Institutions across the country are embracing the idea that ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ now must include anyone who claims that identity at any given moment.
Institutions across the country are embracing the idea that ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ now must include anyone who claims that identity at any given moment.
T he term “woman” is “unquestionably not defined and has multiple definitions.” That’s how the attorney for Kappa Kappa Gamma explained why the women-only sorority ended up with a 6-foot-2-inch man living among the sisters. Members are suing Kappa for failing to live up to its bylaws, but the appellate-court judges aren’t quite sure what the authors of those bylaws — written in the late 1800s — meant when they wrote “woman.”
People tend to laugh when the supposedly smartest people in our country get tongue-tied trying to define a term that wouldn’t trip up the average preschooler. But for parents of daughters, this isn’t a laugh line. It’s reality. We really don’t know what the term “woman” or “girl” means when they are used by schools and other institutions that are supposed to provide services for our daughters. And that’s absolutely terrifying.
We know what it should mean, of course, but we can have no confidence that the school, sports team, or summer camp is similarly reality-based. Those institutions could be embracing any one of the “multiple” definitions that the Kappa sorority lawyer refers to — a definition that ended up forcing those 18- and 19-year-old girls to share their sorority house with a fully intact, 280-pound male.
Parents of daughters are waking up to the reality that they can’t just ignore this issue and hope it goes away. This isn’t just a problem for parents whose daughters are serious athletes fighting for scholarships. Institutions across the country are embracing the idea that “girl” and “woman” now must include anyone who claims that identity at any given moment.
This is already a problem, but it’s about to get worse. The Biden administration just redefined Title IX so that a law written 50 years ago to prevent sex discrimination in education now effectively outlaws anything that distinguishes between the sexes. Biden’s new Title IX undermines not just single-sex sports but locker rooms, dorms, camp houses, bathrooms, sex-ed classes, and even our language. This will have an impact on your daughter. So you’d better be ready to deal with the fallout.
Parents of daughters have always faced a challenge in making their girls, particularly as they enter their teenage years, aware of their own physical vulnerability with men. After years of roughhousing with boys at recess and holding their own during gym class, girls discover that their male classmates grow taller, stronger, faster. Mothers typically explain to their daughters how to protect themselves; it’s a delicate balance to communicate that, of course, most men are not sexual predators, but any man could be. Being aware of that vulnerability is essential to stay safe.
For decades, feminist activists helped drive home the message that women have no duty to compromise our sense of safety for the comfort of men. If a man made us uncomfortable, we were to say something, get ourselves out of the situation, and know that we weren’t wrong for trusting our instincts.
Today, this already challenging conversation is complicated by radical activists and powerful institutions robbing us of the language necessary to discuss these issues with our daughters and help them assess the risks around them. “Transwomen are women,” our girls are lectured. If you see a man undressing in the locker room at your YMCA, then your assumption that he is a man is wrong, we’re told. He has as much right to be there as any other woman does. If you are uncomfortable, you need to get over your hang-ups, not him. That’s what people in authority — from university administrators and school health officials to our HHS secretary and even our president — are telling our daughters. Any questioning of this mantra is out of bounds. Worse, it’s bigoted, transphobic, and increasingly grounds for discipline.
Will your twelve-year-old daughter’s bunkmates at the “all-girls” sleepaway camp really be female? Are you sure that the camp counselors’ definition of “girl” is the same as yours? These are hard conversations to have. But our job as parents isn’t to allow politically correct bullies to cow us into silence. Asking these questions, speaking out about the need to protect our daughters’ rights to privacy and safety, isn’t wrong or discriminatory. What’s wrong and discriminatory is a culture that increasingly denies reality and puts our daughters at risk.