How many years of graduate biology did you need to learn the definition of “woman”? Zero. Children grasp the difference between male and female before they can spell either word. Yet liberal Supreme Court justices and the lawyers who argue before them now treat that distinction as unknowable.

This confusion did not happen by accident. Once a culture rejects God’s creation and natural law, nonsense fills the vacuum.

If you cannot define the subject, you cannot defend it. If you cannot name what a woman is, you cannot decide a case where the law turns on protecting women as a class.

God created the world with real distinctions. Those distinctions do not depend on feelings, desires, or political fashion. When people refuse to think according to what is, scripture describes the result as a “darkened mind,” a mind that cannot grasp even basic truths.

This week, the Supreme Court confronted that reality. The cases before it, arising from West Virginia and Idaho, ask whether biological males who identify as female may compete in women’s sports. The exchanges between the justices and counsel revealed more than legal disagreement. They exposed an unwillingness to define the very terms the law requires.

Several of the court’s conservative justices asked what should have been the most basic question: What does it mean to be a man or a woman?

Justice Samuel Alito pressed an attorney for the ACLU on that point. The attorney conceded that he could not offer a definition of “man” or “woman.” He even admitted his notes warned: “Don’t define sex.” Alito then asked the obvious next question: How can a court determine whether discrimination “on the basis of sex” has occurred if no one will say what “sex” means?

That exchange should have ended the argument.

Congress wrote Title IX in 1972. “Sex” meant biological sex. It did not mean “gender identity,” self-conception, or an internal psychological state. It meant male and female. Everyone understood that because everyone lived in that reality.

Yet one attorney urged the justices to avoid deciding the case on the definition of sex, arguing that Title IX’s purpose was not to define sex accurately but to prevent discrimination. That move should make every American nervous.

Discrimination with respect to what? Opportunities based on what? You cannot prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex while refusing to say what sex is. That is not legal reasoning. That is verbal fog.

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor leaned into the confusion by suggesting that excluding a biological male who identifies as female from women’s sports is “by its nature” a sex-based classification requiring heightened scrutiny. Notice what happened. The argument claims no one can define sex, yet it demands courts treat sex as a controlling legal category. A category of what, exactly? The reasoning collapses under its own weight.

This is what a darkened mind looks like in public office. People use words after they drain them of meaning. They demand that others affirm a contradiction and call it clarity.

Human beings have understood the difference between boy and girl across centuries and civilizations. This is not advanced biology. It is ordinary knowledge that undergirds family, language, and society.

So what changed?

The distinction between male and female did not become complicated. It remained simple and permanent. That permanence blocks any ideology that tries to rebuild reality around will and self-definition. God created male and female. No court can repeal creation.

Progressive jurists increasingly treat being “assigned” a sex at birth as oppression. The individual must claim sovereignty over reality. The self becomes god. Identity becomes law.

This worldview also reveals hypocrisy. Liberal justices demand that society submit to one person’s internal feelings about identity, while dismissing the concrete concerns of women who do not want to compete against men in zero-sum athletic contests.

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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson exposed that contradiction when she questioned why the “fear” of women should govern policy. That question reveals the priority system: One set of feelings can redefine reality and restructure competition; another set — concerns about fairness, safety, and equal opportunity — counts for little.

Justice Jackson famously said she cannot define what a woman is, yet she presents herself as a defender of women’s rights. That contradiction matters. If you cannot define the subject, you cannot defend it. If you cannot name what a woman is, you cannot decide a case where the law turns on protecting women as a class.

Natural law has been pushed aside. The created order is treated as optional. What remains is raw will — whatever a judge, an activist, or an institution demands at the moment. That is not law. It is power dressed up in robes.

The consequences extend beyond sports. Women lose opportunities. Men receive rewards for denying reality. Courts move from recognizing truth to enforcing ideological compliance.

Scripture teaches that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). What we witnessed from liberal justices was the opposite: fear of acknowledging God’s created order. When leaders refuse to name basic truths, they do not climb toward enlightenment. They descend into madness.

When justices on the highest court in the land cannot say what a woman is, the problem is no longer sports. The problem is spiritual.