What is Gender Wholeness?

Gender wholeness is easy to understand conceptually. Most simply put, it is a feeling of similarity and familiarity with your own sex and difference and complementarity with the opposite sex. Let’s break it down into its four components.

First, similarity with your own sex means that your perception of your self as a man adequately matches your beliefs about what a man is supposed to be. In other words, you see yourself as being adequately manly or as masculine enough.

Second, familiarity with your own sex means that your needs for closeness with other men are fulfilled through your relationships with other men. In other words, you feel securely connected to other men in the world around you, have a sense of attachment and resonance with these men, and feel adequately approved of and affirmed by them.

Third, difference from the opposite sex means that you recognize the gender distinctions that naturally exist between men and women, that you identify yourself as belonging to the male gender, and that you experience women as somewhat foreign and mysterious.

And fourth, complementarity with the opposite sex means that you see women as desirable, as having something valuable to contribute to you, and as being able to complete or fulfill you. And it means seeing yourself as capable of contributing something valuable to them as well.

When heterosexual men describe their sense of themselves as men, their relationships with other men, and their experience of women, they tend to describe the four components of gender wholeness. When homosexual men describe these same topics, they usually describe disruptions in some or all of these components. It becomes clear that men with same-sex attraction are not experiencing gender wholeness, but rather gender disruption.

Appropriate therapy is often able to resolve the issues creating disruption in the four components of gender wholeness. This can cause homosexual feelings to diminish and can lead to the development or deepening of opposite-sex attraction.

There is no way to tell how long this process may take or how effective it will be for a given man. But the deeper and more intense the sense of gender wholeness, the greater the change is likely to be. And these changes tend to become more constant and consistent over time as gender wholeness deepens.