I was disturbed by the implicit agreement with the hard-left dogma that gender is a social construct that can be dismantled given for the proper conditions.

I have just a few quick points to make:

1. You take a scriptural principle of ancient women not going to war to mean something hard and fast about traits that males and females should have and if they don’t they are denying some kind of Biblical/creational mandate. I’m wondering what you do with the explicit mandate of greeting fellow believers with an holy kiss. Do you obey this command? Does it rub your cultural manliness the wrong way? It can’t grate on your Biblical manliness because God wouldn’t command you to do something against that, would He?

It is my experience that people tend to pick and choose what they consider mandates versus cultural expressions not intended for every era based on their own comfort zone.

2. I was referring to neither homosexual nor transgendered people when I said that God has created people that don’t fit into your neat definitions. These people are inter-sexed. They have extra chromosomes. They are physically neither only male nor only female. How do these people fit into “male and female created He them?” I’m not necessarily referring to physical interactions, but more the gender traits you say a person should have based on their sex. Should they strive to be a Proverbs 31 woman, or a stalwart leading man? What kind of clothes should they wear? Should they grow their hair long for their glory, or cut it because it’s shameful to have long hair?

3. You referred to essential physical differences between men and women. I agree that most people of a certain sex will have a certain characteristic that most of the people of the other sex do not. But there is overlap. Some men do not display, because they were NOT GIVEN, the manly traits that you say men should have. There are femmy guys out there who are femmy because that’s the way God made them. You’re not going to be able to butch them up. Their hormone exposure is different than yours and you should just deal with it. (And yes, hormone levels do affect how one presents oneself and interacts with the world — just look at people who take hormones.) I am not saying that these differences allow for homosex because God has explicitly forbidden that…

Sorry, but I don’t have time to read the book you suggested although it would be neat to read and discuss it with you…

Just to clarify, I don’t say that women are fragile, but rather that femininity is. The two are quite different, and if not reading closely, could be conflated. I would say that manhood is also fragile. By this I mean that gender roles are easily confused, quickly lost, hard to embody. It is easy to stray from the Scripture’s portrait of either manhood or womanhood.

I also don’t think that men should be vicious. I said, as you can see above, that women should not be “vicious and manly”. This could mean that I’m linking the two; it also could mean that they are separate attributes. This is what I meant; it’s a reasonable construction.

In addition, I take pains to point out that I’m not talking about all sports, but high-contact sports. Read the article over again, and see if that’s so.

E. G., women being the “weaker vessel” would seem to suggest a difference between the genders, though I did not say that women are fragile, but “femininity”. It’s really important to pick up these distinctions, however subtle they may be.

Nathan, you raise an interesting subject. Let me push you a bit, however. Do we only speak about gender on matters that the Scripture explicitly covers? I would say no (perhaps you would say yes). We are required to take scriptural principles and apply them wisely to life. To not do so would be folly. It would mean that we would give, and give, and give some more to the culture, only speaking up on this or any other matter where we had explicit textual warrant. We avoid this major error in all kinds of ways by seeking to apply the Scripture to our eras, whether on questions of technology, sexuality, the modern academy, sports, or countless other subjects.

On this same point, it is without doubt that women and children in ancient Israel did not normally go to war. We must ask, then, whether this reality teaches us something deeper, something permanent, about gender. I would say that it does. In that case, then the Scripture does speak to this matter, if it requires us to think hard and well in our efforts to apply it.

On another note, the presence of trans-gendered people in our world does not legitimize trans-gender as a status. There are homosexuals in our world, but this does not legitimize homosexuality, to give just one example.

In closing, women can play sports and maintain their femininity. Women can play high-contact sports and maintain their femininity. But it is my assertion that doing the latter can often make it very difficult for this to happen. I would challenge all folks who read this post (and others like it) and initially dislike it to read Sokolove’s book (cited above with a link). Even those most indoctrinated by so-called gender neutrality will find it hard to resist the conclusion that there are essential physical differences between the sexes that cannot be ignored, not least because of the glory of God at stake and the physical wellbeing of women. The silent reality here is that many folks who argue strongly against my position do not often know that women suffer frightening levels of serious injury in high-contact sports, data that must not go unstudied.

So even if you disagree ardently with me, even if you hate this post, read that book. Be a free-thinker.

Thanks to all who responded thoughtfully and with argumentation, whether you and I agree or disagree.

Men and women have and express both male and female traits because male and female created He them. To you, I am somehow wrong because I am not a man like you are a man -or- someone isn’t a proper woman because she isn’t the way that you think women should be. God had every chance to outline gender traits the way that is enforced in churches today, but He has left your rules unsaid. It seems to me that the rules for manhood and womanhood are your own extension of the Bible references you use.

You say that God created two separate and distinct genders, each with their own set of character traits. But what we see in life sometimes, are people that are neither of these two distinct genders. For some reason, as God fearfully and wonderfully knit these people together, He saw fit to do something different than the way that you structure the world. Why?

In the former case (fragility) there is no Biblical backing for that, nor is there backing in life.

In the latter, I am hoping that it is just a poor choice of wording by the author.