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With one simple question, Senator Alex Antic this week revealed just how real the ‘slippery slope’ is. Five years ago we undefined marriage. Now Australia’s top medical minds can’t define a woman.

Can Australia’s Department of Health define what a woman is? This was the burning question that Liberal Senator for South Australia Alex Antic took to Senate estimates in Canberra this week.

The response given by the department’s head revealed just how far Australia has drifted from reality since the undefinition of marriage took place in 2017.

“I can’t seem to get a bureaucrat in this building to define what is a woman,” Senator Antic explained to his followers on social media soon after the exchange. “Today, I took it right to the top, straight to the Department of Health, and [received] one of the most extraordinary responses I’ve seen to date.”

Defining a Woman: ’Pretty Basic Stuff’

In a short one-minute video that has had over 150,000 views on Twitter since Wednesday, Senator Antic asks a panel of five of Australia’s top medical experts:

I’m going to finish up … with a very simple question for the department, and that is one which has troubled me for a great deal of time with the bureaucracy here. Can someone please provide me with a definition of what a woman is?

After a period of silence and blank stares, Antic probes further. “Department of Health,” he says incredulously. “Definition of a man. Definition of a woman. Anyone?”

“It’s pretty basic,” someone off camera can be heard saying. “Basic stuff,” Antic adds.

Professor Brendan Murphy, the Secretary of the Department of Health, begins moving uncomfortably in his chair, realising that he is the most senior figure in the room.

“There, look, I think there are a variety of definitions, and I think… Perhaps to give a more fulsome answer we should take that on notice,” he tells the Senator.

Antic is taken aback, asking, “You’re going to take on notice the question of what a woman is?”

“No, well there are a variety of… it’s a very, it’s a very, ah… it’s a very contested space at the moment Senator,” Professor Murphy continues. “There are definitions in terms of how people identify themselves so we’re happy to provide our working definition on that.”

Antic’s response couldn’t have been more appropriate. “I’ve only been here two years,” he remarks. “That’s the best thing I’ve seen thus far. Thank you so much.”

The Slippery Slope is Real

For thousands of years and until very recently, it was universally understood that a woman is an adult human female. The definition of “female” was also set in stone: the sex that can give birth to young or produce eggs.

These definitions were present across cultures, but in the West they were grounded in Scripture. The Bible sheds immense light on the dignity, value and calling of men and women. The foundational text is Genesis 1:27, which declares, “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Bible-believing Christians and other conservatives warned that by introducing same-sex “marriage”, Western nations would de-gender marriage and lay the groundwork for the abolition of gender altogether.

Within just years, this “slippery slope argument”, once mocked by progressives, turns out to have been entirely accurate. Gender is now widely seen as a mere social construct, not grounded in objectivity.

Unmoored from a biblical understanding of reality, the West is losing its moral and intellectual compass.

Westerners are Waking Up to Woke Marxism 

The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) welcomed the “death of God”. He recognised that if the West abandoned Christian belief, it would be like “unchaining the earth from its sun”. Nietzsche conceded that the effects of this would only be seen in time.

Nietzsche’s words have likewise proven eerily prophetic.

To be clear, Professor Murphy and probably every other bureaucrat in the room knows what a woman is and could easily define the word. But knowingly or otherwise, they have been taken captive and effectively silenced by Queer Theory, a branch of woke Marxism that seeks to overthrow the “oppressive” “heteronormative” society that has always existed in the West.

The sort of “utopia” that woke Marxism hopes to introduce is still unclear — even to the most committed woke Marxists. But the fruit of it which we have seen so far couldn’t be more rotten.

Fortunately, God is gracious and he is using the rotten fruit of wokeness to wake Westerners up and call us back to himself.

The sanctity of gender couldn’t be more important. It is an eminently worthy hill for Christians to die on — not for our own sake but for the flourishing of women, men, children, and whole societies.