“Real men don’t cry.”
“You throw like a girl!”
“Boys play with trains, not dolls.”
These are just a few examples of gender stereotypes, and most of us have probably experienced others. Stereotypes about gender persist right from the start of childhood, with blue symbolising boys and pink for girls. The rise of ‘gender reveal’ events bought into this idea with cakes, balloons, and flares colour-coded to the coming baby’s gender. On the other hand, dressing a newborn baby boy in pink is seen as a rebellious act by new parents!
Gender stereotypes go beyond colours however. Society still has unspoken expectations about what a man or a woman should be like. Feminine stereotypes, for example, include being caring and motherly, while masculine traits might include being ambitious or analytical. Stereotypes can feed into negative expectations such as women being passive, naive, or weak, and men being aggressive and lacking emotion.
Most of us would recognise these stereotypes as over-simplified generalisations. While many women are less physically strong than men, that’s not always the case. Some women are muscular while some men are not. Some men are extremely caring and emotional, while some women are deeply logical and analytical. Stereotypes pigeonhole men and women into broad categories which are frequently unhelpful.
For this reason, many gender stereotypes have been broken down by culture over recent years. This has been seen as a positive thing. But what is surprising is that the rise of transgender ideology has worked to reinforce these gender stereotypes rather than remove them. Transgender advocates position themselves as forward-thinking progressives on the vanguard of gender identity. But their agenda may in fact be promoting outdated and unhelpful stereotypes about gender instead.
Stereotypes and diagnosis
Stereotypes play a significant role in deciding whether someone might be transgender, especially when it comes to children. The NHS website includes a page entitled “Think your child might be trans or non-binary?” It includes the following advice:
It's common for children to show an interest in clothes or toys that society tells us are associated with a different gender. With toy stores dedicating floors to colour-coded boys' or girls' toys, as an example, parents may expect a child to closely match expectations of how male and female genders should behave. You may worry that your child's exploration of different gender preferences and behaviours is not "normal". However, this is not the case. A young child's exploration of different gender identities is quite common. However, for some children this may continue into later childhood and adolescence.
On the one hand, this advice seems helpful: don’t worry if your child doesn’t conform to gender stereotypes about what colours they like or what toys they play with. Not every boy likes to play with cars and not every girl likes to wear pink. This is perfectly normal.
But this text has a much less helpful implication: not just that girls and boys don’t conform to stereotypes, but that this shows that they are exploring different gender identities. This argument moves from breaking down gender stereotypes to using stereotypes as a benchmark for deciding whether or not a child is transgender. Instead of removing stereotypes, we start playing to them instead.
The picture is even clearer if we look at the diagnostic criteria in the United States. On their website, the American Psychiatric Association quote from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), the U. S. handbook for mental health issues. They give a number of criteria on which to base a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in children, including:
- A strong preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire in boys; or a strong preference for wearing only typical masculine clothing and a strong resistance to the wearing of typical feminine clothing for girls
- A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play
- A strong preference for the toys, games or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender
- A strong preference for playmates of the other gender
- A strong rejection of typically masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble play for boys; or a strong rejection of typically feminine toys, games, and activities for girls
While these criteria need to be coupled with a stated desire to be a different gender, it is easy to see how this list plays to stereotypes for boys and girls. Toys, games, and activities associated with the other gender are simply expressions of gender stereotypes.
If a boy likes playing ‘house’ does that make him a girl, or simply a different expression of masculinity to the one we often expect? If a girl wants to wear trousers and climb trees, does that make her a boy, or simply an athletic and adventurous girl?
Diagnosing transgender using gender stereotypes only serves to reinforce those stereotypes. If a boy can only enjoy ‘rough and tumble’ games, then we have defined masculinity as aggressive and physical. If a girl can only wear dresses, and like things that are pink, we have defined femininity much more narrowly than we ought.
Stereotypes shape gender questions
While the diagnosis of gender dysphoria in adults is much less based in stereotypes, those same gender stereotypes play a part in shaping what a desire to be another gender looks like.
Most people who come out as transgender express their desire in terms of feelings: “I don’t feel like a man” or “I don’t feel like a woman”. This raises an important question: What does it actually mean to ‘feel’ like a man or a woman? How can someone of one gender know what it looks like to feel like another gender?
The answer is that very often ‘feeling feminine’ equates to pursuing stereotypical feminine traits. Similarly ‘feeling masculine’ means playing to stereotypical ways of being a man. While transgender expressions are not entirely uniform, very often a transgender woman (a biological male who identifies as female) will play to very generic feminine characteristics such as pretty dresses, red lipstick, long hair, and so on. In the same way, a transgender man (a biological female identifying as male) might play to generic ideas of masculinity such as short hair, facial hair, and muscles.
In an article for ‘First Things’, Dan Hitchens, quotes trans writer Andrea Long Chu, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the book ‘Females’, expressing this very idea:
I doubt that any of us transition simply because we want to “be” women, in some abstract, academic way. I certainly didn’t. I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship … But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should. Any TERF* will tell you that most of these items are just the traditional trappings of patriarchal femininity. She won’t be wrong, either.
*TERF stands for ‘Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist’, a derogatory term for a feminist critic of transgender ideology.
Chu makes the point that for most transgender women their desire to be female is shaped by feminine stereotypes. I am certain that much the same could be said of women who want to identify as men.
What is happening is that transgender ideology is not only playing to gender stereotypes, it is also reinforcing those same stereotypes. Rather than being progressive they are regressing society’s view of gender back toward generic categories.
A paper published by the British Journal of Occupational Therapy describes how engaging in stereotypical gender activities reinforced the expression of gender for those who were transgender:
Participants described how engagement in activities reinforced binary gender expressions. For Dee, as a transgender woman, engaging in occupations which reinforced binary gender roles was integral to her gender expression both pre- and post-transition. Before transitioning gender, when living as a man, she had felt compelled to engage in hyper-masculine activities such as white-water rafting to produce masculinity. Following her transition and being able to live openly as a woman, Dee engaged in activities which expressed her female gender identity, such as decorating her home in ‘feminine’ furnishings and joining a social group for women where they ‘do all sort of social activities, go on holidays together’.
This idea of ‘exaggerated femininity’ is not uncommon in men who identify as women. For some, this is playing to society’s ‘norms’ in order to prove their gender identity. For others, like Dee, it helps reinforce their own feelings of gender. Either way, it works to maintain those gender stereotypes in society at large.
An exaggerated and stereotypical idea of masculinity or femininity can also shape the choices of transgender people when they undergo surgery. Changes made to their bodies to express their chosen gender conform to stereotypical ideals of what makes a man or a woman. Their decision to change gender is shaped by stereotypes and their decisions work to further underline those very same stereotypes.
Resisting stereotypes
How should Christians respond to this push back toward gender stereotypes?
First, we can affirm that there are differences in gender. The Bible declares in its opening chapter that “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Gender is something good, created and given by God, with differences between men and women.
The reason that stereotypes exist at all is because there are some discernable differences between the sexes. On average, men are taller and physically stronger than women. There are examples that buck this trend, of course, but in broad terms it is true. Women, on the other hand, have the ability to bear children, which men cannot. This inevitably brings a maternal aspect to being a woman, which that is not to say that men cannot care for children, or that a woman without children is not a true woman. Men and women are equal in worth but different by design.
At the same time, we can also resist unhelpful stereotypes. There is nothing in the Bible that says that boys have to wear blue and girls wear pink. Nor is there a verse we can point to that says men cannot be emotional and women cannot be athletic. In fact, quite the opposite. We have examples throughout the Bible of men and women who do not conform to what our society would see as typical gender stereotypes.
David wrote poetry and lamented over the death of his good friend Jonathan (2 Samuel 1). Jacob was “content to stay at home among the tents” (Genesis 25:27) while his brother Esau went hunting. Jael, the wife of Heber, tricked and killed the commander who was oppressing God’s people (Judges 4). Mary sat at Jesus’ feet while her sister Martha fussed about domestic chores (Luke 10). Esther was a political strategist while Abigail had mastered the art of diplomacy.
Jesus himself gives a powerful example of a man who expressed masculinity without defaulting to gender stereotypes. He wept at the graveside of Lazarus, washed his disciples’ feet like a servant, welcomed children, and spoke about caring for Jerusalem like a mother hen.
As Christians push back against transgender ideology, and affirm the Biblical goodness of gender, we need also to resist the temptation to reinforce unbiblical gender stereotypes. We should delight in what makes us male or female, but we should not force men to be hyper-masculine or women to conform to an exaggerated femininity. A particular ‘type’ of boy or girl is not more or less godly than another.
Andrew Bunt, in a helpful article for Living Out, notes:
We don’t have to like certain things or be wired in a certain way to be a man or a woman. Our identity as men and women isn’t created or earned by living a certain way; it’s given to us by God. God determines who we are and therefore we are free to be how we are. We might be a man who loves chick flicks and period dramas (that’s me), or a woman who is obsessive about football, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are a man or a woman because God says we are a man or a woman.
An example of this can be seen in the life of C.S. Lewis. In his biography, Alister McGrath explains that as a child Lewis wasn’t very ‘boyish’. He didn’t enjoy sports but instead listened to opera and read poetry, which McGrath notes meant Lewis “does not seem to have fitted into the public school culture of the Edwardian age.”
“Boys who were not good at games,” McGrath writes, “were ridiculed and bullied by their peers. Athleticism devalued intellectual and artistic achievement and turned many schools into little more than training camps for the glorification of physicality. Yet the cultivation of manliness was seen as integral to the development of character.” Lewis’ enjoyment of the arts and dislike of athletic sports did not make him the wrong gender. Rather it was evidence of the insightful mind that would make him so influential as a Christian thinker later in his life.
As Dan Hitchens says in his article, “the Christian view is not ultimately that boys should play with guns and girls should play with unicorns.” As Christians we do not believe that fulfilment lies in conforming to a particular view of gender, or achieving some hyper-realised version of gender roles. Our fulfilment comes from Jesus Christ. The goal, for both men and women, is to be be conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29). Differences between men and women are good and given by God, but they make no difference to our ultimate aim. We are to be clothed with Christ where there is “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27-28).