Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine, 1/29/25
Who would have thought the perfect answer to a question that has long eluded the experts and thought leaders among us would come from so unlikely a source as the newly-inaugurated 47th President of the United States? Or that of all the applause lines in a speech that garnered so many, his answer would prove to be the loudest and longest of all?
And yet, there you have it—Donald J. Trump, pronouncing definitively on the subject before an audience of millions. Was the world held spellbound, I wonder, when he told them that, really, there are only two genders? Did they exclaim, “Oh, what a concept you’ve given us, Mr. President! How positively revolutionary!”
All this, of course, was followed the very next day with an Executive Order officially putting an end to the toxic idiocy that there can be no limit placed on the number of genders people choose. End of story.
How wonderfully biblical our new president has become! What a lot of nerve he has shown, too, in returning the question to the Book of Genesis where it rightly belongs. Informing us that not only are we made in God’s image but that, in the clearest and most binary way, God chose to create us either male or female.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)
There is no third way. The forced march in that direction has ended, triumphantly it would appear, in a ditch on the side of a road that goes nowhere. Thus has the door definitively closed on the idea of an ever-expanding field of gender fluidity. The illusion, so comforting to the dysphoric few, that gender is somehow a performative act, a mere social construct we build on our own dime, without reference to the sheer givenness of a reality that comes ready-made from the hand of God, has at last been shown the door. The conceit, so utterly absurd on the face of it, that gender is simply what we do and not what we are, has finally been put to rest.
There is a reality, in other words, and it exists even before we are moved to recognize and give it a name. We may not be reducible to our bodies, but we are surely rooted in them. And they remain, quite ineluctably, either male or female.
Thus, the whole meaning of being on which we depend, the very ground on which we stand—because it comes from God, even as it is mediated by and through the physical union of one man and one woman—is always a gift we receive. Indeed, it is a gift so precious and rare that we can never give it to ourselves.
We are not self-generated, in other words, and our contingent status under God cannot be co-opted by gender theorists, whose hatred of what they call “essentialism” has so consumed them that they are determined to supplant God Himself and the entire order of the universe He inscribed in our bodies. We cannot do as we please with our bodies, trading in one sex for another simply because we happen to prefer a different model. That way lies madness; and now, thanks to its repudiation from the highest elected official in the land, we can relax a bit, knowing the arrangement put in place by God has once again been upheld.
Yes, that madman Nietzsche was right when he told us that “Something came along and wiped away the horizon.” But it has done quite enough damage for now. The time has come to put away that eraser and begin to restore the horizon to where it belongs. And I, for one, do not mind thanking Trump for helping make it happen.
God is not dead, despite the attempt on the part of so many who wish that He were in order to justify the violence they have, until now, been allowed to visit upon the human person made in His image—like performing double mastectomies on adolescent girls to enable them to become boys.
How necessary it is for us to know these things—indeed, to remind ourselves of their continuing relevance in our public and private lives. Hence the importance of Holy Writ in telling us in so many resonant and robust ways that it is God who remains the author of life. Psalm 139, for instance, gives eloquent testimony to the fact that it is God, not chance circumstance or a machine, that fashions the human being, breathing life into the creature whom God knew even in the womb:
For thou didst form my inward parts,
thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful.
Wonderful are thy works!
Thou knowest me right well;
my frame was not hidden from thee,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.
Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance;
in thy book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
Will identity politics ever be the same again? Will it even survive this latest onslaught? Should Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson be calling her office about now? She was, you’ll remember, the clueless judge who, at her confirmation hearing to serve on the Supreme Court back in 2022, insisted that because she hadn’t a biology degree, she really wasn’t qualified to define a woman. Anymore, one supposes, than a non-veterinarian is qualified to speak about dogs. What piffle.
And now, with the return of sanity to the White House, will she, too, be moving in a rightward direction? Not likely, I’m afraid. Woke ideology is not so easily overcome by those who have long accustomed themselves to its sophistry.
Still, if not a complete retraction, at least a little less noise may be forthcoming, which is something to be grateful for. Indeed, we have good reason to rejoice that the insanity of transgenderism may soon be on the run, abandoned by many of its apologists, if only because a majority of Americans appear no longer invested in keeping the mythology alive.
May the day soon come when men pretending to be women, encamping themselves in women’s locker rooms and showers, find that the market for such perversity is no longer there.