Gender is a Family Construct

In the debate between whether gender is a construct created by society or biology we are missing the source of its essence: the family.

Gender is rooted in three family binaries: father/mother, husband/wife, son/daughter. The more you understand these roles within a healthy family the more you will understand male and female.

But what happens when family breaks down and becomes virtually irrelevant? What happens when people grow up in broken families where those representing this roles have violated their essential character? What happens when individuals have no interest in building traditional families? What would happen to all of our family-based gender identities? Exactly what we’re seeing happen today.

Individuals will seek to transcend being bound to family categories. All of this blank space created by the destruction of the family becomes up for grabs. And, like when an interesting section of a city is abandoned the vacuum creates an opportunity for creative people to explore and remake something new, the same is happening in the area of family identity.

That is why the growing category of trans is fundamentally different than the categories created by sexual orientation. The trans movement is not about sex but about creative expression. You only need two things to create a trans person: someone who sees no need to participate or defend the traditional family structure and someone who has the interest and creativity to give themselves a new identity perhaps one society has never seen, one entirely unique to them.

What this also means is those who seek to defend the gender binary are fighting on the wrong ground. They repeatedly make the argument that they are fighting for what is biologically true as if the way we label chromosomes within the cell is of more value than the authentic experience of thousands and soon to be millions of trans people.

Stop, this won’t work and it’s not the real issue.

The problem with losing male and female is not the disruption to a traditional way of labeling biological categories; the problem with losing male and female is that with it you lose any traditional understanding of father/mother, husband/wife and son/daughter.

When a girl says she doesn’t feel like a female she’s saying she doesn’t feel like a daughter.

When a man says he is a woman trapped inside a man’s body he’s saying he identifies more with the mother/wife/daughter roles as he has seen or experienced them.

So as the family breaks down fewer people will seek to switch genders. Family identities (genders) will become irrelevant. The point will be to transcend the family all together.

Thus being trans is not about transcending gender but family.

And the real questions we need to be asking are:

• What happens when an entire culture transcends family?
• What is the value of traditional family categories?
• How did this happen and what should be done about it?

It’s this last question I’ve been wrestling with the most.

When we see how this happened the trans movement no longer looks like the real problem.

Trans becomes an understandable symptom of a much larger problem.

In a society where family is healthy no such movement would exist.

In a society where family completely melts down, a trans movement becomes inevitable.

Heal the family and identities will stabilize.

Destroy the family and gender identity will lose its moorings as we enter a brave new world.