Reality strikes back

Reality is back in style. For example, the North Carolina legislature recently overrode the Democratic governor’s veto and defined male and female as, well, male and female—“corresponding solely to biological sex” as one bitter local liberal columnist put it. Meanwhile, New Hampshire has banned medically transitioning children, and “child gender clinics” across the nation are shutting down under pressure from lawsuits, state laws, and the regulatory efforts of the Trump administration.

The winning is not confined to the United States. Earlier this year the British Supreme Court decided that women are real after all, ruling that “woman” and “sex” in the nation’s 2010 Equality Act “refer to biological women and biological sex.” Which is to say not men, no matter how insistent some blokes are about being—in some mysterious way—women. This decision was a big win for biological-reality-recognizers—a group ranging from atheist gadfly Richard Dawkins to Harry Potter authoress J.K Rowling to Christian litigators.

Trans activists in the United States have also tried (sometimes successfully) to use anti-discrimination laws to eliminate women’s spaces. But it is not invidious discrimination to keep men out of women’s spaces, including prisons, shelters, and locker rooms; it is common sense rooted in the reality of human embodiment as male and female. And we should rejoice that this simple truth seems to be winning. To be sure, gender ideologues are still on the offensive in left-wing strongholds such as California, but the overall tide of the battle has turned.

However, recognizing the reality of male and female in law is not enough to establish right relations between the sexes. The immutable reality of human sexual dimorphism remains for many a source of conflict and despair; our culture is full of men and women who are lonely and embittered against each other, rather than flourishing together. There are fewer marriages, fewer children, and even less (and less satisfying) sex.

As this demonstrates, the sexual revolution, which gave rise to the gender revolution, has not delivered on its promises. Amid the ensuing cultural wreckage, Christians need not only to defend the reality of our embodiment, but also to show that there is a better way to live, in which our maleness and femaleness are respected and their union in marriage is celebrated. This commitment is meant to be cooperative and complementary, contributing to the well-being of both husband and wife, as well as their children. The fundamental solidarity of the family—mother, father, and child—is rooted in our male and female natures and serves as the indispensable foundation for a flourishing society.

Thus, gender ideology is an attack on both the essential nature of our embodied being and on the foundations of a healthy culture and polity. But it is not the only such attack. It was no coincidence that the gender revolution immediately followed the national establishment of same-sex marriage; after all, if male and female don’t matter in marriage, they don’t matter anywhere. Or to take another example, the ubiquity of degrading pornography has not only damaged relations between the sexes, but has also pushed some young women toward gender ideology. —aAfter all, if porn is what being a woman is like, they understandably want no part of it.

Christians must use the pushback against gender ideology to revisit questions about how we are to live as men and women, including sexually. And we must take heed that defeating one lie is no surety of truth. There are many other pitfalls to avoid, fueled by our culture and our own sin natures. In particular, the temptation to respond to the failures of modern liberalism with bitter reaction seems to be seducing many, especially overly online young men. The devil is as happy to ruin lives and damn souls with misogynistic pseudo-traditionalism as with gender ideology and liberal feminism.

Despite such hazards, the pushback against transgenderism provides an important chance to proclaim, and more importantly, to model Christian truth to a world desperately in need of it. Christians have answers about how men and women may life faithfully, fruitfully, and joyfully together, in a union that is rooted in our nature and God’s created order. To a lost, confused, cynical world, Christianity offers much more, and much better, than a minimal acknowledgment of biological reality.