapter, I explore this claim in light of the just society of the resurrection: will genders persist in resurrected persons? Would justice require that God eliminate gender for resurrected persons? I argue that resurrection justice requires gender persistence. God does not merely choose to resurrect persons who are gendered; God must do so in order to accomplish the justice promised in the resurrection itself. Justice in the resurrection is not merely forward-facing (a just future); it is also a rectification of past injustice and (we hope) a reconciliation between perpetrators and victims of injustice. One kind of injustice that many suffer in this life is gendered. To do justice to those individuals in the resurrection, gender must persist. I argue that the resurrected person is a site where features once given as reasons for discrimination become celebrated, where the very reasons cited in defense of unjust treatment are redeemed as reasons for admiration and praise. In the last section of the paper, I consider how gender persistence in the resurrection might provide new insight into what gender is.
