Andrew Lawton:
Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked what seems like a simple question: “Can you provide a definition for the word woman?” Brown Jackson said she couldn’t, famously attributing it to the fact that she’s “not a biologist.”
The question is a necessarily blunt one, because most people know full well what a woman is and are likely shocked to learn their perception is supposedly controversial.
United Kingdom Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said in March that biological females are women – but so is anyone else who wants to be. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a clearer answer, go figure, that “biology” distinguishes women from men.
The great irony in Brown Jackson’s response is that to those cheering her on, a biologist would be especially unqualified to define what a woman is, because the activists wish to separate the idea of womanhood from any objective footing.
If only females are women, then transgender people who identify as women are being denied their dignity, the argument goes.
All humans are deserving of dignity. That includes transgender people. Dignity should never mean the erasure of another group’s rights, which is what happens to women if we refuse to acknowledge a distinction between them and trans women.
In recent months we’ve seen this tension play out in sports, when biologically male athletes are claiming records and medals in women’s sports after transitioning. I don’t argue that these are transitioning just for the trophies, but their biology directly knocks other female athletes down the rankings.
In their book Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport, authors Linda Blade and Barbara Kay explain how doping – which if an athlete is got doing it can rightfully end their career – confers less of an advantage than male bodies naturally have over female bodies.
No one can credibly say there is no difference between the two – yet people are trying to craft intuitional policies saying as much.
It isn’t just in sports, but other areas where sex-segregated spaces have been regarded as significant. In May, the Correctional Service of Canada solidified its policies such that gender preference alone decides whether you are assigned to a men’s prison or a women’s prison. “Offenders will be placed according to their gender identity or expression in a men’s or a women’s institution, if that is their preference, regardless of their sex (i.e., anatomy) or the gender/sex marker on their identification documents,” the directive states.
After the Conservative Party of Canada leadership debate in Edmonton, I asked candidate Leslyn Lewis if she would reverse the directive were she prime minister. “We have to make sure that we find compassionate ways to accommodate the diversity of individuals that will find themselves in a facility, whether it is a shelter or whether it is a correctional facility,” Lewis replied, noting there are situations where biological females “may feel a sense of vulnerability.”
Her answer could have been both clearer and stronger, but in it she at least acknowledged that few in the government seem to want to, which is that women do not deserve to have their safety subordinated to another group’s rights.
To return to sporting for a moment, Blade and Kay have suggested a third, open category of athletics may be the best way around the politics of deciding who competes in which division. Specific trans-friendly shelters and trans units in prisons may be inevitable as well, as it would be similarly unfair to place someone with people of their biological sex with whom they do not resonate.
The problem with the “new category” approach, as Kay noted in an interview with me a while back, is that many male-to-female trans athletes don’t just want to compete: they demand to be accepted as women, meaning anything less than competing alongside women is not good enough.
It’s undoubtedly a triumph of activism over science, often from people who loudly demand people “follow the science” when it comes to climate change or the pandemic.
There is an “Emperor’s new clothes” dimension to this issue in that few people are willing to say what everyone is thinking, especially in the political class.
We should be able to call a spade a spade and a woman a woman.
