I grew up in a New Jersey Rust Belt town which has lost its factories and is now somewhat economically depressed: Perth Amboy. Its name is unusual, a blend of cultures.  “Perth” comes from the Earl of Perth in Scotland, who was one of the backers of the city’s 17^th century settlement. “Amboy” is a corruption of an Indian word for the point on which the city stands, giving it strategic access to what would become New York Harbor.

In my boyhood, then-Mayor George Otlowski used to tell a joke about the city’s unusual name. According to the Mayor, the Scottish proprietor came to the city and was greeted on the waterfront by local colonials and Indians. As he disembarked, the Indian took note of the Earl’s kilt and, pointing at him, asked the local official, “Perth am girl?” The local Scotsman laughed and told him, “No, Perth am boy!”

The joke might have remained but a local office holder’s attempt at humor were we not in a time when supposedly serious public officials seem challenged to decide “Perth am girl” or “Perth am boy.” Case in point: the January 13 Supreme Court hearing over Idaho and West Virginia laws barring boys “identifying” as “girls” from competing in girl’s school sports.

As I wrote elsewhere, the plaintiffs in these cases know which way the wind is blowing and tailored their arguments to protect gender ideology while trying to avoid appearing to do so. Modern legal and political actors evade the basic anthropological truth that there are boys and girls, and this evasion is deliberate. In trying to argue that the laws should not apply to their clients, plaintiffs’ lawyers sought to suggest that what the states really were trying to do was just prevent some “trans-girls” (i.e., boys) who had undergone puberty from enjoying competitive advantages due to their physical development, not to stipulate that there were boys and there were girls and their distinction is not fungible. Their clients, they argued, lacked advantages because they had not undergone puberty, unlike 260 pound, 6 foot 2 “Helga” from the East German Women’s Olympic javelin team. They should, therefore, not be subject to state restrictions. Making them subject to them had “disparate impact” on “trans” versus “cis” girls.

As I wrote in the piece linked above, this splitting of distinctions without differences really was designed to keep gender ideology alive to fight another day. What some commentators noticed, however, was the effort of even some conservatives to avoid saying “there are boys and there are girls and nothing else and they are not interchangeable.”

Perth am-girl?

Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn faced a range of criticisms, from naivete to gender-phobia to political opportunism, when she asked then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson her famous question, “What is a woman?” The same opprobrium was not voiced by those critics when the nominee punted, saying she was not a biologist and so would not opine on the question.

Her punt was, of course, strategic: she didn’t want to come out and admit her receptivity to gender ideology, clear when questions arose about whether “trans girls” face “disparate impact” vis-à-vis “cis girls” on the girls’ high school swim team. The fact proves how prescient Blackburn’s question was — and where we have come in a country where “what is a woman?” is deemed a trick question whose response is best evaded rather than answered.

Once upon a time, the answer would be apparent by looking. But many moderns seem to suffer the same malady old Ebenezer Scrooge did, the one that Jacob Marley identified when he asked him, “Why do you not believe your senses? What evidence would you have of me apart from your senses?”

Scrooge admits: “I don’t know,” though his ignorance apparently isn’t enough to make him believe what he sees. In that sense, perhaps a 17^th century Native American in what would one day be New Jersey was more honest when he asked, “Perth am girl?” At least he acknowledged that the question had an answer.