It grieves me to say that we are living through a renewed struggle over gender roles and identity, predominantly promoted through online content.
The language is familiar—men and women, masculinity and femininity, marriage and family—but the setting has changed. The argument is now shaped by social media algorithms, economic anxiety, political polarisation and highly constructed performative online identities. Feminism, the “manosphere”, toxic masculinity, “tradwives”, transgender identity and LGBTQIA+ inclusion are increasingly presented as opposing sides in a curated cultural contest. At the extremes, each is made to serve as evidence that society has either progressed or collapsed.
These arguments are not merely abstract for me. They are present in friendships, marriages and family members I love dearly. They are shaping how many of our young people understand themselves and whether they believe they can trust, love or even live alongside people of other genders and sexualities; what it means to inhabit one’s gender has become, for many, a highly contested and polarising domain. These tensions are also present within the diversity of our Uniting Church.
The question facing the Uniting Church should never be: Which side are we on? A more demanding Christian question is: What kind of human community are we called to become in Christ?
A widening social divide
There is evidence that attitudes about gender are becoming more polarised in Australia. Research from the Australian National University found that the proportion of Australians who regarded gender equality as “very important” fell from 84.9 per cent in 2022 to 70.3 per cent in 2025. The proportion believing Australia had gone “too far” in promoting equality doubled to 19 per cent, with the shift particularly evident among men. The researchers nevertheless caution against reducing this to a simple story of progressive women and reactionary men. Economic insecurity, educational experience, housing stress and distrust of institutions are also involved. ANU, The Gender Gap Revisited
International research similarly suggests that younger men and women are diverging in their attitudes. In one major study, 60 per cent of Gen Z men agreed that men were being expected to do too much to support gender equality, compared with 38 per cent of Gen Z women. King’s College London
We should be careful with these figures. They do not tell us that all young women are liberal or that all young men are conservative. Nor do they prove that young men are innately hostile to equality. They do tell us that many younger people are learning to interpret gender through increasingly separate cultural worlds and digital social ecosystems.
That should concern our Churches, and its mission.
When the algorithm becomes the village
For most of human history, our understanding of gender was formed primarily within embodied communities and Religion. Some of these communities were nurturing; others were oppressive. Families, workplaces, churches, cultural traditions, sporting clubs and neighbourhoods taught people what it meant to be a woman or a man—or what happened when someone did not fit the expected categories.
Today, formation increasingly occurs online. A young person may inhabit a physical family, school and congregation while receiving their most powerful account of reality from TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, podcasts, gaming communities or anonymous forums.
These spaces can provide genuine belonging, especially for people who feel isolated locally. LGBTQIA+ people, young men unable to speak about loneliness, women experiencing sexism and people questioning their identity may find language and companionship online that are unavailable in their immediate communities.
But online belonging comes with real challenges. It often removes us from the complexity of real people and community. An algorithm does not have to teach us how to remain in relationship with someone who disappoints us. It mainly has to keep us watching.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has found that harmful manosphere content often attracts young men through legitimate interests such as fitness, relationships, confidence and financial independence. These concerns can then become gateways into content built around resentment, misogyny, rigid sexual expectations and the belief that men are victims of a society controlled by women. The research also emphasises that young men need positive relationships and credible alternatives, not simply condemnation. eSafety Commissioner, Young Men Online
The problem is wider than the manosphere. Online feminist, conservative, queer and religious communities can all become enclosed, rigid and reactionary social imaginaries. They may take a partial truth—a real experience of sexism, male loneliness, gender dysphoria, family breakdown or cultural displacement—and turn it into a complete explanation of the world, blaming the ‘other’ as the cause.
Real communities continually confront us with people who do not fit our theory; we need to learn grace, and we need each other to grow, learn, and develop as a people. Algorithms tend to supply more examples that confirm our biases.
Masculinity is not the problem
The phrase “toxic masculinity” is intended to identify destructive forms of masculinity: domination, emotional suppression, sexual entitlement, contempt for weakness and violence as a means of establishing power. It should never mean that masculinity itself is toxic.
Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell has argued that there is no single, timeless masculinity. There are multiple masculinities, shaped by culture, class, sexuality, race, work, family and history. Masculinity is not simply a set of traits possessed by every man; it is formed within relationships and institutions. Raewyn Connell, Masculinities
This is important pastorally. If every expression of male strength, competition, protectiveness, or physicality is treated with suspicion, young men may conclude that such places, like the Church, have no or little constructive account of what it means to be male. Into that absence step influencers who promise certainty, status and belonging.
Yet their vision is often a parody of strength. It produces a man who must dominate because he cannot bear vulnerability; who treats women as prizes or threats; and who mistakes emotional isolation for self-mastery.
The Christian tradition offers a deeper, richer vision of masculinity. Jesus displays courage without domination, authority without coercion, tenderness without shame and sacrifice without the performance of invulnerability. He touches those declared untouchable, receives ministry from women, weeps publicly, confronts abusive power and gives himself without making another person smaller.
The Church and Christian communities need places where boys and men can form friendships, learn responsibility, take worthwhile risks, develop emotional language and practise care. Men do not need to fear becoming less male. They need liberation from the fear that their purpose depends upon power over someone else.
Patriarchy harms women through domination while also wounding men by teaching them to distrust tenderness, dependence on others, interdependence and love. A Christian response should therefore be accountable about male power while remaining hopeful about men.
Feminism, agency and the unfinished work of equality
The Uniting Church possesses a deeply embedded feminist conviction, even when it does not always use that word. Women possess agency, intellect, spiritual and organisational authority and the capacity to exercise every ministry of the Church. The ordination of women is not simply an administrative permission. It is part of the Church’s doctrine and its understanding of the Spirit’s freedom to call and equip people for ministry. Uniting Church, The Nature of Doctrine and the Role of the Assembly
This does not require us to believe that women and men are interchangeable. It means that gender cannot be used to predetermine whose voice carries authority, who may lead, who possesses theological intelligence and reflective ability, or who is capable of sacrificial service.
Nor is feminism’s work complete. Australian women continue to undertake substantially more unpaid care than men—on average, 32 hours each week, nine hours more than men. The burden rises significantly for women raising children. Australian Government, Status of Women Report Card 2025 A gender pay gap also remains, although its size varies according to the measure used. Workplace Gender Equality Agency
Significant women in my life have reflected to me that the promise that women could simply “have it all” was always incomplete. It sometimes meant that women could enter workplaces designed around historical male patterns of availability while continuing to carry a disproportionate share of domestic and family care responsibilities. Parenthood is disproportionately more costly for women’s bodies and lives than for men. What appeared to be liberation could become an exhausting combination of career, parenting, household management and care.
This is not an argument for restoring 1950-style domestic roles, far from it. It is an argument against allowing a traditionally male-dominated market to define women’s choices and liberation.
A woman may freely choose professional leadership, full-time parenting, shared care, singleness, marriage or some changing combination across her life. But genuine choice requires economic security, social respect and relationships in which sacrifice is shared. The same freedom could also enable men to become deeply present fathers and carers without being regarded as less ambitious or less masculine. Many marriages work hard to achieve an egalitarian, negotiated balance.
The tradwife and the corporate woman
The online “tradwife” aesthetic appears to offer an alternative: domestic order, beauty, children, baking, dependence and clearly differentiated gender roles. Some women may freely and faithfully choose to devote a period of life to home and family (the economic security of this life is very difficult and rare). However, such work has real dignity and should not be dismissed as evidence of false consciousness or of lesser human value.
The concern arises when one woman’s vocation becomes a universal account of womanhood—or when economic dependence, male authority and female submission are romanticised while the risks remain invisible, including that risk of unaccountable abuse.
Much tradwife content is not traditional life but contemporary digital performance. Its carefully staged domesticity is produced for an audience, monetised through platforms and sustained by forms of entrepreneurial labour that the aesthetic itself tends to conceal. Like the image of the endlessly successful corporate woman, it can turn a wonderfully complicated human life into a consumable brand or a franchised product.
Both ideals can become cruel. One suggests that a woman has failed if she does not sacrifice ambition for family. The other suggests she has failed if she does.
In contract, Christian freedom is not freedom to conform to the correct social image. It is freedom to receive and exercise one’s gifts in loving responsibility to God and neighbour.
Sex, gender and those who do not fit neatly
Contemporary language around sex and gender can be confusing because several distinct matters are sometimes collapsed together.
Sex refers broadly to embodied biological characteristics. Gender concerns the social, relational and personal meanings associated with being a woman, a man or another gender. Transgender people experience their gender as different from that assigned to them at birth. Non-binary people do not experience themselves as fitting exclusively within the categories of woman or man. Intersex people are born with variations in sex characteristics; intersex is not itself a gender identity, and many intersex people identify simply as women or men or neither.
These categories need careful discussion, but the people concerned must never be reduced to categories.
In 2024, the Uniting Church’s 17th Assembly affirmed that transgender, gender-diverse and intersex people are beloved by God and full members of the body of Christ through baptism. It invited the Church to honour their gifts in worship, leadership and advocacy—not merely to acknowledge their existence. Uniting Church, Affirmation for Gender Diverse People
This is important. Inclusion is not an act of generosity performed by supposedly normal people for those at the margins. Baptism means that we receive one another as people whom Christ has already received.
That does not resolve every theological, ethical, pastoral or medical question. The Church can recognise complexity, especially where children and young people are concerned, without allowing vulnerable people to become political symbols of exploitation. Questions can be asked without humiliation. Difference can be discussed without denying another person’s agency, intellect or belonging.
Sexual freedom and right relationship
The Uniting Church is sometimes accused by those outside the church of having simply adopted the sexual ethics of liberal individualism. That is inaccurate and far from the truth of the painful discernment process that has enabled some of our distinctive voice in this space. A voice that didn’t cause the splits other churches internationally still struggle with.
The Church has recognised significant diversity in Christian understandings of marriage and sexuality. Since 2018, it has held two equal and distinct understandings of marriage, one referring to the covenant between a woman and a man and another to the covenant between two people. Ministers may act according to conscience within the Church’s polity.
What holds these understandings together is not the claim that any sexual choice is automatically good. The Church continues to speak of marriage as a public covenant, intended for life and directed towards the wellbeing of the partners and the wider human family. Its ethical language has also emphasised “right relationships”: relationships marked by consent, faithfulness, mutuality, responsibility, respect and freedom from exploitation. Uniting Church, Doc.bytes: Marriage
This offers something more demanding than either permissiveness or prohibition.
Sexuality is not merely private self-expression. It forms people, affects communities and creates responsibilities. At the same time, Christian sexual ethics cannot be reduced to enforcing heterosexual conformity. LGBTQIA+ couples are also called to practise fidelity, mutual care, truthfulness and covenantal responsibility.
The primary Christian question is not simply, “Is this permitted?” It is: “Does this relationship enable each person to become more truthful, loving, free and responsible in covenant with God reflected and practised in the covenant of marriage?”
Difference without destiny
The Church need not claim that men and women are identical. Embodiment matters. Pregnancy, childbirth and reproductive difference have profound personal and social consequences. Our bodies are not disposable accessories.
Yet difference does not dictate destiny.
There is no single Christian personality for women or men or any person. Scripture contains women who lead, judge, prophesy, teach, finance ministries and bear apostolic witness. It contains men who fight and build, but also men who sing, grieve, nurture, wash feet and form communities of care. The Spirit distributes gifts without consulting our gender stereotypes.
Galatians 3:28 does not erase Jewishness, social location or gendered embodiment. It denies that these differences establish roadblocks to access to Christ and communion with God. First Corinthians 12 goes further: difference becomes the material of communion. The members of the body are not valuable because they are the same, but because they belong to one another.
This may be the distinctive Uniting Church Christian contribution: equality without sameness, difference without domination, freedom without isolation and belonging without enforced conformity.
Public, private and protected spaces
Modern digital culture has also weakened the distinction between public and private life. Intimate experiences become content. Relationships become brands. Personal uncertainty becomes a public declaration expected to remain permanently consistent.
Human beings need forms of privacy. We also need smaller spaces of trust in which aspects of identity can be explored without being performed before everyone.
Many cultures have maintained gendered spaces. In some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, particular forms of knowledge and ceremony may be held as women’s business or men’s business. These practices are culturally specific and should not be appropriated as evidence for a universal Western theory of gender. They do, however, remind us that not every form of belonging must be public, undifferentiated or visible to all.
Men may need spaces with other men, and women with other women. Transgender, non-binary and intersex people may need queer spaces in which they are not required continually to explain themselves. Such spaces can support healing, cultural responsibility and honest conversation.
They become destructive when privacy protects abuse, when separation establishes superiority, or when participation in a gendered space becomes the sole measure of a person’s legitimacy and identity.
Within the Uniting Church, questions of gender and sexuality matter because people matter. They concern bodies, relationships, power, safety, vocation and belonging.
They are a vital part of communal life and the Christian faith.
However, the Church does not gather because its members have achieved agreement about gender. It gathers because Jesus Christ has called into being a reconciled and reconciling community. Our primary identity is received through grace and baptism, not secured through success in a cultural argument about gender and sexuality.
Gender and sexuality for people of faith will always be interpreted within the larger Christian story of creation, incarnation, reconciliation and new creation.
This creates tension because churches include families formed by different cultural, theological and generational imaginaries. One person experiences changing gender language as liberation; another experiences it as the loss of a world that gave life coherence. One fears exclusion; another fears that honest questions are no longer permitted. Christian community cannot simply affirm or mitigate every fear. It can, however, journey with the Crucified Risen Christ whose way transcends all our fears.
From coexistence to communion
The Church should aim for more than the managed coexistence of competing identities. Its calling is communion: the slow, demanding practice of receiving another person as a gift of grace in Christ, as we all grow more deeply and humbly into Christ as the people of God.
This will require congregations to forge:
- intergenerational relationships stronger than algorithmic addictive content;
- spaces where boys and men can speak about loneliness, purpose and masculinity without being recruited into resentment;
- communities where women’s authority, voice and agency is ordinary rather than exceptional;
- material support for families and carers, rather than romantic language about sacrifice;
- genuine participation by LGBTQIA+, transgender, non-binary and intersex people;
- respectful spaces for theological disagreement that do not make another person’s dignity debatable or their relationship in and with God dismissed;
- teaching about relationships shaped by consent, covenant, fidelity, mutuality and responsibility;
- friendships across political and gender differences in which people encounter one another as a gift rather than representatives of a category.
Communion does not mean pretending that every belief or practice is equally life-giving. It requires truth, repentance, boundaries and protection from abuse and sin. But its purpose is not victory over an enemy. It is the restoration of relationship in the reconciliation of Christ.
The gender war invites us to imagine that flourishing must be achieved at someone else’s expense: women against men, feminism against family, masculinity against equality, heterosexual people against queer people, tradition against freedom.
The gospel tells a very different story.
In Christ, power is not proved through domination. Difference need not become ‘othered’ away. Vulnerability is not failure. Care is not lesser value of work. The body is neither an idol nor an embarrassment.
Perhaps the Uniting Church’s most countercultural witness will not be a perfectly resolved theory of gender or sexuality. Perhaps it will be communities in which women, men and gender-diverse people can exercise agency, offer their gifts, accept responsibility and learn to treasure one another in love.
Not because our differences are unimportant.
Because, by the grace of God, we are made for communion.
Ben Gilmour
