When President Donald Trump signed an executive order preventing trans girls and women from competing in women’s sports, I wrote a post on Facebook which I thought was fairly simple and straightforward: “I will no longer use the phrase ‘biological woman.’ It’s redundant.”

Most of my friends agreed with me, as I suspected they would.

But one woman who I otherwise like and very much respect took me to task for what she considered to be the cruelty of my words.

I suppose I could have just let it rest, move on and realize that this was not an issue in which passionate people could be persuaded to the other side.

But there was something that angered me about the suggestion that holding this fundamental view, one informed by my morals and experience, was an attack on strangers.

What’s funny about the whole thing is I am not a crusading Joan of Arc on trans issues.

I learned my lesson with my opposition to same-sex marriage over a decade ago. My series of columns supporting Defense of Marriage Act and challenging the legality of same-sex unions was based more on what I saw as the manipulation of constitutional principle and less on any religious or moral opposition.

It seemed as if LGBT advocates were engaging in constitutional cosplay to advance a societal goal. It was very, very different from my hatred of abortion and my decades-long lobbying for the overturning of Roe.

Men marrying men didn’t really bother me at all. It was the parsing of equal protection principles that angered me, and arguments that would have gotten an F on any law school exam.

Abortion was much different.

It was, and is, a barbarism, an assault against the dignity of human beings. My opposition to calling men “women” is more aligned with my abortion stance. That is because I see the desire to make biology irrelevant exactly the same as … making biology irrelevant.

Refusing to accept that abortion is the deliberate destruction of an innocent human life is similar to the desire to accept trans women — who are biologically men — as my biological equals. They are not. They will never have the power to give life.

There are women who are barren, and those who choose not to have children, but the single most important identifying factor of womanhood is the potential to nurture life in the womb, and feed it from and with our bodies, in our arms.

That is a woman. It is not all women. But without that, there is no foundation for the idea that you are female.

To accept the idea that there is no functional distinction between the psychological and cosmetic affect of a trans woman and a biological woman is to accept that the unborn child is a clump of cells. I reject both premises.

Sadly, this is now considered cruelty. I would love to make a Venn Diagram — as a Catholic school lifer I loved them before Kamala — and isolate that common ground where accepting trans as biologically sound and rejecting unborn children as biologically sound are equally valid principles.

I think it’s probably quite large.

As for me, I’ll stand outside of the circle with my morals in one hand and my science in the other and call women and babies by their actual names.

Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers