Gender Theory

Preacher: Gareth Maggs
Bible Reading: Genesis 1:27
Date: 10 April 2022

Audio Only:

Christ Church Midrand · Gender Theory with Becket Cook Interview

Gender Theory

Intro

Morning everyone, so today we are talking on a topic which I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of ‘Gender Theory’. This is the idea that you can choose your gender. It’s blown up the internet, it’s being taught in many of your schools, many of your friends and families are actively engaged in it, some of you are engaged in it and it’s something that Christians need to talk about, because it may be with us for a long time.

You might be here today and you are struggling with this identity thing. You’re thinking I’m born with a physical gender, but I don’t feel I’m the gender I was told I had at birth. For others may you have discovered that you are not the gender you were born with and are on the road to ALREADY living out your new gender. To the rest of you all, you may have strong feelings, hurts or confusion around this topic. My goal today is to, in love, help us understand the topic a bit, and more importantly, help us see what the bible has to say about it.

What is gender theory

Gender Theory, in short, is the theory that you can express yourself for how you truly feel you are. Let me give you the most basic example: You could be born into a male body, but you feel in your head that you identify more with being a woman, so you decide to be a woman. But you might feel that you don’t want to express yourself entirely as a female, so you still work with tools in the garage and drink beer (Things that are considered manly) and in terms of who you are sexually oriented towards, well if you feel you are more attracted to men, you can choose to be with a man.

In the past the sex that you were born with (your biological sex) was considered to be one with your gender. Very few people thought that you could ever separate the 2. In other words, if someone looked at me and said, ‘Are you man’, I’ll say ‘Hell yes! I have male genitalia. I’m a man’. Really what Gender theory seeks to do is to break gender away from sexual orientation and make it fluid. You can be born a female, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a woman. You can choose to be a man, but still do some female things if you want to. Gender theory says you don’t have to be constrained to the sexual orientation you were born with. You can be whoever you want to be.

In the past men would buy a suite from the store and walk around with pants too long and shoulders too wide. Now days, suites are tailored to fit men perfectly. Gender theory does the same with gender. It tailors it to fit you perfectly. You might be born a male, but you don’t feel like you are one entirely, but now you can tailor your gender to fit you. And it’s goal is that you will look in the mirror and smile broadly because you really, really like what you see. Perhaps more then you ever have in your life.

To help you tailor your gender, there is this diagram. I’m sure you’ve seen it. It’s called the gender bread person.

Let’s go through it.

Anatomical sex (Or Biological sex)

This is where the physical attributes of your body will tell you if you are male or female. How you determined your biological sex is you’ll look at a bunch of physical features on your body and conclude that you are male, female, or intersex. You’ll look at your chromosomes through a blood test (males have XX chromosomes, females have XY chromosomes), voice pitch, body hair, genitals, muscle tone, chest, hip shape and what you’ll do is see where you are on this scale.

You can’t really choose your Anatomical sex (Though some people will have operations to alter it once they know their identity. This is known as Gender confirmation surgery), you look at what you’ve been born with. What you do with what you have been born with, is you take stock of what you have and you place it on a scale. In other words, you say, I have XX chromosomes, I have male muscle tone, I have a deep voice, I grow facial hair, I have male genitalia. I must be 100% on the maleness slide and 0% on the female side. 98.3% of people are 100% male or 100% female. There is only 1.7% of people who are born with physical abnormalities that affect their anatomical sex. For example, they have XX chromosomes, which means they are male, but they may been born with female genitalia. They may chart themselves somewhere further down.

Gender Identity

This is the gender you feel you have in your head. Your biological sex might be male, but you might feel in your head that your gender is not masculine but more feminine. How you determined your gender is you’ll look at your personality traits, your job, your hobbies, roles, expectations and decide your gender. I.e. you may be born a woman, but your prefer a lot more manly things. I.e. you love watching sport, playing rugby and doing jobs that are considered more manly, like I don’t know, being a lumber jack or a mechanic. What determines what is manly jobs, hobbies, personality traits is the society you live in. For example in South Africa, ballet may be considered to feminine, so you’ll say you are more feminine, but in another country, ballet may be considered to be more masculine, and so if you love ballet in Russia, you may consider your gender to be more masculine.

What’s helpful is that they have a scale, because you might feel you are not completely manly, so you might love watching sport, playing rugby and working with tools, but every Tuesday you like to dance the woman’s role at a ball room dancing class. In this case you may make yourself 80% man-ness but 20% women-ness.

Gender Expression

This is how you express yourself. So you might be born a male, identify as a female, but you may still wish to appear in a more masculine or feminine way. I.e if you identify as a male, you may still wish to dress more like a woman, or style yourself in ways that are considered feminine or put on makeup, etc. Your appearance, or how you express yourself, is considered more feminine. Once again you have a scale, and you can decide just how feminine or masculine you want to express yourself.

In other words, your anatomical sex can be male, but you can choose to be a woman, yet express yourself as either a man or a woman, or a combination of the 2. In fact, dressing up with a combination of the 2 is quite popular now, with many celebrities choosing to do it. They call themselves androgynous. Which means, they neither dress male or female, but combine the 2.

Attraction

Lastly you have attraction and under attraction you can be sexually attracted to someone, but romantically attracted to someone else. In other words, you might be sexually attracted to men, but you may want to be in a relationship with a woman where there is no sex. Once again there is a scale and if you look at the scale, you’ll see that you can either be attracted to females (Their sexual organs are female), women (They identify as women) or femininity (they express themselves as women). So, you can look at the scale and say. ‘I’m 100% into females (People who have female genitalia)’. Or you can choose 2 items in that list and say, ‘I’m into females, and men who identify as women.’

I think from how I explained this, you can work out how the bottom part with the men/males/masculinity works too. With those 2 graphs, you might say that you are sexually attracted to men and women. Or you could be attracted to males, and transwomen. Etc. Or finally, you be zero on both scales, which means you have no sexual drive at all. You are called asexual.

I think you can also then figure out your romantic attraction works as well.

What does the bible say?

At first when you read this Gender theory, it can cause you to get really excited. You’re free from the binds of viewing gender as binary. You can be whoever you want to be, you can be born female, but you walk and talk like a man, but dress looking more like a female. It’s your choice, or you can choose every so often to change. This week you can be a women dressed like a woman and next week you can be a man and dress halfway between a man and a woman. The world is your oyster.

It’s all up to you. That’s why it’s difficult because the weight of your identity is completely on your shoulders. Because of this you’ll either live a confused life, or a good life, but you’ll never live the great life.

Let’s see what the bible says about Gender

If you open up to Genesis 1, you read this in verse 27

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

It says in verse 26 as well as twice in verse 27 that God made us in HIS image. In other words, 3 times it tells us whose image we are made in, and it’s not in our own image, it’s in HIS image. So, if you ever question who has the role to create an image, it’s God. Not you. Let me just say this yet another way so that I can drum it in. God says, I’m making man, but he doesn’t just make man and say, you decide your identity! No, he tells them their identity, he says: ‘You are made in my image’.

What does it mean to be made in his image?

Now we don’t know everything about what it means to be made in the image of God. We know some things. Like,

we we’re not God, we simply reflect him.
We can see in Genesis 1 that he’s creative. He developed this entire world out of nothing, So we’re creative. Even if you think you are not. you might not be able to paint, but we all do things like plan our day, our lives, and our futures. That’s being creative. We like to combine different foods together, dress with different colours, tell stories, decorate our bedrooms, fantasise over what a date would be like with a certain celebrity… we are all creative.
he’s logical – he did things in a certain way. He created some things on day 1 and other things on day 2. We’re logical
He’s moral. In chapter 1 and 2 we see continually that he sees creation as good, but he sees it’s wrong for Adam to be alone and so he makes Eve to be with Adam. We’re moral as well.
He’s relational, God is a trinity, he is perfect love and so we are designed to need other people.
We’re emotional, just as he is emotional. Throughout the bible we see God getting angry, sad, happy, etc.
He works so we work. God is working when he creates the world, and so we work. This means we don’t sit around doing nothing. No, we have purpose and we live out that purpose.

Now all of these things we have to infer from the bible because God doesn’t necessarily say ‘you are created to be logical’, or ‘creative’, or ‘moral’ or ‘relational’ or emotional. But there is one part of our identity which he doesn’t require us to ‘infer’ or work out, because he tells us directly. In verse 27 in chapter 1, he tells us straight! We are made male and female.

We don’t have to guess if we are male or female, or non-binary. He tells us. We are male and female.

Now, that term ‘man’ in chapter one refers to all of humanity. In other words, in humanity you have males and females. It’s binary. In chapter 2, you have a fleshing out of the creation of man. Adam is first spoken about and God gives him masculine terms, calling him ‘he’. So, God is showing us who the male us. When God creates Eve, Adam tells us that not only is Eve a female, but she’s a woman. What happens is, Adam is put to sleep by God who takes a rib from Adam, to create Eve. When Adam wakes up and sees Eve, naked in front of him, he doesn’t say, ‘Eve shall be called female’ when he sees her genitals. He calls her woman. In other words, Adam does the Maths. He looks at her and says, ‘well if I’m the male’ and humanity is created male and female, then she must be the female. But he doesn’t call her female, he calls her women. Signifying that there is no separation between gender and biological sex. Women are females, and by implication, men are males.

This binary account of creation is also seen in other aspects of creation as well. God separates light from dark, sea from land, and sky from ground. Therefore, if he is binary in the rest of creation, why wouldn’t he be binary with humanity?

The evidence is saying the following:

God creates identities
He’s made us male and female
Gender and biological sex are not separate

Gender theory may lead to the good life, but not the best life.

Every story of a person who decides to change their identity starts because they are unsettled. They look at their body and in their mind, they don’t feel everything is right and so they begin a journey to fix that feeling of ‘not everything is ok’. Believe it or not, if you are feeling those feelings, the bible actually agrees with you. In other words, everybody should look at themselves and realise something is wrong. What the bible tells us is that in Genesis, God gave us the perfect identity, one that is guaranteed to bring us joy, because he made it that way. But what happened is Genesis 3 occurred. Humanity rebelled against him. Humanity chose to live a life without God’s leadership and when that happened, God said ok, ‘you want to live in a world without me’, fine. If that’s your choice, then so be it. So, God took a step back from the world. When a good God takes a step back, what fills the space? The absence of good is evil. Now thankfully God doesn’t take a full step back, because we still experience a lot of good in the world. I.e. love, joy, peace, happiness, etc. But we also experience evil in the world. We see tsunamis happen, droughts, storms that destroy crops and there is death in the world, people die, plants die, which means we have to work hard at looking after crops. If the rest of creation is messed up? Why would we not be messed up too? If mountains and rivers, animals… if everything has been affected by what happened in Genesis 3, why wouldn’t gender? If you are feeling uncomfortable with the body you are in or frustrated with the gender you thought you had when you were born… well you are experiencing the effects of the fall. If everyone was happy with their gender we’d be in Eden, in paradise, but we’re all broken, even in our minds.

The problem comes in when we try and fix the problem we see in ourselves. It’s a problem because we were never meant to fix it. As we saw earlier, we are not the God of our identities, God is. But what we do is we say, ‘Somethings wrong’ and instead of going to the creator to fix it, we fix it ourselves.

We decide, ‘Ok I’m clearly not the gender of this body’. We begin a journey of building a new identity to rectify the problem we see inside ourselves. The identity starts with a foundation. I.e. Ok, I’m clearly not a man, who am I? Let me use this helpful diagram. I have male genitalia so biologically I’m a male, And I do identify more with being a woman, so let me say, ‘I’m probably 60% woman’, but there’s still some man there so let me say about 50% man. On my expression, well, I actually don’t mind dressing up as a guy, but I also love a good night out dressed as a female, so I want to express myself as a female. On the attraction side, I like men through-and-through, so I’m going to say that I’m both romantically and sexually attracted to men.

So you define yourself, and what happens next. You build your life upon that. You start doing things that are typically woman like going to a women’s gym classes, getting your nails done and your hair and yet you still love kicking back at night with a cold beer (Which is considered manly). You hang out with your transgender friends heading to transgender night clubs, where you get to dress completely as a woman and you still dress more like a man for work, just because you don’t want people staring at you all the time, but you don’t mind because you still like dressing like a guy. But people must not call you a man at work, you are a woman, and you must be addressed as such. You soon fall in love, gain a husband and eventually you get married and adopt a kid who you want to raise gender neutral until they are old enough to decide their own gender.

What started with your gender choice, expanded into an entire life. Your gender choice is at the foundation of your life and the rest of your life is built upon that.

You’ve looked at yourself. Seen what’s wrong and you’ve taken to build a new identity to solve what you felt inside. The result of this is you may find that you feel better about yourself, or you’ll feel just as bad as before, or you’ll feel worse, but you’ll never experience the best life. The life you were created to live. Why? Because you were never created to be in charge of your identity. You are a fault filled human being who barely knows yourself, God is a good and perfect father, who loved you from the start, knit you together in your mother’s womb and knows every hair on your head… who’s going to create the better identity for you? You or him?

I’m going to play you a video from Becket Cook. Becket Cook is a man who lived a gay life and became a Christian. He wrote a book called ‘A Change of Affection’ and in it he shares his testimony of how his life changed. Although he doesn’t speak much on the topic of gender, he speaks on identity and so I want to play you a portion of his testimony. This video is an hour long. I obviously can’t show you an hour video, so I’ve edited just a part of it out, but you can go and watch it. I will share a link to it on the Lumi Phone

Select this link to play the video.

Something that he said there. When he was in the bar, just before he spoke to the Christians, he thought to himself, ‘What if God is real, what if homosexuality is wrong, is sinful and what if I’ve built my life on a false foundation and I don’t know it. That’s a possibility’

This is the key thing that led to his conversion. Earlier on in his testimony he said he looked at his life and he felt empty. There’s a helpful parable which Jesus tells in Mathew 7 and Luke chapter 6 of the man who builds his house on the sand and the man who builds his house on the rock. In the story Jesus says the one who builds his house upon the sand, has a problem, because the foundation seems firm, but when you look closely, you’ll see that there’s holes running all way down so when the storm comes, the house will just disintegrate. But the one who builds the house on the rock, a solid foundation with no holes, that house will stand no matter the storm is. In the story Jesus is asking, what’s the foundation of your life, and he says, if you listen to his words, you’ll find the right foundation which is the rock.

The reason this parable is applicable to Becket’s testimony, is that Becket was looking at his foundation and he realized there was holes in it. He was looking down at the sand saying it looks firm, but I can see the cracks. He was feeling empty and when he saw the Christians, he thought. Maybe, just maybe I’ve built my life on the wrong foundation.

When he then went to church and heard the Gospel, and he really listened to God’s word, he found the foundation he was looking for. Do you know what the Gospel is? It’s this.

Before Genesis 3, we were made in the image of God. In his identity, but humanity rebelled against God, they lost that identity, but Jesus being rich in mercy and abounding in grace. Came to those who rebelled against him, and he dies in our place. That death on the cross meant that God could forgive humanity… the result of this death is that God who has stepped back, can now step back in.

Becket saw that if he trusted in this Jesus, God could step back into his life and start making him into the identity God had given him before Genesis 3. He says in the testimony, take my life it’s yours and God takes it and starts the journey, that doesn’t end in this life, of returning becket to the glorious identity Adam had. An identity where Adam did not look at himself and say somethings wrong, because in Adam nothing was wrong!!

One final thing to say about that Testimony. When Becket became a Christian after that sermon on Romans 9 he said this, ‘I knew homosexuality wasn’t my identity any more, dating guys was no longer part of my future, but I didn’t care because I’d just met Jesus, and I was like ‘I’m going to go with that guy’ good riddance to that life!’

What would make him say that? After he realized his foundation was on the sand, he heard God’s word and he began to trust it. But when he stood on the rock (Which is God’s word), he saw at the center of God’s word is actually a person. It’s Jesus. When you meet Jesus you realize something so power. It’s something that Becket realized. Jesus is worth so much, that he is worth anything you’d give up.

Jesus is not a book. He’s a man, and before the world began he loved you. When he realized sin was the one thing that was separating him and you, he decided to come down and give his life, just so that he could have a relationship with you. Ever since you were born he’s watched you, and he’s seen the struggles you go through, and it may be the struggles with your view of yourself and he’s longed for the day where he can come into your life to start building your identity back into the one you had before the fall. Guess what he’s longed to walk with you, he’s longed to hear you cry out to him as you share your fears, he’s longed to love you as a father. Jesus says in Matthew 11, ‘Come to me all who are burdened and I will give you peace’… I know that’s what we are all after.

You might be here today, and you might be like Becket, looking at your life and you are not completely happy. Or you may actually be happy. But the one thing is you’ll never be the kind of happy that comes from knowing Jesus. Knowing Jesus means you are not smiles all the time, you will go through ups and downs, but when you look over the years that you’ve been a Christian, you will smile, because you will know joy like no other.

How do you respond to Gender Theory?

One final thing to say. I know I’ve been long. How do you respond to Gender theory? From the above you can see that God is the one the one that builds your identity. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have your hand in some of it. God stipulates whether you are a man or a woman, but there is nothing in the bible that says you can’t change how you express yourself.

A problem that I have with this Gender theory thing is that it seems to claim certain jobs or things or either feminine or masculine. I.e. it will say that if a boy is playing with dolls, he is more feminine and therefore should identify more as a girl. But why is playing with dolls feminine? And why have we given an object, like a doll, such power that simply by playing with it, it literally changes our gender.

Knowing who you are in God actually gives you freedom. You can be like, well I know I’m a boy, but so what, I can play with dolls. Because playing with dolls doesn’t define my gender, God does. So what if you are a woman and you like blue, or you want to play rugby, or you want to dress more like a boy. So what. That doesn’t matter.

What I would give you as wisdom, Paul says in Romans

15 We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

What Paul is saying here, is be mindful of the fact that there are weaker brothers and sisters around you. So if you are attending church and you are a woman and you dress like a man, it may not be helpful to them. It can cause anger and frustration and may cause them to leave the church, because the church ‘accepts those people’. Clearly they are weaker, because simply how you dress can cause them to leave church, so rather be the bigger person and dress differently. But equally, if you dress like your biological gender and you come here and you want to hate on those who dress differently, you are also going against this passage. Because you are not obliging someone who could be the weaker person.

What we need to do with people who different to us is love them. We need to serve them, we need to be there for them and then, when they see our love, they will be more likely able to hear the truth form us.

Let’s pray.