“Gender is a social construct,” the transgender apologists tell us, thinking with that single stroke they’ve negated gender roles; that they’ve relegated them to the optional, like what kind of cuisine you prefer. Sure, you may be born Italian but that doesn’t mean you’re now bound, by the expectations of your native culture, to be confined to Italian food. Spaghetti is a social construct. So, you can choose sushi if you want. If it’s something society made up – like a preference for pasta or chop sticks or kilts – then, we’re told, it’s entirely optional for we sovereign individuals. No figment of a culture can possibly over-ride our inviolable free choice.
As I admitted in my earlier The Transgender Bait and Switch, gender is indeed a social construct – something made by society, not by biology or the will of the individual. That’s confusing to those who have used “gender” and “sex” synonymously. The transsexual apologists take advantage of that confusion, like a SWAT team takes advantage of the bewilderment caused by “flash bang” grenades. They throw in the fact that “gender is a social construct” to take unsuspecting gnostics captive. Their new knowledge – that gender does not equal sex and that it is a “social construct” – bewilders them, renders them incapable of processing anything else. They imagine themselves to have been armed with a new insight into reality when actually they’ve been disarmed against the onslaught of absurdities.
Our American political division manifests in the transgender debate by the left generally believing that there is only gender and the right generally believing there is only sex – the biological reality of chromosomes, hormones, and genitalia – not a squishy sociological category called “gender.” But that’s not necessary. There is the cultural expectation that men wear ties, short hair, and pants; women wear dresses, lip-stick. That is gender. But transgender apologists are insinuating that since culture makes up gender, the individual can set it aside. They’re wrong.
Society has rights. In America, society has a right to tell us to drive on the right side of the road. In Britain, it’s chosen to exercise its right to make people drive on the left. Which side of the road we drive on is a social construct. But we can’t conclude, then, that I – the autonomous individual – have a right, here in America, to drive on the left if I feel like. If I claim that I’m a left-side driver born in a right-side driving society, I can throw off the chains of society and drive on the left. So the reasoning goes. If I did, a collision would soon be the result. Society has a right to make conventions that individuals must submit to.
Ah, but the transsexual propagandist will reply, ‘The analogy doesn’t work because being trans doesn’t harm anyone.’ We’re about to see – if they’re not censored into silence – hordes of “detransitioners,” who were affirmed into getting “top surgery” – double mastectomies for women, or breast-like augmentations for men – and “bottom surgery” – genital mutilation – or whose bodies were irrecoverably damaged by hormones intended for the opposite sex. (Notice, by the way, the bizarrely ambiguous, obfuscating terminology for a field that otherwise demands precision.) We’ve already seen the first ripples of the waves of such regretful people who will be deprived of having children or even, in many cases, healthy sexual relationships, and thus full marriages. Just like society demands we drive on the side of the road they choose, we find that there are reasons it trains boys to act like men and girls to act like women. That training prevents people from colliding into reality. Nurture, at its best, cultivates nature. It’s not an arbitrary tyranny of traditionalism. It’s to keep you from crashing headlong into the on-coming traffic of your transient, idiosyncratic whims, driven recklessly by amoral doctors.
In first-century Corinth, they had a problem with some women disregarding the social construct of a head-covering (1 Cor. 11:2-16). They would come to church, celebrating their freedom in Christ, remove their veil from their hair and pray or prophesy. The sociology majors among them lectured anyone who dared challenge them, “Head coverings are a social construct.” They’d be right too. Head coverings were made up by their society. But they were wrong in assuming that they then had the right to lay them aside.
In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia I came upon a woman sitting on the ground, by a busy street, begging. She had a head a covering. It’s a sign of modesty in their culture, just as it was in first century Corinth. She was begging because she had severe burns on her right breast. As usual with wounded beggars there, she displayed her wounds. Her breasts were fully exposed. The question: is she modest? Yes, of course. She has a head covering. She was submitting to the expectations of her culture, which don’t include covering breasts.
Angels understand that society has rights. Back in first century Corinth, the visiting, invisible angels were offended by women flouting the social construct of a head covering (1 Cor. 11:10.) They likely were not offended by the wounded woman in Addis Ababa with exposed breasts. She wasn’t flouting her culture. In America, they would be offended by the “independent woman” who refuses to take her husband’s last name or the milquetoast man who shrugs his shoulders and enables it.
In Chinese culture, women do not take the family name of their husbands. I married my Chinese wife in her native Singapore and so, to this day, 32 years later, she is still, legally, “Mary Yeo,” not “Mary Carpenter.” But here, in the USA, if a woman were to come to me, asking me to perform her wedding and yet insisting that she’s going to keep her maiden name, or adopt a hyphenated, combo name, to assert her independence from the patriarchy because, after all, ‘wives’ changing their names to their husband’s is a social construct,’ I would refuse to do the wedding. Society has rights.
Society’s rights exceed the individual’s except when it demands the individual do something counter to divine law, expressed either in scripture or nature. Society can’t make me say that Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page is male, although Twitter tried that unnatural tyranny on me – suspending my account to force conformity – before Elon Musk took over. Society doesn’t have the right to make me lie about Page’s sexual identity, even if it considers that lie enlightened. So even if the transsexual revolution manages to capture society so that transsexuality is the new social construct and we’re told to call women “men,” if they identify as such, or vice versa, we say, “no.” Society doesn’t have that right.
But society has rights and those rights extend to defining what it means to be a man or woman, what is feminine and masculine, as long as it is doing it to cultivate true sexual identity, to nurture nature. In nature, “The head of woman is man” (1 Cor. 11:3.) That’s not just a social construct, like head coverings. It’s a universal law, rooted in the relations of Christ to the Father, creation (1 Cor. 11:8-9), and the fall (1 Tim. 2:12-14.) The reality of men’s headship is not just a gender role which ancient, oppressive, benighted cultures made up and arbitrarily imposed. Cultures may construct different expressions of what men’s headship looks like – wearing “kilts” in Scotland; “kilt” being Scottish Gaelic for “skirt,” maybe. But they cannot set that reality aside. Society has the right to nurture nature, not destroy it.
Pronouns are a social construct. Like all of language, the words it pours meanings into are based only on what society says they mean. In English, “he” means a male. “She” means a female. Language has pronouns. Individuals do not. Someone claiming, “My pronouns are . . .” is usurping for himself the right only the language has. No individual has the right to arbitrarily redefine the language for him- or herself. If he or she did, communication would be impossible. My pledge to tell the truth is meaningless if I can define the words I say however I like. Just as Bill Clinton thought he could redefine the meaning of “is” to suit himself, so pronoun namers think they can fit their pronouns to their psyche. But individuals have the pronouns language assigns. Nature assigns our sex, society assigns our gender, and language assigns our pronouns.
The transsexual apologists smugly insist that “gender is a social construct,” and think that ends the debate. But society has the right to say ‘Your sex is female and so your gender should be feminine; you should wear dresses and take your husband’s family name,’ or ‘You were born male and so should be masculine; wear pants’ – unless you’re in Scotland where it can tell you to wear a kilt. So, even if gender is assigned, that doesn’t mean we can, at our whim, reassign our gender. Society has the right to construct gender.
John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022).