The Battle of the Sexes: Everyone Loses

When my children were little, I told them they didn’t have gender-based roles.

As they grew older, they occasionally argued with me.

School, media, culture, and even well-meaning adults kept introducing a different story.

Boys were supposed to be one way. Girls another.

It is a story I’ve traced more fully in The Gendered American — how culture turned human wholeness into costume.

At the time, I couldn’t fully explain why I resisted those assumptions.

I only knew I wanted both of them to become fully human.

Looking back, I realize something else was happening.

Children are not only encouraged toward certain strengths.

They are also corrected away from others.

A boy who shows tenderness is often told to toughen up.

A girl who leads boldly is often told to soften.

The corrections rarely arrive as rules.

They arrive as jokes.

As compliments. As disappointment.

As subtle redirections from the people we love and trust.

Over time, they become formation.

We don’t simply learn who we are.

We learn which parts of ourselves are welcomed, and which parts are quietly redirected. That is human formation at its most intimate.

Years later, I finally found language for what I was trying to protect.

Human life begins with two complementary powers.

The power to create. The power to hold.

What I’ve come to see as the two postures explored in Caretakers and Caregivers — containment and connection, both necessary, neither complete alone.

Nature introduces both.

A father contributes to the beginning of life.

A mother receives, carries, protects, and holds that life until it is ready to enter the world.

Neither power is complete on its own. Without both, life does not exist.

Nature begins with their partnership.

Culture often teaches their separation.

Formation determines which story we carry into adulthood.

That pattern does not end at birth.
It becomes the pattern of a lifetime.

From that moment forward, life asks us all to create.

And life asks us all to hold.

Every family.
Every friendship.
Every community.
Every institution.

Every act of leadership.

Leadership reveals whether we have integrated both.

It is not simply the ability to create change.

It is the maturity to hold humanity while creating it.

The battle of the sexes is a no-win game because it asks us to compete over powers that life itself requires together.

The crisis isn’t our leaders.

It’s the leadership model we’ve learned to celebrate.

Leadership has become remarkably good at creating change.

It has become far less intentional about holding humanity.

If my children asked me today why I told them they didn’t have gender-based roles,

I would tell them this.

I wasn’t trying to erase their differences. I was trying to protect their humanity.

I wanted both of them to develop the power to create.
I wanted both of them to develop the power to hold.

Life would ask both of them for both.