Dear friends, this post’s title is not a mere attention getter. It is an actual caution to parents to read this before allowing children access. But on another level, it is a warning that you must gain discretion yourself and give it to your children. You must say, “My son [my daughter], do not lose sight of these— keep sound wisdom and discretion.” (Proverbs 3:21) With that in mind, we proceed.

“Bleeder” and “Breeder.” Are you familiar with these cultural slang terms? In a way, I hope not, and yet if not, I am going to crack the shell of your innocence. These are current replacements for “woman” in the biological sense. And in the Biblical sense.

It is appropriate that having just celebrated Mother’s Day, we consider the beauty of motherhood and the glory of female in the image of God because it is under attack in new ways all around us today. How do you like this new definition by transgender author Andrea Long Chu? “Female is a ‘universal existential condition’ defined by submitting to someone else’s desires.” (Shrier 152) How disgustingly inglorious and demeaning!

In her book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Abigail Shrier exposes the denigration with which womanhood is being viewed in our culture. The new terms, such as “pregnant people” and “people who menstruate” and the above mentioned “bleeders and breeders” (as well as others too inappropriate to repeat), reduce God's design to utilitarian indignity. As Ms. Shirer morosely asks, “What does [this terminology] offer … girls, except membership in a group so grotesquely described that they could hardly wish to belong to it? Our biological gifts so downgraded, a young girl can only look toward the future with distaste, if not outright dread.”(158)  The author also considers in her work how easily-accessed violent pornography has frightened girls away from relationships with boys and how technology and social media have isolated girls from their friends—all factors leading to an increase in teens identifying as transgender males.

While I believe her facts and agree with her reasoning, I hope she is mistaken on the pervasiveness of this view. But PLEASE, PLEASE do not dismiss these ideas as “out there in the world” unable to touch your daughters, your children. We must recognize the dangers surrounding us and commit to speaking the truth and living it with joy.

The day after I read the above section of Shrier’s book, I came in my reading through the Psalms to number 57. How timely are the words:

I am in the midst of lions; …
men whose teeth are spears and arrows,
    whose tongues are sharp swords.

… They spread a net for my feet—
    I was bowed down in distress.
They dug a pit in my path—

But God’s word brings us hope! Let’s return to the opening chapters of Genesis, where the Creator with great deliberation does more than speak man into existence--he “forms,” he “fashions” him from the dust of the ground and breathes into him the breath of life. He puts the man to sleep, removes a rib from his side, and “builds” a woman, whom he brings to the man. She is a gift.

Special creations indeed! Made in the likeness of the creator and BLESSED with a special purpose: to be fruitful and multiply, to fill and subdue the earth, to be his “very good” representatives in the earth. Note the emphasis. Not a duty assigned; the mandate is a blessing! Mothers and girls yet to be mothers, this is your beautiful gift. The King of the universe has blessed you with the privilege of being a partner in building his good kingdom, and he built your body especially for it.

He is the giver of every good and perfect gift. And it is urgent, o church, that we proclaim it, “telling to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and His strength, and his wonderful works that he has done.”

Psalm 57 does not end in the pit, and neither will I. Instead,

I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples;
    I will sing praises to you among the nations.
For your steadfast love is great to the heavens,
    your faithfulness to the clouds.

 Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!
    Let your glory be over all the earth!