Human rights and dignity are inextricably tied to the natural gender binary of male and female. This simple thesis, once internationally assumed, is now radically countercultural. Whereas older works on human rights recognized that the right to marry and found a family is grounded in the complementary binary revealed in the creation order, contemporary arguments for transgender ‘rights’ undermine human flourishing by subverting the very logic on which these rights stand.
Christians today must articulate explicitly and defend what our forebears affirmed implicitly—that marriage, family, and the gender binary (as established by God in creation) are fundamental to human dignity. Any effort to undermine these institutions must be resisted. In doing so, we can find help from unusual places—including international declarations, an executive order from the sitting President of the United States, and oral arguments at the Supreme Court. And this is all in addition to the order that God himself wrote into creation.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
Originally published in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was pioneered by the United States as an attempt to reassert what is universally true about human rights and dignity in the aftermath of history’s largest and bloodiest conflict. At the time, humanitarians across the globe were reeling, and they landed on forging a consensus that they thought could help prevent future atrocities.
Given the religious, ethnic, geopolitical, and economic diversity represented in the final list of state signatories, the common ground established in the UDHR is quite remarkable. In some ways, for those with eyes to see, its publication represents a modest victory of Christian civilizational norms regarding human dignity.
For the purposes of this essay, particularly notable in the Declaration is Article 16 on the importance of marriage and family in protecting human rights and dignity:
- Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
- Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
- The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Three elements in this text are noteworthy. First, one should note the UDHR’s unqualified statement of the gender binary: it is “men and women” who have the right to marry. One might respond that the UDHR was written before gender fluidity came onto the world stage. Precisely. Second, one should observe the connection between the gender binary, “men and women,” and the institution of marriage and the family. The underlying assumption is simple yet profound: new (complementary) marriages lead to the formation of new families through (complementary) procreation and child-rearing. The UDHR goes on in Article 26 to affirm the natural bond between parents and their biological offspring in its assertion of a parent’s right to direct their children’s education apart from state interference. Finally, one should note the UDHR’s use of the word “natural”: the family is the “natural”—i.e., what is according to Nature—and “fundamental group unit of society.” To put a fine point on it: what is natural—normal, right, good—according to the UDHR? Men and women marrying and forming families through procreation—all of which is predicated on a basic recognition of the gender binary inherent to human nature.
Perhaps more fascinating than the member states that signed the UDHR—a list that includes Afghanistan, China, Turkey, and the United Kingdom—is the list of eight countries that abstained, and their reasons for doing so. Six abstaining states were under the influence of the communist Soviet bloc at the time, which fundamentally disagreed with the idea of human rights altogether. South Africa abstained on grounds related to racial equality and its ongoing apartheid regime. And Saudi Arabia abstained on religious grounds in part due to its Islamic regime’s position on the rights of women.
It turns out communism, racism, and Islam don’t take kindly to the Christian ideals of human rights and dignity, especially related to our Maker’s design for us as male and female through the institutions of marriage and family. That was true in 1948. But fast forward to today, and you have nearly the exact same “-isms” arrayed against human rights and dignity. The twist is, the call is sometimes coming from inside the house. The United States is no longer a bastion of protection of marriage and the family, especially under the last administration. Instead we have led the West in laying the groundwork for their undermining and dissolution. Cultural Marxism, with its disdain for marriage, the family, and the gender binary, has taken deep root in the West. Rather than promoting human flourishing, Cultural Marxism strangles it—and human flourishing will continue to be strangled everywhere this ideology is allowed to fester.
Changing Tide
Thankfully, we may be seeing the tide change. On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order that reasserted the gender binary, male and female, as the basis for interpreting law in America at the federal level. Titled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” this executive order was a direct shot at the previous administration’s radical social engineering with respect to gender ideology. No longer will activists be able to play fast and loose with legal language regarding gender and sex. In fact, Trump’s executive order explicitly defines sex for legal purposes as referring to “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. ‘Sex’ is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity.’”
Even so, with America’s constitutional government being intentionally designed by our Founders with three branches of separated powers, coupled with our two- and four-year political cycle, Christians will need to join in earnest the contest for the truth over our created natures as male and female, and teach our churches to do the same. Orders that can be established with the stroke of a pen can be revoked with the stroke of a pen. The fight is not anywhere close to being over. In many ways, it has only just begun.
United States v. Skrmetti
In 2023, the Tennessee legislature passed a law to restrict off-label and experimental use of pharmaceuticals by minors seeking to change their biological sex. The passage of this law was motivated by the desire to prevent known complications from these untested hormonal drugs. Besides the obvious dangers of encouraging body-dissociative psychosis in pursuit of an unattainable fantasy, complications from these drugs include malformation, irreversible damage, suicidality, and permanent sterilization.
Tennessee quite obviously has an interest in protecting the long-term well-being of minors in the state, which includes preserving their procreative potential into adulthood. Administering harmful “gender-affirming” drugs does the opposite. One would think that the United States has a similar concern for its citizens. Instead, the Department of Justice, under the direction of Joe Biden, sued the State of Tennessee (represented by State Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti) on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional and falls afoul of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As of early 2025, Tennessee’s law is currently on the docket of the US Supreme Court under the title, United States v. Skrmetti.
The actions of the Biden administration violate both the spirit and letter of Article 16 of the 1948 UDHR. If Biden’s Department of Justice prevails at the Supreme Court, then the future rights of American minors to one day marry (which naturally includes copulation) and form a family (which naturally involves procreation) are endangered. In other words, if we sterilize minors, we take away their rights to marry and have a family. And if minors cannot consent to sexual relations with an adult, in what world would we allow them to “consent” to sexual sterilization by an adult?
Thankfully, sanity may prevail at the Court instead. In a line of questioning aimed at the team of plaintiffs, which sported the Department of Justice’s Solicitor General and one “transgender” lawyer (Chase Strangio), Justice Alito blew a hole in the logic of their case, which they were attempting to build on the idea that “transgender” status is immutable (i.e. not able to be changed) and therefore protected like race and sex:
JUSTICE ALITO: Counsel, I don’t think you had a chance to finish answering my question whether transgender status is immutable. You cited a bunch of other criteria, but is it immutable?
MR. STRANGIO [sic, Strangio is a biological woman]: I—I think that the record shows that the—the discordance between a person’s birth sex and gender identity has a strong biological basis and would satisfy an immutability test. And I also think, under this Court’s precedents for determining whether something is a suspect or quasi-suspect classification, a distinguishing characteristic is sufficient.
JUSTICE ALITO: Does the category of—does transgender status apply to individuals who are gender fluid?
MR. STRANGIO: I think that the—the distinguishing characteristic is to have a birth sex that does not align with—or a gender that does not align with one’s birth sex. So it may include people who have different understandings of—of their gender identity, but I think it is still the distinguishing characteristic of a birth sex and a gender identity that are incongruent.
JUSTICE ALITO: Are there individuals who are born male, assigned male at birth, who at one point identify as female but then later come to identify as male, and, likewise, for individuals who are assigned female at birth, at some point identify as male—as female—I’m sorry—identify as male but later come to identify as female? Are there not such people?
MR. STRANGIO: There are such people. I agree with that, Justice Alito.
JUSTICE ALITO: So it’s not an immutable characteristic, is it?
Alito drove home the point that if people can supposedly change their gender back and forth at will, then transgenderism is not an immutable characteristic. And if transgender status is not immutable, then the Department of Justice’s case falls apart and Tennessee’s law stands. This would be a victory for human rights and dignity, which are grounded in God’s design and the creation order.
But even if a majority of the Supreme Court Justices rule reasonably on this case, and even apart from President Trump’s recent encouraging executive order declaring there to be only two genders, the surest foundation Christians have to make the case for human flourishing in line with our natural design as male and female is rooted in God’s revelation.
Creation Order
Genesis 1 and 2 narrate how God created and ordered the cosmos according to his good will. On the sixth and final day of creation, God capped off his creation order by the special creation of man and woman. God made Adam and Eve male and female for the purpose of marriage and procreation, which serve as the foundations of the institution of the family and the cornerstone of human society. Every family on earth is not only informed by this original pattern, but each family is literally formed through a common descent from the first man and first woman. One should carefully note the connection between being created in the image of God, which grounds human dignity, and being made male and female (see particularly Gen. 1:27).
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26–28)
Jesus connects God’s creation of mankind male and female with God’s design for marriage in Matthew 19:4–6, where he goes on to quote from the following passage in Genesis 2:23–24, quoted below:
23 Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:23–24)
The logic of these two chapters is straightforward: God made mankind male and female for marriage, and marriage for procreation, and procreation for family formation, and family formation and multiplication for filling the earth. Any stress on any part of this chain threatens the integrity of the whole.
Conclusion
What this all means is that what the UHDR affirmed implicitly, we must affirm explicitly, especially in the face of contemporary challenges to the natural order of the cosmos—even from our own government. Marriage and family, which are definitional to the human experience, are inseparable from the natural and inherent sexual binary. The logic of the two-ness and complementary nature of the marriage bond is based in God’s original design, reflected in all of creation, and testified to in the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature.
What this means is that an attack on the gender binary—which is an attack on what it means to be male or female—should be assessed as nothing less than an attack on marriage, family, and the very foundations of human rights and dignity. If recent news is any indication, a lane has opened up for a robust defense in the public square of the biblical witness. Let’s make that case, to the glory of God and for the future flourishing of humanity.
