Though our culture is confused, we don’t have to be in doubt. You can know the truth and not be pressured into adopting modern reinventions. God has made the definition of a woman clear through both special revelation (Scripture) and general revelation (creation). He made her. He made him too. Male and female he created them.
The year 2022 signaled the start of a surprising controversy over how to answer the question “What is a woman?” It’s surprising because until the last few seconds of human history, the answer was never in question. With the rise of the “trans women are women” mantra, many people seem to be in doubt.
In March of 2022, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson refused to define a woman when asked. Her response: “I’m not a biologist.” Does that presume only biologists know the answer? Many educated scientists squirm when pressed to define a woman because if their answer is “an adult human female,” that disqualifies biological men who “identify” as women. Being politically incorrect, that answer would jeopardize their reputation and possibly end their careers.
Numerous definitions for “woman” have surfaced over the last few years. I’ve noticed that these definitions fall into one of three categories: They’re either circular, absurd, or accurate.
First, some definitions of a woman are circular.
This mistake occurs when someone attempts to define a word but then uses the word they’re trying to define in the definition. For example, defining nuclear power as “energy derived from a nuclear source” is circular because the word you’re trying to explain, “nuclear,” is used in the definition. Transgender advocates often make the same mistake when they define a woman. They claim, “A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.” That definition is circular. After all, what is that thing—a “woman”—that the person is identifying as? They need to avoid the term “woman” in their definition if they want to provide a meaningful explanation.
Second, some definitions of a woman are absurd.
Cambridge Dictionary has recently amended its definition of a woman: “An adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.” Notice they’ve replaced “woman” with “female.” Though this averts a circular definition, it creates a new problem. “Female” is a reference to biology—a person who has XX chromosomes and reproductive organs that make bearing children possible. What does it mean for a man, who has XY chromosomes, to identify as a person who possesses ovaries, a uterus, and breasts when he doesn’t? It’s absurd.
This is similar to when 69-year-old Dutch TV personality Emile Ratelband decided to identify as a 49-year-old and demanded the courts change his legal age. It’s absurd. No amount of sincerity, hormones, or surgical intervention can make him younger. He can make cosmetic changes to his body that make him look younger, but he’ll never become younger. That’s because age is a biological reality that can’t be changed. In the same way, a person’s sex is a biological reality that can’t be changed. A man can make cosmetic changes to his body to make him look like a woman, but he’ll never become a woman.
The other problem with Cambridge’s new definition is that a woman can now be someone who had a “different sex at birth.” What sex might that be? Male. That means a woman can now be defined as someone who was the opposite of a woman—a man. This is absurd because it makes the word “woman” meaningless when someone who is the opposite sex can be a woman. It’s like saying parallel can be defined as perpendicular lines. Such confused definitions reduce the meaning of words to absurdity.
Third, some definitions of a woman are accurate.
Prior to the last few seconds of human history, defining a woman was uncontroversial. People accepted the dictionary definition: an adult human female. They recognized that women have XX chromosomes, while men have XY chromosomes. Though this definition is accurate, it has some liabilities.
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The book, while scary and disheartening, is truth-seeking and ultimately optimistic. Ritchie doesn’t come to bury science; he comes to fix it. “The ideals of the scientific process aren’t the problem,” he writes on the last page, “the problem is the betrayal of those ideals by the way we do research in practice.”

In a year where scientists seemed to have gotten everything wrong, a book attempting to explain why is bizarrely relevant. Of course, science was in deep trouble long before the pandemic began and Stuart Ritchie’s excellent Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth had been long in the making. Much welcomed, nonetheless, and very important.
For a contrarian like me, reading Ritchie is good for my mental sanity – but bad for my intellectual integrity. It fuels my priors that a lot of people, even experts, delude themselves into thinking they know things they actually don’t. Fantastic scientific results, either the kind blasted across headlines or those which gradually make it into public awareness, are often so poorly made that the results don’t hold up; they don’t capture anything real about the world. The book is a wake-up call for a scientific establishment often too blinded by its own erudite proclamations.
Filled with examples and accessible explanations, Ritchie expertly leads the reader on a journey through science’s many troubles. He categorizes them by the four subtitles of the book: fraud, bias, negligence, and hype. Together, they all undermine the search for truth that is science’s raison d’être. It’s not that scientists willfully lie, cheat, or deceive – even though that happens uncomfortably often, even in the best of journals – but that poorly designed experiments, underpowered studies, spreadsheet errors or intentionally or unintentionally manipulated p-values yield results that are too good to be true. Since academics’ careers depend on publishing novel, fascinating and significant results, most of them don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If the statistical software says “significant,” they confidently write up the study and persuasively argue their amazing case before a top-ranked journal, its editors, and the slacking peers in the field who are supposed to police their mistakes.
Ritchie isn’t some crackpot science denier or conspiracy theorist working out of his mom’s basement; he’s a celebrated psychologist at King’s College London with lots of experience in debunking poorly-made research, particularly in his own field of psychology. For the last decade or more, this discipline has been the unfortunate poster child for the “Replication Crisis,” the discovery that – to use Stanford’s John Ioannidis’ well-known article title – “Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
Take the example of former Cornell psychology professor Daryl Bem and his infamous “psychic pornography” experiment that opens Ritchie’s book. On screens, a thousand undergraduates were shown two curtains, only one of which hid an image that the students were supposed to find. The choice was a coin toss, as they had no other information to go on. As expected, for most kinds of images they picked the right curtain about 50 percent of the time. But – and here was Bem’s claim to fame – when pornographic images hid behind the curtails, students choose the right one 53 percent of the time, enough to pass for statistical significance in his sample. The road for top-ranked publication was wide open.
When the article came out after passing peer review, the world was stunned to learn that undergrads could see the future – at least when images of a sexual nature were involved. Proven by science, certified by The Scientific Method™, the psychology world was thrown into chaos. The study was done properly, passed peer review, and published in a top field journal, with the same method that underlies all the other well-known results in the field. Still, the result was totally bonkers. What had gone wrong?
Or take the don of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman, whose many quirky experiments convinced an entire economics profession of individual irrationality and ultimately earned him the Nobel Prize. The psychological literature on so-called ‘priming,’ part of which is used by behavioral economists, suggested that tiny changes in settings can produce remarkably large impacts in behavior. For instance, subtly reminding people of money – through symbols or the clicking noise of coins – makes them behave more individualistically and less caring of others. “Disbelief is not an option,” wrote Kahneman in his famous best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow, “you have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these [priming] studies are true.”
Beginning in the 2010s, psychologists tried to replicate these famous results and more. When tried elsewhere, with other students, better equipment, or larger samples – or sometimes with the exact same data – the same results wouldn’t emerge. How odd. Lab teams tried to replicate many established findings, coming up way short: “The replication crisis seems,” writes Ritchie, “with a snap of its fingers, to have wiped about half of all psychology research off the map.” There was something structurally wrong in the way that psychology found and displayed knowledge. Some research.
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In the space of three decades, nearly all of Albania’s officially atheist population claimed or reclaimed a religion—by 2018, self-identified atheists dropped to less than 1 percent of the population. People primarily sorted themselves into their family’s pre-communist religions—about 75 percent are now Muslim, 11 percent are Catholic, and 7 percent are Orthodox. While the number of evangelicals expanded from 16 to around 17,000, they’re still less than 1 percent of the population.

When Asim Hamza was growing up in communist Albania in the 1980s, it was the third poorest country in the world. The farm technology hadn’t been updated since the 1920s. Lines for milk stretched 80 people long before dawn. Pharmacies carried nothing but aspirin. Electricity didn’t reliably turn or stay on. Religion was outlawed—making the sign of the cross could land you in jail for three years, owning a Bible was five years.
Hamza had no idea anything was wrong.
The government-controlled television, during the two or three hours it was on each day, showed images of children starving in sub-Saharan Africa. “We were told that was happening everywhere,” Hamza said. “They said, ‘You are the happiest kids in the world.’ And we believed it. We were so thankful to the Communist party leader.”
“I remember I was in a meeting in Holland with all the global missions agencies,” Mansfield said. “At the time, I didn’t know anything. They were talking about what was going on, and I raised my hand. I asked, ‘How many believers are there in the country?’”Back then, “Albania was one of the three most closed countries in the world, along with North Korea and Mongolia,” Campus Crusade for Christ missionary Don Mansfield said. He became Cru’s country director for Albania in 1991, when the communist government began to topple. He’d never been there before.
He was expecting a guesstimate, or maybe a percentage of the population.
“Do you know Sonila?” one person asked.
“Kristi?” suggested someone else.
“Maria is a Christian.”
“People were throwing out names, and I got to 16,” Mansfield said. “Everybody looked around and went, ‘Does anybody else know anyone else?’”
No one did. But today, Mansfield could name hundreds. The Joshua Project estimates there are 17,000 evangelical believers in the country. While half of that growth came in the first decade the country was open, the evangelical growth rate is still nearly twice the rate of the rest of the world (4.6 percent compared to 2.6 percent).
To be sure, “we’re still small, and we’re not significant in the eyes of this world,” Light Church Tirana lead elder and TGC Albanian Council member Andi Dina said. “But we have a big God, and we worship him. We know he’ll build his church, and the gates of hell won’t prevail against it.”“It’s been a remarkable story of seeing what God has done in one lifetime,” said The Orchard Evangelical Free Church senior pastor and TGC Council member Colin Smith, who spoke at the region’s first TGC conference in 2019. “It’s an amazing change.”
World’s First Atheist State
Even before supreme ruler Enver Hoxha declared Albania the world’s first atheist state in 1967, evangelicals were few and far between. The population was primarily Muslim (70 percent, a heritage from the Ottoman Turks), followed by Greek Orthodox (20 percent, primarily along the border with Greece) and Roman Catholic (10 percent, mostly along the sea that separates Albania from Italy).
The evangelical Christians—by one count there were about 100—were largely gathered around a Baptist mission in the city of Korce. But the week after Pearl Harbor, the government kicked all American missionaries out. (Italy, a member of the Axis, was then occupying Albania.)
Foreign missionaries wouldn’t be allowed back for another 50 years. Hoxha, who came to power after World War II, didn’t just believe religion was opium for the masses. He also saw it as an issue of state security—Roman Catholicism meant influence from Italy, Orthodoxy came straight from Greece and Serbia, and Islam meant interference from Turkey. To allow Protestants would mean meddling from the West. Not only was practicing religion illegal, then, but so was believing it.
Hoxha’s enforcers started by burning four Franciscan priests to death, then turned mosques and churches into factories (minarets became chimneys) and shot an elderly Catholic priest for baptizing children. Hundreds of clergy were tortured and imprisoned for decades, forced to do hard labor in mines and sewage canals. Government-produced films that accused clerics of corruption, corroborating with foreign powers, and arranging forced marriages were broadcast over and over on the television channel. Newspapers mocked religious leaders on trial for being traitors.
Eventually, Albania’s borders were sealed so tightly—against both the democratic West and the communist Soviet Union and China—that nobody could get in to see what was going on, much less evangelize.
But that didn’t keep the Bibles out.
By Air and Sea
Albert Kona grew up in the town of Durrës, on the Adriatic Sea. In his childhood photos, you can count his ribs. He remembers his parents getting up at 2:00 a.m. to stand in line for bread or milk.
His family had been Eastern Orthodox, though he didn’t know that. One day, when playing in an antique wooden trunk of his grandmother’s, he found part of an old book with some pages ripped out. In it, he read about Peter and John.
In 1985, an Operation Mobilization (OM) ship anchored 12 miles off the Albanian coast, just far enough out to be in international water. Those on board dropped copies of the Gospel of Mark, freshly translated into Albanian, into gallon-sized ziplock bags. They blew each bag up with air so it would float. Then when the tide was just right, they plopped the Bibles into the water, praying they’d wash up on shore. In Kosovo, OM staff were standing on the banks of rivers that flow into Albania, doing the same thing.He wasn’t the only one to get his hands on Bible stories. After World War II, some American GIs flew over Albania and tossed out Bibles attached to parachutes. Most of them were gathered up by the government, but one man found about 12 chapters from the Gospel of Luke. “He understood who Jesus was and what Jesus had done,” said Kona, who met the man years later, after the country opened up. “He had a true and simple faith.”
“That was about all you could do,” Mansfield said. Some Swiss Christians had tried to smuggle Bibles in on a rare visit, but when they got to the airport, all the Bibles they’d surreptitiously given out were returned to them.
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