Gender Reconciliation

What is Gender Reconciliation?

Gender Reconciliation is a burgeoning new field of transformational healing and reconciliation between women and men.  D.H. Lawrence once remarked that “The future of humanity will be decided not by relations between nations, but by relations between women and men.”  Gender reconciliation recognizes the profound wound in the human family constellated around cultural conditioning relating to gender, sexuality, and relational intimacy. The ‘gender wound’ is manifest in myriad forms in virtually every society across the planet.

Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasized that societal transformation does not take place by keeping injustice and corruption hidden, but only by bringing them into the light and confronting them with the power of love.  This is the purpose and method of gender reconciliation. Both women and men are afflicted by gender injustice, and each needs the other for a true and complete healing.  Domestic violence is the leading cause of death for women aged 15 to 44 worldwide.  Men have higher death rates than women for all 15 leading causes of death.  The premise of gender reconciliation is that women and men can and must work together to jointly transform these tragic conditions.  Gender reconciliation embraces all sexual orientations, including heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender.

Gender Reconciliation International has facilitated workshops and training programs for more than 2,000 men and women in seven countries to date.  Our experience demonstrates that earnest women and men are capable of extraordinary levels of healing and reconciliation, and thereby fostering new levels of mutual trust, respect, communication, and joyful partnership. Independent monitoring and evaluation of our programs conducted by Phaphama Initiatives in South Africa concluded that Gender Reconciliation is a powerful tool for addressing the causes of HIV/AIDS (rather than just treating symptoms), and that Gender Reconciliation has the potential to prevent communities from self-destructing because of gender-based violence and AIDS (see Articles).

Gender Reconciliation builds upon yet goes well beyond the work of the women’s and men’s movements—both of which are crucial social movements in their own right that have made essential contributions.  Gender reconciliation takes another bold step—or leap!—to bring women and men together to begin an unprecedented collaborative work of facing the disastrous reality of gender injustice in its many forms, and embarking upon the integral work of mutual transformation to create a new, unprecedented harmony between the sexes.  Working through the challenges of gender disharmony with integrity, compassion, and non-judgment, men and women discover a liberating awakening and new spiritual communion.