Anyone Who Calls A Man A Woman Erases His Own Credibility

ABC, NBC, Fox and CNN have all reported on a man’s arrest for vandalizing cyber trucks at a Tesla dealership in Loveland, Colorado. Rather than being honest and calling a man a man, their stories are filled with references to a woman.

It is crystal clear to any reader that no woman was involved in the incident. Yet even Fox News gave the headline “Woman arrested after explosives discovered at Tesla dealership.” Their report features this official mugshot of a person who is clearly a man, and used female pronouns for him, although it also noted he goes by the name Justin Thomas Nelson in addition to a female name.

ABC’s brief story referred to this man three times as a woman. At least USA Today referred to Nelson as a “person,” even though it used grammatically incorrect “they” pronouns.

It is long overdue to declare that no reasonable journalist should ever trade in such deceptions. No credible news source should publish and distribute them. No discerning reader should tolerate them. It is manufactured falsehood. Let us all demand to be done with it.

We have all had, for too many years now, an a-scientific gender ideology forced upon us in the media, the workplace, at school, our communities, even in our families. It is time to reject the nonsense wholesale. Refuse to participate in it in your language, email signatures, on conference and workplace name badges, in orientation routines at school. Everywhere. Reasonable people do not do such things.

This resolve toward sanity compelled the Christian author Rosaria Butterfield to publicly repent two years ago of ever participating in this confusion, even for the sake of “kindness.” She recognized that the broader evangelical church showed confusion on this issue.

“Psychologist Mark Yarhouse and author Preston Sprinkle summarize the Christian case for transgender pronouns,” believing “using transgender pronouns is respectful of someone’s chosen identity; it’s kind and courteous and necessary for continuing a relationship,” she noted in her public repentance. Of course it is not. Butterfield admits, “I once sinfully said all these things, too. But this position makes no Christian sense.”

It makes no Christian sense because it makes no logical sense. To be human is to be either male or female. This is a common grace, a universal truth. It is not a cultural construct as the false discipline of gender studies teaches its captives on day one of its first class.

If this were true, we would have to be introduced to the various other genders that have been culturally constructed in all the other cultures around the world. But this never needs to be done. Everywhere you travel in the world, to the most remarkable and diverse cultures, you only find two kinds of humans: male or female. This fact is the first empirical denunciation of gender ideology.

This incoherence was infamously demonstrated in the Democratic National Committee’s leadership elections just last month when outgoing Chairman Jaime Harrison got flustered trying to officially explain to delegates why their votes must include votes for males, females, and “a gender non-binary candidate or officer.”

Remarkably, liberals like Jonathan Chait quickly highlighted the inanity of this in the pages of The Atlantic. Pete Buttigieg recently confessed at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, in colorful detail, that this identity silliness was a serious problem for his party and had to stop.

It is past time that we all resolve to show the kind of rational clarity this cultural moment demands. Every one of us knows what a woman and man are. We didn’t have to learn it, and we needed no one to explain it to us. There was no path of discovery any of us needed to take to realize this universal and self-evident truth.

We are in a civilizational moment where we must all resolve to reject, without apology or explanation, this deception in every form. We must demand that those who speak to us in the media, from lecterns in our classrooms, from C-suites and HR departments in our workplaces, and from pulpits in our churches do so from reality.

As the famous Soviet dissident and moral voice of his age, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, told his fellow countrymen living under the systematic and sustained deception of Communism 51 years ago, their continued captivity “demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.”

He concluded, “And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”

Cultural renewal must start today in this way, with our wholesale rejection, at every turn, of the present lie that male and female exist in subjective identity. It must be fueled by our clarity, determination, and moral courage. We have that power within us.

Glenn T. Stanton is the director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family and the author of “The Myth of the Dying Church.”