I would just like to point out,” said Sara Jacobs, a California Democrat speaking from the House floor, “that I think it’s very interesting that my colleague from South Carolina [Rep. Nancy Mace] is so obsessed with the issue of trans people—using horrible slurs to talk about them—when many people in this body have received gender-affirming care.”
Jacobs wasn’t referring to lawmakers who have undergone medical transition, of whom there is exactly one. Her argument was rather the increasingly common notion among trans advocates that cosmetic and reparative plastic surgery, treatment for hormonal disorders, less permanent cosmetic alterations, and even cancer prevention may be swept into the same category as a vaginoplasty performed on a male. Jacobs continued:
Filler is gender-affirming care. Boob jobs [are] gender-affirming care. Botox is gender-affirming care. Lots of my colleagues have received gender-affirming care. And let me be clear: I think everyone should have access to the gender-affirming care that they need.
This is nonsense, not least because no one needs cosmetic filler. But it is perhaps a predictable nonsense in a culture as fixated on gender as ours.
America has long been consumed by sex: having it, wanting it, denying it, describing it, commodifying and coercing and containing it. But this conscious fixation on gender is comparatively novel.
We think about gender too much. We talk about gender too much. We are ruminative—mulling, mulling, mulling what it means to be a woman; to feel like a “real man”; to be masculine but not toxic or feminine but not retrograde; to flout stereotypes and profit from them; to willingly choose the only option our grandmothers ever had; to cut into our bodies to make them meet the very social standards and vanities we denounce.
Our obsession, if I may borrow the single word Jacobs got correct, is not limited to one side of the culture war. To be sure, the left-wing version is the more obvious and disquieting—gender theory and the elective, sometimes gruesome and unsuccessful surgeries it is deployed to justify. This is a milieu that at once makes too much of our body parts (“bodies with vaginas”) and too little of our embodied sex as part of an integrated whole (“trans woman are women”).
First Comes Sex, Then Comes Gender
The right-wing version is more familiar, though lately expressed in technologically novel forms. Tradwife influencing is big business. Burly men who drink whiskey, grow big beards, wear flannel, and record Reformed theology podcasts are a trope for good reason. President Donald Trump’s supporters work up AI images that plop his head onto cartoonishly masculine bodies.
Or consider Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who apparently prepared for her move from congressional and state politics to the White House with an Instagram-inspired makeover: tight clothes, long and flowing hair, new teeth, and what looks to my eye to be considerable use of injectables. Noem made news early in her tenure for a series of photos and videos that seemed designed to remind their beholders that, though filling a stereotypically masculine role in a historically male sphere of life, she is not only a woman but also an attractive and uncannily youthful one.
The American church has not escaped this obsession. We too talk endlessly about manhood and womanhood (biblical or otherwise), masculinity and femininity, gender roles and whether our conception and execution of them is Christlike or worldly. Sometimes it seems we attend more to the conversations and cultural trappings around the male and female experiences than to males and females themselves.
When I was a child, gender was a polite euphemism for sex, deployed when you wished to distinguish between male and female but could not bring yourself to enunciate the word that also signified the act of copulation. That usage lingers, but it is not what I mean when I say we are fixated on gender.
Exactly what I do mean is difficult to pin down—not because it’s uncertain in my mind but because it’s uncertain in our culture. The way we now speak about gender in popular conversation is downstream of the convoluted work of academic gender theorists, the most recognizable of whom is Judith Butler, known for her conception of gender as a sort of performance. (If you’re unfamiliar here’s a taste from a 2021 interview: It is “anti-feminist, homophobic, and transphobic,” Butler alleged, to insist “that sex is biological and real.”)
The exact schema of gender theory depends on the thinker. For some, gender is an expression of sex; for others, it is wholly independent of sex; for yet others, the relationship is different still. But as most of us have adopted the newer uses of gender without any knowledge of that theoretical history, two colloquial definitions will here suffice.
Sometimes we distinguish between gender and sex as I have implicitly done in the first section of this article: Sex is the biological fact, while gender is about the cultural expectations, norms, and habits related to each sex. Gender as “a social construct” is the common phrase.
In my marriage, I am the spouse who gave birth because I am female (that’s sex). I’m also the spouse who wears a dress to our cocktail parties because that’s the conventional attire for such an occasion in the modern West (that’s gender). In this usage, sex and gender are related. Sex is the primary or foundational element, while the expectations, norms, and habits of gender may be questioned or changed, whether deliberately or organically. My husband could not choose to give birth, but I could choose pants for our next party.
At its best, gender in this sense is a useful word for talking about what we expect of and assume about one another in connection to the realities of sex. It can be a tool of prudence and grace. At its worst, however, this understanding of gender devolves into rank stereotyping and sets the stage for the second colloquial usage.
Sometimes we speak about gender as Catholic scholar Abigail Favale critically described in The Genesis of Gender: “the sex of the soul, the innate manhood or womanhood that may or may not ‘align’ with the sex of the body. In this understanding, gender is decidedly not a mere construct, but is rather a pre-social reality, the inner truth against which the body must be measured.” Here, an internal conception of gender is the primary or foundational element, while the sexed body may be questioned or changed through hormonal and surgical intervention.
When Identity Becomes Idolatry
It is incoherent to hold to these two colloquial ideas of gender simultaneously. Gender cannot be both an external social construct and an internal, indisputable sex of the soul. It cannot be both secondary to biological sex and its unquestionable override. Yet in practice, particularly in conversations around gender dysphoria, that incoherence is blithely ignored.
It works like this: Drawing on the second usage, trans advocates announce the existence and primacy of gender identity. Some people may imagine that being trans is a choice, the sole trans member of Congress, Sarah McBride, told The New York Times. “That’s not what gender identity is,” McBride said. “It is much more innate. It is a visceral feeling.”
But what exactly does that feeling entail? What does it mean to feel like a man or a woman? How would a member of one sex—who has only ever experienced life as that sex—have any true knowledge of the internal experience of the other? We can imagine, sure. But how would we know?
This is when the worst version of the first usage is pulled into play: You feel like a woman if you like stereotypically female things. You feel like a man if you enjoy stereotypically male things. A little boy who plays with a princess dress-up set is conforming to norms for girls (gender in the social usage); therefore he may be said to be a girl (gender in the soul usage).
McBride and allies might cry foul here, contending that it’s not so simple as this, that a playtime predilection would not set anyone on the path to medical transition. Maybe not, but in many cases I think my simplification is slight.
“If girlness and boyness no longer reside in the body, there is no other ground for these concepts except stereotypes,” Favale observed. And so, “when a girl recognizes that she does not fit the stereotypes of girlhood, she is now invited to question her sex rather than the stereotype.”
It is unsurprising, then, in transition stories, to hear a ruminative concern for what social-gender is supposed to say about soul-gender. In 18 Months, Shannon Thrace’s memoir of her husband’s transition and the resulting dissolution of their marriage, she repeatedly describes “endless ruminating.”
“Since you came out, we haven’t had a single pleasant evening,” she writes, addressing her ex-husband. “You’re obsessed with your appearance. You’re fragile and quick to fight. You cry yourself to sleep.” She mourns “the days when we snapped green beans on the porch. Concerns about your gender consume our days and keep us up at night.”
Or consider the account of a detransitioner named Céline Calame, who wrote on her Substack last summer about life after a regretted mastectomy:
It is odd for me to look at myself in the mirror. … My chest feels simultaneously flat and full. When I focus on it, this between-feeling makes my head hurt and stomach twist. I grasp myself—where am I? How long have I been gone? What could my body have been if I had never thought of ‘woman’ as an identity I had to feel in order to be, and had never pursued these medical interventions?
Calame’s final what if points toward the way out of this ruminative cycle. Being a man or a woman, as Christian author Leah Libresco Sargeant told me in an interview, is not dependent on our feelings or actions. It is a fact, a biological reality, a relational necessity, a given, and a gift of God, though a gift we may sometimes struggle to understand.
Rejection of that givenness is unmistakable in trans medicalization. But our culture’s far broader tendency to ruminate on gender, Sargeant said, likewise “implies that being a man or a woman is something you can fail at”—and therefore a project in which you must pursue some measure of success.
The better understanding, Sargeant said, is that “there are men and there are women, and both men and women are called to virtue.” Sex is a given, but virtue is not, and our individual pursuits of virtue may well be shaped by our sex and gender (in the social sense). “Virtue is what you can fail at,” Sargeant continued, drawing on the work of Sister Prudence Allen:
You can be more or less virtuous—more or less anything—but sex is a bedrock thing about you. It can’t be threatened by, say, the fact that you wear jeans or don’t. You can grow further into virtue, and when you’re brave as a woman, you’re always brave in a womanly way. That’s not because the act of bravery is different. You’re brave in a womanly way because you are a woman. Your gender is never imperiled.
Now, your soul can be imperiled. You can be more or less virtuous. You can be more or less of what God has asked you to be—which is not necessarily the same as what he’s asked the man or woman next to you to be. But whatever you do, you are always doing it in a womanly way.
The claim here is not about different standards of morality for the sexes. In her newest book, The Dignity of Dependence, Sargeant approvingly quotes Teddy Roosevelt remembering his father’s instruction that “what was wrong in a woman could not be right in a man.” Yet a man’s cowardice might well be distinguishable from a woman’s, and a woman’s courage may take a different shape than a man’s.
What would it mean to understand that we can’t fail in being a man or a woman? That it’s a given that “male and female he created” us (Gen. 1:27)? How could it break our culture’s gender fixation?
To begin, we can be free of the taxing and ridiculous idea of gender affirmation. If a woman is something I am, not something I must somehow feel or do, then there is no way to make me more or less a woman. There is no way to diminish my sex—and no way to affirm it. There is nothing to achieve, no performance to perfect, no lack to which I can add. I can decide to play by the current rules of social-gender or not, but even in that case affirmation is the wrong word.
So down with contorting ourselves to fit silly stereotypes, with self-justifying performances, with cutting off healthy body parts and putting acids inside our faces to fashion ourselves into visions of man and woman that are all surface, no substance—all rumination, no relational responsibility.
“When gender remains rooted in sex—when womanhood refers to femaleness rather than the embodiment of a feminine stereotype—this allows ‘woman’ to be a much roomier box,” Favale wrote. To me, that sounds like freedom, a reprieve to focus on better and more needful things in service of God and neighbor (Gal. 5:6, 13). It’s not like Jesus gave sex-segregated versions of the Sermon on the Mount.
I don’t think about my own sex or gender much anyway. But in this I suspect I’m the oddity. Not everyone wants a roomier box. “Most people have strong sense of being men or women,” noted theologian Alastair Roberts for the Theopolis Institute.
At Wisdom of Crowds, journalist Christine Emba extends that point, arguing that a generic aim toward virtue is not enough for many people, especially many men. “Young men and boys are telling us, often literally, that they desperately need and desire direction, norms, and a concrete rubric for how to be a man—not just a ‘good person’—and that in fact the lack of said norms is causing considerable distress,” Emba writes.
In practice, she believes, a set of ideals “capacious” enough for the experiences of male and female alike is unlikely to be “thick enough to live on.” Virtue is virtue, yes, yet because “difference demands specificity,” an injunction to “‘Just be good’ isn’t enough.”
Many, perhaps most, people would agree. They want some assurance that they’re being a man or a woman as they ought to be. The perpetual uncertainty of rumination has proved to be of no help, but a universal call to virtue may seem insubstantial. We need virtue not in the abstract but, suitably to the subject at hand, embodied in relationship.
The internet untethered us from the body, from the concrete relationships that really elicit our sense of ourselves as male and female,” Roberts told me in an interview. “Things like being a husband, father, son, or brother—this sort of thing is very grounded.” Our increasingly isolated, disembodied way of life will tend to “elicit rumination,” he argued, because it requires us to craft a sense of self and purpose as male or female for and by ourselves.
“In the past, that would largely be given to you, and it would be something that was evoked in you by the grounding realities of your existence”—chiefly your relationships, Roberts said. “My body says that I’m male, and ideally, my embodied relationships ground that sense for me. Like walking on the floor, I don’t have to think about it.” With too few of those relationships, we think and overthink, perform and consume in search of some substitute source of grounding.
These alternatives won’t satisfy. Sargeant recounts in The Dignity of Dependence that a reader once wrote to her describing exactly this problem. Single and nearing 30, he had an instinct that being a virtuous Christian man would entail sacrificial care for others. But, he told Sargeant, “I feel like I can’t really know if I’m ‘doing life right’ or being as charitable toward my fellow humans as I could because there are no particular, instantiated person[s] for me to love.”
Most Christians would not talk about our culture’s sex and gender woes in terms of “grounding” or “rumination.” But I suspect, with Roberts, that our “concern to get a sort of ‘biblical masculinity’ or ‘biblical femininity’ is often responding to these same anxieties.” There may well be a place for that work, but I’m increasingly convinced a less direct approach is better. Rather than meet overthinking with even more thinking, or answering anxiety about measuring up with another standard to reach, we should focus on growing in grace and love in the relationships God gives us. Focus on life in community—especially family, but also in friendship, neighborhood, school, work, and church.
Community “gives context within which virtues can be shown and reputations can be built or destroyed,” Roberts said. Seek out enduring community, he advised. Learn from elderly couples with long marriages. Invest in institutions and help young people get their start. Aspire to imitate the good men and good women you know, to emulate their model of maleness or femaleness conformed not to stereotypes but to Christ.
Bonnie Kristian is deputy editor at Christianity Today.
