Is She Safe?

How Gender Stereotypes Harm Women

Some years ago, I visited Honolulu on my way home to Tennessee from Micronesia. I had just completed a year as a student missionary on the island of Pohnpei. My friend and I decided to visit the beach in Honolulu. Since I had just spent a year on an island where it was considered taboo to show too much skin, I felt self-conscious and exposed in just a bikini. To counteract this reverse culture shock, I put on a pair of board shorts over my swimsuit. Since I’m a 5’11” women, these were men’s shorts, as women’s shorts weren’t long enough for Micronesian standards.

I must have stood out like a sore thumb. In Honolulu, women often wore bikinis everywhere when they were around the beach area. As we walked down the sidewalk toward the beach, some people leaned out of their 2nd-story window and shouted an anti-gay slur at me. “We don’t want your kind here!” they screamed. “Get out of our state!”

My body tensed in fear and my brain went into fight-or-flight mode. I just wanted to get out of there and go cry somewhere. I didn’t enjoy my time at the beach that day. I honestly don’t even remember being at the beach. The rest of the day is a dark blur.

Why am I telling you a story about something that happened in 2006? Because I’m seeing similar things happen today more and more frequently. The most recent controversy involved an Olympic boxer named Imane Khelif. I won’t rehash all the details, but Khelif was accused of being a man, and an army of online trolls spewed all manner of vicious hatred toward her.

Of course, this isn’t just a problem online. Hateful words on the internet lead to hateful actions in real life. And people are being emotionally traumatized and put in actual physical danger. My story happened over 20 years ago, before the debate about trans people reached the fever pitch it’s at today. I can only imagine what people who don’t fit into gender stereotypes must experience today.

Women have long been held to impossible-to-meet cultural beauty standards, judged for being too fat, too thin, too curvy, not curvy enough, too tall, too athletic—on and on it goes.

On top of all this, women now face additional scrutiny from online “transvestigators” who have convinced themselves they can identify whether a woman is really a woman simply by analyzing her photos. This mindset starts online but spills over into the real world. Many people today seem to think they have a right to an opinion on whether a woman looks “feminine” enough to be considered a female. Is her hair long enough? Are her facial features soft enough? Are her shoulders too broad? Are her breasts too small? Are her hips too narrow? Is she too skinny?

The people who participate in the “is she really a man?” debates often think they are protecting women by demanding that “masculine-looking” women prove that they are women before entering sports competitions. They think they are protecting women in bathrooms by demanding that trans women use the men’s bathrooms.

They also think they are talking about someone far away, someone they don’t know and have never met, someone whose feelings they don’t have to consider. There are no relational consequences for criticizing someone on the internet.

Or so we’d like to think. The women we are talking about online may never see our comments about them. But the women in our life will. Our wives, sisters, daughters, mothers, neighbors, and friends will know what we think about women who don’t measure up to our subjective standards of femininity.

I included my story to show that these discussions aren’t just intellectual debates online. Hateful people can and do harm women in real life because they decided, with a quick glance, that they are not feminine enough.

“I would never scream obscenities out a window at a stranger” you say. But would you participate in online debates about a complete stranger’s gender or appearance?  Your words online can harm people. These are real humans that you are discussing. They are being traumatized by the vitriol being hurled their way. That should matter to us, even if we don’t know them personally.

The great irony of this for me is that I grew up in the South in a conservative, religious home. I’ve lived my whole life hearing people’s opinions on women’s appearance. In churches, the discussion centers on what women should wear and how they should behave to be considered “modest.”

When my husband was a pastor, I was targeted multiple times by church members who didn’t think I dressed appropriately. My skirts weren’t long enough for their standards.

The common thread here is people making judgments about me based on their ideas of what a woman should be and how she should look. Both on the sidewalk and in the church, I felt unwanted, unsafe, and unprotected. And I learned that as a woman, no matter what I do I can’t win. I can’t please everyone with my appearance. No matter where I go, I will always feel a degree of insecurity. No matter how I’m dressed, someone will take offense. Even the church, which is supposed to be a community of belonging, is not a safe place for women.

The people telling me to change my clothes didn’t want me in church if I didn’t live up to their standards. Others who heard about the incident expected me to conform to the extremists’ wishes to “keep the peace.” Most people just wanted to ignore it. But looking away when people are being attacked just ensures that the victim endures the pain alone.

Churches who ignore harm are not a true body of Christ because they don’t feel the pain of their wounded extremities. They would rather cut off a hand or a foot than deal with the injuries they have sustained. How many churches have crippled themselves because they refused to stand up for the vulnerable, because they preferred to protect the feelings of judgmental critics instead of their defenseless targets?

When Jesus was on earth, all kinds of people were drawn to Him. In particular, social outcasts like prostitutes and tax collectors, those who didn’t live up to society’s standards of who they should be, felt welcome in His presence.

Jesus demonstrated the kind of love that He wants us to live. Before He left this earth, He gave His disciples this instruction: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34).

Does your presence make people feel safe, welcome, and loved? Does your church make people feel safe, welcome, and loved?

Perhaps you are already a loving person. But if you recognize that there are those in your church community who make others feel unsafe, unwelcome, or unloved, maybe it’s time to consider what you will do about it. The vulnerable and defenseless need someone who will stand up for them. Are you actively working to make your church a safer place for them? Or are you silently standing by while they get amputated?