The sad paradox of non-binarity

Many years ago, in very different times, I went through a phase. During this phase, I was fascinated by "girly" things. I played prince and princess with the girl next door and insisted on being the princess (I wore a blanket as a dress). I also have a distinct memory of wearing a pair of boots that felt girly to me, and instead of feeling revulsion, I was curious enough to wear them around the block, imagining myself as female. This all happened when I was about 7 years old.

Flashback to the 1970s

If my politically progressive parents were alarmed by any of this, they never let on. My mother was hardly a stock character of femininity, but she certainly wasn't masculine. She wore Adidas sneakers over nylons, but she never wore trousers. She was her own person; as a woman, she marched to the beat of her own drum. My father was more traditional, but as a scientist he subscribed to a "live and let live" doctrine long before it was fashionable.

In less than a year, my curiosity about femaleness and the performance of things feminine wore off. And it has never returned—not even a glimmer of it. Even though a few years later I became aware of experiencing same-sex attraction, at no time since then have I felt the slightest twinge of anything that might be called "gender dysphoria." While some evangelicals might point fingers and say that my parents helped create a space in which my SSA later flourished, I would argue back that they set the stage for me to be gender-secure, despite any number of physical, emotional, or mental characteristics that might have made me question my maleness.

I'm grateful for this. I doubt it would have played out the same today.

The politically progressive parent of today is unlike the politically progressive parent of the 1970s. When I was 7 years old, the ink on Title IX (1972) was still drying; this legislation banned sex-based discrimination in federally funded education. The Women's Educational Equity Act (WEEA) of 1974 was still fresh in people's minds. I remember learning the word "stereotype" that same year (in first grade), and finding it funny but fascinating—and a little threatening. I remember the teacher telling us "boys can do girl things and girls can do boy things." When I started learning to read that year, we used a recently-published curriculum that dismantled the sex stereotyping of the Dick and Jane era. I learned to read with Bill and Jill, who were presented free of sex stereotypes, and also with Nan and Ted, who were African American. I didn't realize it at the time, but I went through my "questioning" phase (if it can even be called that) at a time of great social progressivism in U.S. history. It was a progressivism I feel was fundamentally good.

Have we made progress?

Today, political progressivism means something different—especially when it comes to sexual identity. The politically progressive parent of today does not look upon a "questioning" child with quite the same sense of laissez-faire as the parent of the 1970s. This is because the sense that "boys can do girl things and girls can do boy things" has morphed into a gargoyle. Today, a boy who "does girl things" is likely soon to be told that he is, in fact, a girl inside, and a girl who does "boy things" is likely soon to be told that she is a boy inside.

Keep in mind that the feeling of being "something else inside" necessarily follows from outward expression or performance, not the other way around. A boy is told he is a girl inside because of what he does, how he talks, the way he dresses, the way he walks, and so on. Folks can say that gender dysphoria is a war with what is inside, but the fact remains that all the symptoms of gender dysphoria come from outside, not from within, and these symptoms are then internalized as conflictive, inward feelings.

This shift in thinking is a step backward, not forward. It is tremendously harmful.

Before the rise of "sexual authenticity," boys and girls could cross into each other's territory—innocently—without being diagnosed by adults as somehow incongruent with themselves. A boy who liked cooking was just a boy who liked cooking, and a girl who liked sports was just a girl who liked sports. Neither one was incongruent with themselves, and more importantly, neither one was sinning. Even forays into cross-dressing (such as mine) did not scream for some kind of corrective or "affirming" intervention. Like most kids who experiment with cross-dressing, I outgrew it.

The result of this shift? Society is more sexually binary today than it was in 1974.

This is a sad paradox. The world congratulates itself on having dismantled the burdensome sex stereotypes of the past, yet at the same time grooms young people for a vision of themselves encumbered by those same stereotypes. On the one hand, they hear: "Male and female are social constructs—be yourself!" And on the other: "If you feel like a boy/girl, you had best transition into one!" The messages are contradictory. But worse, they are lies.

What does it "mean" to be male or female?

What it means to be male and what it means to be female are enduring controversies in the Church. It is indisputable that humans are born either male or female (medically verified exceptions account for just 0.01% of the population). That being so, what is the right response to being "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139: 14) when it comes to maleness and femaleness?

Specific scriptural instructions to men and women as such are few and far between. Jesus never addressed gender-segregated crowds. That should tell us something. When he called upon followers to acknowledge him before others, he was reminding men of the importance of truthful confession and giving women a public voice they did not have (Matthew 10: 32–33). When he called upon crowds to think of the Kingdom of Heaven like "yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour" (Matthew 13: 33), he was speaking to women's direct experience and challenging men to think beyond their day-to-day "male" experience.

And yet Jesus was not calling for a sexual revolution. He was merely challenging us to think more broadly about our gifted maleness and femaleness, and to be less legalistic in our standards. Jesus himself was a man in every way, yet he did not marry, did not have children, and did not have a home—by 1st century Judean standards he was a failed man. Yet he was, objectively, still a man, fully male. When Jesus washed the apostles' feet (John 13), he alarmingly assumed the subservient posture of a woman (recall Mary in Luke 10: 38–42), yet he was foreshadowing how he would become the greatest man of all.

What lessons can we learn from all of this? In a recent article in Christianity Today (May/June 2026), Bonnie Kristian suggests we build on the notion that our sex is something we have been given, not something we can relinquish or have taken away:

If a woman is something that 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.

These are words from another time—yet they ring more true today than ever. The essential truth is that since sex is given and cannot be taken away, there is freedom in being male and female, far more than we tend to see. There are boundaries for how men and women are to act and interact, of course. But within these boundaries there is a vast open field on which we can live our lives in holiness and good standing.

For discussion

1. Think about ways you are not "typically male" or "typically female" in the way you talk, walk, dress, pursue hobbies, arrange your life, decorate your home, etc. Be honest. Do you feel fully free in these? Do you ever wish you were "more male" or "more female"? What peace do you find in God's statement that you are "fearfully and wonderfully made"?

2. Same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria both lay "traps" for those who experience them, in that they can lead to sexual sin. How are the traps different? How are they the same?

3. Chart your own "progress" in how you think about maleness and femaleness (your own and other people's) as a Christian. Has it been easy or hard? What has made it that way?