Whence came the dress?

If many in the Christian community are going to continue to accept unquestioningly the zeitgeist‘s mantra that gender is nothing but a social construct, then how are we going to avoid the conclusion that there is no moral dimension or moral ought to how someone lives and presents themselves as male or female? How can we continue to encourage nothing short of a full embrace of one’s God-given nature as male or female?

The Atlantic recently published an article that is making the rounds where we read of a mother’s proud support for her little boy who prefers to wear dresses and costumes for girls over the clothes he has that are designed for boys.

The article begins nonchalantly, “In hindsight, our son was gearing up to wear a dress to school for quite some time. For months, he wore dresses—or his purple-and-green mermaid costume—on weekends and after school. Then he began wearing them to sleep in lieu of pajamas, changing out of them after breakfast.” This pattern continued unchecked and, apparently, unchallenged until one day, the boy’s mother came to help him get dressed for school and found him already dressed, “seated on the couch in a gray cotton sundress covered in doe-eyed unicorns with rainbow manes.” The mother explains, “He’d slept in it, and in his dreaming hours, I imagine, stood at a podium giving inspirational speeches to an audience composed only of himself. When he’d woken up, he was ready.” Apparently his mother or father didn’t disagree. Wearing a dress to school that day was such a positive experience for her boy that “[m]ost days since,” the mother writes, “he’s worn a dress from his small collection.” Where this small dress collection came from and how it came to be his is left unexplained.

For most of the rest of the article, the boy’s mother laments the fact that more boys and men don’t, like her son, have a desire to be like girls and women like her son. At one point, she even complains, “Exceedingly few parents dress their baby boys in a headband and a dress.” According to this mother, the fact that more girls want to be like boys than vice versa is evidence of a misogynist society. (This, of course, instead of questioning the premise why it isn’t fine and good and to be encouraged for girls to want to be like girls and boys to be like boys.)

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the feminism being promoted in this article is not content with merely advocating for a kind of equality of opportunity, where a girl can and should be able to be and do anything a boy can. Instead, this sort of feminism won’t be satisfied until equality of outcome is achieved: every girl not only can “be” a boy, but every boy wants to be a girl. This war against The Patriarchy is being waged not by the Egalitarian, as we’ve been led to believe, but by the full blown Matriarchist.

But there is an important paragraph embedded in this article that gets at what I believe to be the heart of the current evangelical confusion on the relationship between gender and sex.

“It’s important to note that there are children who do feel they’ve been born in the wrong body, who long for different anatomy, a different pronoun. Trans kids need to be supported and accepted. And, at the same time, not every boy who puts on a dress is communicating a wish to be a girl. Too often gender dysphoria is conflated with the simple possibility that kids, when not steered toward one toy or color, will just like what they like, traditional gender expectations notwithstanding. There is little space given to experimentation and exploration before a child’s community seeks to categorize them. Boyhood, as it is popularly imagined, is so narrow and confining that to press against its boundaries is to end up in a different identity altogether.”

A half-presented truth can sometimes do more harm than a lie. There is some truth in this paragraph that we would do good to affirm. To be sure, the boundaries of boyhood should not be exclusively defined by toys and colors. But neither should we go to the other extreme and downplay the real, good, natural differences between boyhood and girlhood, which rightly prepare and can serve, when rightly conceived, to actively disciple children into godly manhood or womanhood.

Consider the following verses from Proverbs 29:

The rod and reproof give wisdom,
but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.
When the wicked increase, transgression increases,
but the righteous will look upon their downfall.
Discipline your son, and he will give you rest;
he will give delight to your heart.
-Proverbs 29:15–17

According to this proverb, leaving a child to his own “experimentation and exploration” leads not to flourishing, but to familial shame. Instead, from this text we see that reproof and discipline toward wisdom are means for the parent to avoiding shame and arriving at peace and delight. As the book of Proverbs makes clear elsewhere, this kind of wisdom comes in the form of both scriptural and natural revelation. But if we aren’t careful, we ignore natural revelation to the detriment of making sense of scriptural revelation. Below I unpack this statement.

Deuteronomy 22:5 teaches that God considers it an abomination for a woman to wear a man’s garment or for a man to put on a woman’s cloak (Dt 22:5). But this passage begs an obvious question: what makes a garment manly or a cloak womanly? Here we come to part of what, I believe, forms the crux of evangelicalism’s confusion today.

We have abandoned the following maxim and failed to apprehend the consequences: Extra-biblical cultural norms that complement biblical norms may be able to be proved from the natural order and thus embraced as God-ordained. Below I will attempt to unpack this statement with two biblical examples.

Returning again to the sartorial prohibition of Deuteronomy 22:5, the Israelites no doubt inherited a tradition of dress handed down in various iterations from time immemorial. This tradition was no doubt at some level influenced by other cultures via proximate osmosis and genetic tributaries, as it were. The book of Deuteronomy codifies this cultural dress, in a way, as the proper avenue for plainly and obviously signaling sex difference in life not only as a member of God’s creation, but as a member of God’s people.

A woman who puts on a man’s garment — notice that what constitutes a man’s garment is assumed in Deuteronomy 22:5 — sows confusion by failing to signal her conformity to her God-given nature in a world where sex difference matters. And a man who dresses as a woman tells his Creator, “You are mistaken. I am better this way.”

Another example of this kind of a biblical affirmation of a natural or cultural norm comes in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16, where Paul instructs the church on head coverings. In this passage, Paul makes an appeal to the self-evident character of what “nature” reveals as grounds for his admonition about how to handle head coverings in the church. Paul presents a cultural custom — long hair for women and short hair for men — as flowing directly from the natural differences between men and women. (Which probably reflects the anatomical difference between men and women — a woman’s long hair is able to function as an upper-torso covering of which a man has no need.) This biological difference has been codified in a cultural custom, and here Paul embraces this custom in his argument as God-ordained. It is good and righteous and just — even for the sake of the angels (1 Cor 11:10) — to be able to distinguish the men from the women, the boys and the girls, in the gathered assembly.

Sometimes when evangelicals say “gender is a cultural construct,” they imply that gender is an amoral expression of sex about which neither Scripture nor traditional wisdom has anything meaningful to say. But here is where we must let a careful reading of Deuteronomy 22 and 1 Corinthians 11 correct such notions. Insofar as we uncritically eschew cultural customs, we open ourselves up to rejecting patterns and traditions that may, in fact, turn out to be faithful constructions after the pattern revealed in nature and confirmed by Scripture.

As things go, at this point in the argument, many gravity toward cross-cultural anomalies or disparities in order to disprove its merits. For instance, some would cite the fact that men wear skirts (kilts) in Scotland as a defeater. But it is not. Instead, that we can identify what a man typically wears in Scotland as distinguished from what a woman typically wears actually serves to confirm the argument. (Even as we can argue about the relative superiority and inferiority — read: more or less rooted in natural and Judeo-Christian revelation — of certain cultures when compared to others.) In fact, the very frame and argument of The Atlantic article only makes sense in a society that has historically and currently has categories for clothes that are for men and women, boys and girls.

Sometimes children and teenagers flounder in their progression from boy to man, girl to woman, and the results are increasingly tragic and even sometimes indelible. We must recognize the ways our culture — evangelicals included — has contributed to this confusion through our definitions of boyhood and manhood, girlhood and womanhood, that have more in common with Hollywood stereotypes than the Bible. But we also must recognize the world of difference between wisely expanding the boundaries of boyhood and girlhood to include experiences beyond blue cars and pink dolls and encouraging boys to identify — through dress or otherwise — as girls and girls, boys.

Near the end of her article in The Atlantic, the little boy’s mother concludes,

“This fall, our son will start kindergarten, and with kindergarten comes a school uniform. This means pale blue collared shirts for all the kids, paired with navy blue pants, jumpers, or skirts. Currently there don’t seem to be any boys at the school who choose the jumper or skirt, and it remains to be seen whether our son will maintain his penchant for dresses even when the sartorial binary becomes starker—and the dresses more plain.

“Whatever he decides is fine with us.”

But this is dishonoring to this little boy’s design, who was created male by God. Boys should be encouraged to act and dress like boys who are becoming men, and girls should be encouraged to act and dress like girls becoming women. Boys and girls who are encouraged to do otherwise are being encouraged not only to chafe against the natural order, but to embrace an abomination forbidden by God and His holy revelation.