Tuesday, May 03, 2016

Gender issues

This morning I read an article from the BBC about transgender children.  This is a very rare phenomenon, but apparently instances are growing very rapidly, which the article attributes to growing social acceptance.  There is a lot that could be said about the article - I'd like to deconstruct the idea that people have an internal identity which they need to be allowed to discover, for example - but the bigger question on how my mind is this: how do we, those of us who believe that gender is a good gift, respond to a society that increasingly sees things otherwise?  Here are a few of my thoughts this morning, but I can't pretend to have done nearly enough work on the topic.  Perhaps you have better thoughts you could share?

Firstly, in terms of our fundamental teaching in churches, we need to present a robust doctrine of creation in the context of the gospel.  That gospel context is all important.  If we teach creation without the gospel, all we do is hold up an ideal picture of reality which clearly doesn't match our experience of the world or ourselves.  In the area of gender specifically, we need to teach that God made gender, and gives it to us as a gift, but also that we, fallen people in a fallen world, do not experience that gift as he intended - and finally, we need to teach that we can look forward to the redemption of gender and our experience of it in the new creation!

Secondly, we need to make sure we teach and model the range of legitimate expressions of gender.  We need to avoid taking a particular cultural expression of masculinity (for example) and absolutising it, as if this and only this is the way to be a man.  I think a lot of complementarian literature, particularly coming out of the States, falls into this trap.

Thirdly, we need to recognise that gender is a calling as well as a gift and we need to acknowledge that (as with every calling from God) it is not something the individual is meant to work out by themselves.  Church communities need to be places where people are able to admit to finding gender a difficult calling, and places where people can ask for, and receive, help.  My guess is that quite a lot of us - maybe most of us - find gender difficult in different ways and to a greater or lesser extent, and honesty about this would surely help.

Fourthly, we need to ensure that in our teaching there is no implicit contradiction between a good gift and a cross.  The prevailing culture insists that if something feels like death, it must be death - if it feels hard to bear, we shouldn't bear it.  The gospel insists that cross-bearing - which is hard, and which feels like death - is part and parcel of the path to real life.

Fifthly, all of this needs to happen in a fellowship of people who believe that Jesus, and Jesus alone, defines who we are.  Gender, although important, is not the absolute foundation of our identity, which is found in Christ.

10 comments:

  1. i was reminded this week that the best thing people can and must do is listen.
    These stories are tragic. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n09/jacqueline-rose/who-do-you-think-you-are

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    1. Wow, yes. I'm going to have to read that in detail later. Listening is clearly crucial, and an unflinching listening at that - need to overcome what is probably a self-preservation instinct that wants to block out the challenging or marginal.

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  2. Anonymous4:38 pm

    You might enjoy this http://www.jubilee-centre.org/10178-2/

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    1. Yes, I did enjoy it. Particularly helpful to reflect on this as an opportunity to proclaim the gospel, and not only a challenge.

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  3. Sarah Bhogal6:19 pm

    Daniel, at this stage in your thinking, to what extent can/should we as Christians agree with society that gender is socially constructed? It seems like the Bible is very clear that we're created as male and female (sex) and that we should live within those categories (gender), so sex = gender, but what, biblically, do those categories mean? I suspect there is massive cultural variation in the understanding of what it means to be particularly male and particularly female.

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    1. Hi Sarah. Excellent question. I wrote something a while back (http://danielblanche.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/gender-and-stereotypes.html) which I'd broadly stand by. I think to develop it a bit more, I'd want to deny the sex/gender split, because I think that is based on a body/spirit dualism which in the end devalues what the body brings to the party. I prefer language of gift and calling, to capture the 'given-ness' of gender (and the body really stands for this given-ness, although it isn't exclusively here) and the 'working-out' of gender. At the stage of working out, there definitely is a social aspect to it - but then, why not? I think we need to be careful not to make those cultural expressions biblical, but I think we should also acknowledge that we're not complete individualists - society can and does have a say in what gender roles and expression will look like.

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    2. I also suspect we go wrong when we try to boil gender down to a list of essential characteristics - I'm not sure we see that in Scripture. Actually I'd suggest that Biblically gender is about relationship - so you can't define masculinity in the absence of femininity or vice versa. But again, more thought needed.

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  4. It seems to me that the main problem is the loss of an understanding of gender as being *potential* (even if unrealised to singleness or infertility) fatherhood or motherhood. This would tie in well with God's creation commission to men and women after making them in two genders.

    In a society where sex and procreation are seen as inseparably linked, abnormal sexuality is easily identified and gender roles emerge fairly naturally from the fact that most women would have to put the majority of their time and energy into nurturing their children, requiring men to be more involved in the public sphere (while not neglecting the domestic).

    Separate procreation from sexuality, and the question of what gender is, and what masculinity and femininity is, becomes much more difficult to answer.

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    1. Hi Ben. I think that's helpful, although I'd want to think a bit about the language of 'potential' (especially, perhaps when it is joined with 'unrealised') - that might be more of a pastoral than a conceptual concern, to be honest.

      Definitely separating things out - procreation from sexuality, sexuality from gender, gender from 'embodiedness' - adds to the general confusion.

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  5. Yes, it's a sensitive area. Perhaps it's better to say that a men and women always 'signify' motherhood or fatherhood, even if unrealised due to celibacy or infertility.

    I suspect this is why Paul makes that unusual leap in 1 Timothy from women not having authority over or teaching a man to them being saved in some sense through childbearing. That would suggest gender roles and fertility are so closely intertwined that to alter one is to damage the other. I'm thinking of the feminist drive to get more women into the workplace through social pressure and increased childcare provision, helping lead to below-replacement birth rates for indigenous Europeans - a slow suicide. The consequence of death is of course part of Paul's argument too.

    If you haven't seen it before, you may find this article helpful, as it ties the threads together extremely well:

    https://theopolisinstitute.com/before-obergefell-some-thoughts-on-how-we-got-here/

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