Culture Friday: The Lia Thomas reversal

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday, the 4th of July. Happy Independence Day!

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday and joining us now is John Stonestreet. He is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good morning to you.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

BROWN: John, this is major news. The University of Pennsylvania has agreed to reverse course on the whole Lia Thomas matter. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon at the White House this week:

MCMAHON: The University will be sending a personal apology to every female athlete who is forced to compete against a man. [applause]

An apology for sending out a mediocre male swimmer who identifies as a woman to dominate a pool full of women in competition. Thomas broke at least five Penn records and even that is being walked back.

What’s striking is how thorough the reversal is—acknowledging wrongdoing, restoring titles, and pledging safeguards.

I’d love your thoughts—not just on how this happened, but on what it reveals about the whole arc of this issue. For a while, the movement felt inevitable. But this week, it looks like it collapsed almost overnight.

STONESTREET: Oh boy, there is a lot to talk about. The fact that the quote, unquote deal, which was—I saw the headlines of “University of Pennsylvania agrees.” And I feel like you need to put that word “agree” in a lot of quotation marks, because this was a “you will not do this anymore,” and it included an apology to the athletes that were wronged by this man who pretended to be a woman, and also making sure that it never happened again, and returning the rightful titles and the wins and all that in the right direction, and protecting the spaces. I mean, this was pretty thorough. There’s really a lot to talk about here.

I think the first thing is that many people were surprised by how quickly even an absurd idea like that can seem overwhelming and, quote, unquote, inevitable. Then also that it’s not inevitable. That claims to inevitability, particularly by those who have vested interest in making these claims seem inevitable—that usually is just a tactic to silence people. Unfortunately, it worked for a lot of people.

Praise God it didn’t work for Riley Gaines. Praise God it didn’t work for other people involved in this story. Paula Scanlon, who was one of the teammates of Will Thomas, took a lot of shots for that. We think of somebody, for example, like J.K. Rowling. We think of Ryan Anderson early on. We think of Abigail Shrier, whose book just was gargantuan in this.

Then we also think of a lot of people who weren’t willing to take a stand. We think of a lot of pastors that left parents hanging out to dry, left moms isolated, accused of bigotry for not going along with their child’s delusion when they knew their kid better.

There are just so many aspects of this story, and it continues to develop. But listen, unless we come to some sort of grips on a cultural level with an anthropology that we can all agree on, then this fad is going to be replaced by another one.

Unless we’re tempted, a year from now, whenever the next thing takes hold like this, to think there’s nothing we can do, that that idea is inevitable, that we’re on the wrong side of history, that we don’t want to offend anybody or hurt any feelings—let’s learn from this that claims of inevitability are just that: claims. And that this is really an illusion, because there is this thing called reality. The Christian worldview actually gets us closer to reality than anything else.

Let’s trust that. Let’s believe that. Let’s have the courage to speak out.

EICHER: Earlier you named some of the courageous voices who resisted this movement early on—the heroes. But what about villains, those behind the movement, or those who enabled it, or those who didn’t stand up to it?

There were people in positions of trust who stayed silent or caved in. Could you talk a bit about that failure of leadership, and what kind of reckoning—if any—should follow?

STONESTREET: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think there are kind of ideological villains, because, you know, you could say all of this is in Rousseau, or all of this is in Freud, or all of this is the result of some of the worst thinking of the sexual revolution, and that these ideas aren’t just theoretical ones on paper, but that ideas can grow legs.

Schaeffer talked about the line of despair, where ideas begin with thought leaders, shape academic culture, and then shape popular culture and then the popular imagination. We certainly saw that happen in a hurry.

I think we can also talk about the activists, the bullies, the villains, because this is really something where people—people who lead a movement like what was the gay rights movement—are now even dismissing these people.

But there’s also the state officials—everyone from department heads to school boards to administrators—all that at some level or another work for the government. I’m thinking of civil rights commissioners like in Colorado. I think of even the medical doctors who knew better and basically issued the threat to thousands of parents: “Do you want a dead son or a live daughter,” or vice versa?

There’s a lot to pay for here, and I don’t think the goal here should be revenge. I think the goal here is that we can somehow come up with a framing of this issue and a framing of what happened so that we don’t let so many children in particular get harmed the next time around.

I don’t know that we have the ideological ground for that. I think the deep mistrust that has been sown in this issue—I mean, people talk about the medical establishment and the trust that was lost in COVID. I’m not sure that measures up to the trust that was lost because of those in the medical profession who just made up things like WPATH.

Then, of course, you have villains who are doubling down on this stuff. For example, the American Psychological Association, who quickly commented on the ruling in the Skrmetti case that states actually could protect their own children from this nonsense.

So yeah, ideas die long. I’m not sure that this one’s fully dead. It is unbelievable to see the speed at which this one took over the world and is now being discredited so widely.

We do need to have some kind of a culture-wide deep six on this, so that we can know exactly what happened, where we were duped, and how we can never do it again. Specifically, I think the church needs to have a deep six on this—on what it means to have courage.

I won’t use the word villain, although I’m tempted to, for leaders who are just absolutely clear that we should speak out about some things—but never this. I think there needs to be at least some level of a reckoning on this.

EICHER: John, this has been one of the most consequential Supreme Court terms in recent memory, with multiple rulings that touch on fundamental questions in the culture.

You stay closely connected to these developments, I know. But of all the decisions that came down in recent weeks, what stands out to you most?

STONESTREET: Oh man, it’s a lot. This was a really consequential Supreme Court term. But I do think that one of the best things that we saw was in the Mahmoud decision, having to do with the Montgomery County School Board.

Given the fact that school boards and other state officials have so brazenly—and I would say evilly—placed themselves between children and their parents so often and so completely over the last several years, for the Supreme Court basically to say, “No, you cannot just brainwash students as if parents do not have a role in this process,”—now look, I think that the narrative has become so thorough that education belongs to the state, that it actually has led many parents to think about education as belonging to the state and not to them.

Therefore, the necessary kind of tail end of that idea is that the children actually are citizens more than their children. That is a damnable idea. That is an anti-biblical idea. That’s one that’s particularly dangerous. This was a pushback on that.

Now again, the nuances here were much more specific. But listen, if you don’t think that there are actually educational leaders in America who think that they own your kids, they know better than you—you’re just not paying attention. You don’t hate this as much as you should. I don’t mean you, Nick. I mean, or you, Myrna. I mean like in general, we don’t quite understand just how bad it is.

We had this glimpse during COVID thanks to the Loudoun County School Board. We have another glimpse here. And I know we’re going to get people writing in and saying, “Well, you know, there are good people who work in the public school system.” I agree. I think Christian adults should go to the public school system as missionaries. You’re going to face a lot of trouble if you do—but go there.

But to subject children to that right now just seems unconscionable if you have any other alternative, because it ideologically is built on a vision of what it means to be human that is so absolutely dominated by the sexual revolution and its worst ideas.

Parents are not just in the way anymore. They’re considered the bad guys. I mean, there has never been a better opportunity right now to disrupt the status quo when it comes to education in America. God help us do it in every way that we can.

We need as many alternatives as we can. We need the alternatives, especially Christian schools, to be really good at what they do. Right now that’s a mixed bag. We need to point out over and over the ideology that shapes this practice. It’s got to be exposed, because it is as bad as you think—and worse.

BROWN: As we talk today, it’s the Fourth of July—a summer holiday, yes, but also a deeply significant anniversary.

We’re marking the signing of a document that put the founders at odds with the most powerful empire on earth. We don’t often reflect on the danger they faced—but treason against King George could cost you your life. That’s the kind of courage we celebrate today.

What does this day mean for Christians who love their country? How do you think rightly about patriotism—from a Christian worldview perspective?

STONESTREET: Yeah. Well, listen, in general, when I think about patriotism and what does it mean to have national identity, I think of something that Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote in First Things years ago. He said, “When I meet God, I expect to meet Him as an American.”

He got in some trouble when he said that. He wasn’t saying that the only way to meet God is as an American, or you have a better chance if you’re an American, or that God was an American. He wasn’t saying that either.

He was just saying that part of our identity—part that we did not choose, one of the givens, if we were going to use the same word that we use on so many of these other issues of anthropology—is where we’re born, the nation to which we belong. There’s an implied stewardship there.

So I think in the terms of patriotism, we can accept this as part of the sovereignty of God, and then say, “Well, then what does God expect?” That’s different than any sort of supremacy that’s rightfully denounced.

On the other hand, I think it’s also easy to miss how remarkable the Declaration was. When I speak to students and young adults, and there are people from other countries, and I start the line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” even the non-American students know this.

It’s a remarkable line. It’s not as remarkable to us because we’re pretty familiar with it, but it was really remarkable then. Luc Ferry says that it’s one of the Christian innovations and contributions to the world. It’s significant that he says it as a secular humanist philosopher from the University of Paris.

Basically, Christianity, he said, was to introduce to the world the idea of equality—that humans were equal in dignity, not on the outside but on the inside. That gave birth to our entire modern, democratic inheritance.

He said it is a remarkable line, because honestly, it’s not been self-evident historically that humans are equal. I mean, even in the American context, it was an aspirational idea. It was something to which America was now going to strive but never reach, and actually had a long way to go—from our national original sin of slavery to our contemporary national sin of abortion.

We don’t live that ideal out, but the ideal itself is remarkable. The only way you have equality is not because it’s self-evident by any characteristic we share on the outside—because there is no characteristic we share on the outside. It’s the second part of that line which is so important: that they are endowed by their Creator.

You only get “all men are created equal” if all men have been endowed by their Creator. That is an important observation to remember on this day that we recall how the founders at the Continental Congress in 1776, on this date, adopted the Declaration of Independence.

BROWN: John Stonestreet, president of the Colson center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, thanks again, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.