the gender excuse

I'm stunned by the variety of excuses for sin. Yes, that includes my own. Previously I mentioned the tendency to blame "virtues" for excesses of some kind. For instance, " 'Exhortation' is my specialty. Regardless of whether my words hit people like wrecking balls, I'm not doing anything wrong." 

Another category of excuse is gender. These excuses take the general form, "I realize that an attitude or action is sinful in some way, but it exemplifies my gender. Do you honestly expect me to deny my gender differences?" This is akin to entangling a sense of identity with sin, following to an extreme the sometimes misguided advice to "be yourself".

I opine that God doesn't want gender to disappear (although it's an intriguing question about our future heavenly bodies). I'd say that part of what the surrounding culture calls "masculine" or "feminine" is praiseworthy, but not every part. As Christian devotees called to a spiritual life, we will be inevitably countercultural. We should pursue right attitudes and actions and not fear narrow classifications of masculine or feminine, which are assigned by the flawed ideas of our culture. It may not be comfortable. It may not be conventional. 

But we cannot misuse gender to choose which sins to prefer, including sins of omission. The fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23 aren't gender-specific. Christians cannot place either too much or too little emphasis on each. It's pitiful to claim, "I can't be like that. I'm too [masculine,feminine]." Faithful disciples continue to have genders, but they don't continue to have the same sins.