“Male and female created he them, and blessed them.” Genesis 5:2a, KJV
“What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpent’s offer and had said to him instead, ‘Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be–let me be a woman,'” Elisabeth Elliot.
When I was in tenth grade, I imagined what life would be if I were someone else. I imagined myself as a girl in my class who wasn’t too tall or too plump, as I saw myself. She had the cutest layered hair cut. Not in the style of Farrah Fawcett, who had yet to achieve fame, but who would seed a crop of feathered hair across our nation.
Instead of wondering who I was, who I was supposed to become, I worried more about what people, especially boys, wanted me to be. That was who I wanted to be.
Around the time I was musing within my high school mind, many of the world’s women imagined what life would be if they could only be like men. Not actually men, mind you. Just like men.
So in the ’70s women wanted to be like men. But they couldn’t be like men because men don’t have babies. Men could have sex casually and choose to avoid the consequences.
So women wanted abortion. And now men have sex with them and push them to abortion, at least some of the time. Sometimes, it’s a girl’s or woman’s parents. Sometimes, it’s her abuser, her trafficker. No matter the situation, her choice isn’t as free as abortion supporters had promised it would be.
Women wanted to be like men and still pay a big price for behaving as men sometimes do.
Now a new possibility emerges on that same front, a vaccination to prevent pregnancy. And it seems possible that such a medication is on the horizon for women.
It sounds like a great idea. No hormones.
No side effects?
Not so fast.
Immunizations get our bodies to attack cells we don’t want.
“[W]hat comes of immunizing a woman against herself? For this is precisely what a birth control vaccine would do. Where other forms of contraceptives attack the female body’s natural cycles, a vaccine would deputize the work of pregnancy prevention to her own flesh, teaching her cells to become belligerents against their own. It would bring the war on womanhood right down to the cellular level, teaching her body to strip itself of the very thing that makes it female,” Carmel Richardson.
Many men and women today who are de-transitioning from trying to become the opposite sex are learning that what we want when we are young often changes later on. Some treatments are permanent. We can’t always turn back from what we decided in our youth.
Brenda Baletti quotes Brian Hooker, PhD. PE: “The big question [about a contraceptive vaccine] that comes to mind is ‘reversibility.’ It is very difficult to turn off an immune response complete with memory B-cells after it has been turned on. My fear is that many would be left permanently sterile from this type of vaccine.”
Richardson points out that, at the least, “’People with especially enthusiastic immune responses‘ could end up infertile for several years.”
Imagine abusers and traffickers threatening, forcing the vaccine on their victims, not bothering to persuade, not concerned with consequences.
As Eve learned the hard way, trying to be who we want to be without regard to God’s intentions doesn’t produce the desired result. A deal with the devil never pays as it promises.
Women striving to be “like men” has led to today–when men want to become women and women want to become men. Social movements keep moving. They don’t stand still. From the ’70s to today, people seek new, self-created identities.
The recently departed Dr. Timothy Keller reminded us that “identity is received, not achieved.” We can never make ourselves into something better than who God intended for us to be, who he specifically gifted us to be.
Attempting to create ourselves anew is distorted pride.
Elisabeth Elliot quotes Isak Dinesen to define an undistorted God-centered pride, a good kind of pride, as “faith in the idea that God had when he made us. A proud man is conscious of the idea, and aspires to realize it. He does not strive towards a happiness, or comfort, which may be irrelevant to God’s idea of him. His success is the idea of God, successfully carried through, and he is in love with his destiny.”
Our attempts to recreate ourselves in mentally conjured images are Eve’s sin, distorted self-pride. Idolization of self.
Social movements move. They do not stand still. Nothing stays put. We will not reach an end that says, “I am content with the person I am,” unless we come to God’s view, who he had in mind when he made us.
Fulfillment lies in following his plan.
Let the Creator be the Creator.
Be the creation he made.
