In an age where social “engineers” are trying to push for the idea that gender is changeable; that there are many genders; and that gender is a matter of personal preference, there is a need, more than ever before, to celebrate who God designed us to be for the sake of the generation we are raising and the future of humanity.

Sweden, which prides itself in its support of gender neutrality, recently added a gender-neutral pronoun to their National Encyclopedia. It’s the word, “hen.” In gender-neutral schools, they don’t call children girls or boys, but “buddies.” Sweden has also published its first gender-neutral children’s book, “Kivi och Monsterhund”. Their intention is to allow children to be “freed” from gender stereotypes.

When I first read about the Egalia pre-school in Sweden last July 2011, I was deeply disturbed. I don’t hate liberals or “free” thinkers, but I do believe that morality and truth are not relative and that absolute truth exists. We are free to choose what to believe in, but not free to escape the consequences of our choices.

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I don’t share this because I think that my perspective is superior. I am a nobody. But I believe in what the Bible says because Jesus Christ died and rose again. Therefore what he says in his word is valid, correct, and proven. (Otherwise, I wouldn’t waste my time writing about the things I do in this blog.)

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One of the important truths that we need to teach our children is that God created two genders, male and female. And these genders are distinct, unique, equally important, and necessary.

God made and makes no mistakes. I have seen, first-hand, that men and women who accept and celebrate their manhood and womanhood as God design them to be are the most liberated and free to enjoy his plan and purpose for their lives. In contrast, I have observed that those who refuse and deny their God-given gender, have greater struggles with self-esteem, confusion, depression, and relationship problems. As a mother of three boys and a girl, I also know that my sons and my daughter behave in distinctly masculine and feminine ways.

But these statements may seem subjective and baseless to people who want facts and figures. And so I decided to create a more convincing case for gender. My desire is to help parents understand that it is our responsibility to teach our children to be the man or woman that God so lovingly created them to be.

I came across a fantastic read called 21 Reasons Why Gender Matters. I have copied down the reasons and salient points here because it is a lengthy article, but please take time to click on the link above and read the entire article. It is complete, informative, and eye-opening. It will also help you and I to better understand why gender is necessary for the healthy development of a person and the proper functioning of a society. These are not my ideas and this article was written from an academic and scientific perspective, but these points validate what the Bible says about God’s design.

1. Gender uniqueness and complementarity means that each gender has a unique contribution to work, society and interpersonal communication that cannot be filled by the other gender in its entirety.

“Men and women bring unique and complementary skills,abilities, gifts and talents to relationships, to work, to society, and to one another. There is overwhelming medical, social, and psychological evidence affirming the naturalness and critical importance of traditional sex roles. These unique contributions are most evident in the family unit. ”

2. Acknowledging gender differences helps children learn more effectively.

“Major differences start to occur early in children’s development. Studies have found that one-day-old baby girls look longer at a a picture of a human face, whereas boys look longer at objects. Day-old female infants cry longer than male infants when they heart the sound of other crying infants. These difference are found throughout a child’s life. Girls like cooperation more than boys do, and like competition less. They care about playmates’ feelings and they can read others’ emotions better than boys. Girls like one-on-one relationships, and they say sweet, affirming things to friends and put their arms around them. they bond through confiding talk. Girls play house, and their pretend play involves more cooperative role playing. Boys are more self-centered; for example, they have a harder time learning to share, and they act up more and are less likely to be team players in schools. Boys develop strong passions for particular things, the passions seem to arise out of nowhere, and they change through time. A boy may be unable to get enough of cars, trucks or tractors, then of dinosaurs, then music, then computers.” Therefore, it is necessary to acknowledge that boys and girls learn differently and to teach them with these differences in mind.

3. Men and women are happier and healthier when they acknowledge and celebrate their respective gender differences.

“Congenital malformations are sometimes referred to by the gender feminists. But they are comparatively rare, and they do not prove there are more than two sexes and do not prove that heterosexuality is not natural any more than the fact that some babies are born blind proves that it isn’t natural for human beings to see. Biological sex is not determined by external organs alone but by genetic structure. Every cell of the human body is clearly marked male or female, and the human brain, which is the primary sex organ, is masculinised or feminized in the foetal stage of development by the presence or absence of testosterone.”

4. The masculine gender is an essential ingredient for fatherhood, and children raised by a committed father do much better in life.

“Research is quite clear that children need a loving father to protect, defend and guide them. Children growing up without fathers experience numerous problems, including: an increased risk of being involved in crime and criminal activities; a greater likelihood of involvement in illicit drug use, alcohol consumption and tobacco use; a greater chance of committing suicide; a greater likelihood of developing mental health problems; an increased risk of sexual promiscuity and other sexual problems, including, gender confusion issues; an increased risk of becoming a victim of child sexual abuse; and a greater chance of growing up poor or in poverty.”

5. The feminine gender is an essential ingredient of motherhood, and children do better in life with an involved and committed mother.

“It is only women who can bear and breastfeed babies, and their role as nurturers and carers is clearly found throughout history and all human societies. Dr. John Bowlby, in two definitive books, Maternal Care and Mental Health and Attachment and Loss, described the harmful effects on babies and young children of being deprived of maternal care.”

6. Marriage is the best way for men and women to enjoy gender complementarity.

Firstly, men and women are anatomically designed for physical union resulting in the “generation of new life.” Furthermore, men and women “have areas of specialization due to the differences in their physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual gifts, which when brought together, complete each other and make for a harmonious richness in their relationship, and in the home they create, by mutual cooperation, thus providing the best balance between the protection needed and nurture required to raise children.”

7. Gender complementarity in a life long committed marriage between a man and a woman is essential for the continuation of humanity.

Statistics show that when traditional marriage disappears, so does childbearing. When people choose to co-habit, the “retreat from true marriage and the retreat from children go together.”

8. Gender complementarity in a life-long committed marriage between a man and a woman is needed for a healthy, stable society.

“When marriage breaks down, along with the very idea of marriage, then societies struggle to stay together.”

9. Gender complementarity in a life long committed marriage between a man and a woman is good for the economy as a whole.

“Married men have greater work commitment, lower quit rates and healthier and more stable personal routines (including sleep, diet and alcohol consumption). Marriage also encourages savings and asset accumulation and reduces poverty. Cohabitation does less to raise overall incomes than marriage does.”

10. Marriage involving a man and a woman is the foundation of a successful family and the best way to protect children.

“Marriage is the best means to bring and keep a man and a woman together, to regulate human sexuality and to raise the next generation. The evidence is quite clear as to how children are most free from abuse and other problems when living with their biological parents, cemented by marriage. As one leading expert has put it, ‘Research clearly demonstrates that children growing up with two continuously married parents are less likely than other children to experience a wide range of cognitive, emotional, and social problems, not only during childhood, but also in adulthood.’”

(I want to add that the foundation of a successful family is Jesus!)

Children who are raised by homosexual parents are more likely to become homosexual

11. Gender complementarity in a life long committed marriage between men and women is the best way to teach children the value of gender.

“Married male and female parents are the best role models for children, and the best school for passing on the value of two heterosexual parents. In fact the best way to raise children is in the natural tension that is created between both genders. It is in the midst of this tension that a child finds his or her gender identity.”

12. Gender is important in understanding the significance of manhood.

“Before individually based, child-centred pedagogies were embraced by post-enlightenment in the West, most ancient cultures ‘initiated’ young boys into manhood through ‘rites of passage’ rituals. All of these ceremonies had some common features. They all included the ritual of transition, the role of relationship, pain and the acceptance of responsibility. Almost all of these initiation ceremonies coincided with the new level of sexual feeling that a young man feels at puberty. In many ways they prepared him to accept responsibility for his sexual prowess and required a commitment to self control. When a young male reaches his teen years, he instinctively looks for ways to affirm his manhood.

In societies where rites of passage are part of the norm, each young male participates in a formal ceremony during which his manhood is publicly and undeniably affirmed. From that day forward, he is treated differently by those around him and receives more freedom, rights and privileges. In response the young man begins to think and act more an as adult than as a child. For the rest of his life he pursues maturity rather than manhood.

In contrast, a young male living in a society with no formal rites of passage must find his own path to adulthood. Without formal affirmation of his transformation, he vainly tries to find manhood on his own through a variety of means. Sadly, his pursuit of manhood rather than maturity will lead him down many side roads that are fruitless at best, destructive at worst.”

13. Gender is important in understanding the significance of womanhood.

…in general we see that female verbal abilities assist them in raising and teaching their children, while greater male strength and visuo-spatial abilities are suited to the protector and provider role. The female hormones of oxytocin and prolactin prepare women for nurturing and breastfeeding their young, while the male hormone, testosterone, encourages men to explore, discover and compete in the world outside the home. Testosterone, in particular, has an effect on the male brain not only at puberty but also in utero.”

14. Gender differences are universally celebrated and acknowledged around the world in healthy societies. Conversely, societies and civilisations which reject gender uniqueness and complementarity often face harmful consequences.

“Finally, on a broader scale, historians have noted the role of moral decline in general and sexual deviancy in particular, as leading causes of the decline of nations. For example, Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has written much about ‘sensate culture,’ and how declining morality and sexual debauchery have led to cultural decay.

Writing at almost the same period, historian J.D. Unwin studied a number of cultures which had declined throughout history. He noted that the rejection of marriage and sexual morality was a leading contributing factor in the destruction of nations. He wrote: ‘In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on prenuptial and postnuptial continence.’”

15. Healthy gender development is important because it prevents individuals of either gender from developing compulsive obsessive disorders that can lead to sexual addiction and other pathologies.

“Many homosexuals report that as children, they had a dysfunctional relationship with their same-sex parent – such relationships being their primary means of gender identification and affirmation. For some children, particularly those whose parents are separated or divorced, the dissociation from their same-sex parent can cause an unconscious but directive drive for gender identification and affirmation among same sex peers, which, after puberty, can manifest as sexual behaviour…Some homosexuals report that they over-identified with their opposite sex parent and peers – thus a boy becomes increasingly feminized while a girl becomes more masculine. In both cases – lack of identity and over identity – there is a common denominator, which is emotional deprivation. In their formative years, all children need emotional and physical closeness with their parents – particularly with their same sex parent, and they need to develop a healthy sense of their gender identity as male or female. Healthy gender development secures a person with a positive self esteem, a recognition of one’s own value as a man or woman, and the knowledge that sexual love has to do with the giving of oneself as a gift to the beloved, rather than having a neediness which seeks fulfilment through sex. Secure gender identity enables respect for other people of both genders and self-control in seeing others as whole people rather than as objects of lust. Their sexuality is channelled within healthy boundaries. On the other hand, when people are insecure in their sense of gender, many are driven to compensate, and try to build a sense of gender security through sexual activity.”

16. Gender disorientation pathology, as in the form of sexual addictions, is often a symptom of family dysfunction, personality disorder, father absence, health malfunction or sexual abuse.

“The causes of gender disorientation pathology have been shown to be largely social. One leading researcher summarised, ‘Sexual orientation is genetically influenced but not hardwired by DNA, and that whatever genes are involved represent predispositions, not predeterminations.’ Psychotherapists tend to agree that the major factor in the emergence of same sex attraction is a defective gender identification in childhood and teen years.”

17. Gender disorientation pathology will lead to increased levels of drug abuse and partner violence.

“Evidence shows that there are increased risks of drug abuse, partner violence, suicide and other problems associated with the homosexual lifestyle. Gender disoriented relationships tend to derive from dysfunctional families of origin, and also tend to repeat the pattern. Higher incidences of drug abuse, violence and suicide indicate that same sex relationships struggle to meet emotional needs or provide fulfilment and stability.”

18. Gender disorientation pathology will increase the risk of communicable disease and the likelihood of suffering bad health.

“The lifestyle which encompasses gender disorientation pathology causes increased incidents of other physical illnesses. Diseases such as anal cancer, herpes simplex virus, human papilloma virus, microsporidia, gonorrhea, viral hepatitis types B and C are particularly common among homosexual men. These diseases are much less prevalent among heterosexual men. Syphilis, though found among heterosexuals, is far more prevalent among homosexuals.”

19. Gender disorientation pathology will decrease life expectancy.

“Promiscuity, AIDS and other diseases cause sexually active males who suffer from gender disorientation pathology to lose up to 20 years of life expectancy.”

20. Gender disorientation pathology is preventable and treatable.

“Many have left the homosexual lifestyle, and restoration to wholeness can occur. While it may well be a slow and difficult process, substantial healing and freedom is possible, as experienced by many thousands of former sufferers of gender disorientation pathology. Like all sexual addictions, it takes a lot of effort to break free, but it can be done.”

21. Gender disorientation pathology encourages the sexual and psychological exploitation of children.

“A recent review of the child molestation literature as it appears in medical and psychological journals concluded that between 25 and 40 per cent of all recorded child molestation was homosexual. Also, a Family Research Institute’s national (US) random survey of 4,340 adults found that about a third of those who reported having been molested were homosexually molested. Other polls have come out with similar findings. Also, homosexual pedophiles victimise far more children than do heterosexual pedophiles (150 to 20).”

“A lesbian mother has publicly expressed her regret at bearing three children through artificial insemination. The New Zealand woman, who says she is ‘now in the process of becoming a heterosexual,’ had a stormy relationship with her lesbian lover, which eventually broke down. Her comments are worth noting: ‘I realise now that I deprived my kids of their right to a father, and I see the hurt in their faces every day. . . . I believe children should have the best opportunities in life. The best way they can have a balanced view of what is normal is with heterosexual parents.’”

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To follow…Celebrating our God-Given Chromosomes

Other helpful resources:

Lies Women Believe

Hope in A World of Gender Confusion

What is Womanhood