Two former NBA players are making a point at the WNBA’s expense. Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White have said they intend to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft. Their point is obvious: They are men, and the WNBA exists as a women’s league. Yet a culture that struggles to say what a woman is has made even an obvious distinction strangely difficult to state.

There is a stage in childhood development often described as “magical thinking.” A child has not yet learned to distinguish consistently between what he wishes, imagines, or says and what exists independently of his mind.

Children eventually learn that saying, ‘I’m a pirate,’ does not make them pirates. A healthy civilization would do well to remember the same lesson.

The child announces, “I’m a pirate!” and for the next hour he is Captain Blackbeard. Later, he is a knight. By dinner, perhaps he is George Washington.

This is charming in a 3-year-old. It becomes considerably less charming when adults and institutions adopt a similar theory of reality. If an adult insists that he is Napoleon despite all evidence to the contrary, we do not ordinarily conclude that his conviction has transformed reality.

Consider one of the central claims of transgender ideology: A person can be a woman because he identifies as a woman. The identification is treated not merely as a desire, preference, or psychological state but as establishing what the person actually is.

Notice the philosophical claim being made.

Ordinarily, thinking something does not make it so. If I believe I am 6'5'', my belief does not add inches to my height. If I announce that I am 25 years old, the state does not alter my birth certificate. If I sincerely identify as the king of England, Buckingham Palace is under no obligation to prepare my bedroom.

Reality stubbornly refuses to conform itself to my thoughts.

Yet transgender ideology asks others to treat a declaration of gender identity as authoritative. Pronouns change. Bathrooms change. Athletic categories change. Institutional policies change. Increasingly, disagreement with the underlying claim is treated not as a philosophical dispute but as a moral offense.

When medical intervention enters the picture, the same assumption is extended to the body itself: Healthy tissue may be altered so that the body more closely conforms to the asserted identity, and the alteration is presented as affirming the person’s true self.

The remarkable thing is that the identification can itself be fluid. Someone might identify as male at one time, female at another, or neither. The surrounding society is nevertheless expected to reorganize itself around each successive declaration. That is the absurdity White and Freedom are trying to expose by invoking the WNBA.

RELATED: Trans basketball player dominating French women’s league responds to calls to play in WNBA

Valery HACHE/AFP/Getty Images

Imagine our 3-year-old announcing, “I’m a pirate,” and the entire neighborhood immediately converting itself into a Caribbean port. When he announces an hour later that he is a knight, everyone rushes outside to build a castle.

We would recognize the problem immediately. The world does not become whatever someone currently imagines it to be.

This raises a much older philosophical question: What does it mean for one thing actually to become another?

Change is real. An acorn becomes an oak tree. A boy becomes a man. Water can become ice or vapor or, under carefully controlled conditions, all three at once. But not every imaginable change is possible. A giraffe cannot become a lizard. A whale cannot become a cow. Saying otherwise does not expand the possibilities of nature.

The biblical account of creation provides a foundation for understanding why. God creates things with definite natures. Genesis repeatedly describes living things reproducing “according to their kinds.” Creation contains enormous variation, but variation does not abolish nature.

Human beings likewise have a nature. “Male and female he created them,” Genesis 1:27 tells us. Men and women share a common human nature and are equally made in the image of God, but they are not interchangeable sexes.

Men vary enormously from one another. Women vary enormously from one another. A man may be tall or short, masculine or effeminate, athletic or bookish. A woman may possess any combination of personality traits, interests, abilities, and appearances. None of those variations turns one sex into the other.

This is where our culture has confused identity with reality.

Historically, truth has meant bringing our minds into conformity with what is. If I believe something false, reality is not required to change. I am required to change my belief. That’s how we distinguish what is real from what is merely asserted.

The contemporary revolution reverses the direction. Instead of requiring my mind to conform to reality, reality — and everyone around me — must conform to my mind.

Behind this error stands an ancient temptation.

The Greek sophist Protagoras famously declared that “man is the measure of all things.” Taken in its most radical form, that principle places the human knower rather than an objective order at the center of truth.

RELATED:Christian family seeks SCOTUS win against trans insanity in ‘case about swinging d**ks’

Mike Kemp/In Pictures/Getty Images

The biblical account takes us even further back. In Genesis 3, the serpent tempts Adam and Eve with the promise that they will “be like God,” determining good and evil for themselves.

The temptation is not merely to break a rule. It is to claim an authority that belongs to the Creator: the authority to determine reality and goodness for ourselves.

Some strands of modern critical theory give this temptation a contemporary vocabulary. Categories once understood as features of reality are redescribed as social constructions maintained by power. If human beings constructed the categories, the argument goes, human beings can reconstruct them.

But creation is not ours to reconstruct.

Christianity begins somewhere radically different: God is the measure of all things. God determines what exists because God created what exists. God determines human nature because God created humanity. God determines male and female because “male and female he created them.” And God determines what is good for us because God created our nature.

Our task, therefore, is not to demand that reality conform to our desires. It is to discipline our desires and beliefs according to reality.

That distinction reaches far beyond the transgender debate. A civilization cannot survive indefinitely if it teaches its citizens that sincere belief establishes truth and that everyone else must participate in maintaining the resulting claim.

Children eventually learn that saying, “I’m a pirate,” does not make them pirates.

A healthy civilization would do well to remember the same lesson.