Monday, February 10, 2025

Part I

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‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’: President Trump Signs Executive Order for Transgender Women in Sports Ban

When you get closer to creation order, the importance of the issues just skyrocket. And thus, when we look back to something that happened last week, we understand that something like a dividing line in history was set, or at least we hope it was set. It might be reset. We really need to think about it.

Last week surrounded by girls and young women, President Trump signed an executive order with the title, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” That’s clarity for you, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” It also means keeping boys out of girls sports. It defies the wisdom of the wise of this age, and frankly, it was brilliantly done. It was an act of political stagecraft. No doubt about it having all those girls on the stage watching as the president signed the executive order, but it’s the kind of brilliant stagecraft that makes a big point. And honestly, it probably made a bigger point even though the White House intended. Because just the visuals of all those girls and young women surrounding the president as he signed this order just makes the point.

Girls and young women are a reality, and so is the threat to women and girls, and female sports when it comes to the transgender revolution, and in particular in relation to this policy, boys and men playing on girls and women’s teams, and competing against girls and women in athletic competition. Now I have argued that this is a demonstration of both courage and clarity, but let’s think about the clarity first. What was clarified?

Well, let’s go back to the president’s inaugural address when he made the statement, “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.” Now there is a single sentence there. He backed it up with a couple of other statements but that is the key sentence, “From now, as of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States.” What would be the policy? That there are only two genders, male and female.

Now one of the interesting things just in historical perspective is that you can’t imagine any previous president, or until recent times, any president even understanding why such a sentence would be necessary. But there’s something else encoded there that I want us to note, and that is the fact that throughout most of American history, English language usage here would be two sexes, male and female, not two genders. As I remember being told back when I was a high school student, humanity has two sexes and not genders. The French language has genders. By the way another little footnote there, the French language is going to have to require a whole set of modifications if the transgender revolutionaries have their way. If you have gendered nouns with verbal consequences, and you mix all that up, you mix up your language. But as I said, that’s a footnote of a footnote. We’re not going to trace that anymore. Let’s leave that to the French. They’ve got a lot on their plate.

Coming back to the United States, President Trump did make that statement. And when he used the word genders there, male and female, the key issue is what came before two genders, and that is there are only two genders, male and female. Now of course you can look at that and you recognize there are some on the transgender ideological spectrum who would at least find some way to agree with that if there is no definition behind male and female here, no definition behind gender. And so that’s why it’s important to recognize that the president did issue a full executive order going back to Inauguration Day in which he did stipulate exactly what it means when we say male and female.

And for instance, the president on Inauguration Day signed an order defining a female “as a person belonging at conception to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” And he went on to say that a male is “a person belonging at conception to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.” So even though he didn’t use the word sperm and egg, everyone understands. In legal language that’s exactly what he was talking about. It’s also just extremely significant, incredibly significant, talk about encoded language, notice the use of the word “conception” here. From conception, that’s when this identity is established as male or female based upon the presence of and potential for large or small reproductive cells. That is astounding clarity. Again, I can only imagine a conversation and it would have to be of course an imagined conversation in which Donald Trump would would’ve to explain to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, why he would’ve had to have said such a thing.

But in terms of clarification, the president has achieved a very rare clarity, and now he has driven it through a succession of executive orders having to do with the military, having to do with the Department of Health and Human Services, having to do with the Department of Education, having to do, for example, with female sports in something that is extended to anything involved with federal funding. And that means virtually all major colleges and universities in the United States.

So let’s understand that the policy, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” it’s abundantly clear. As a matter of fact, even just the title makes the issue abundantly clear. I said that the president has achieved a great deal of clarity here, and I want to give him credit for that clarity. I want to give him even more credit for the courage. So let me speak very bluntly. Here’s the way politics is played.

President Trump could have effectively paid off many in his conservative base, many of the people who paid for him, if he had simply given some kind of tip of the hat to this issue, issued some kind of vague nonbinding order and just made some generalized declarations in terms of his speeches. That’s not what he did. Instead, with an astounding comprehensiveness, President Trump is driving the reality of male and female, and that means the reality as Christians understand of creation order through federal policies. Here’s something else. The courage in all of that is reflected not only in the fact that he’s put his name on these documents, and he has also exercised stagecraft and statecraft by having these public signings with so many people around him. He’s not trying to deflect attention from these executive orders, he’s directing attention to them.

He also knows that every single one of them is almost certain to be challenged in court. A more weak-kneed administration would fear that. I think it’s pretty clear that President Trump is invigorated by the thought. I think he wants his administration to go into court and make the arguments, and he knows that the vast majority of the American people are with him. So here’s something really, really interesting. We’ve talked about it before. The LGBTQ revolution is coming apart right now at the T. We’ve seen this over the course of the last several years. We’ve seen prominent female athletes such as say Martina Navratilova, who is also a lesbian, come out absolutely against male participation in female sports. She has said quite accurately, it would mean the end of female sports. You’ve also had major figures in the literary world such as J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, who has also very courageously made the same point and at risk to her own name and her own brand.

And just again as a footnote, another I’ll insert here, even as the ideological Left and the revolutionaries have tried to destroy J. K. Rowling, I mentioned on The Briefing not long ago, she signed another massive package in terms of a film release. And that has a lot to do with the fact that the vast majority of the public just aren’t buying the argument. They’re not as offended as LGBTQ activists are counting upon them being. And as Christians, we understand that’s because it is a reflection of creation order in such a direct way that even the people who try to convince themselves they’re entirely for this revolution, or the fellow travelers who try to convince themselves that they’re, if not say, putting energy behind it, they at least believe in what the activists say. They have to convince themselves over and over again, and try to keep their stories straight when they use the words male and female when they know they do not apply.

Now, I mentioned the courts. I really do believe that President Trump and those in his administration know that this is going to get into the courts. I’m not saying they necessarily welcome it, but knowing it’s inevitable, I think they do welcome the opportunity to defend the policy, and frankly to have America watch as they defend the policy.

Part II

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State Bans on Hormone Therapy and Puberty Blockers on Minors are Constitutional: Trump Reverses Important Supreme Court Argument from the Biden Administration

But on this issue, there’s something else the Trump administration has done that has escaped a lot of notice, and that’s because most Americans aren’t watching these things. Usually in a customary fashion when there is a change of administrations even between parties in an active case before the United States Supreme Court, the administration does not change the executive branch’s argument. But President Trump and his administration have done just that, in the Tennessee case before the United States Supreme Court in which there’s a Tennessee law that bans hormone treatments and puberty blockers for children and adolescents under legal age.

And so that case was appealed by some in Tennessee and the case was on arrival the U.S. Supreme Court and the Biden administration said that it was officially opposed to state-level laws such as the law in Tennessee. Now the Trump administration has reversed the argument.

USA Today noticed it. The article declares, “The Justice Department told the Supreme Court on Friday it’s with withdrawing the government’s opposition to state laws banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors, reversing the Biden administration’s view that such bans discriminate against transgender people.” It’s also interesting that in the statements made by the administration are these words, “the sexes are not changeable.” In a second week in office, President Trump issued yet another executive order in which he declared related to young people under the age of 19. “It is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called transition of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

Put the two things together, President Trump has issued an executive order making very clear that the U.S. government is not in favor of these procedures, won’t pay for them, et cetera, and it is supportive of state laws limiting them. This is really big news, but it’s coming in such an avalanche of big news, lot of people are going to miss it.

All of this is really important. But the big theological point, the big Christian worldview point we need to recognize is not just that God made human beings in His image, male and female created he, them, that is essential, but all of creation order is essential. And when you look at the rejection or the subversion of male and female as objective truth, as biological reality, as stable categories, you are subverting creation order itself. Now Christians understand that the entire LGBTQ revolution is at war with creation order, but here’s where we need to understand that issues become closer and closer to the core of creation order.

Issues become more and more visible, harder and harder to suppress in unrighteousness, to use the language of the Apostle Paul in Romans 1. I think as a theologian that what’s going on here is that many very confused Americans are unwilling to speak to behavior in the way they should when it comes to say the L, the G and the B. But when it comes to the activist claims of the transgender movement, it’s not just about what you do, it’s a claim about who you are, and it is right down to the mutilation of children, and the mutilation of human bodies, and the complete confusion of all reality. When it comes down to male and female, it turns out that those categories are absolutely necessary to sanity in a civilization or in a society. Again, in creation order that’s abundantly clear. Notice that male and female is in the same passage as the creation of human beings as beings. We were from the beginning created, male and female. Not only stable categories, not only distinct categories, but categories that bring the Creator great glory, and bring the creature great good.

Part III

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The NCAA Falls in Line: Trump’s Executive Order Banning Trans Women Sports is Already Reshaping the Nation’s Most Influential College Sports Governing Body

Okay. There’s another big dimension for us to note here. When President Trump signed that executive order, it was just a matter of days and hours before there was a response from the NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The NCAA, it includes hundreds of thousands of athletes. It includes an incredible number of member schools. It is the establishment when it comes to collegiate sports. And like so much of higher education, it has been ideologically captured. But on this particular question that ideological capture has been unraveling.

So here’s what’s really interesting. Just days after the president issued his order, Charlie Baker, we could refer to him as Governor Baker as a former Republican governor of the state of Massachusetts, not particularly conservative, certainly not a warrior on these issues. Nonetheless, as president of the NCAA, he issued a statement of his own in which he declared that the NCAA would reorganize its policies in line with the president’s declaration. He said this, “We strongly believe that clear, consistent and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions.” But he then went on to say, “To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear national standard.” Well, of course it does. That’s exactly what it does. The NCAA could have done that. It didn’t have the nerve to do that.

So one of the other worldview lessons we learn here is that when you have a strong authoritative argument made in a consistent way, it also gives a bit of courage and perhaps even a little bit of coercion here, let’s be honest, for a group like the NCAA to get in line. Now the really interesting thing to watch is how the institutions respond. Individually and in groups, it’s going to be very interesting to see what kind of Left-wing activism comes from say, the left-wing faculty and so many of these institutions, which is to say like 99% of the faculty in order to see what kind of pushback comes given their complicity in the NCAA’s cooperation with President Donald Trump. They find themselves in a fine mess.

One interesting thing to watch is whether or not the institutions themselves get the hint and begin to organize their own student policies in line with at least something close to this kind of executive order. Honestly, that will require the refutation of the stances taken by the institutions and their faculties and others for a long time. And by the way, the social activists who work in the bureaucracies of many of these institutions, major universities and colleges, just watch out parents, they’re often even more liberal than the faculty. That’s absolutely true, and when you think about it’s absolutely scary.

But I want to make a statement about political reality that I just feel honor bound to make here. When you look at the kind of consistency and as I say, courage demonstrated by the Trump administration and by President Trump himself on these issues, we need to understand that the way the traditional game of politics is played, a traditional Republican president wouldn’t have done anything like this in terms of the extent, the detail, the specificity, and the consistency. This is incredibly bold and it represents a break with the kind of traditional Republicanism of the past. Those traditional Republicans delivered some real victories for the conservative base, but the conservative base was often frustrated at a lack of real progress. President Trump and his administration have been very bold on these issues, and it’s up to us to make very clear we are in absolute agreement on these issues with the remarkable clarity of the president and his executive orders. And we are willing to contend for these things in the court of public opinion as the Trump administration has to do the same, but also has to defend these issues in the courts.

Or to put it another way, some of the president’s actions, words, some of his arguments, they can give traditional conservatives, Christian conservatives, heartburn. On the other hand, the courage and consistency the president has shown on this issue, it’s downright heartwarming, but let’s look at a deeper issue here. We see the pattern that on the transgender issue, a lot of Americans are in a very different place than on other issues even in the sexual revolution. This is a bridge too far. It’s a road they don’t want to take, but let’s also be honest about something else. This issue achieves greater clarity when you talk about children and teenagers than when you’re talking about adults. Given American understandings, that is to say cultural understandings of personal autonomy. The fact is that an awful lot of Americans really don’t achieve the moral clarity to say, “You ought not to do that,” when you’re talking about an adult.

And let’s just talk about something like what’s called sex reassignment surgery. We know what we’re talking about here. Many Americans just seem to be unwilling to say that ought to be taken off the table. Now many of them are very much in agreement that taxpayer money shouldn’t pay for it, but they’re basically at least many Americans ready to go along. But let’s face it, many Americans are ready to go along and simply say, “If they want to pay for it, it’s their choice. They could do what they want.” I think that argument is wrong, but I think we do need to recognize it’s common. But when you talk about children and teenagers, notice the same people reverse their stance. They no longer want to talk about personal autonomy. They want to talk about protecting children and young people. Now that’s the vestige, that’s the remnant of a very healthy moral impulse.

So let’s just explain it this way. When it comes to children and young people, it’s very interesting that a lot of our neighbors who are confused about adults, they’re pretty clear when it comes to young people and creation order. They understand that there’s a difference between a boy and a girl, and they think that’s healthy for children and teenagers even if they’re troubled about other issues, and even if adults might have their own adult rights, the argument might go. When it comes to children, the protective instinct comes in, and I’m going to argue that protective instinct is in alignment with the moral order, and it’s in alignment with creation order.

Part IV

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A 3-Year-Old ‘Trans’ Toddler? – This is Sheer Insanity

And that leads to an absolutely heartbreaking and tragic article that appeared recently. It appeared at a media site known as The Cut, and that is an online representation of New York Magazine. Now, New York Magazine is pretty much about the cultural movements in New York City, by definition, progressive, kind of transgressive, all the rest, you know what we’re talking about here.

The Cut however, recently ran an article opposed to “the anti-trans movement” as they would say, and stipulating that they would argue, at least the writer of the article would argue that children in New York City are being targeted by the Trump administration, and they’re being harmed by the Trump administration’s directives. Now we believe the children are being protected, the creation order is being respected, that this is the way things ought to be. But the interesting thing is the argument is coming back. Anya Kamenetz’s writing at The Cut, she’s identified as “a writer who covers parenting.” She tells of a protest outside New York University’s Medical Center back on the 3rd of February. And this included teenagers, and young people, and parents complaining about the Trump administration’s policies.

I’m not going to look at this in detail because you pretty much can figure out what this means. I do want to point to one thing, and I want to say that this was pointed out by Michael Deacon in an article in the London paper known as The Telegraph. I just want to say he insightfully saw this issue at The Cut and understood how horrifying it is. He wrote an article asking, “What sort of parent believes their toddler is trans.” And embedded at this article at The Cut which is a part of New York Magazine, one parent in this case a mom spoke up supposedly on behalf of her son who was transitioning. And we’re told this, that stress has affected one mother in the Bronx whose son transitioned at the age of three. He will soon be 12, and his doctor at New York University Langone, [that’s the medical center,] informed her that he will not be able to get a puberty blocker device implanted in his arm this spring as planned.”

Notice what we were told here. This is a mother in the Bronx “whose son transitioned at the age of three.” Now we’re talking about a higher order of insanity here, and it’s the insanity that comes at both ends of this equation. Evidently, this reporter for this media source thinks that this mother is supposed to make sense speaking of a child who “transitioned at the age of three.”

What exactly would that look like? Having the wrong color socks on, blue rather than pink, or pink rather than blue? What exactly would a three-year-old transgender transitioning child look like? I think we know exactly what we’re talking about here. This is the parent transitioning not the child. The child may be confused, but the child of this parent is doomed to be confused. How in the world would a parent look at a three-year-old as the article in The Telegraph said at a toddler and say, “Well, there’s a transitioning individual for you. You know the birth certificate, it’s just three years old. But it’s already out of date because he’s transitioning or she’s transitioning.” And just given the way the ideological language is used these days, presumably this is a girl now referred to as a son. Otherwise, the article doesn’t make sense, but quite frankly, the entire universe according to this article doesn’t make sense.

Michael Deaton at The Telegraph referring to this parent and to this statement in the article says that The Cut, that is the media source, should have asked big questions. “But of course it didn’t. Because it plainly thinks that the above quote is all perfectly fine and dandy, not strange or unusual in any shape or form. Nothing to see here.” That’s the insanity. He saw it. I hope you see it.

And that’s the courage and clarity demanded of us all, to see things as they really are, to speak of things only in ways that are true, and to love people even when it means not agreeing with who they say they are, but loving them for who God made them to be. Even if they’re confused, loving them all the more, but loving them all the more consistently with who God made them to be, and helping them to see that God made them who he made them for their good and for his glory.