Is There a Difference?
There’s some confusion about what it means to be a human versus what it means to be a woman. Are those the same reality or different realities? How do they overlap? I like to think of it a like a Venn diagram.
Think of a circle that encompasses being a woman and a circle that encompasses being a man. There are some similarities there, so some parts of the circles are going to overlap and then some parts won’t overlap. What title would you put on that whole diagram? You would call it humanity because humanity encompasses both those who were created male and those who were created female.
Both All Human
What we don’t have is a third circle that says this is what humanity is and so humanity is something different than being a woman. No, everything about being a woman—whether it’s the distinctive part or the part similar to being a man—is all human. All of it. Everything about being a man—the distinctive part and the part similar to being a woman—it’s all human.
So, what we can’t do as women is transcend being a woman in order to be a human. You might hear someone say, I just want someone to stop treating me like a woman and treat me like a person. I think what they mean by that is something really valid: I want you to see me as something fuller than what you’re seeing me as. They’re probably being demeaned in some way and they’re saying, Could you see all of me?
But where that type of language gets us in trouble is that it implies that there’s a different category than woman, implying that if we can just get into the human category then we’ll have value.
But the Bible says that we are made male and female, and being a woman is completely valuable. Every part of it is human and valuable—not just the part that’s overlapping with being a man and not just the part that’s distinct from being a man. All of it.
