Thread by @sometimesalight

TFW a trans woman cites conservative evangelical gender paradigms as proof of new definition of gender as "the expression of someone else's sexuality."
newrepublic.com/article/155614…

Here's the thing: Chu is not wrong to make this connection.

It's been my sense for quite a while now that evangelical gender categories have a TON in common w/ more progressive gender categories insofar as they divorce gender from embodiment & imago Dei.

Superficially, they are worlds apart but Chu's work is showing how much they are built on similar assumptions about female/male relationships. It also explains why gender roles & sexuality are package for most evangelicals.

What gives femaleness it's identity & value is not its responsiveness to maleness. What gives it identity & value is its responsiveness to Divine thru imago Dei agency & vocation.

This involves partnership with maleness but not as primary identifier. IOW, sexuality is a feature of femaleness but not its basis. To be female is not to be the object of male desire, but to be a daughter of Creator.

Women who've come thru evangelical teaching on gender should recognize Chu's paradigm immediately because it's same message they received... your femaleness exists & has meaning as it is desired by others. In conservative circles, the other is men.

Obviously, a Twitter thread is inadequate to do justice to this conversation. The point is that gender theory must built on imago Dei identity. If it isn't, our identity is forever malleable, created either by self or others.

While we evangelicals rightly reject self-created gender identity, we've yet to grapple w/ reality that group-created identity is no better or stable. Only identity built on vocation as embodied image bearers can tell us how to rightly relate to ourselves & those around us.

Here's e.g. of the problem:

To know myself as a sexed creature thru lens of someone's else's desire of me will forever subject me to another creature. I will (albeit willingly) become whatever it is they desire me to be rather than what my Creator desires for & of me.

I will build self-concept, make major life choices, etc to secure the desire & love of the other, not to serve them, but because I need it for my own sense of self.

Such a paradigm will lead me to offend both the Greatest Commandment & the 2nd. If my neighbor takes place of God in forming my self-concept, I cannot love God as I should & thus will not know self, making me unable to love others as I should.

If, however, I can form self-concept thru identity as loved, accepted female offspring of the Creator, I am freed to partner w/ male offspring of the Creator. Freed to enter into true partnership to fulfill our shared vocation as sons & daughters of God.

Someone recently suggested to me that evangelical gender convo is as much a psychological convo as it is a theological convo. I think this is fair insofar as we are teaching self-concept in them.

The irony, of course, is how many of same folks would resist psychological categories in first place. That doesn't stop us from operating in them, tho.