Not long ago, I lamented the Massachusetts legislature’s bill attempt to redefine the nature of parenting. Touted as a needed “tune-up” to “outdated norms” in current family law, the bill was written to carefully scrub out offensive, archaic words like “paternity” and replace them with innocuous, up-to-date terms like “parentage.”

We would no longer have “men” being “fathers;” we would have “persons” being “parents.” Sigh.

However, it is my honor to report that not all legislators think this way. Not quite all of the momentum is moving in that direction. Illinois conservatives—and especially those of you who live in Legislative District 15—you ought to be proud of your very own U.S. Representative Mary Miller for being bold enough to offer the nation a basic biology lesson.

Miller’s bill (cosponsored by 12 other representatives) was introduced at the end of July and is named the “Defining Male and Female Act.” As Miller explained in a recent press release, this measure is a response to the Biden administration’s attempts to mess with Title IX (the federal law against sex discrimination).

She particularly charges the Biden administration with allowing men into women’s sports and restrooms, and her stated goal is that this bill would prohibit the Biden administration and any future administration from redefining Title IX.

Let’s look at the bill itself. (To be transparent about my research—the actual bill text is surprisingly hard to find, because at the time of this writing it was not yet published on Congress.gov, and news coverage was scant.

However, by the time you read this, you may very well be able to read the actual bill and track its progress on the official government website here. For this article, I used this online copy of the bill, which is dated a few weeks before the bill was actually presented. I assume the general sentiment is the same in the final copy.)

Anyways, I do start chuckling inside as I study this bill. Normally, legislative bills have a “definitions” section at the beginning, laying out the precise nuances of the major legal words that will be used in the rest of the bill.

Then, usually, proceeds an extended list of various action items that build on these definitions.

Not so with this bill! There are no action items after the definitions, because nothing is after the definitions. After some observations about the nation’s current gender confusion, the bill simply sets the record straight on a short list of relatively simple words: sex, female, male, woman, girl, man, boy, mother, father, gender.

And that’s it. So boring, yet so revolutionarily controversial in a world that has started denying even the “boring,” fundamental truths of God’s world.

Some of these definitions will make you feel like you’re in a high school biology class (“‘female’ . . . means an individual who has . . . the reproductive system that . . . produces, transports, and uses eggs for fertilization’” [p.4]). Others will make you feel like a six-year-old (“‘mother’ means a female parent” [p.4]).

And just to clarify—my chuckles are not directed at Miller, but at the crazy world she’s fighting to change. It’s ultimately a judgment on the condition of everyone around her if Miller really must talk to the nation like it’s full of six-year-olds.  

One interesting note on the word “gender:” the bill explicitly stipulates that it is a synonym for “sex,” and also stipulates that the word “does not mean a synonym for terms or ideas such as gender identity, experienced gender, gender expression, or gender roles” [p.5].

As far as I understand the legal implications of this, Miller is doing something profound. With a couple short sentences, she’s slicing away the legal relevance of volumes of gender studies philosophy. As Miller would have it, let’s forget the “72 genders” (or more, if there are more) based on whatever complex web of identities and attachments gender theorists have conjured up to justify sinful corruption in humanity.

How about, for the purposes of nondiscrimination, legally treating “gender” just as a synonym for the binary biological reality we cannot deny? For those of you who thought this whole “gender studies” thing was getting a little too complicated, Miller offers us a very simple solution: stop it.

I’m excited that at least a dozen representatives are willing to be so bold as to outright challenge all the gender nonsense going on in the law right now. I’m also a little sobered by the fact that something so obvious is now so controversial.

Yet, in the midst of the excitement and solemnity, I must have a little bit of fun with this bill. I’ve been thinking up possible headlines for it if it ever were to hit the news bigtime:

“Rep. Miller Says Congress Needs a Dictionary.”

“Rep. Miller Asks Congress to Stop Being Science-Deniers.”

“Rep. Miller Gives Congress Secret Hint About How to Identify a ‘Mother.'”

“Rep. Miller Introduces Sex-Ed for Congress.”

And perhaps the most telling: “Rep. Miller Says the Emperor Has No Clothes.”