Gender isn't Arbitrary

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Genesis 1:27

So much is happening in our world now. Just a few days ago, a news segment aired on a major TV network, attempting to define something that doctors, now, are calling "gender dysphoria."

This news piece featured an ordinary young woman but suggested that she is among those who have gender dysphoria, maybe because she was born with a chimera trait that gave her a little male tissue where there should be only female tissues. Because of that chimera error, as science used to call it, someone labeled her "male" at her birth, leaving her to feel, as an adult, that gender is just arbitrary.

But gender is not arbitrary. Heaven was so very intentional about creating two distinct genders that make up mankind. Somewhere along the way, mankind, through experimentation, did introduce various biological "errors," including problems that cause abnormalities like cleft lips. But children born with cleft lips are not rabbits! They're children like any other child.

Similarly, girls born with abnormal tissues and/or missing organs aren't boys! They're girls who are genetically a little different. And boys who are missing things at birth are likewise: In fact, the Bible suggests that, when God chose to walk the earth in the person of Jesus, He had the physical trait of what was known then as a "eunuch," an underdeveloped man — which, in biblical times, usually was a man whose family would dedicate to serve in the temple, being unable to bear children. Some devout men even chose to become eunuchs, so as not to be tempted or distracted from religious service.

King Solomon once wrote, "There's nothing new under the sun." And, indeed, while science has advanced, many of the problems science has introduced aren't altogether new. What is kind of new is the way our world views biological differences.

Some view such differences as evidence that God has some less-than-obvious purpose in mind for those who are different. Others view our differences as "diseases" that need eradicating. While others believe our differences only challenge us to be accepting of one another, apart from any sin.

I think I lean toward the latter, feeling that Heaven carefully, creatively, and purposefully set our world in motion, patiently planning how everything could be but knowing what errors and challenges mankind would introduce. I think that, because of inevitable errors or imperfections that are not sin, we're challenged to be kind-hearted or understanding toward one another, and that we're wise to see women who are helped by men as women who are helped by men. Period. And I think we would be wise to recognize at least one popular thought from the 1970s and 1980s: that women who have been surgically changed to seem more mannish, have been, in a way, "butchered." While some women were once known as "Butch," it's a blessing that we've overcome that verbiage and can just recognize one another sympathetically as women.

That being, to an extent, how I feel, I'm reminded of an old song that adults taught me to dislike when I was a child. Adults, back then, said this song is sacrilegious, because it repeatedly says "if God is dead." But, as an older adult now, I realize the song is only rhetorical, and that it's actually an affirmation of faith, written for times like now.

God set everything in motion. So why should any error or imperfection cause dysphoria or conflicted feelings of any kind?