The Supreme Court Knows What a Woman Is After All

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily struck down the Biden Administration’s attempt to effectively nullify Title IX by redefining sex according to “gender identity”. What the Biden (and Kamala) Administration had tried to do would have affected everything from women’s sports to bathrooms and shared housing in colleges.

The method they used to accomplish this was telling. Despite all of the screaming about “democracy”, the people were never consulted. Rather than attempting to pass laws through the legislature (who should represent that public), they decided to change the definition of words that have existed for as long as our language—words like sex, woman, and man. In so doing, they attempted to unilaterally destroy protections for women, which are based on biological realities.

After all, women’s sports are segregated because of physical differences that make it impossible for women to fairly compete against men. Women’s bathrooms are separated (in part) because women are uniquely vulnerable to men in those situations, as with women’s locker rooms. These are the obvious facts that some pretend to find confusing.

This dispute went to the Supreme Court because Title IX protections are related to an interpretation of the 14th Amendment. When we used to look at the Constitution, which is the purpose of a Supreme Court appeal, we would look not just at the text, but at what it meant when it was written. To do otherwise is to gradually change the meaning over time according to what some people wish it said. There is a contemporary movement that alleges that the U.S. Constitution is a “living document” and thus is constantly evolving by emerging definitions and understandings. In this view, nothing has any solidity or meaning at all.

What’s fascinating about this perspective is that while documents are supposedly automatically ‘upgraded’ or at least changed according to modern sensibilities, the men who wrote them are still pilloried for having the opinions that led them to write such a document. In other words, historical documents can be perceived to be “good” based upon contemporary redefinitions even while their writers are villainized for writing them.

As a result of this modern movement of redefinitions and selective understandings, those who take a historical and accurate reading of the texts had to clarify that they were “originalists” or “traditionalists”. Justice Antonin Scalia was perhaps the most famous to use and popularize the former phrase. It’s tragic that one has to clarify, because the issue of making documents say what we want them to say has become so common.

In any case, if we take an originalist look at the current issue, one doesn’t have to go far back in time before it becomes obvious that the writers and signers of the Constitution and its amendments knew what women and men were. Whether we refer to the original ratification of the Constitution, the addition of the 14th Amendment (equal rights), or the 19th Amendment (women’s right to vote)—the confusion about sex in terms of how we define men and women is an extremely recent and socially contrived idea.

Therefore, to assert that there is a constitutional right for men to pretend to be women and thus be allowed into women’s bathrooms is as offensive as it is preposterous. Comically, perhaps we can say that there would be no constitutional reason why we couldn’t propose the death penalty for those who tried to re-engineer their sex to enter female spaces, because the death penalty is not and was not considered to be cruel or unusual. Perhaps that’s a tangent.

In any event, this ruling by the Supreme Court is a victory that should become permanent. The redefining of words from “female” to “marriage” is emblematic of a cultural relativism that is corrosive to our society.