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On the definition of “Woman”

On the definition of “Woman”

Last updated on: April 16, 2025 at 3:41 pm by Dan Peterson

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On the definition of “Woman” 2025-04-16T15:41:38-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A view of London as it appeared prior to the new ruling from the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

A horrific judicial decision has just emerged out of the United Kingdom: “U.K. Supreme Court issues unanimous ruling on the definition of ‘woman’: The ruling is a significant development in the country’s ongoing debate over transgender issues.” If this sort of thing goes much further, some people will begin to imagine that reality and biology are real and that words have determinate meaning. And to think that such things are happening in the land of Lewis Carroll!

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,'” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!'”

“But glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,'” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “Which is to be master—that’s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly, verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Some months ago at Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, which some scholars have identified as the Book of Mormon’s “Waters of Mormon.” From left to right: Larry Ainsworth (a member of Interpreter’s board of directors), Brant Gardner (a noted scholar of the Book of Mormon and now an Interpreter editor), Steve Densley (Interpreter’s executive vice president), and an unidentified vagrant who photobombed the scene and then escaped, running maniacally and hopping and laughing.

Brant A. Gardner has begun a new series of blog posts on the immutably unchanging website of the Interpreter Foundation that, I hope, many will find both useful and interesting. Today’s installment is “The Heartland Versus Mesoamerica Part 1: A Foundation for Comparison.”

Build the wall! Let there be walls, and more walls! (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

It’s long overdue that America rid itself of career criminals like Suguru Onda! We don’t want his type in our country or our state, and anyway, just like Canada and Denmark, Japan is our enemy. Make America great again! “BYU grad student has I-20 visa revoked, leaving student, family, unclear”

I’ve shared my view of the matter with Senator John Curtis, Senator Mike Lee, and my congressman, Representative Mike Kennedy.

Let’s face it: Government is simply always and everywhere and invariably a force for good, and the more power it has and the more it intervenes in the lives of ordinary people, the better off the world will be. Right? Consider, for example, this case of a small family bakery in my own adopted hometown of Orem, Utah: “‘Our last hope’: Family fights to save bakery with community support” Curiously, I felt an urgent need immediately after reading that article to go out and buy some Argentine food. I had a ham and cheese sandwich from La Brioche earlier today and, tonight, we’ll enjoy the empanadas that we bought. La Brioche is located at 845 North 100 West, Suite 104, in Orem, and it’s open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 AM to 7 PM.

It felt something like this. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

For my sins — and as a legacy of my misspent southern California youth in and around swimming pools, on beaches, and, hatless, out on road-construction jobs — I spent some quality time with my dermatologist this morning. In the medieval era, we penitents wore hair shirts whenever we weren’t applying whips and cords to our backs. Now we use liquid nitrogen (applied in my case by a professional who keeps up a continual patter of chirpy conversation and questions about the Middle East while I fight back tears from the pain). But I deserve it. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

This candid photograph was taken of me just before I headed out this morning for my daily round of mutilating plants and tormenting kittens. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

This blog’s repetitious former resident atheist, who posted here for many years under the moniker of gemli, reappeared a couple of nights ago. I had “shadow-banned” him because of his absolute refusal, during his last year or two, actually to engage with anything that I or anybody else had written and because of his insistence, instead, on simply repeating his position over and over and over again. Time having dulled my memory of the almost unendurable monotony of gemli’s many daily comments, and because I’m a soft-hearted sap, I decided to give him another chance here. I went through the process, as Disqus explains it, of reversing the “shadow ban.” I don’t know, however, whether my effort to overturn the “shadow ban” has actually worked. Gemli hasn’t attempted to post again and, no matter how many times I’ve followed the instructions, nothing seems to have changed. For example, he’s still listed on my control panel as “shadow-banned” or even as, in one place, seemingly neither “shadow-banned” nor not “shadow-banned.” (Maybe that makes sense to somebody?) If gemli decides to try posting here again, I’ll learn whether my attempt to un-ban him has worked.

In the meanwhile, kindly and reasonably, I myself copied and pasted his recent comments — unchanged, unedited, and complete — into my responses to them, so that people here could read what he had written.

However, over at the fever swamp known as the Peterson Obsession Board — I’m not making this up! — gemli is deeply admired for the brilliance and rigor of the arguments he continually posted here prior to his assisted exit. And some of his fan club there are now accusing me of having invented those recent comments out of thin air (in, as I understand the theory, a desperate bid to make my blog interesting), of having unethically modified or truncated those recent comments, of having lied about trying but apparently failing to un-ban him, and of just generally being, once again, the irredeemably vile human being that they’ve always known me to be. And it all redundantly serves to illustrate my undeviating dishonesty. (In a world of continual and sometimes disorienting change, I remain constant! I am a rock. I am an island.)

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