Jeopardy

Introduction

What is a woman?

If this were a Jeopardy! answer, what would be the clue? Would Alex Trebek need to provide the answer as the contestants stood silent? And most curious, would Amy Schneider, formerly Thomas Schneider, the first transgender champion of Jeopardy!, confidently bet it all on Final Jeopardy?

During the congressional confirmation hearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson a few days ago she was asked, “What is your definition of a woman?” There was some hemming and hawing, some shuffling of papers, and finally the political Tai Chi maneuver we were all anticipating. She could not answer the question, she said, because she is “not a biologist,” a sure sign that we are in a different kind of jeopardy all together.

The answer has entered the pantheon of the side-stepping, gamey answers that we have come to expect from our best and brightest. Since the clip of the questioning went viral, there has been a barrage of satire and flabbergastification from conservative outlets, and all of it justified.

But what is more odd than a Supreme Court nominee’s inability to define a woman is the fact that the question was asked in the first place. As much as we’d all love to think this was some dreamy ponderance over this greatest of mysteries, it just ain’t so. This was not the humble crumb of wisdom falling from a pair of human lips, or a curious expedition into platonic forms, but a sign of late stage cultural decadence.

Good Examples Of Bad Answers

Now, we all had a good laugh at this, and there was no small amount of eye rolling and giddy meme generating, such as the one to the right. But when the snickering subsided and conservatives filled their chests in preparation for their devastating retorts, their answers to this question were confined also to the biological, and amounted to a woman having X chromosomes, a vagina, and the ability to birth tiny humans.

Jackson’s answer was dumb because not only did she hint that woman was merely biological, but took the next step of proving that she had not even a kindergartener’s understanding of biology. The only difference in the conservative answer is that they do have a kindergartener’s understanding of biology. One is not as smart as a five year old, and the other boasts they are at least as smart. All around, not a good showing from either side. This is a good example of a bad answer.

Defining a woman in terms of biology is unhelpful for a few of reasons. It is not helpful because in our modern parlance, an appeal to genetics is an appeal to evolution, and evolution means incremental changes from one thing to another. Or to use a synonym, a transition from one thing to another. Where have we heard that word transition before…? Practically, mutating XY to XX is not a real thing, but we live in a time where we don’t need to trifle with things like arithmetic and probability, the concept is enough to satisfy. So when conservatives site biology as definitional, they are appealing to an endless succession of changes as evidence that ‘woman’ is a fixed biological category.

Secondly, we live in a time when feelings trump facts. Personal truths are woven into a coherent worldview detached from corresponding reality. I know Ben Shapiro is fond of saying “facts don’t care about your feelings,” and they don’t, but that is perfectly useless when facts are filtered through “personal reality’, and accepted or rejected based on if they tickle the feelings or no. There are no present consequences for feelings not corresponding with reality. Feelings packed her bags and walked out on Facts a decade ago; they divorced over irreconcilable differences. She is now living in a small apartment in the Upper West Side with her terrier and a view of the park.

But most importantly, appealing to biology is unhelpful because it is not addressing the real problem, which is the assumption that gender and sex are separate entities. Take any progressive you like and ask if a woman has a pair of X chromosomes and they will say she sure can, but a “woman” can also have fists like sides of beef, and a pair of dangling biologicals. Sex and gender have been decoupled. Current understanding of humans is that we are ghosts in a machine; there is nothing about the shape of the machine that necessitates a particular gender of ghost haunt the inner parts.

A Christian Answer

We do not need a conservative answer to this question, we need a Christian one. Any answer to what a woman is must address the estrangement of gender and biology, which means it cannot be answered without reference to a creator God. Since God is the manufacturer, perhaps he has some suggestions for his creation’s intended purpose.

One way to think about the answer is to consider the relationship of gender and sex in terms of which came first; which is derivative of the other? Did biological sex conjure up gender through some hegemonic hocus pocus? Or did the Masculine precede the male, and Feminine the female?

Clearly, for America and her Western traveling companions on Handbasket Airlines, the answer is that masculinity and femininity are derived from having a penis or vagina, which is to say, it is invented; a “social construct” as the kids are fond of saying. One gets a penis from his genes and has been pre-conditioned by society to act, think and behave along masculine grooves carved by culture. The other gets a different set of genes and a different cultural role to perform. Call this the to the female -> feminine approach, where genes are spooged into a cultural mold manufactured by a particular society, at a particular epoch, that we call gender. And since gender is just play acting, it doesn’t so much matter who plays the woman, much like some avant garde reboot of Macbeth.

Conversely, the Bible teaches the Feminine -> female view, which means the female biology is a response to the Feminine gender – that fraction of God’s being he chose to place in a vessel for the expressed purpose of imaging certain truths about Himself.In other words, shape matters. The female form is on purpose; biology harkens to gender and is responsive to it. Gender is not a creation; it is creative. Woman is that glorious biological repository of Femininity which existed in the heart of God for forever.

Feminine and female are not separate concepts welded together through some cultural tack. Nor did they come into existence at the same time, like twins, the one physical an the one immaterial. Neither can we consider biology distinct from gender, as though a woman’s personality could be extracted from the female form and relocated in the male body, like someone swapping cars. Gender is as old as the Ancient of Days because it is an expression of God, who is eternal. Male and female is the shape Masculinity and Femininity takes through the creative medium of bone and clay.

An Example From Lewis

All this is very mysterious, so much so that the true unity of the Feminine to the female cannot be codified or bean counted. This is normal. And when someone with the perspicacity of CS Lewis also bumbles through it, you know that you have gone down the road of mystery about as far as you can go.

In Perlandra, Lewis hints at a truer understanding of gender as his protagonist Ransom witnesses Malacandra and Perlandra, the “Adam and Eve” of the planet, unfallen and glorious:

“Both the bodies were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try–Ransom has tried a hundred times–to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don’t know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, party exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity. All this Ransom saw, as it were, with his own eyes. The two white creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female).”

Lewis plumbs the eternal roots of the Feminine, of which the human female is the fruit. Gender is fundamental, definitional, and older than the universe. The image is a “blurred reflection” of the Feminine which are higher up and further in. They were the model in God’s Spirit that sat for the portrait of himself he imaged when he created woman.

Conclusion

The physical and emotional structure of the female is made in the image of the ideal Feminine which are native to the character of God – the “idea” in bodily form. God is nurturing, compassionate, life giving, beautiful, comley, alluring and wholesome; the female took the shape befitting the Feminine; Feminine gender embodied looks female.

Sure, the next new justice in highest court in the land cannot or will not say what a woman is. We can take this as apocalyptic decadence and kiss our androgynous butts goodbye, or we can use this an opportunity to magnify the image of God through gender and give crisp answers to what a woman (and man) is when we are questioned in our workplaces, school boards, boardrooms, and pubs. Perhaps we never had a need to rediscover the depth and glory of Gender which God has so succinctly packed into these jars of clay?

Let us not be the kind of people who pussyfoot around answers, nor the scream the wrong answer loudly. What a woman is cannot be separated from gender, and gender is only real if there is a God. If sex makes gender, then we should silently resign from the discussion right now and concede it is a social construct, and all the hegemonic oppression from whence it came. But if the female sex is the means of imaging the Feminine and is derived from it in the kind of way Lewis described, then this instructive, directional, life-giving polarity which was bound in the Spirit of God since eternity, must be proclaimed with gusto.