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If you’ve got 45 minutes to listen to a couple Episcopal priests talk about Galatians, the Fruit of the Spirit, and gender expression, by all means spend it on this video:

Fr. David W. Johnson and Mtr. Kelli Joyce have some wonderful thoughts here. There are a couple portions I want to highlight over a couple of blog posts. First, on the “crisis of masculinity” and gender expression, here’s what Mtr. Kelli has to say (36:40 - 39:00 in the video, minor transcript edits for clarity, emphasis mine):

In terms of the crisis of masculinity, it seems like this could be understood almost like how Paul talks about the law. There was this thing that was provided when we needed it, which told us “here’s how you be”. And now there’s freedom, and it’s a freedom we didn’t have before, which is not some new homogenized other way of being that says you have to stop being everything you were, but that says what is important here is that whatever you are is following Christ.

And so I think, to me, I think that there are healthy and Christ-honoring was of expressing something that looks like traditional masculinity, and healthy and Christ-honoring ways of expressing something that looks very much like traditional femininity. I think that there are sinful and sin-warped ways of doing both of those things. And so what seems important to me is not about pursuing or avoiding a certain kind of gender expression, or restraining that to a certain kind of person or a certain kind of body, but about saying “who has God made me to be?”, “what brings me joy?”, “What feels like I am living out the self I was given by God in creation?”, and “how does that enable me, personally, in my context as who I am, from where I’m standing, to follow Christ?”.

So, to me, there can be virtuous masculinity, virtuous femininity, kind of a virtuous gender neutrality. But the important piece there is the virtue, and not that there is some sort of binding need to have one or the other kind of gender expression. Because nobody has a perfectly anything gender expression. Everybody has traits that are from a mix of these two big categories that we talk about and think about. And that’s OK. In Christ those things are not what define our relationship to God or our relationship to other members of the body. It is who we are together by the power of the Spirit.

Yes and amen.