What makes human beings men and women?

From Christian Post.com (Mar. 24, 2023):

What makes human beings men and women? A couple of decades ago, the answer to this question was rather obvious, but not so in our present culture. What was once an obvious biological reality has now been hijacked and corrupted by moral relativism and the sexual revolution.

Transgender activists have succeeded in sowing mass confusion on the issue of sex and gender, and this confusion has ignited a new front in the culture wars that few people outside of evangelical Christian thinkers anticipated. In order to make sense of it all, we need to understand transgender ideology and what the Bible says about gender.

What is transgenderism?

Transgenderism maintains that gender is distinct from, and at times in conflict with, biological sex. According to transgender activists, gender is a social construct and gender identity is a subjective state of self-understanding. The “real self” is not biologically based, but psychologically based.

By this thinking, the “real self” is defined by one’s gender identify: a person is the gender they experience themselves to be. Unlike a traditional view that attaches gender to biological sex, transgenderism detaches gender from sex, and it does so in several ways.

Transgenderism claims that a person’s biological sex does not determine their identity. Rather, a person can identify as either pole on the gender binary (man or woman); they can identify as “fluid,” meaning they are somewhere in between the two poles of the gender binary; or they can even deny the gender binary completely and identify as something outside of it (i.e. non-binary).

The basic goal of transgender activists, therefore, is gender deconstruction. Since they believe that traditional understandings of gender — wherein gender is biologically based — is a cultural construct, it can be replaced with a new gender paradigm.

Transgender ideology suffers from many philosophical problems (too many, in fact, to cover at length in this article). For example, transgenderism claims that gender is a cultural construct, but maintains that gender identity is innate; that is, natural or naturally belonging to a person. This is clearly inconsistent.

As Ryan T. Anderson points out in his book When Harry Became Sally, if gender is a social construct, then gender identity is too. Also, transgenderism’s mind-body dualism — where “real self” is psychologically based, not biologically based — can apply to other concepts besides gender identity. To be logically consistent, transgender activists must accept and affirm trans-species, trans-racial, trans-ability, and trans-age communities.

Aside from its incoherence, transgender ideology has enormous political, economic, cultural, and medical ramifications. Gender identity, not biological sex, is now used in many hospitals to determine the proper medical treatment for patients, including minors. Transgender activists are undermining protections for women and children in sports, education, public accommodations, military, and prisons. Transgender ideology also threatens religious liberty and freedom of conscience for Christian schools, businesses, and individuals.

So, what should Christians think about transgenderism? [read more]