Gender idealogues say that Lia Thomas is a woman, but they cannot tell you what they mean when they say that. What is a woman? Gender theory has made it so that the word “woman” itself, and the word man, have no meaning. Leftists, because of their ideological commitments, cannot define the terms. They say trans women are women. They say that someone can start out life as a male and transition into a woman. But how can I understand any of these claims and declarations if I do not know how they define the word woman? And how can they make any meaningful statements about women if they themselves do not know what they mean by it? So I ask very simply, as I have been asking for years, as I asked on Dr. Phil: what is a woman?
They say that biology has nothing to do with womanhood. Well, then what does have something to do with womanhood? If we cannot define a woman physically, how can we define her? What is a woman? What does the word mean? If you are on the Left, what exactly are you trying to say the word, woman, means? When you say that such and such biological man is a woman, what are you actually trying to convey about that person? What do you mean that Lia Thomas is a woman? What is that supposed to mean?
Watch the trailer for Matt’s new documentary What Is A Woman:
I have been told, by the few that attempted to give an answer, that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. But that definition doesn’t work because you can’t use the word you’re defining in the definition. If I ask you for the definition of “apple” and you tell me “an apple is that which is an apple” — or even worse, “that which looks like an apple” — you have told me nothing about apples. The same goes for a woman.
You might say that a woman is an adult human female or anyone who identifies as an adult human female. But that is just another way of saying that a woman is an adult human female or not an adult human female. And that’s just another way of saying that a woman is nothing in particular. “Woman” has no definition if that is the definition. Also, the person offering that definition is him or herself drawing a distinction between a person who is the thing and a person who identifies as the thing. By drawing the distinction, a person is admitting that there is a definitional difference. The very phrase “trans women are women” seems to admit, in its construction, that trans women are not women. If they were women, why are you calling them trans? What does the trans part denote? In order for the phrase “trans women are women” to mean anything, trans women have to be a category distinct from women. If they aren’t, then the phrase is a meaningless redundancy. But if they are distinct, then they aren’t women. So if “trans women are women,” means anything, it means nothing.
What is a female? Well, a female is someone with XX chromosomes, a female reproductive system, female gametes, or eggs, and the ability in principle to ovulate and bear offspring. There are females who suffer from illnesses, injuries, or malformations — or who simply are post-menopausal — which prevent them from bearing offspring. This does not make them any less female. It is instead an exception that proves the rule.
Here’s why: When a female cannot bear children, we know that something has prevented an otherwise natural process. But when a man cannot bear children, we know that it is not a sign of anything having gone wrong, because men are not supposed to bear children, and no man in history ever has. If, as a woman, you go to the doctor and tell him that you are unable to conceive children in your womb, he will run some tests to figure out why, because a reason preventing normal child bearing exists. If, as a man, you go to the doctor and tell him that you are unable to conceive children in your womb, he will run some tests to figure out what’s wrong with your mind. Or at least, that’s how he would have responded until recently. Now, because society has lost its mind, he might give the man hormone pills to help him transition into a woman. But you will note that, even after transition, still the man will not be able to ovulate or conceive children or perform any other exclusively female function, because he is not a female, and will never be one.
Thomas is and will always be a male, with XY chromosomes, male anatomy (as the women who’ve seen him in the locker room have attested), and male gametes. But there is a lot more to being a male than just that. Indeed, the physical differences between men and women are not confined to the reproductive system. They can be found in every bodily system. In every part of the body. Lia Thomas, like any male, is male down to his bones, down to his cells, down to his DNA. When he dies and is buried beneath a giant monument celebrating him as history’s greatest female athlete, 100 years hence he could be excavated and his bones analyzed and scientists will be very confused to discover that the greatest female athlete is a male. His bones will attest to the biological reality. They will not declare his pronouns or affirm his self-perception. There will be no self. The self is gone. But the man remains.
Many of these biological differences happen to give him a distinct advantage over women in sports, especially swimming. When Thomas got in the pool earlier this month at Georgia Tech, he swam against people with 20 percent less muscle mass on average, 40 percent less upper body strength, 33 percent less lower body strength, as well as smaller fast-twitch muscle fibers, smaller lungs, smaller hearts, shorter legs, more estrogen and less testosterone, and a lower capacity to produce oxygen when they exert themselves. Courageously, Thomas has chosen to race against people who have literally dozens of immutable biological disadvantages in comparison to himself.
These advantages are why the fastest man in the world is always faster than the fastest woman. And if the fastest man dies, the next fastest will be faster than the fastest woman. In fact, if the 100 fastest men all got on a plane to go on a fastest man retreat, and the plane tragically crashed, and they all died, the 101st fastest man, who is now the fastest man by inheritance, would still be faster than the fastest woman. And then the next 100 fastest men, if they tried to go to the same retreat, and they all crashed and died too, the next batch of 100 would still all be faster than the fastest woman, and so on. Same for the strongest men vs the strongest women. The Olympics attest to this. There has never been a time — never, not ever — when the women’s racing or swimming champions were faster on average than the men. It has never happened, ever, in history, and never will. These advantages are why there is a whole website dedicated to comparing high school boys track and field champions against female Olympians.
The high school boys outperform the female olympians in almost every category, by huge margins. Here is an example. The New Balance Nationals Outdoor meet is one of the preeminent high school track meets in the country. If the 2016 High School Boys Finalists in the 100 meter were to have raced against the 2016 female Olympic finalists, the fastest woman would have come in 9th place. 9th. Gold, silver, bronze, and places 4 through 8 would all be held by high school boys, against female Olympians. This holds true in almost every event. And it’s not just track, and not just hypothetical. Back in 2017, a team of 15-year-old boys scrimmaged against the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team and won, handily, 5 to 2. Male and female athletes are so different, separated by such a vast biological chasm, that you can actually count the total number of dunks made by WNBA players in the history of the league. That number: 28. And 23 of them were by the same player. There’s a player in the NBA who dunked the ball 300 times by himself in one season. That’s one player in one year dunking it ten times more than the entire WNBA over the course of a quarter century. Men and women are different. A lot different.
Men are stronger. They are faster. They are better at almost every competitive sport. Literally every line of evidence supports this. All of the evidence — all of it — supports the claim that men in general have biological advantages over women in sports. There is no evidence going the other way. Which is why the gender ideologues on that side do not produce evidence. They have none to produce. They cannot defend their position. They cannot even really explain it because they run into a basic logical problem.
What it comes down to is that if the word woman means nothing, it would be nonsensical to identify as one, given that you’re identifying as something that is not really anything. Is a woman, in the end, just anyone who enjoys feminine things or dresses in a feminine way? Well, that can’t be it because we can’t define “feminine” until we have defined “woman.” Besides, the Left has been trying to break down the societal constructs of feminine vs masculine for years. You can’t go from “not all women should be expected to be feminine” to “the only defining characteristic of womanhood is femininity.” You can’t do a 180 and undermine everything you’ve been saying for the last 60 years and expect some sense to come from that. So what is a woman, according to the Left?
They cannot answer. They insist that our conception of womanhood is wrong and then when we ask them what the right conception is, they shrug their shoulders. “We don’t know what a woman is,” they say, “but whatever a woman is, Lia Thomas is it.” This is nonsense. And we all know that it is nonsense. Even most of them know that it is nonsense. Yet we are supposed to cooperate with the idea anyway. We are supposed to abandon all the fundamental truths that all of us know, and have always known, and we are supposed to do it for no reason other than the fact that it will hurt the feelings of whoever identifies as trans if we don’t. And of course, those feelings are the only feelings that matter. Those feelings, for some reason, are supposed to outweigh the feelings of women who don’t want their sports destroyed and their privacy invaded and their very identities appropriated and stolen, cheapened, fetishized, turned into a Halloween costume. The feelings of a million women are dust when stacked up against the feelings of one gender confused dude. All of reality is dust. The truth is dust. Biology. Everything. All of it is to be discarded for one trans person’s feelings.
Well, I say: no. I urge you all to say “no.” Do not affirm what you know are lies. Do not cooperate with what you know is wrong. Do not abandon what you know is true. Do not pretend to believe what you do not believe. It takes courage to say no in this world. It’s a word that is not said nearly enough. But all of the gender ideologues need to hear it now. All of the liars and frauds trying to coerce and shame us into surrendering our common sense need to give ear. All of the cry-bullies using emotional blackmail because they have no arguments and everyone demanding that we pretend to believe what we do not believe need to hear it. All of them, everywhere, they all need to hear a resounding voice of reason and conviction saying: no.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.