Christians are fighting transgender ideologies with transgender assumptions, and it’s just not going to work.
“I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body” sounds ridiculous to many Christians. If they’re biologically male, we wonder how they could question whether they’re something other than a man. Yet what few realize is that the same language they use to correct their sons and daughters, or critique those who aren’t “real men,” can accidentally support the foundational assumptions behind transgenderism itself.
After all, how many boys know they are male, and yet are told they need to “man up” because of their hobbies, preferences, habits, attitudes, personality, or physical features (besides the one obvious one)? How many young men go through life thinking “Am I man enough?” because they’ve been taught that manhood is something internal that they must discover, prove, or feel? Christian men and women often speak as though manhood and womanhood must be validated by personality, preferences, temperament, or feelings rather than simply being recognized as realities rooted in biological sex. Though they’d disagree with transgender conclusions, they tend to agree that our psychology can fail to match our biology.
This article will likely challenge assumptions many Christians have held for most of their lives. It will likely press against what they were taught and may even question advice they’ve given others. This article isn’t about refining modern ideas of “biblical manhood” or “biblical womanhood,” but about questioning whether those beliefs are biblical in the first place.
Content warning: I’ll probably offend people at least once
When our beliefs are challenged, it’s easy to assume the person challenging them belongs to the “other side.” I imagine this article will give most readers enough reasons to think I’m one of “them.”
Some may read this and conclude I’m a liberal, feminist, and egalitarian who believes gender is a social construct.
Others will reach my final points and conclude I’m a misogynistic sexist who hates women and views them as less valuable than men.
Those who know me may cautiously wonder if they’ll finally understand how I can hold to a patriarchal view of marriage while also being a stay-at-home dad.
So let me start by laying some cards on the table: Men and women are not identical, interchangeable, or social constructs. “Man” and “woman” are rooted in the creation order itself, with distinct roles from God.
However, we must reject that we can be more or less of a man or woman than someone else who shares our biology. We must also reject treating masculine and feminine tendencies as the standard for biblical manhood or womanhood. I believe those categories not only add to Scripture’s definitions but also weaken biblical arguments against transgenderism itself.
So as you read, I simply ask that you temporarily set aside cultural assumptions long enough to consider whether the Bible speaks about manhood and womanhood the same way we do. And if it doesn’t, I also ask that you consider whether our modern categories are compatible with how God designed us.
Inheriting feelings-based manhood
It’s difficult to imagine “How I think today” isn’t “How people have always thought.” When we study history, it’s shocking to realize that assumptions we make aren’t universal truths, but things we’ve inherited from our culture. How we frame and define manhood is one belief we’ve inherited without realizing it.
Historically, cultures certainly had masculine ideals, expectations, and virtues. Men worried about courage, honor, strength, reputation, and whether they measured up to what society expected of them. The specifics varied too widely to discuss here, but where we do have evidence (like my Luther excerpts later), we see something consistent: manhood was tied more to role and responsibility than to an inward psychological identity.
A man could fail masculine expectations and still be recognized as a man. His failure reflected on his character, maturity, virtue, or ability to fulfill his responsibilities. It did not typically raise questions about whether he possessed an authentic inner sense of manhood. This helps explain why earlier understandings of manhood often produced responsibility and shame, but not the same kind of insecurity that many modern men experience.
Yet it’s not a foreign concept for us to judge ourselves and others based on role instead of internal feelings and validation. Consider an analogy from our corporate world:
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Imagine Herbert is promoted to the role of manager in his company. After some training, he’s set loose to go manage his section of the company. However, Herbert feels nervous about being in charge of people or having his employees not like him, so he goes for the “fun guy” approach and doesn’t hold people accountable for their work. His employees like him, invite him out, and are generally happy to see him. He feels like a great manager.
Then corporate notices an absolute nosedive in productivity. They sit Herbert down, tell him to pick things up or else, and send him on his way. Upon returning to the office, our guy tries to encourage people to work while remaining likable, but no one takes him seriously or increases their work output. Frustrated, Herbert tells his higher-ups “They refuse to listen to me. I just don’t feel like a manager.”
Here’s his problem: Herbert is a manager. The company records clearly show that this is the role he’s in. The issue isn’t whether or not he “feels” like a manager. Herbert needs to worry about whether he succeeds or fails to fulfill his duties.
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Herbert’s failure doesn’t make him less of a manager. It simply makes him a bad manager.
Historically, discussions of manhood worked much the same way. A cowardly man was still a man. A lazy man was still a man. The question was not whether he possessed an inner sense of manhood, but whether he was faithfully fulfilling the responsibilities attached to it.
A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, no matter what. Their self-evaluation was tied far more closely to how they fulfilled their responsibilities than to whether they felt an authentic sense of manhood. This is radically different from how modern culture views manhood as something inward, psychological, and performative.
True biblical manhood and womanhood
Discussing things like “biblical masculinity” tends to reveal how we can accidentally place modern assumptions on biblical categories. When we study Scripture, we see that God commands all believers to cultivate various virtues that are independent of sex. The Bible doesn’t treat manhood as a psychological identity that must be felt, expressed, and validated. Instead, when speaking of men and women, the Bible gives each sex a set of role-based responsibilities that can only be fully completed by embracing virtues commanded for all believers.
Let’s start by getting a glimpse of what God expects of His people. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it is meant to highlight the biblical traits and virtues that aren’t unique to men or women:
- Love (1 Corinthians 13:7-10, Galatians 5:22)
- Joy (Galatians 5:22)
- Peace (Galatians 5:22)
- Patience (Galatians 5:22)
- Kindness (Galatians 5:22)
- Goodness (Galatians 5:22)
- Faithfulness (Galatians 5:22)
- Gentleness (Galatians 5:23)
- Self-control (Titus 2:11-12, Galatians 5:23)
- Humility (James 4:10)
- Sacrificial living (Philippians 2:3)
- Courage (1 Corinthians 16:13; see this article)
- Purity (1 Thessalonians 4:3-7)
- Wisdom (James 1:5)
- Contentment (Philippians 4:11-13)
- Forgiving (Ephesians 4:32)
- Hospitable (1 Peter 4:9)
- Endurance (Hebrews 12:1-3)
- Holiness (1 Peter 1:6)
We could go on, but the reality is that nearly all of the Bible’s commands for God’s people are given to men and women alike. These are virtues that reflect God’s character and thus should be reflected through all of God’s people.
That’s not to say God is blind to gender. After all, the Bible isn’t shy about commands to men and women. And we’ll soon note that the various virtues the Bible commands will necessarily play out in how a man or woman fulfills their role
A man:
- Receives responsibilities from God and is given a helper to assist him in them (Genesis 2:15-22, note that Adam was given a task, then Eve was created as a helper for him to accomplish it)
- Participates in discipleship with other men (2 Timothy 2:2)
- Can pastor a church if he’s qualified (1 Timothy 3:1-7)
- Is the head of his wife (Ephesians 5:23, 1 Corinthians 11:3)
- Leads and loves his wife sacrificially (Ephesians 5:25)
- Isn’t harsh with his wife (Colossians 3:19)
- Lives in an understanding way with his wife (1 Peter 3:7)
- Honors his wife as a fellow heir of eternal life (1 Peter 3:7)
- Bears responsibility for the care of his household (Ephesians 5:28–29, 1 Timothy 5:8)
- Is prepared to serve his family by answering biblical questions (1 Corinthians 14:35)
- Gives his wife her sexual rights (1 Corinthians 7:3-5)
- Raises his children to know and follow God instead of provoking them to anger (Ephesians 6:4, Deuteronomy 6:6-7)
- Manages his family (1 Timothy 3:4-5; while this is specific to pastors, it assumes that this is the mark of a mature man)
A woman:
- Learns from older women (Titus 2:4)
- Teaches younger women (Titus 2:4)
- Dresses with modesty (1 Tim. 2:9–10, 1 Peter 3:3–4)
- Submits to her husband as her head (Ephesians 5:22)
- Respects her husband in his role as head of their household (Ephesians 5:33)
- Acts as a “fit helper” to her husband and his areas of stewardship (Genesis 2:15-22)
- Gives her husband his sexual rights (1 Corinthians 7:3-5)
- Loves her husband and children (Titus 2:4-5, Proverbs 31:10-31)
- Manages her household (1 Timothy 5:14, Titus 2:5)
We should note two unique things about these:
1. These are all relational in how a person relates to God, family, and their community.
2. None of them require masculine or feminine psychology or traits, but instead demand universal Christian virtues applied to a person’s gender-specific roles.
In other words, Scripture often emphasizes the distinction between men and women as responsibility-based. Someone who is biologically male or female has responsibilities that God holds them accountable for, no matter what. A woman with more Bible knowledge or leadership skills cannot claim the husband’s leadership authority any more than an employee who went to Harvard can usurp their manager’s authority. A man who would rather spend time on his own hobbies or let his wife raise their kids isn’t relieved of his responsibilities; he’s just an absentee head of his household.
The Bible never speaks as though an internal sense of “manhood” is part of what it takes to be a man. A man is a man; the question is whether or not he’s doing his job. He doesn’t need to worry about satisfying various cultural stereotypes. Instead, he needs to focus on two things: Am I cultivating Christian virtues, and am I applying those virtues to the tasks God has given me?
The rise of personal identity
If the Bible doesn’t define degrees of “gender success” for men and women based on the many factors we use, where did this thinking come from? Why would someone consider themselves less of a man for doing the dishes, enjoying baking, lacking muscle mass, or gagging while putting a worm on a fishing hook? To summarize, it seems largely tied to two very related shifts in our culture:
- Religion is no longer central to everyday life
- Culture teaches being true to our “authentic self”
Let’s look at how culture shifted from a religious understanding of gender to the psychological one we have today.
God defines you
Prior to the 1600s, religion played a dominant role in almost every society. For our purposes, it’s vital to recognize that a religion-based society has an objective source of truth. Instead of discovering their own meaning and purpose, their religion would largely define it for them.
As Christians, we find this especially relevant. Though we can rightly argue that state-enforced religion leads to a lot of false converts, members of that society still understand themselves in light of the Bible. That means that men and women of the past viewed themselves largely through their role in the family, church, and community as defined by God. Though it had its flaws over time, this external source of “identity” is closer to what we see in the Bible.
A snapshot of Luther’s worldview
Before moving on to the major cultural shift of the Enlightenment, writings from as late as the 1500s reveal that manhood was viewed as a gendered duty, not something we must become.
In The Estate of Marriage (1522), Martin Luther gives a short essay on, well, marriage. Though his primary focus is to disprove the Roman Catholic concept of celibacy, his reasoning shows that even those in the 1500s viewed manhood as an unchangeable reality. Below, I’ll put a few quotes and my brief comments.
[Speaking of how the command to multiply is more than just a command] Rather, it is just as necessary as the fact that I am a man, and more necessary than sleeping and waking, eating and drinking, and emptying the bowels and bladder. It is a nature and disposition just as innate as the organs involved in it Therefore, just as God does not command anyone to be a man or a woman but creates them the way they have to be, so he does not command them to multiply but creates them so that they have to multiply. And wherever men try to resist this, it remains irresistible nonetheless and goes its way through fornication, adultery, and secret sins, for this is a matter of nature and not of choice.
Toward the beginning, Luther argues that the desire to create children through sex is a natural part of our biology. We don’t choose to desire sex any more than we choose to be male or female.
A wife too should regard her duties in the same light, as she suckles the child, rocks and bathes it, and cares for it in other ways; and as she busies herself with other duties and renders help and obedience to her husband. These are truly golden and noble works. This is also how to comfort and encourage a woman in the pangs of childbirth, not by repeating St Margaret legends and other silly old wives’ tales but by speaking thus, “Dear Grete, remember that you are a woman, and that this work of God in you is pleasing to him. Trust joyfully in his will, and let him have his way with you. Work with all your might to bring forth the child. Should it mean your death, then depart happily, for you will die in a noble deed and in subservience to God. If you were not a woman you should now wish to be one for the sake of this very work alone, that you might thus gloriously suffer and even die in the performance of God’s work and will. For here you have the word of God, who so created you and implanted within you this extremity.” Tell me, is not this indeed (as Solomon says [Prov. 18:22]) “to obtain favour from the Lord,” even in the midst of such extremity?
Agree or not with Luther’s words, it reflects the beliefs of the time: to be a woman was to perform certain glorious duties. The honor and nobility of being a woman in childbirth brought such meaning that Luther suggests it should even comfort a woman who could very well die during the process. He viewed the duty of womanhood in the same way we may view a soldier who understands he may die in battle, knowing death is an inherent risk of the duty he performs.
Now you tell me, when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool, though that father is acting in the spirit just described and in Christian faith, my dear fellow you tell me, which of the two is most keenly ridiculing the other? God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling, not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith. Those who sneer at him and see only the task but not the faith are ridiculing God with all his creatures, as the biggest fool on earth. Indeed, they are only ridiculing themselves; with all their cleverness they are nothing but devil’s fools.
In arguing against the idea that church positions (monk, priest, etc) are more noble than fatherhood, Luther challenges the assumption that a father is acting in degrading duties. Instead, he points out that God is pleased with a man who is acting in faith, even if it’s doing something society labels as “women’s work.”
But the greatest good in married life, that which makes all suffering and labour worthwhile, is that God grants offspring and commands that they be brought up to worship and serve him. In all the world this is the noblest and most precious work, because to God there can be nothing dearer than the salvation of souls. Now since we are all duty bound to suffer death, if need be, that we might bring a single soul to God, you can see how rich the estate of marriage is in good works. God has entrusted to its bosom souls begotten of its own body, on whom it can lavish all manner of Christian works. Most certainly father and mother are apostles, bishops, and priests to their children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the gospel. In short, there is no greater or nobler authority on earth than that of parents over their children, for this authority is both spiritual and temporal. Whoever teaches the gospel to another is truly his apostle and bishop. Mitre and staff and great estates indeed produce idols, but teaching the gospel produces apostles and bishops. See therefore how good and great is God’s work and ordinance!
Again, Luther argues that our greatest purpose is found in role and duty. In this case, he argues that it’s living out the role of parent. Yet parenthood isn’t fulfilling at a psychological level, as though only certain people should find happiness in being parents, but because of the activity in training young souls to understand and believe the gospel of Jesus Christ.
He who would enter into wedlock as a Christian must not be ashamed of being poor and despised, and doing insignificant work. He should take satisfaction in this: first, that his status and occupation are pleasing to God; second, that God will most certainly provide for him if only he does his job to the best of his ability, and that, if he cannot be a squire or a prince, he is a manservant or a maidservant.
As he wraps up his essay, Luther continues with this vocational language. Who we are, and who God desires us to be, is found in how we fill the roles God gives us. That’s not to say life is all work, but rather that our purpose and meaning are found outside ourselves, in who God is and what He calls us to.
The point of this section isn’t to say whether or not Luther is wrong in any of his quotes. Rather, it’s to highlight that, even 500 years ago, the biblical worldview held that gender was tied to our biology. That same biology locked us into a certain role, and it was necessary for us to glorify God by living out that role out of a love for Him and a duty towards our family and community.
And it’s this very objective, outward source of truth that would soon be challenged and replaced with the early versions of our modern worldview.
The Enlightenment: You find truth on your own
If the Bible treats manhood and womanhood as objective roles that give us certain responsibilities, how did modern culture begin treating them as inward identities?
In the 1600s, we saw the beginning of the Enlightenment. For our purposes, one of the biggest outcomes of this period is that people learned to trust science and human reason rather than religion or tradition. Authority shifted from external and objective sources, focusing more on humans looking inward for truth. Confidence in human reason grew dramatically, and many thinkers began questioning whether tradition, religion, and external authority were necessary sources of truth.
Below is a compressed overview of a shift that took two centuries and many more thinkers than I have room for here. Carl Trueman’s “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” traces the fuller history of this. For our purposes, let’s examine three men who mark the cultural shift clearly enough.
Rousseau: You define yourself
The Enlightenment didn’t immediately kickstart how we view identity today, but it did lay the groundwork that others would build upon. In the 1700s, a man named Rousseau was one such builder who pushed our search for truth and meaning further inward. One of his most famous quotes stands as a sharp contrast to the thinking of the pre-modern world:
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. (The Social Contract, 1762)
Rousseau saw man as inherently good and morally capable of defining himself. More importantly for our discussion, Rousseau helped popularize the idea that a person’s truest self lies within. Consequently, this meant that humanity’s problem came from the various external authority structures that kept their true selves confined, even corrupting their pure nature. Things like society, tradition, and religion weren’t sources of truth, but were actually inhibiting us from discovering who we truly are.
In Rousseau’s world, religion still held strong across most areas of society, even as its value was being challenged by people who wondered whether they needed such outdated traditions to understand themselves. Rousseau reflects the early ways in which the Enlightenment affected how humans viewed their own merit and, thus, their own worth. People were starting to realize they could be autonomous, individual agents instead of parts of a greater whole.
Rousseau represented a massive shift. Truth and meaning were no longer automatically received from God, family, and community, but something discovered within the self. And as Western culture embraced this idea more and more, later philosophers would begin to wrestle with what would happen when these external sources of truth, derived primarily from religious beliefs, no longer represented an ultimate truth that gave us meaning.
Nietzsche: You are the new God
About two centuries after the Enlightenment kicked off, Friedrich Nietzsche penned one of his most famous (and misunderstood) quotes.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? (The Gay Science, 1882)
Nietzsche wasn’t claiming that God went from a state of life to death. Rather, he realized that the success of the Enlightenment brought something dangerous with it: the end of external morality and meaning. He recognized that religion had always defined those things, but now no longer could. So as the world became more individualistic and less reliant on these old structures, Nietzsche argued that people were now the ones who must define their own morality and meaning.
Trusting in human achievement left a vacuum. Where once people turned outward for God to define who they were, now they had to turn inward to their new god. Objective sex distinctions became less important than identity and self-understanding. The only remaining question was where humans should turn to discover and understand themselves. Freud would soon provide the answer: our psychology.
Freud: You are your psychological self
Sigmund Freud, building on the development of individualism and self-creation from the previous 200 years, created a movement in the 1900s that has deeply affected us ever since. Freud helped popularize the idea that understanding a person’s inner psychology is essential to understanding who they are.
Though his work is largely questionable today, he nevertheless laid the groundwork for understanding humans in terms of desires, sexuality, and self-expression. In identifying human suffering as a psychological malady, his solution was likewise psychological in nature.
Freud introduced us to therapeutic solutions. He pioneered the idea that humans needed to look inward at their suffering and correct it. Human suffering increasingly came to be understood through psychological categories rather than moral, religious, or community-oriented ones.
Across many schools of modern psychology, the inner life increasingly became the place where people sought explanations for suffering, identity, and fulfillment. Yet from Freudian psychology of the 1900s to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy of today, one thread remains constant: humans must nurture their inner psychology to understand and address their suffering and personhood.
It’s no surprise, then, to see why “male” and “female” are no longer as clear-cut as they once were. Even something as straightforward as “biological sex” is now questioned because self-expression, feeling, and identity are our highest source of truth. The material world is real, but somehow far less real than our psychological beliefs about ourselves.
Where once science rescued us from the shackles of religion and tradition, now even science itself must make way for the psychological. A man is no longer a man based on his genetics, but on how he feels about himself. And with the advances of technology, we don’t need to live in the contradiction of our lesser biology not matching our superior belief about who we truly are.
And once humans are primarily understood as psychological beings whose inner identity must be felt and expressed, transgender ideology ceases to be strange and is instead understood to be entirely logical.
Lipstick on a broken framework
This is the therapeutic worldview we have inherited today. Yet its effects go far beyond transgenderism. Long before someone identifies as transgender, these assumptions have already shaped how many Christians think about manhood and womanhood.
Historically, the primary question was whether a man was faithfully fulfilling the responsibilities attached to his role. Today, the primary question is often whether he feels like he is man enough.
These questions are not the same.
The role-based framework asks:
- Am I fulfilling my obligations?
- Am I acting faithfully toward God, my family, and my community?
- Am I succeeding or failing in the responsibilities God has given me?
The modern, identity-based framework asks:
- Am I masculine enough?
- Do I possess the right personality traits?
- Do I enjoy the right hobbies?
- Do others see me as manly?
- Do I fit culture’s expectations of what a man should be?
The focus has shifted from God-given responsibility to self-discovered identity.
A man who failed under the older framework might be called lazy, cowardly, irresponsible, or immature. The fix was to do the things his role required. A man who fails under the modern framework often concludes that he is somehow less of a man. The modern solution often involves forcing himself to change his habits, appearance, personality, interests, or body in pursuit of an authentic sense of manhood.
This is why so many young men grow up feeling insecure about their manhood. They aren’t merely worried about whether they’re fulfilling their responsibilities. They’re worried about whether they possess enough of whatever they believe “manhood” means. They spend years searching for confirmation that they’re masculine enough, strong enough, confident enough, dominant enough, athletic enough, or interested in the right things.
This also creates a need for others to affirm our psychology. For our discussion, a man rarely feels man enough unless he performs what he believes a “man” is in front of others and, most importantly, they then recognize his manhood. Modern manhood is a performance where men constantly try to convince themselves and others that they are man enough. But unlike earlier generations, manhood isn’t defined by an objective source. Instead, it’s determined inwardly and merely confirmed outwardly.
For example, what do we mean when we tell boys to “be a man”? We rarely mean “fulfill your responsibilities as a son, husband, or father.” More often, we mean “stop crying,” “be tougher,” “like different things,” “change your personality,” or “act more masculine.” Failing to heed these commands leaves many boys insecure about whether they measure up to what a man is supposed to be. It teaches boys that manhood must be achieved, validated, or demonstrated rather than simply lived out through faithful obedience to their responsibilities. Moreover, it teaches them that certain flaws, interests, or personality traits are inconsistent with what a man is supposed to be.
It may seem innocent to teach children that their psychology needs to match their biology. But if we’re adding more to “man” and “woman” than God designed, we shouldn’t be surprised when things go wrong. In a world where the psychological is most important, what do we think will happen when someone is taught that their mind and body don’t match? If culture teaches us that our inner selves are our greatest source of truth, why should we be shocked when someone wants to change their body to match the greatest aspect of their personhood?
This, I fear, is what Christians have engaged in without realizing it. We borrow from a secular belief system that says that a man or woman must possess and act out a series of psychological traits because gender is a personal and inward-focused reality. We’ve taught generations of boys and girls that their personalities define their gender. Then, when they turn to surgery to resolve this inconsistency, we’re shocked that they “fixed” their biology so that they can leave their true, authentic self unchanged.
If we adopt beliefs that arose as Western culture moved away from God as the ultimate source of meaning and identity, we shouldn’t wonder why people don’t listen to us when we tell them to live and act in a way that is contrary to those beliefs. Transgenderism is, in fact, deeply consistent with a worldview that insists humans are psychological creatures who can and must define themselves, pursue their own happiness, and look inward to know who they are and what they must do. We surrender biblical ground when we let secular philosophy define men and women for us, even if we try to turn it around and apply terms like “biblical masculinity” to a system that arose as society tried to replace the Bible as an objective source of truth.
Summarizing the problem
This article isn’t trying to find a way to “beat” transgenderism. Instead, I’m pointing out how Christians have adopted a secular worldview that makes them unable to seriously discuss the objective realities of man and woman. We’ve embraced a belief system that says manhood and womanhood are, at least in part, psychological realities. They are identities we must feel inwardly, express to others, and have confirmed by those who witness our performance.
Christians borrow from the world’s understanding of identity, even though we reach a different (though arguably less consistent) conclusion than transgender ideology. Many Christians increasingly share the secular assumptions that things like personality traits, tendencies, hobbies, and mannerisms “make” someone a man or woman. Both increasingly treat personality traits, interests, tendencies, and mannerisms as evidence that someone is more or less aligned with what a man or woman truly is, despite what someone’s sex organs testify. They speak as though we have an inner “self” that must match our outer self.
One major area of disagreement concerns how psychology and biology should relate to one another. Transgenderism says, “Force biology to match psychology.” Yet many Christians, innocently believing they’re espousing a biblical understanding of sex, insist that psychology must change to match biology. But when we’re already borrowing from a worldview that elevates our psychology above biology, it’s little wonder that we have no ground to stand on when we say the greater truth should bend to the lesser one.
We’ve allowed sex, a biological reality, to be separated from “gender,” which the world claims is a psychological identity. We’ve borrowed too freely from a worldview that developed specifically to replace God as the one who determines our role, only to be surprised when Christian men and women talk about gender being a feeling. We don’t understand why a boy grows up questioning whether he is man enough after spending his childhood being measured against cultural expectations of masculinity. Further, we’re puzzled why that same boy may believe he must be a “girl trapped in a boy’s body” because his personality is much more in line with things attributed to women.
Offering a solution
A man is a man. A woman is a woman. Both have responsibilities as humans and as a particular gender, but there’s no “acting” like a man or “feeling” like a woman. Instead, we must let the Bible stand on its own, free from our assumptions about psychological selfhood, to determine what it means to be born as one sex or the other.
The question Scripture asks is not whether we feel like men or women, but whether we are faithfully living as the men and women God created us to be.
As explained above, Scripture primarily describes men and women in terms of responsibilities and relationships rather than psychological identity. A man reading this has absolute responsibilities, and a woman has different but equally important and valuable responsibilities.
All of this changes the question we ask when we fall short of God’s design for our gender. As a man, I don’t ask “Do I feel like enough of a man?” but rather “Am I living out Christian virtues as I uniquely serve my family and my God?” The duties don’t change, but how we measure ourselves absolutely does, especially when it comes to removing all the extra “stuff” we’ve added to manhood and womanhood because of culture.
So how do we train young men and women? We teach them the virtues necessary for every Christian and prepare them to live out those virtues in their current and future roles. We don’t eliminate their roles, but we stop measuring them differently than God does. We prepare them to do the duties required of them.
Remember that we don’t choose the duties attached to our sex any more than we choose our sex. God holds us responsible for fulfilling our obligations. A man who abandons his family, consumes himself with work at the expense of his home leadership, or lets his wife take control, isn’t handing over his responsibilities. His role remains unchanged, but his choices reflect a man who is failing to do what God calls him to.
What happens if we take this seriously? Suddenly, behaviors and personalities aren’t evaluated based on whether they “make” someone a man or woman. Instead, all the unique things about a person are seen as positive, negative, or even neutral in how they let that person fulfill their role.
Is a man playing video games more or less “manly” than one who fishes? No, because both are equal failures if those hobbies interfere with their duties or sanctification.
Is a woman less “womanly” if she would rather visit a hunting store over a nail salon? No, as long as the time and money she spends don’t interfere with her duties or sanctification.
As I said in the beginning, this is why I think Christians will keep losing the transgender debate. We can’t argue that biology should override psychology while our own framework quietly agrees that psychology is where manhood and womanhood live in the first place. The solution isn’t better arguments, deeper studies, or more data on negative outcomes. Instead, we need to recover an understanding of men and women that goes beyond feelings or psychology and deals with truth as God sees it.
I also said in the beginning that I’m a stay-at-home dad. Fibromyalgia made that the wisest call for the family God calls me to lead; I stay home with our four kids while my wife works. My typical day doesn’t produce a paycheck, which by every cultural metric we’ve imported into Christianity should make me a failure. Yet I still lead my wife, disciple my children, carry responsibility for our home’s spiritual health, and set our direction. Living out our responsibilities is possible, even in imperfect circumstances.
Understanding men and women this way may seem radical or relieving. Living it out is counter-cultural. But as you think about this, evaluate the most important question: Is it biblical? If I’ve accurately and faithfully explained what we see in God’s word, and if I’ve been fair in how I’ve contrasted that with our modern views of sex and gender, then it’s now up to the reader to take this information and prayerfully do something about it.