gender

 
A class I teach includes an overview of women in church history. In addition to reading accounts of women martyrs, students watch the film “Iron Jawed Angels.” Most people don’t realize that Alice Paul, a key leader in the fight for suffrage in the USA, was a Quaker. 
 

“I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to agree with each other in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you, loyal yokefellow, help these women who have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel” (Phil. 4:2–3).

Look up “gender” in the dictionary, and you will probably find “sex” as its definition. As if the words were interchangeable. In the not-so-distant past, “gender” referred only to grammatical fields. But in 1955, a sexologist suggested that we distinguish between biological sex and gender as a way of distinguishing between male and female. 

Did you see the Youtube video, “Riley on Marketing” that went viral? Diane Sawyer later interviewed little Riley, who ranted right in the middle of the toy store about how little girls like her get relegated to only pink princess toys while boys get all the other colors—and only the boys get to be superheroes.

Recently when I spoke with a group about biblical teaching on marriage, one of the people in attendance told of a young Christian husband who refused to do a simple household task his wife asked him to do. 

There was a storm of controversy recently over a Toronto couple’s announcement that they were not disclosing the sex of their now 4-month-old baby. They “believe they are giving their children the freedom to choose who they want to be, unconstrained by social norms about males and females.” Not only are they raising their child Storm to be genderless, but they decided not to tell the world—and the world did not like that one bit.

When I use the term “gender spectrum,” you might think in terms of masculinity on one end and femininity on the other. We hear men being prompted to “get in touch with your feminine side.” (For some reason, women never seem to be exhorted to “get in touch with your masculine side.” Huh.)

But I don’t think that’s the way it works. In Genesis 1, we are told that “God created them male and female” (Gen. 1:27). I think, rather, that there is one spectrum of masculinity and another spectrum of femininity. I also think that God is the one who chooses where on the spectrum babies are born, according to His design and for His pleasure and glory.