Smart people saying silly things

There have been many ideas throughout history that have led otherwise intelligent people to say very silly things, but transgenderism is surely among one of the contenders for the top spot. Take Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, for example. She is a highly accomplished legal mind who serves on the highest court in the land. Yet at her Senate confirmation hearing, she avoided having to define “woman” by declaring that she was not a biologist.

Taken in isolation, the thinking behind that statement is sound. Biology does play a key role in defining what a woman is. A woman is a human being whose body is normatively tailored toward gestation. Yet in the context of the hearing, the claim was practically incoherent.

It is reasonable to interpret Jackson’s answer as motivated by her not wanting to be outed as progressive on the issue. It is amusing that she inadvertently offered a very conservative response, because, by making biology the decisive factor, she placed herself close to the thinking of those of us who do indeed believe that physical reality is decisive in this matter. What the answer revealed was her incompetence in the area of sex and gender theory that underlies the current confusion regarding the transgender question.

Jackson did that again last week when addressing the Tennessee law banning gender transition procedures for minors, which is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Concerned about the implications for equal protection that a ruling to uphold the law might carry, she drew an analogy with the constitutional protection of mixed-race marriage.

The niceties of legal debate are one thing. But it should be painfully obvious to anyone reflecting on the issue that there is no real analogy between debates about gender treatments for minors and mixed-race marriage. The former addresses medical procedures, which when properly administered, have the end of rectifying or restoring a person to health. The latter is about a freely contracted relationship that has no such medical end whatsoever.

Whatever the debates about equal protection might be, only a mind, whether on the left or the right, that sees all issues through the lens of identity politics could possibly see an important connection between the two.

For anyone not mesmerized by such, the Tennessee case is about making sure that children’s bodies are not destroyed by medical procedures that take their cue from the fetid flimflam of once-obscure branches of critical theories. We don’t legally allow children to have tattoos because it involves a decision to receive a lifelong body change that they are incompetent to make at a young age. The same should surely apply in a far stronger form to the confusion generated by a toxic mix of quack theorists, TikTok influencers, and benighted parents. But tattoo artists don’t have the same well-funded lobbyists and slick media support as transgender clip artists.

More broadly, Justice Jackson’s comments point to a deeper problem in our society: the intuitive acceptance that everything is now to be parsed along political lines. Yes, the science is to be followed by radicals on the left and right, but only so long as the science itself follows the chosen political tastes of the respective partisans. That is a worrying situation to be in, especially when we are talking about the most vulnerable people in society: babies in the womb, children, the handicapped, the old, and the infirm.

We need our leaders, whether in Congress, the White House, or the Supreme Court, to start thinking about their true task: not the promotion of niche philosophies that serve their political causes but the protection of the weak, the suppression of the wicked, and the mitigation of evil. Silly analogies that demand we think of apples as really oranges will not ultimately serve that cause.