I’ll never forget the day at middle school camp when a boy named Tommy offered to carry my friend’s Bible after chapel. I didn’t get it. I stood there bewildered, wondering, Why would she need you to carry her Bible?

My friend seemed to be delighted with Tommy’s attention, which confused me even more. Tommy was a smelly know-it-all. I wished he would leave us alone so we could run to our cabin and get changed to go swimming.

I didn’t start liking boys until much later than my friend, which meant I also didn’t care about doing my hair or wearing makeup. Once my eyes did flutter open to the world of comparison, I felt embarrassed by all the ways I didn’t measure up to other girls. I tried to catch up by learning about style and how to hold a curling iron without burning myself.

New Pressures for Teen Girls

Today’s teen comparison struggles aren’t new, but if you took my silly middle school self from forty years ago and positioned me on today’s timeline, I’m convinced there would be doubts and insecurities to contend with that I never conceived of as a kid. Not only are there new, digital ways to compare, there are additional pressures that simply didn’t exist. 

In our current culture, the boundary lines have been drawn extra tight around femininity. A girl must look, talk, and walk a certain way. She must wear certain clothes and do certain activities. And if she steps over some imaginary boundary line, the question is immediately raised: What if she actually isn’t a girl?

Ironically, it’s not God imposing such a harsh and narrow view of femininity; it’s culture. And it’s destroying our teens. 

NBC reported in 2024 that nearly 30 percent of Gen Z identify as LGB (lesbian, gay, or bi) and Pew research reported that 5 percent of young adults in the United States say their gender is different from what they were assigned at birth. In a world where teen girls are searching for truth about themselves, let’s be women who show them where the truth is found. 

3 Biblical Truths about Femininity

If there’s a teen girl you know and love, here are three freeing biblical truths to remind and re-remind her of God’s view of her femininity.

1. Just because she’s not like that other girl doesn’t mean she isn’t a girl. 

The new face on the same tired battle of comparison has to do with identity. It starts with a girl glancing sideways and noticing she’s not like other girls, then wondering if she actually is a girl.

Back when I wished Tommy would leave my friend and I alone so we could just go swimming, I can’t imagine what it would have done to my soul to wonder, What if I’m actually a boy?

Here’s the truth: girls express their femininity in vastly different ways. Some girls love math and science, play sports, and don’t express much emotion. Other girls love art, play in the orchestra, and enjoy sappy movies. These contrasts shouldn’t surprise us if we look at the rest of creation. Just consider how many types of fruits, flowers, and fish there are in the world. Would God really make us girls like a string of identical paper dolls? 

Culture’s boundary lines for gender expression are narrow and restrictive. God’s boundary lines are wide enough for every unique girl to fit inside with room to spare. 

2. Femininity is an expression of what God is like (not just what she is like). 

I love an illustration that Jimmy Needham used in a sermon titled “Gender in Genesis.” He compared God creating people in His own image (Gen. 1:27) to an artist painting a self-portrait. But as God gets to work, there’s a surprise tucked into how He refers to Himself, saying, “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1:26, emphasis added). 

Because God is three in one (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), He not only refers to Himself with plural pronouns, He uses two canvases to create His self-portrait: male and female. One canvas would have only given half the picture.

It’s true that God’s boundary lines for gender expression are wide. However, it’s also true that those boundary lines exist and are important to God. Believe it or not, this is a pretty provocative thing to say right now. Culture wants to describe gender distinctions as insignificant details on the surface, which can be easily altered to express who we really are on the inside. But notice how this thinking contradicts God.

Genesis 1:27 doesn’t say “people created themselves male and female.” It says that God created people in His own image: “he created them male and female” (Gen. 1:27). God hasn’t given us gender as a way to express what we are like; He painted on two canvases to express what He is like.

3. She isn’t the Creator in her story. 

Suppose your girl begins to notice that she’s not like other girls. Maybe, like me as a young teen, she doesn’t like boys. Or she prefers baggy clothes. Or she likes hockey instead of ballet. 

As she becomes uncomfortable in her own skin, culture’s solution is to hand her the paintbrush. “Go ahead and paint over what God made,” she’s told. “Turn yourself into the person you imagine yourself to be.”

This sounds like freedom—but it’s not. The statistics for girls who choose not to identify as girls—which include spikes in depression and suicide rates—are devastating. Trying to be the Creator in her own story is a burden your teen was never designed to carry.

The good news is that there’s already a Creator in her story! Just as God made Eve out of Adam’s rib, He knit your girl together as female—a fact to which every cell in her body and every drop of her blood testifies. If she tries to uncreate what God has made, she runs the risk of being hurt rather than healed.

A girl’s gender is inextricably tied to her sex—that is, her biology at birth. Culture tries to separate the two and say that gender is merely a flexible behavioral expression rather than something rooted in reality. But look at how gender shares the same root as genetics, generations, and genitals. None of these other words refer to anything abstract or immaterial. “Gender” shouldn’t either. It’s something real, and it’s created by God. 

In her book Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality, Hillary Ferrar says that since the root word gen means “that which produces,” a girl’s gender is determined by her genitals. That’s pretty blunt, but we’re not helping our girls when we fail to state the obvious. Your teen needs to know that her body matters to God and it gives evidence of who He created her to be.

Point Her to the Truth

Sister, your teen is living in a world pumped full of pressure to compare and to despair in ways that you and I would have never considered. As the moms, grandmas, and friends who love them, we must point our girls to the unchanging, life-giving truth of God’s Word. Let’s help them agree with what God says about their identity.

Will you be the woman in a teen’s life who lovingly challenges her to stand against culture? Cheer her on as she takes a courageous leap of faith and says, “My Creator made me a girl, and that is what I am.”