Someone Please Teach The Birds & Bees To The Washington Post

A decade ago, The Washington Post revealed its ignorance about where babies come from. On Wednesday, the publication showed its writers still don’t understand what every 10-year-old learns in a special talk with mom or dad. (I’d heard the panicked argument that all that USAID money was necessary to fund sex ed in uneducated parts of the world, but I didn’t realize those uneducated places were actually Washington newsrooms!)

In 2014, the Post’s Philip Bump took a factual statement that he didn’t like but that everyone understands to be true — that “human life beings at conception” — and tried to refute it by citing “experts” who said that pregnancy doesn’t begin until implantation. As it probably took you two seconds to notice just now, the moment life is created and the moment implantation happens are not the same thing, as Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway explained to the Bumps of the world at the time.

This week, the Post is at it again, with an equally obvious fact of mankind’s sexual existence: the fact that, when you come into the world, you are either male or female.

Once again, Post writers were responding to a scientific reality that even young children understand, but which is inconvenient for them politically. Following President Donald Trump’s executive order recognizing “two sexes, male and female,” the Post went searching for “experts” and “science” to prove him wrong.

“Trump says there are ‘two sexes.’ Experts and science say it’s not binary,” is the headline they chose.

Writers Kelsey Ables and Mark Johnson solicited the help of “experts” like the University of Iowa’s Maurine Neiman to explain why sex is “much more complicated than a simple binary.” Neiman, by the way, was granted nearly a million dollars by the National Science Foundation several years ago to study the sexual functions of a New Zealand snail. Your tax dollars at work!

Now, unlike D-list Broadway actress Ketanji Brown Jackson, you probably didn’t need the input of “science experts” to understand the difference between boys and girls. Americans agree on the existence of two and only two sexes by a more overwhelming majority larger than that any U.S. president has won since voters, instead of state legislatures, became responsible for choosing presidential electors. Which means that most Americans are smarter than The Washington Post.

Trump, and all those Americans who agree with him, are “oversimplifying” human biology, the Post and its experts say. Ables and Johnson start with this definition that is so scientifically and teleologically ignorant that the editor who let it go to publish deserves to never work in media again:

Sex is widely understood to refer to a label assigned at birth based on one’s anatomy that may or may not match a person’s gender.

As is obvious to everyone who has ever seen another human being, sex is not just a letter on your birth certificate. It’s not just “assigned” by a doctor. It’s not even just anatomy, although anatomy is a pretty darn consistent indicator of it! It is an immutable fact of our existence, as reflected by our sexual anatomy, hormones, and secondary physical, mental, and emotional characteristics. We can’t change it any more than we can change our genetic parentage. We also can’t change it by lopping off breast and penile tissue. A man whose legs have been amputated is still teleologically a biped.

The article’s insertion of junk science about gender identity — and the stated concern that Trump’s order is “targeting transgender people” — gives away the game. The Post is on the side of men and women who want to force society to indulge the delusion that they are actually the opposite sex.

But letting men use the bathroom with little girls is not a very popular hill to die on, so the Post pretends its objection is actually about people with chromosomal abnormalities or whose reproductive and sexual organs did not develop properly.

As the Post pointed out, boys with Klinefelter syndrome are born with an extra X chromosome. Girls born with Turner syndrome only have a single X chromosome. Some boys are born with a resistance to male hormones, and some girls are born with overactive male hormones, both anomalies that affect anatomical development. In extremely rare cases, babies are born with chromosomes that don’t match their anatomy or with both ovarian and testicular tissue. But the number of babies affected by these uncommon cases is nowhere near the “close to 2 percent of the U.S. population” for whom the Post’s experts suggest sex is hard to “assign.”

It’s true that certain physical ailments affect our ability to operate as we were designed. Babies whose bodies don’t develop properly deserve the utmost compassion and care. But a person born blind or paralyzed or in need of heart surgery is not some new species just because his body is not operating the way it was designed. Take it from none other than the Post’s “expert” Maurine Neiman, who refuted her own position without realizing it.

“There are people we could call females using other criteria who don’t produce any eggs,” she says in the article. Well, yes, exactly — and we all recognize that those women are still women!

But wait, there’s more. The Post and its experts take issue with the fact that Trump’s order “says sex is determined ‘at conception.’” But how could that be, says “expert” Eve Feinberg, because reproductive organs don’t form until later in gestation?

Oh my. Feinberg is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at what is ranked the No. 6 university in America. I wonder if she knows that a baby’s genetics are determined as soon as sperm and egg meet. Does she know that a baby’s skin color and eye color, for example, are determined genetically long before his skin and eyes fully develop?

I hope someone will educate the Post and its experts on how male and female anatomy are designed to complement each other in the creation of life — and on all the other amazing, complementary differences between men and women. I really hope someone shows them Webster’s 1828 definition of “sex,” which is beautiful in its political incorrectness in a way historical texts can sometimes be.

God’s design for men and women is so wonderful that it’s a shame for anyone to miss out on understanding it. I hope some mom or dad sits the folks at The Washington Post down for that talk before they consult with any more “experts.”

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.