He Who Defines The Premise Wins The Argument

Once someone else defines the terms, they aren’t merely changing the vocabulary; they’re changing the argument.

Luis Gonzalez | October 15, 2026

On September 28, the U.S. Department of Education formally rescinded the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX regulations and restored the 2020 regulations to the Code of Federal Regulations. The 2024 rule had already been vacated by a federal court in January 2025.

The law didn’t change; one word did: “Sex.”

That raises some strange questions: When did we forget what a man is? When did we forget what a woman is?

Graphic: Luis Gonzalaz, Chat GPT

Long before written language, prehistoric humans were already depicting human bodies. At Chauvet, more than 36,000 years ago, artists depicted the lower body of a woman, female genitalia, and human hands. At Lascaux, roughly 21,000 years ago, human imagery included an anthropomorphic figure and representations of female and, much less often, male sexual anatomy.

Whatever those ancient images meant to the people who made them, the physical distinction was not invented by a modern political argument.

A man was an adult male human being. A woman was an adult female human being. Those were descriptions of reality. Now they are political arguments.

So, what happened to the words?

Look at Title IX. The law prohibits discrimination “on the basis of sex.” The Biden-era regulations interpreted that language to include discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. The 2020 regulations took a different approach.

Change the meaning of “sex,” and you change the argument about what Title IX protects, what........

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