You are a man or you are woman. You are a witness to the particular charism of being either one or the other. We are able to live together by giving to one another and by receiving from one another. We are able to receive from others because we do not already have everything. They have what we don’t. We are able to receive from them whatever they have and are able to contribute, because we cannot provide it for ourselves. We need what only they can give us, and so we need them, and they need us. Given differences, of age and of experience and of sex orient us towards one another. Sexual difference brings us together, and make us look to other, appeal to them and wait for them to provide whatever we cannot provide for ourselves. Our need makes us receptive, prompting us to make them welcome. What is more, we may not know what they have to contribute; they may surprise us, and thus we cannot control them, or insist that they make only the contribution that we demand and allow. What they bring may not be entirely determined by us, and this means that to some degree they are free of us. We are witnesses that differences, and sexual differences in particular, are not subject to our determination. We cannot entirely define and control them. Attempts to deny or reduce differences are untruthful, and in the long term fruitless. Attempts to expunge sexual difference are futile and an assault on the truth.
God did not intend a unisex human. God does not make everything identical to everything else, for then there would only be one thing, and there would be no one to see it and marvel at it. God brings order, not confusion; God brings what is new, but what is new supplements what is given, it does sweep it aside as though it were all a mistake. God made man, male and female he made them. God saw that they were good, both individually and together. Christian doctrine says that creation is good, our sexual differences and complementarity are good, and for the health of our society it is the job of Christians to say so.
