As the weather heats up, along with the controversy surrounding gender issues, Affirming Gender is hitting the road for a season of speaking and presentations. This year, we are choosing audiences of a particular kind of influence to address. I am veritably gay (in the old sense of the word—you remember, like how Maria used it in West Side Story) at the thought of talking to these influencers.
Of the seventeen new fantastic role model Barbies, including Conservationist Barbie, Boxing Champion Barbie, and Mathematician Barbie, most are not available for sale. Instead Mattel will focus sales on a Barbie line that highlights baking and cooking based on “proven play patterns.”
People have a hard time suppressing all of God’s truth. There is usually some of His common grace operating wherever you see relationships. When you come to recognize the Biblical principles of gender, you can see the good happening even when dressed in some gaudily bad outfits.
I am a woman who has struggled intensely with lust and sexual sin for most of my life, while also battling deep shame in the context of a church that always speaks about sexuality as a man’s struggle. The painful lie is that something is disgustingly wrong with me, that especially in church, I can’t talk about it.
If there was an anthem for the last ten years of gender minimization, it would be the sentence, “I was born this way.” The proclamation would stop conversations, halt dialogues, silence critics. Now the chorus is dying away and, like most pop songs, it will soon be forgotten.
If we look past some of the sexism of 1940s England, we see a valuable picture. The story presents us with the way a marriage in that incredibly stressful situation has to work if victory would be achieved. Winston Churchill was, of course, a leader. He led. But we see, in the few poignant scenes including Clementine, how she needed to be quite as strong as he for him to be able to lead. And she was.
“What am I going to do with these feelings? I can’t stand living in this body. Someone told me about this website but it’s all talk. Where can I get HELP?” Welcome to AffirmingGender’s new tab for pastoral care.
Are you receiving policy mandates from your company or school about pronouns? One reader writes: …Some in the administration would like to force faculty to use the pronoun that a student chooses instead of a gender-based pronoun. The student affairs folks are also going to provide gender inclusive housing options this fall…
Do you agree to use “she” to refer to your trans-man uncle? Do you accept your niece’s insistence that she is really a ‘he’ and you should call her…that is him, that? Soon all of us will face this question as our culture continues to shred gender like it was some kind of incriminating document.
This game, like the other recent ones, have displayed repeated opportunities to marvel at the achievement of the male body. But absent was any of the usual exploitation of the female body to sell things. The female body was respected. And we were free to celebrate the male.
