The ground erodes under feminists’ feet

The tribulations of J. K. Rowling on Twitter show us how quickly fortunes can change for the worse in today’s woke climate. At least in antiquity, the fall of the great could be blamed on fortune. Today we can only blame ourselves for not getting with the inevitable progress of history. In much of the ancient world, things just happened. Today if you’re not on the right side of history, you’re stupid or immoral—probably both.

Rowling appeared to be standing on solid ground when the earth opened up and swallowed her. Seemingly she’d squared the circle of women’s rights and the sexual revolution, even proving herself hip to alphabet-soup identity politics when she famously outed one of her fictional characters as gay when the Harry Potter saga was complete.

Nevertheless, even after the films and a theme park based on her stories, she’s now persona non grata in Hollywood and New York. This is because she committed an unpardonable sin. She insisted that sex is real and that men are men and women are women, no matter what they cut off or sew on.

Looking closely, we can see that the ground beneath her feet had been eroding for some time. And the reason is you simply cannot insist that the differences between men and women are both real and unreal at the same time.

If the differences are real, then God is behind them, and you’re fighting God by insisting otherwise. If, on the other hand, the differences are only apparent, and exist merely in our heads, then physical differences—even if they go on existing—are merely engineering problems.

Feminism made its deal with the devil ages ago when it insisted on having it both ways. The deal was simple: attribute gender distinctions to culture when they seem to work against women. But then insist that the differences are real when they favor women. Heads, I win; tails, you lose.

Then the unthinkable happened. A few men decided they wanted in on the action. And why not? After all, what is a woman? We’ve seen the outcomes—men winning swimming medals and beauty contests, all intended for women, to the wild applause of the beautiful people. And they’ve even been granted access to spaces set aside for women: bathrooms, locker rooms, and prisons.

Somewhat ironically, there’s been a backlash from feminists like Rowling. Overnight they went from downplaying the differences between men and women to insisting on them. This, in turn, has led to another backlash and the coining of a derogatory label, TERFs—for, “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.” Now they are accounted among the irredeemably privileged. And that’s the reason they must be excluded.

Centuries ago, Aristotle identified something called “the law of the excluded middle.” That means propositions that contradict each other can’t both be true at the same time. Feminists generally express distaste for Aristotle. And everyone from Hegel to Dewey has been looking for ways to get around him and his excluded middle. But sometimes, you can’t find a way to blend things or arrive at a compromise. Sometimes propositions can’t be reconciled. Either dimorphism is real, or it is not. It can’t be both.

But let’s suppose that gender-egalitarianism was never really the goal anyway. Perhaps feminism was merely an early phase in a much more ambitious project—the denial of reality altogether, of starting completely fresh, a blank slate. Perhaps feminism has served its purpose, and the juggernaut of progress has moved on. Perhaps the real goal from the start was, “you shall be as gods.”

Some evangelicals made their own deal with the devil, downgrading the meaning and significance of the sexes to accommodate the spirit of the age. As a result, they now find themselves in the same spot as Rowling. The ground beneath their feet is moving. They once believed that men were men and women were women. And that was because they could still feel the foundations of a Christian culture beneath their feet. But, no more.

So, what should we expect now? Your humble scribe predicts the following: many evangelicals will go full-woke on gender, denying any residual meaning to sex, while a minority (yes, I believe it will be a minority—at least in the near term) will rediscover and take their stand on the meaning of the Scripture, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).