Making war on reality

You could have heard a pin drop in the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 13. The collective intake of breath in the courtroom came after the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal team refused to define the word “sex.”

“How can a court determine whether there’s discrimination on the basis of sex without knowing what ‘sex’ means?” Justice Samuel Alito understandably asked.

How indeed?

Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador and West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey, together with attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom, were at the nation’s high court that day, defending Idaho’s and West Virginia’s laws that safeguard fairness and safety in women’s athletics.

At issue in these cases is whether states can separate sports teams based on sex, given the inherent physical differences between men and women—or if that is sex discrimination.

Yet, when Alito asked the simple question, “[W]hat does it mean to be a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl?” the ACLU’s team responded, “We do not have a definition for the court.”

It was an important moment. First, it demonstrated the challengers’ refusal to acknowledge biological reality and objective truth—on which the cases hinge. And second, it highlighted that the ACLU is now desperately trying to run away from its own legal strategy because it doesn’t make sense. The ACLU has been too focused on erasing the enduring differences between men and women to notice that they’re rapidly losing credibility.

It’s a troubling place we’ve reached. And the women and girls who have lost medals, scholarships, and other opportunities know the devastating consequences all too well.

For years, society has been drifting away from the foundational truth that men and women are created in the image of God, uniquely different yet equal in value. We were told that rejecting this truth was compassionate—that redefining the body would lead to greater kindness and inclusion.

But when the law ignores reality—when sex is treated as something that can be redefined rather than something created—there is a real human cost.

Children become medical experiments and lifelong patients. They are told they are born in the wrong bodies and given dangerous drugs and life-altering surgeries.

And as we see so vividly in the women’s sports cases before the Supreme Court, this rejection of truth has reduced women and girls to spectators in their own sports. They’re losing equal opportunity, fairness, safety, and privacy as confused men take over their sports and locker rooms. Even in domestic violence shelters and prisons, confused men seek to enter women’s spaces.

Indeed, believing the lie that men can become women has impacted every sphere of society—it threatens free speech, parental rights, and religious liberty and rewards falsehood at the expense of reality and true human flourishing.

There is nothing compassionate about confusion. And there is nothing kind about asking women and girls to surrender fairness, safety, or truth itself. Scripture teaches that truth is not something we invent; it is something we receive.

God’s design for men and women is not arbitrary. It is good—very good, according to Scripture. And when society abandons it, what breaks cannot be repaired by doubling down on the lie.

What the Supreme Court justices heard in their courtroom wasn’t just about states’ laws and whether women should have their own sports teams. Underlying it all was a fundamental question about truth itself.

If society cannot distinguish male from female, how can we trust the law to uphold other objective realities? We cannot.

At its core, this is about whether we are willing to center our laws, our compassion, and our culture on God’s design—the only foundation on which people can truly flourish. Restoration requires returning to what is true.