A Civilization That Can No Longer Say What a Woman Is

There is something strange about a country that has reached the point where a court must decide what a woman is, and then gets it wrong.

In AUSTRALIA, a federal court has just ruled that Sall Grover, a woman who built an app for women, discriminated by refusing a man entry. The man identified as a woman, and that, according to the court, was enough. Biology played no role. Reality played no role. The simple fact that a woman's body differs from a man's, the thing every child knows, the thing every language across human history has had a word for, was treated by the court as legally irrelevant.

This is where we now stand.

It is easy to be drawn into the moral question of respect, of dignity, of feelings, and miss what is actually at stake.

But what is at stake is simpler and far graver. A civilization that can no longer say what a woman is has lost the ability to say what anything is. It has given up the first and most fundamental thing of all, that words refer to reality.

When the Woman is no longer the Woman, the Man is no longer the Man. The Child is no longer the Child. The Mother is no longer the Mother. The whole architecture of meaning on which a society rests crumbles from within, because the language carrying it has been hollowed out.

This is not a political phenomenon.

It is a metaphysical event, a society losing contact with what is.

The satirical video accompanying this text was made by artificial intelligence. It shows women and girls who does not exist. Faces, bodies, a movement, all of it generated out of nothing. That is fitting. Because the ruling Australia has just handed down does precisely the same thing. It generates a woman out of a word. It replaces what is living, what is born, what is bodily with a category that exists only inside the word itself.

And there is something cold and unreal about it.

For those who build women-only spaces, shelters, sports clubs, locker rooms, communities for women who have survived violence, this is not an abstract discussion. It is their mothers' freedom, their daughters' safety, their own reality that is on the line. They know why these spaces came into being. They know what they protect against. And they are now being told that what they know is discriminatory.

This is not progress. This is a society that has stopped being able to see.

When a culture can no longer say what is, it can no longer say what is true. And when it can no longer say what is true, it can no longer defend anything at all, not even the women whose struggles made it possible for a ruling like this to be handed down inside a free legal system in the first place.

Sall Grover has done nothing more than say what every language in history has said before her. That a woman is a woman.

It is no victory for anyone that she had to say it inside a courtroom. It is a measure of how far we have moved away from ourselves.

I am the son of a woman. The husband of a woman. The brother of two women. The uncle of five nieces. I have more women in my life as close friends than I can count.

And I understand, because we have written it and described it and laid it open more than once, why it has become so difficult for women to say plainly what they see and feel. The language has been corrupted, subverted and seeded against them. Every word they reach for has already been loaded with the meaning that will be turned against them the moment they speak.

To call themselves women is now treated as a position. To defend a space they built is treated as bigotry. To trust their own eyes is treated as violence.

So.

I take this fight on their behalf. I carry it until one of us is down. I don't care what it takes - like the rest of the nonsense we have walked ourselves into. The order we are being pulled toward cannot stand. It MUST NOT be allowed to stand.

And if no one else will name it clearly, let me.
Let me slaughter it for what it is -