Recently, two transgender athletes qualified to participate in women’s divisions at the Tokyo Olympics this summer. Though their formal approval by the International Olympic Committee would seem to indicate universal acceptance, athletes and onlookers alike have criticized the decision for what it is: giving unfair advantage to biological males and dissuading women from participating in sports. In one tragic instance, this has spelled early retirement for New Zealand weightlifter Tracey Lambrechs, who previously held significant records in her weight class until they were crushed over a single weekend by Laurel Hubbard, a biological male. This and other examples of female displacement in sports by transgender competitors reflect a distressing trend against women’s equal participation, since some activities require separation on the basis of sex in order to maintain an even playing field. How did we get to a place where some view sex as interchangeable, despite these obvious infringements of women’s privacy and equality?
When Sex Became Gender
Until the 1950’s, there was no understanding of gender as a social construct (that is, as a purely social role associated with biological sex) rather than a grammatical category. Though the term “gender” began to surpass “sex” in colloquial usage, sex characteristics were still generally regarded as immutable signs of natural sex, not as expressions of one’s preferred identity. This grounding of sex in the realities of the body was important for the development of United States civil rights law, which regarded sexual distinctions as integral to securing women’s rights, privacy, and equality. Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on sex, while Title IX reads that no person shall be denied the benefits of or subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance on the basis of sex. Unfortunately, a Supreme Court majority recently ruled that sex no longer means biological sex, but “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” – further eroding the sense of sex as a bodily reality while precipitating the fall of women’s same-sex spaces and activities.
Revisionist View of Marriage
With the advent of the pill and the sexual revolution came an increase in sexual behavior outside of marriage. Dovetailing with the rise of and widespread resignation to divorce, American society primed the ground for a revisionist view of marriage, whereby sex was no longer a specifically marital act. More recently, sexual difference has been deemed unnecessary for marriage with the case Obergefell v. Hodges, and polyamorous arrangements are becoming more common place. All of this points to what Professor Robert P. George, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis called in their book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense the “revisionist view of marriage.” Romantic love and sexual companionship take precedence in the relationship rather than procreation, which is only possible with the union of a biological male and female. Ultimately, the severing of sex from marriage, and marriage from children, turned marriage itself into anything other than a comprehensive union of the spouses for the purpose of raising children.
Men, Women, and Honoring the Difference
When men and women fail to honor the meaning of sexual difference, they fail to secure children’s best chance for growing up secure and confident in their identity. When they separate sex from marriage, they gaslight the innocent child from seeing and stating the obvious: that they need and want both mother and a father, to whom they have a natural right. The once unforeseen outcomes of changing sex to now-nebulous “gender” and marriage to a transactional relationship based on personal whim are being realized in the form of gender confusion, and in many cases, the gaslighting of women – whose natural right it is to participate in a society in which they are more than fifty-percent represented. To reverse course, we will need to defend sexual integrity at every turn. That means upholding a woman’s right to participate safely in sports; a child’s right to live with his or her biological parents; and marriage as a building block for social stability.
