In a healthy constitutional republic, courts interpret laws; they do not redefine reality. Judges are charged with reading legal texts, not resolving questions of basic human biology that ordinary citizens have understood for centuries. Yet our cultural moment has produced an inversion: courts are increasingly asked to decide whether obvious truths about sex still count as truths at all.
That tension was on full display during yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments challenging state laws in West Virginia and Idaho that reserve girls’ and women’s sports for girls and women. These cases are not really about athletics. They are about whether the law must affirm a fiction—namely, that biological sex is either unknowable or irrelevant.
Why Female Sports Exist at All
Sex-segregated sports exist for a reason. Biological differences between males and females are real, measurable, and consequential—especially in competitive athletics, where strength, speed, and endurance matter not only for fairness but also for safety.
Female sports were created precisely because competing against males would disadvantage women and girls. To claim that excluding males from female sports is discriminatory misses the point entirely. The distinction is not arbitrary; it is grounded in biology.
That is why these cases almost always involve males seeking access to female sports rather than the reverse. Males who identify as female are not barred from sports altogether. They are barred from competing as females.
Sex Discrimination—or Biological Reality?
The challengers argue that laws preserving female-only sports constitute unlawful sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX. But this argument collapses on contact with reality.
Sex-based distinctions are not inherently unjust. The law has long recognized that some forms of sex discrimination are legitimate when they reflect real biological differences rather than irrational prejudice. This is why sex-based classifications receive less stringent judicial scrutiny than race-based ones. Biology is not bigotry.
Female-only sports discriminate on the basis of sex by design—and rightly so.
The Question That Ends the Debate
During oral arguments, Justice Alito asked the question that cuts through all the legal gymnastics: What does “sex” mean for purposes of equal protection and federal civil rights law? How can courts determine whether discrimination has occurred if they cannot define the category at issue?
The response was astonishing. The challengers conceded that they had no definition. Sex, we were told, has no fixed legal meaning.
That should have ended the case.
When Congress prohibited discrimination “on the basis of sex,” it used a word with a clear, public meaning—one rooted in biology and universally understood when those laws were enacted. If that definition governs, laws protecting female sports are plainly lawful. If federal law is silent, then states are entitled to define sex reasonably for themselves. Either way, a biological definition cannot violate federal law.
The Absurd Alternative
The only alternative offered is worse: a system in which schools must police hormone levels, medical histories, and bodily alterations to determine who qualifies as female enough to compete. Such a regime would be invasive, unworkable, and deeply unjust—especially to girls.
The truth is neither complicated nor cruel. Boys are not girls. Men are not women. A legal system that cannot say so is not advancing equality; it is abandoning reality.
Welcome back to the Podcast. I’m glad you’re here with me today. We’re tackling a big cultural question—the growing obsession with what can be called the promise of disembodiment. That’s the idea that our bodies don’t matter, that they’re just clay to be reshaped, husks to be discarded, or even obstacles to the “real” self.
Today, I want to walk with you through this lie, why it’s so appealing, and why the Christian vision of the body offers a much more beautiful, hopeful truth.
Naming the Lie
The cultural signs are everywhere. Abortion framed as a right to bodily “autonomy.” Gender ideology claiming male and female are optional. Assisted suicide presented as dignity. Even futuristic fantasies of uploading our minds into machines. (Yeah, there are some technologists out there that are presenting that as a possibility.)
All of these share the same root assumption: the body doesn’t matter.
“Those of us who know that we were created in God’s image have no choice but to acknowledge our bodies, those awkward earthly vessels that matter and cannot be manipulated as if they were raw material for our disembodied wills.”
That’s exactly it. Either the body is a gift with meaning—or it’s just raw material, something to use, discard, or redefine.
And when we lose the sense of the sacredness of the body, Leibovitz warns,
“Take away this belief in the sacred character of the body and it becomes not a temple but a speed bump.”
A speed bump. Something in the way. Something to get past. That’s the lie we’re facing.
Why the Lie Is Attractive
Let’s be honest—this lie is appealing because it promises freedom. If my body doesn’t matter, then I can do whatever I want with it. I can erase biological sex. I can evade the consequences of sex. I can even reject life itself if it doesn’t feel worth living.
But this so-called freedom is actually a prison. Leibovitz writes:
“When you do away with the sanctity of the body, you invite tyranny, because you are no longer bound to acknowledge what is real, only what is willed.”
If all that matters is my will, then whoever has the strongest will gets to impose their version of “reality.” And that’s not freedom—that’s bondage.
The Christian Response
Here’s where Christianity gives us something radically different.
The very first chapter of the Bible declares:
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).
Jesus himself reaffirms this in Matthew 19:4: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?”
The Apostle Paul drives it home: “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you…? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies” (1 Cor. 6:19–20).
The Christian response to the lie of disembodiment is simple but profound: your body matters. It’s not a mistake. It’s not an accident. It’s not raw clay for you to remake. It is God’s creation, God’s gift, and God’s temple.
Why This Matters Today
This isn’t just theory. It affects the way we live right now.
Children are told they can “change” their sex.
The elderly are told their lives are no longer worth living.
The unborn are treated as disposable tissue.
And technology dangles the fantasy of living without flesh at all.
But Christians know better. As Leibovitz reminds us:
“The rejection of the body is the rejection of limits, and the rejection of limits is the rejection of responsibility. And where responsibility vanishes, so does love.”
That’s the key. Love requires limits. Love requires responsibility. Love requires embodiment.
Think about it: Christ didn’t love us from afar. He took on flesh. He bore our sins in his body. He rose bodily from the grave. Real love shows up in the flesh.
It is no good to say: “Be warmed, be filled, go in peace” to the poor person (James 2:15-16). You gotta give them a cloak. You gotta give them food. That’s what it means to love your neighbor.
The True Promise
So what’s the alternative to the lie?
It’s not escape. It’s not disembodiment. It’s resurrection.
The gospel promises that these very bodies—frail, weak, mortal—will be redeemed. Paul writes in Romans 8:23 that we await “the redemption of our bodies.” Christ himself is the guarantee, the firstfruits of the resurrection.
So, no, we don’t hope for disembodiment. We don’t hope for escape. We hope for restoration, fulfillment, resurrection glory.
Friends, the promise of disembodiment is a lie. It sounds like freedom, but it ends in alienation and death. The true promise is this: your body matters. God made it, Christ redeemed it, and the Spirit indwells it.
So let’s live that truth with courage and joy. Let’s reject the lie. And let’s proclaim to the world: our hope is not to leave the body behind—but to rise with it, made new, forever.
Thanks for joining me today on the Podcast. Until next time, remember—your body is a temple, and your destiny is resurrection.
If you walked into a hospital and asked, “What is medicine for?”—most people would offer some version of the same answer: to heal what’s broken.
But what if medicine stopped healing and started interrupting?
What if a medical intervention didn’t restore nature, but halted it?
And what if the patients were children?
That’s the debate surroundingKing’s College London’s new trial on puberty blockers for 226 kids under sixteen—a trial whose central question is not whether puberty blockers should be used, but when they should be administered.
And that, right there, reveals everything.
Today, we need to talk about why puberty blockers are not just risky, not just poorly evidenced, and not just morally incoherent—but why they are, in the deepest Christian sense, bad medicine.
1. Medicine that heals—which restores a natural process that’s gone wrong.
2. Medicine that disrupts—which interrupts a natural process on purpose.
Restorative medicine is Christian through and through. Jesus heals. The Church heals. Doctors heal. And we are thankful for all of that.
But the trial at King’s College isn’t trying to heal anything.
Puberty isn’t a disease. It’s not a malfunction. It’s not an affliction. It’s the God-designed process by which a child becomes an adult in body, mind, and soul.
Harrington notes that puberty is a “complex set of naturally occurring changes intrinsic to the human genetic template.” But the King’s College trial doesn’t ask whether halting these changes is moral or wise. It only asks:
Should we delay puberty blockers—or give them earlier?
And there’s the problem: the worldview underneath the trial has already decided that human nature is raw material—neutral matter that exists for us to re-engineer.
But Christians don’t believe in engineering the human being.
We believe in receiving what God has made.
NOTICERS VS. ENGINEERS
Harrington describes two kinds of people in this debate: Noticers and Engineers.
Engineers
Engineers look at the world the way Francis Bacon did in the 17th century:
The world is stuff. Stuff can be rearranged. And the job of science is to overpower nature “for the relief of man’s estate.”
There’s no form.
No telos. (The Greek word for ‘goal’ or ‘end’.)
No given meaning.
Puberty, therefore, isn’t a stage of creaturely development—it’s an expressive option. Something you can modify according to your inner sense of self.
Noticers
Noticers, on the other hand, see the world as Christians have always seen it:
Creation has shape.
Creation has direction.
Creation has purpose.
This is Aristotelian1 Based on the teachings of Greek philosopher Aristotle. It’s Thomistic2Based on the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. It’s also John Paul II. (Saint John Paul the Second.3Pope from 1978 to 2005)
It’s Genesis. It’s Jesus. (Gen 1:26-284Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” ; Matt 19:4-65[Jesus] answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”)
Our bodies are not blank canvases. They are icons—physical revelations of invisible truths. Male and female are not costumes. They are modes of being human.
And as Harrington puts it, even in the most secular scientific contexts:
“Form and ends (telos) never really go away.”
You can deny nature only so long before it comes roaring back.
THE LIMITS OF CONSENT
One of the most powerful parts of Harrington’s argument is her explanation of how our culture replaced metaphysical limits with the single moral requirement of consent.
After the horrors of the 20th century—eugenics, forced sterilizations, and the experiments of Josef Mengele6Josef Mengele was a Nazi physician notorious for brutal experiments at Auschwitz—Western ethics focused intensely on coercion. The logic became:
As long as a subject consents, the action is morally permissible.
But this missed the deeper problem.
The Nazi doctors weren’t evil only because they coerced people. They were evil because they treated human beings as manipulable material—as lab rats.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If your worldview treats the human body as raw material to be reshaped for psychological comfort, you’ve accepted the same metaphysical mistake that drove eugenics.
Harrington writes:
“Never mind consent, it’s an offense not just against that child, but against reality itself: an atrocity only distinguishable from those of Dr Mengele in its having manipulated the victims into seeing it as ‘medicine.’”
That sentence should shake us.
It isn’t hyperbole.
It’s moral clarity:
If children are persuaded to view the disruption of healthy development as “care,” the wrongness isn’t lessened. It is compounded.
Children cannot meaningfully consent to the permanent interruption of their own maturation. You can’t sign a permission slip for your future self.
Consent cannot sanctify what violates nature.
THE CASS REVIEW: WHAT IT REVEALED (AND WHERE IT STOPPED SHORT)
In 2024, the Cass Review shook the UK medical establishment by revealing that the evidence base for “gender-affirming care” in minors was astonishingly weak.
It found:
• No robust evidence that puberty blockers improve mental health.
• No convincing data that blockers reduce suicide risk. (The primary concern)
• Significant concerns about bone density, cognitive development, and fertility.
• A clinical model driven more by ideology than by science.
As a result, puberty blockers were banned in the UK—but only until better data could be gathered. And there’s the rub!
King’s College London intends to gather that data.
But here’s the problem:
Cass framed the issue as uncertainty. Christian anthropology frames it as impossibility.
You don’t need “more data” to know that interrupting a child’s sexual maturation is a violation of creaturely design.
The Cass Review was a step in the right direction, but from a Christian point of view, it didn’t go nearly far enough. It never asked the foundational question:
Should we be medicalizing gender distress at all—especially through interventions that halt the very process by which a child becomes an adult?
THE METAPHYSICAL FAULT LINE
Here is Harrington’s most important passage, which I’ll read in full:
“The nub of the King’s College debate, then, isn’t over trial design, or consent. It’s a metaphysical disagreement so deep as to be irreconcilable. Is there any difference between using a drug to restore normal health in a child with cancer or premature puberty, and using the same drug to induce abnormal puberty-less-ness in a child who simply believes themselves to be the opposite sex?”
Mary Harrington
That is a razor-sharp question.
Now to the Engineer, perhaps, there is no difference.
To the Christian—noticer, realist, creature—the difference is everything.
A cancer drug given to correct disease is medicine. A cancer drug given to abolish normal development is harm.
And Harrington continues:
“The engineers… say it’s all just ‘healthcare.’ But noticers of human nature respond: no, puberty is not an illness… It’s an aspect of our form and telos.”
Form. Telos. Purpose.
Puberty is the God-given road by which childhood becomes adulthood.
It is ordered toward future vocation, future parenthood, future communion between male and female.
To interrupt it is not compassion.
It is, quite literally, a denial of human nature.
WHAT THE CHURCH MUST SAY
So what do we do with all of this?
First: We tell the truth.
We tell the truth about the body. We tell the truth about creation. We tell the truth about the limits of consent. We tell the truth about the dangers of engineering the human being.
Second: We care for hurting children with compassion—not affirmation of falsehood. A child in distress deserves love, stability, patient listening, and the promise that their body is not their enemy.
Third: We reject the false choice between cruelty and “affirmation.”
There is a third way: truthful love.
Love that does not lie about creation. Love that does not cooperate with gender ideology. Love that sees the child not as an identity project, but as a creature of God.
Finally: We remember that the body is an icon, a revelation.
Your body is not a problem to solve.
It is a gift to receive.
It is a form that speaks.
It is a telos that unfolds.
Puberty is one of God’s good words spoken into creation.
It is not ours to erase.
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Psalm 139 says,
“You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
To receive the body is to receive God’s work.
To reject the body is to reject His wisdom.
And to interrupt a child’s development is to tamper with what God Himself has ordained.
May the Church be a place of clarity, courage, and compassion—a place where children are protected, where truth is spoken, and where the human body is honored as the handiwork of the Creator.
Thanks for listening.
If this episode was helpful, please share it—and join me next time as we continue forming a distinctly Christian imagination for the world God made.
