A video recently went viral of a top Michigan education official who was asked how many genders there are. She replied, “Different people have different beliefs about that.” Her answer shouldn’t surprise anyone. What surprises me is that conservatives still respond with little more than shock and ridicule. Their reactions make them look unprepared to provide the leadership our society needs.
I think the response on X of Heritage Foundation’s Vice President Roger Severino - a really smart person - about the Michigan official is worthy of consideration. He rightly noted that it was comparable to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s famous line when asked to provide to U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn a “definition” for the word woman. She said, but only in part, “I’m not a biologist.”
Such answers are not surprising to me. As I will explain, I think both the Michigan official and Justice Jackson gave answers consistent with their broader beliefs about how the world works. What really surprises me is why conservatives continue to act surprised by these gender responses.
Their responses reflect ideas that have been developing for centuries. Conservatives often don’t seem to understand the long-developing worldview behind such answers. Or, if they do, they haven’t figured out how to use these moments to open a deeper conversation. These exchanges present an opportunity for them to discuss the long philosophical and theological shifts that have shaped our current debates. And, more importantly, to expose that shift as a lie.
After the Reformation debates of the 1600s faded, Enlightenment thinkers in the 1700s placed their hope in human reason and scientific progress. The term “science,” which once referred to any organized body of knowledge, shifted. It began to mean only the empirical sciences—a field of study or knowledge that deals only with data that can be observed and measured. No empirical science can answer questions about meaning or values. Those are metaphysical questions--something beyond physics.
Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant hoped reason could supply the answers to meaning and values. That hope ultimately collapsed, and for good reason as I next explain.
All reasoning must begin with one fundamental axiom or principle we believe is true.
But, philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche disavowed the previously held axiom--the existence of a Triune God who created all things from nothing but the power of His word and to reveal His glory. He said it was not true. He said Kant’s idea about meaning and values being reached by reason just kept us from seeing the things constituting natural phenomena as they really are.
Without that fundamental premise, Nietzsche, then others, concluded that there are no objectively knowable metaphysical truths at all. According to this view, reality consists only of raw phenomena. This outlook is often called metaphysical nihilism.
Few talk about metaphysics anymore. I think that is strong evidence that practically-speaking everyone bought into Nietzsche’s philosophy. For example, ask yourself: When is the last time you heard the preacher at your church use the word metaphysics let alone speak to its meaning or importance? In six decades I had never heard such talk from a pulpit
This worldview explains why many people simply redefine words when new social trends emerge. If reality has no built-in meaning, then meaning is something we create by the words we give to things. When new trends emerge, we simply insert a new meaning into a word, like “marriage” in 2015, or come up with a new word.
This explains how the word gender shifted from a grammatical term to a description of personal identity that differs from biological sex. If natural phenomena are viewed as the meaningless product of random forces, then biological facts can be treated as raw material without any inherent meaning or purpose. But we can’t live without meaning; so, the word “gender” was taken captive, and it became a word about personal meaning beyond the meaningless of our raw material.
Once you understand this framework, the Michigan official’s answer—and Justice Jackson’s during her confirmation hearings—becomes understandable, even logical. Their reasoning is consistent with the belief that the world is constantly evolving. Therefore, meaning and values must shift along with it.
Instead of trying to score political points through ridicule, Christians could use such moments to reintroduce the kinds of metaphysical thinking that once made it obvious that gender refers only to grammar.
But the part of Justice Jackson’s remark about the biologist that seemed to go over everyone’s head is that her answer was in the “context” of her role as a judge. She said her job as a judge is to evaluate a “dispute about the definition” of a word, listen to arguments over that definition, then apply the law. I suspect it never occurred to her that law already provides the definition.
But Senator Blackburn followed up by launching into a political speech about the “dangers of progressive education” and the then-recent Lia Thomas situation. She could have followed up by asking, “Given what you just said, how do you define law?” That question would have forced Jackson to confront the implications of her own worldview as a judge.
If Justice Jackson had answered a hypothetical question like I would have given her, and answered it honestly and with a bit of reciprocating political flair, she might have said something like this.
I can’t give you a definition, Senator, because law is constantly evolving to meet the “felt needs” and “intuitions” of society. I am here quoting from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s trailblazing work on law in 1882, The Common Law. Justice Ginsburg expressed a similar view. For example, she predicted that redefining marriage would likely be embraced because “public attitudes” had shifted. In this new way of thinking about law, definitions—including those of fundamental ideas like “marriage,” “woman,” or even “law”—change as society changes.
Your temporary outrage in 2015 over the Court’s decision to redefine the statutory definition of “marriage” in Obergefell v. Hodges was followed by years of silence. Your silence would indicate to impartial observers that you either you agree with the redefinition or you believe the Supreme Court exercises the power to change the scope and meaning of the words and phrases in the written Constitution.
You seem to agree with Justice Ginsburg’s views about sex, but her understanding of it was fluid enough to provide a new definition for word “marriage.” Perhaps your views on all such subjects should also change.
Based on my experience with Senator Blackburn (we served together in the Tennessee Senate four years), I think she would have been unprepared to respond meaningfully and substantively to such an answer. But, until unprepared conservatives like her learn how to respond to gender answers on a philosophical, or better yet, a theological level, surprise, ridicule, and scoring political points will remain their only strategy.
And just as conservatives (including an increasing number of Christians) accommodated themselves to a new definition of marriage in just 10 years, I suspect today’s political outrage over gender won’t change anything.
