Biblical Foundations: Male and Female

The Creation narrative teaches the goodness of our existence as specifically two types of sexual beings: “Male and female he created them . . . and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:27, 31). Our sexual differentiation as female and male is a creational good deliberately planned by the Creator! Men and women should embrace their sex as a gift.

We live in a time when strident voices increasingly proclaim that there are more sexes than just the two. Some say there is an infinite spectrum; others identify an array of categories. Some say our bodies do not matter and that our sex is determined by our minds. And some even say that sex as male, female, or other is so subjective, a person can vacillate between categories or make their own category as they wish. This is a direct example of the elevation in the modern mind of the subjective self, which rejects all external constraints.

The biological and medical reality is that in a very few cases (less than 0.02 percent of all births), there is some degree of biological confusion about the sex of the baby. For example, some people are truly “intersex” (that is, possessing some sort of confusing array of both biologically male and female features). We’ll talk more about this in chapter 10; for now, note that this is not by God’s design but rather is the result of living in a broken world. Truly intersex persons should be treated the same compassion and understanding as anyone with a birth defect.

The new voices proclaiming sex to be a rainbow of possibilities rather than a binary reality of male and female are simply wrong. God designed us as biological males or females.

[This complex topic is dealt with in a variety of ways in other chapters.]

Some content taken from HOW AND WHEN TO TELL YOUR KIDS ABOUT SEX, by Stan and Brenna Jones. Copyright © 1993, 2007, 2019. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. To purchase books in the GOD’S DESIGN FOR SEX book series, go to www.navpress.com.