The Problem With Definitions

 It must seem like a flashback to the Bill Clinton days when when Biden's SCOTUS nominee balked on answering a question about whether she could define what a woman is. In responding to the question during her Senate confirmation hearing, the Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson stated that she could not answer the question because she is not a biologist. And so Jackson's balking at answering the question brought back memories of Bill Clinton while he was being asked about whether he had sex with an intern. In responding, we heard about what is the definition of the word 'is' and sex.

Denny Burk (click here for a very brief bio), a religiously conservative Christian college professor, minister, and commentator on the world around us, tries to discredit the Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson from being confirmed as a judge on the Supreme Court in part because of her answer to the above question, Jackson declined to answer. and so Burk writes an article on his blog about how he thinks that, despite her refusal to answer the question, she really knows what a woman is (click here). In the end, Burk attributes Jackson's reluctance to define what a woman is to our current culture's current embracing of 'expressive individualism'--a concept discussed by Dr Carl Trueman, a fellow religiously conservative Christian. If my initial impression of what Trueman meant by the term is correct, expressive individualism refers to such a stress on individualism  that what we think of ourselves as individuals trumps any reality taught to us from the objective world or the past.

But there is a certain opportunism in Burk's complaint. That is because while the dialogue in the hearing reproduced by Burk asks Jackson about what is a woman within a specific context, Burk doesn't include that context when discussing her answer. For the context of the question asked of Jackson was a comment made by Ginsburg in a certain setting. 

And so Jackson refused to answer the question about what is a woman in the context of that comment. Later on, Jackson clearly states in the hearing that she knows that she is a woman as well as some others So Burk's suspicion about what Jackson's definition of a woman was answered before he raised it. But such is life in a world where opportunism reigns.

But beyond that verbal scuffle in the Senate hearing about what is a woman, there is a cultural change in context that have religiously conservative Christians, especially the intellectual ones, up in arms while singing the Things Ain't What They Use To Be blues. That cultural change is due to an effort to stop society from continuing to marginalize homosexuals and transgendered people. For the social injustices suffered by the LGBT community has been for centuries in this nation and even longer in Western Civilization. 

And what we should note is that many attempts to undo long standing social injustices often employ a similar logic on which those injustices are based. That logic is based on the desire not just to undo past and current injustices, but to prevent any future injustices. And thus the logic employed is similar to that employed in phobias where there is either an inability or unwillingness to distinguish that which only has a coincidentally association with one's fears from that which actually contributed to those fears. Here we should note that many social injustices are based on bigotry where there is an unwillingness or inability to make distinctions.

And so while many from the LGBT community insist that, to be properly respected, one's gender identity must be considered one's biological sex and always regarded that way in society, many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians insist that biological sex must be the overriding, if not the only, factor that almost every person must use in determining what gender they identify as. The error of both groups is, as they provide mirror images of each other, that they conflate one's biological sex with one's gender identity. And the problem there is that while biological sex deals with the physical world, gender identity deals with the social-psychological world. . 

Thus there is an obvious need by both many in the LGBT community as well as many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians to return to the drawing board. That is because, on the LGBT side, gender identity cannot redefine what is biological. And thus to adequately describe the place in which many who are or who are seeking to be transgendered find themselves is that there are more than just the two categories in biological sex. For many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians, what they need to realize that gender identity is not solely determined by the equipment one is born with and thus we can't force the reality we experience or expect on them. Here we should note that gender identity issues have a history that is both outside of and precedes Western Civilization's current experiment with expressive individualism which Burk mentions as a contributing factor to our problems with gender identity.

Burk needs to be more careful in commenting on the views of others with whom he sharply disagrees. In addition, he needs to study the topic of gender identity as it has existed before the current time and in other societies than his own.