Our current culture dictates that little boys who like pink, or little girls who like dump trucks, are “gender nonconforming.” This seed, planted throughout public kindergarten school curricula, later instruction nurtures and waters, harvesting one of the most damaging doctrines of our age: feeling uncomfortable with your body means that you are trans. In fact, these things have little to do with gender as God defines it.
This mis-naming percipitates isolation. It stunts people by making them unable to bond with others. Because God gave the gift of gender for intimacy and fruitfulness, its disintegration produces an accompanying inability to do relationship.
Today’s statistics are sad, especially concerning women. In 1950, 20% of the U.S. population of women were “never-married,” i.e. were not married and had never been. Today it is more than 30%. That 10+% is a large shift. Perhaps looking at those actually now married makes the size of the shift clearer. In 1950, 70% of America’s women were married. Today it is less than 50%.
Combine these with the statistics on living alone I presented in enGendered (Ch.18) and you get the sorry picture of relationship breakdown. Going back to the relationship beginnings, among singles, we find the same sadness. 61% of single men say that they are looking for a relationship. Among women—who, I thought, are supposed to be all about relationship—that number is now 38%. The upcoming generation do not feel as if they can do relationship, or they do not want to.
Marriage usually implies children, and as we now know, Americans, along with most of the Western world, are not having them. In 1990, only one in ten American women reached the end of her child-bearing years without having any children. Today, based on the 2020 census data, it is one in six. I give more of these facts in Dating with Discernment. For a growing number of people, having a child is an increasingly difficult decision. For one in six women, it just seems not worth it.
Men have their own big relationship wreckers that parallel these. We could cite many proximate reasons for this, such as prevalence of porn, shifting ideology, or uncritical use of technological innovation, but beneath them is the rejection of that gift for relationship—our genders. As I have written about before, when men and women turn away from things like marriage and children, it means that the love of many is growing cold.
The irony could not be thicker. To “not conform” to the spiritual calling proclaimed by our bodies and our God, is to actually not “affirm gender.” The new supposedly enlightened view brings people to reject the gift that builds relationship.
That is the real gender nonconforming: giving up hope on intergendered relationship.