Venus and Mars (and possibly other places of origin)

It says almost at the start of the Bible, in the story of the Creation, ‘God created adam [whatever adam really means]: in his own image he created him; male and female he created them’, and in Deuteronomy it lays down ‘a woman must not wear man’s clothing, nor a man wear woman’s clothing: for the Lord detests anyone who does this’. That’s pretty clear, isn’t it?

Or at least so the Rowes think: if you keep up with the news you will know that they are the parents of two young children and have now, on different occasions, withdrawn each of them from their local Church of England primary school because of disagreements with the school’s approach to gender. The current quarrel concerns a six-year-old pupil who has sometimes come into school wearing male clothing, and sometimes in female. Their son, the couple say, was ‘distressed’ and ‘confused’, and ‘as Christians’ they objected to what they perceive to be the influence of ‘an agenda’ to abolish sexual difference. On the Today programme they suggested the cross-dressing child’s issues should have been dealt with ‘privately, in the home’ before being made public, and refused to accept that children who perceived themselves as transgender (that is, not conforming to standard gender norms – no one is talking about six-year-olds undergoing surgical sexual reassignment) were being bullied.

Children are, indeed, very concerned with sexual difference. They become aware early on that there is such a thing as male and such a thing as female, and that it’s one of the great organising principles of the world, affecting not just human beings but animals too. They want to find their place in this binary structure, and having devised a model of how it works, can get confused when the world turns out not to fit it. I have a friend whose small children were not just confused but morally outraged when they discovered that she was a whole six months older than their father. ‘The man should be older!’ they both protested, having developed a whole nexus of concepts which connected maleness, age, and authority, a bit like the medieval system of correspondences. Like that system, too, children have to grow out of their grand, all-encompassing notions of sexual differentiation if they are to make sense of the world as it is.

I also think the Rowes are not wrong in that the proposition that sexual difference doesn’t really exist is one of the governing ideas, ideals perhaps, of our time. The parallel insistences that people can, and should, ‘choose what they want to be’ and yet also ‘express who they really are’ strike me as an incoherent attempt to hold together determinism and voluntarism. For my part, too, I think ‘male’ and ‘female’ do exist, objectively, as something more than just differential physical bits and pieces, although I’m not quite sure what constitutes either of them. It’s one of the considerations which affect my views of whether two people of the same sex can celebrate the sacrament of matrimony. And yet I think back to my own experience, which is this.

My dad was a car mechanic, a roughty-toughty masculine line of work if ever there was one (I know girls who are dab hands at stripping an engine, but mechanicking has never been coded as a female occupation). His attempts to get me interested in football, too, were pretty much a dead loss, although I did develop some boyish concerns like space exploration and model aeroplanes.  I knew from when I was tiny that there was a great gulf fixed between my world and my dad’s, and dimly that what I was separated from was a specifically male world of experience, epitomised by Harvey’s Garage in Hamworthy where he worked, redolent with the scent of motor oil and the sound of metal and whistling men. I never thought of myself as a little boy, as such. But I never really identified with girls, either: I was just me, a somewhat sui generis small person not easily fitting into any particular category beyond my own.

That continued into adolescence. Of course I had sexual feelings, but still not a very clear sense of my own identity as a male, and being in the relatively repressed atmosphere of an all-boys secondary school made it easier to let that question slide. I never cross-dressed or explored any sort of unusual sexuality (or any kind at all), but still sort-of conceived of myself as separate from the whole business of binary sexual identity. I think this sense of not being anything very much even continued into university. There, my first girlfriend told me ‘You’re very feminine, but very male’, and though I’m still not entirely sure I know what she meant, it did make me reflect.

As time has gone on I’ve recognised more and more stereotypically male traits in the way I think and act, from not being able to talk on the phone very readily, to having a bent for categorisation and ordering things. And middle-age has brought inescapably home to me my physical maleness, as hair sprouts enthusiastically everywhere except where I want it and gravity gets more and more of a grip on my pitiful frame. Eventually, I will reach the point where my sex, again, makes as little difference to me as it did when I was a child: the chief factors governing my life will be trying to put one foot in front of the other without falling over, medicine, and how I deal with more-or-less acute sensations of pain. But, for the moment, I’m reconciled with being male. I do have the strange sense, however, that I am wearing my maleness – my body, and even my masculine mind, being a sort of garment that I have a slightly distant relationship with. It leads me to reflect that my truce with my gender identity is probably partly to do with dress, as well: as over the years I’ve become more and more comfortable with what is really very conservative clothing traditionally coded as male (which doesn’t mean women can’t wear it – my accountant Ms Death-and-Taxes carries off a three-piece and a wing-collar rather well), I’ve found that the role sort of suits me (no pun intended). That’s when I’m not flouncing about in vestments, naturally.

This all inclines me to think that sex, gender identification and sexuality are not as simple as either conservative Christians or radical individualists might imagine. I think that ‘male’ and ‘female’ have some sort of objective existence, and that it’s a bit silly to claim they don’t, but that they each have performative elements, and it’s just as silly to deny that too. I think the old phrase you hear bruited around (less frequently these days), that a person with a non-standard experience of sexual identification ‘has the mind of one sex in the body of another’ doesn’t have any rational basis, and that people are, generally, happier if they learn to accept what nature has made them; but that they have to work that out for themselves. They should be allowed to do it, as I rather did, without pressure or contempt. And part of the working-out, part of the negotiation of the varied elements of masculine and feminine that make up any individual person, and between that person and the socially-coded nature of gender, might be for a six-year-old to dress as the other sex now and again and experiment with having a different name. If any children around them are confused, calm parents might tell them that in the end, most people are happy being boys or girls, but that some people take a while to work it out. I think children, who are generally more sensible than grown-ups, are likely to take that on board.

Which leaves us with the question of why the Biblical texts are so hung up on sexual difference. Because there’s no getting away from the fact that they are. Various gender-liquid happenings in first-century Corinth drive St Paul positively frantic with concern, provoking his remark, ‘doesn’t the very nature of things show you that if a man has long hair, it’s a matter of shame to him?’ Well, no, it doesn’t, but Christians don’t really have the option, though some try to take it, of saying that this is all just antiquated rubbish we can safely ignore, as there’s a rather important baby going out with that particular bathwater if they do. It must mean something. Paul’s argument is so silly (as our New Testament tutor at college remarked, ‘He can’t have spent much time in first-century Palestine’ – and bearing in mind that he came from Tarsus rather than Judaea, he probably hadn’t) that I suspect its silliness is the whole point of it being there. Sexual differentiation is important, but the content of that differentiation is less so.

Why should this be? My only ideas so far are two. First, that sexual differentiation is the clearest sign of our non-interchangeability as beings. You can’t simply swap one human being for another, as we are different, defiantly, irreducibly different: some of us are male, some are female. From that distinction descends all our absolute and unique worth as individuals. The Sign of Difference is the mark of our freedom. Secondly, the business of negotiating our own place in this spectrum of difference is one which develops our maturity, our sensitivity, and our tolerance for those who find themselves taking another route through it. Without there being a sense that there is a journey to take, two poles to define one’s location against, there is no movement, no negotiation, and therefore no growth. And I suspect (only suspect, mind you) that this is what the Lord, in all his beautiful simplicity and subtlety, has in mind.

P.S. I remembered that a couple of years ago our church Toddler Group was blessed by the presence of two small brothers who more often than not turned up dressed as Snow White. I don't recall anyone, child or grown-up, being either confused or distressed.