Constructing Men and Women

In her essay in World Magazine ("Constricted by 'Constructs'"), Janie B. Cheaney laments the recent American Psychological Association counseling guidelines for boys and men:

From the beginning, Guidelines claims that all defining characteristics of masculinity are socially constructed. All of them. Men are that way because they are taught that way. Testosterone? A trifle. DNA? Forget it. The only place, oddly, where the APA even suggests that nature may play a part is in the supposed genetic makeup of trans men (i.e., biological women).

Of course, the Lord disagrees. From the beginning, he created the world differently:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

Human beings have a way of distorting God's world and manipulating it for their own purposes. The Apostle Paul warns us of this as well:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. - Romans 1:19-23

Ignoring God's purposes and plans for us as men and women can have dire consequences. Janie Cheaney ends her essay with this:

Being "traditionally" male is not a psychological problem. But if we don't figure out that men and women are, by and large, a certain way because they're created that way, and learn to work with it rather than against it, some psychological mainspring within the collective culture is certain to break.