a word before we begin

I am going to tell you something in this booklet that will sound, at first, like one of the most offensive things a person can say in our moment, and I am going to spend the whole of these pages showing you it is simply true. Here it is. Men and women are not nearly as different as you have been told. Not by the world, which lies about nearly everything, and, more painfully, not by the church, which took the world’s lie and preached it back to you as though it came down from heaven.

Hear me carefully, because the ground has to be laid exactly right or the whole thing will be misheard within a sentence. God made them male and female. I believe that with my whole heart; it is the plain word of Genesis, and I will not give back an inch of it. There are real differences between a man and a woman, woven into the body by God, good and purposed and not to be erased. That is not what I am contesting. What I am contesting is the vast catalog of differences piled on top of that, the ones about temperament and feeling and the inner life, the notion that women are the soft, emotional, tender sex and men the hard, stoic, unfeeling one, that we are two nearly separate species who can barely understand each other across the divide. That picture is not from God, and it is not from your Bible, and it is not even very old. It was built a couple of centuries ago, and it was handed to you as nature when it was only ever nurture, and it has done more quiet damage than almost anything else the age has sold us.

So let me tell you where I stand before we take another step, because I do not fit the boxes and I will not pretend to. I am not an egalitarian; I do not believe men and women are interchangeable, and the people who say so are ignoring the plain design of God. And I am not a complementarian in the way that word is now used, because that camp, whatever its intentions, has swallowed a great deal of the temperamental lie and called it doctrine. I hold a third thing, and since it has no name I have given it one. I am a Wholist. And in a moment I will tell you exactly what that means.

Wholist | ˈhō-list |

noun · a belief system

one who holds that man and woman, though truly made male and female, are far more alike than different. Each is created a whole person, made to feel deeply and act bravely both, and the splitting of humanity into a soft, emotional sex and a hard, unfeeling one is a manufactured lie, not the design of God.

  1. That God made humankind male and female, truly and bodily and on purpose, and that this design is good and is not to be erased.
  2. That the differences between the sexes have been wildly overstated, and that most of what we are taught to call natural, the soft woman and the hard man, is manufactured, not made by God.
  3. That every person is created whole, to feel deeply and to act bravely both, and that the splitting of the human being into an emotional half and an active half, and the handing of one half to each sex, is a lie.
  4. That the Scripture alone is sufficient to tell us what a man and a woman are, over against a world, and a church, that has believed a counterfeit.
  5. That headship and submission are a matter of order and covering between a husband and a wife, and have nothing whatever to do with temperament or worth, and are a separate subject from this one.

That is the view. Everything in this booklet is the unfolding and the defense of it, from history, from anthropology, and above all from the Word of God. Come and see whether it does not hold.

And if you wonder why I would call it Wholism, the root of the word is right there in the second chapter of Genesis, in the moment the woman is first made. When the man beholds her, he names her with his own name. He is ish, and he calls her ishah, which is simply his own name carried over into the feminine, the same word, as if to say she-man, or a female version of himself. And what does he say in the same breath? Not how unlike him she is, but how like: this is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. Sameness first. Kinship first. The likeness is what he marvels at, and the difference, real as it is, comes second and quieter. That is the whole of Wholism in a single verse: one flesh, one image, the same clay, named nearly the same name, alike before they are ever contrasted.1

chapter one

the lie of mars and venus

You know the slogan even if you have never read the book. Men are from one planet, women from another, two alien species who must labor with charts and translators just to understand each other across the void. That single idea, in a thousand forms, is the background hum of nearly every conversation our culture has about the sexes. It sold tens of millions of copies as a book and then soaked into the water until no one thinks to question it. And it is worth noticing, before we go a step further, how strange a claim it actually is, once you say it plainly: that half the human race and the other half are so fundamentally unlike that mutual understanding is nearly hopeless.2

I want to hand you, at the very start, the single test that this whole booklet runs on, because once you hold it you can weigh the claim for yourself. It is this. If a difference between men and women is truly natural, truly built into us by God, then it will show up everywhere and in every age. It will be a human universal, because human nature does not change with the century or the country. Real design is constant. But if a supposed difference keeps changing, if it looks one way in this age and the opposite way in that one, if one culture assigns a trait to men and another assigns the very same trait to women, then you are not looking at nature at all. You are looking at a costume, something sewn by a particular time and place and then mistaken for skin.

Real design is constant. A thing that keeps changing its mind about which sex it belongs to was never nature to begin with.

Hold that test up to the soft-woman, hard-man picture, and watch what happens to it, because it does not survive contact with history for even a moment. The traits we are told are eternally masculine and eternally feminine turn out to wander from one sex to the other across the centuries, to reverse, to trade places, to mean one thing in one age and the opposite in the next. And a thing that cannot make up its mind about which sex it belongs to was very obviously never bolted to either one by God. That is the thread I mean to pull, and the whole garment of the modern lie comes apart as I pull it.

it came from babylon, not the bible

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sources & notes

  1. Genesis 2:23, where the man, ish (אִישׁ), names the woman ishah (אִשָּׁה), the same word in feminine form, “She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man,” preceded by “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” The naming emphasizes correspondence and likeness (so most of the older commentators, e.g. Adam Clarke and Keil-Delitzsch, who render the sense “she-man” or “female man,” as Latin virago from vir). Some modern philologists note the two Hebrew words may not share a deep etymological root; the text nonetheless uses them as a deliberate wordplay of sameness, which is the point drawn here.
  2. The “men and women are from different planets” framing is popularized by John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992), among the best-selling nonfiction titles of its era. It is cited here as the representative popular expression of strong sex-difference essentialism, not as a scholarly source.
  3. The “separate spheres” doctrine and the “cult of domesticity” arose as products of industrialization. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (Yale University Press, 1977). Historians locate the ideology’s rise in the decades around 1800 and its peak roughly 1840–1860, tied directly to the Industrial Revolution’s separation, for the first time, of waged work from the household. Before industrialization, family members generally worked together in and around the home.
  4. That the domestic ideal was class-bound is standard in the historical literature: the sheltered, non-laboring woman was a middle-class status marker made possible by a single male income, while working-class, poor, and farming women continued in hard physical and wage labor throughout. See Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood; and general treatments of the Cult of Domesticity, which note it applied only to families who could afford a non-earning wife.
  5. Pink/blue sex-coding is recent. For most of the nineteenth century small children of both sexes wore white; no fixed color-to-sex rule existed. A 1918 trade journal and a 1927 Time survey of U.S. department stores show the coding still unsettled, with several major stores recommending pink (as a shade of red, deemed “stronger”) for boys and blue for girls. The now-standard pink-for-girls, blue-for-boys convention did not fix until roughly the 1940s and was driven by marketing. See Jo B. Paoletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America (Indiana University Press, 2012). (Some scholars, e.g. Marco Del Giudice, argue the earlier “reversal” was less uniform than often claimed; either way, the fixed modern coding is recent and commercial, not natural.)
  6. Honored male weeping in antiquity and the Middle Ages is well documented. The Iliad (c. 8th century B.C.) repeatedly depicts warriors, including Achilles, and the whole Greek army weeping openly and without shame. Hélène Monsacré, The Tears of Achilles (French 1984; Eng. trans. Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018), argues these tears confirm rather than diminish heroic manhood, and that the “stoically inexpressive” male ideal is a later development. Medieval chronicles similarly record kings, knights, and assemblies weeping publicly; see Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), on the era’s open emotionality.
  7. Strong men weeping without shame in Scripture: Joseph (Genesis 42:24; 43:30; 45:1–2; 46:29); Jacob and Esau reconciling (Genesis 33:4); David and Jonathan at their parting, “they wept one with another, until David exceeded” (1 Samuel 20:41); David’s tears throughout the Psalms (e.g. Psalm 6:6); and the Lord Jesus at Lazarus’s tomb, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). None is treated as unmanly.
  8. The Hebrew chayil (חַיִל), used of the woman of Proverbs 31:10, denotes strength, might, valour, and force, and is used elsewhere of armies and “mighty men of valour” (e.g. Joshua 1:14; 1 Samuel 16:18). The “virtuous woman” is literally an eshet chayil, a woman of valour. W. E. Vine and standard Hebrew lexicons (BDB). On women’s continuous participation in production and trade across pre-industrial history, see general economic and social history of the household economy.
  9. Proverbs 31:10–31: the woman “considereth a field, and buyeth it” and “planteth a vineyard” (v. 16), “perceiveth that her merchandise is good” (v. 18), “maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant” (v. 24); while her husband “is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land” (v. 23). The passage places her economic enterprise and his seat in civic leadership side by side without tension, the interpretive key (v. 30) being that “a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.”
  10. That parental duties are given to both parents, not divided by sex: “My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother” (Proverbs 1:8; cf. 6:20), pairing father and mother in the same teaching role; “ye fathers… bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4), assigning the nurturing task to fathers; and the general commands to train and discipline children (Deuteronomy 6:6–7; Proverbs 22:6), addressed to parents without distinction of sex.
  11. That the overwhelming majority of Scripture’s commands are given to all believers without distinction of sex: the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23); “be strong and of a good courage” (Joshua 1:9; Deuteronomy 31:6), to all; “be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted” (Ephesians 4:32), to all; “weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15); and the many “one another” commands (e.g. John 13:34; Galatians 6:2). Sex-specific instructions (as in Ephesians 5:22–33; 1 Peter 3:1–7) are comparatively few and concern the ordering of marriage, not temperament.
  12. The marriage order of headship and the wife’s submission (Ephesians 5:22–33; Colossians 3:18–19; 1 Peter 3:1–7) is a matter of structure and covering within marriage, not a statement about temperament, capability, or worth, and is treated here as a distinct subject. Proverbs 31 demonstrates the distinction: full female economic strength and enterprise coexisting with the husband’s civic headship. Conflating the marriage order with temperamental stereotype is the specific error this booklet identifies.
  13. The reference is to the broad genre of popular Christian marriage and “gender difference” literature and conference material built on strong essentialist premises, treated here as a category rather than by singling out particular titles. The critique is that it imports the popular Mars-and-Venus framework (see note 1) and attaches proof-texts, rather than deriving its anthropology from Scripture.
  14. Humanity is inherently worshipping. Romans 1:21–25, describing the exchange of the worship owed the Creator for the worship of created things, i.e. misplaced rather than absent worship; Ecclesiastes 3:11, God “hath set the world” (eternity) “in their heart”; Matthew 6:24, no one can serve two masters, implying all serve one; and the classic formulation of Augustine, Confessions I.1, “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee.”
  15. The Fall’s corruption of the God-made bonds between persons is the root here (Genesis 3, including the fracture in the man-woman relation, 3:12, 16) and the adversary’s settled program against the works of God: “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy” (John 10:10); “your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). The distortion of how the sexes understand one another is framed here as one front in that longstanding opposition.
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