Sen. Marsha Blackburn tried to put Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on the spot with a question that sounded innocent if you have followed absolutely zero coverage of recent U.S. politics, but was intended as a trap on transgender issues that might someday come before the Supreme Court: “Can you define the word ‘woman’?”
”Can I provide a definition?” Jackson replied. “No, I can’t. I’m not a biologist.”
What do you know? She doesn’t have the relevant expertise and was not going to offer an uninformed answer. She has respect for expertise and won’t leap to judgment without hearing from people who know what they’re talking about.
Of course, to Republicans the refusal to fall into the trap laid by a self-righteous pile of hair was itself a problem, because the whole point was to put Jackson in a no-win situation. But, HuffPost found when it turned the question back on some of those same Republicans, they didn’t have great answers themselves.
Blackburn herself initially refused to respond to the reporters’ questions, then took a little time with it and came back with an email from a spokesperson specifying “Two X chromosomes.” Except, whoops, it’s more complicated than that. A lot more complicated.
Sen. Chuck Grassley took the same “two X chromosomes” approach as Blackburn. Which makes him as wrong as her. Sens. John Kennedy and John Cornyn refused to answer. Sen. Mike Lee said, “An adult female of the human species.” Sen. Ted Cruz answered similarly, saying, “an adult female human” before offering up the “two X chromosomes” answer. Sen. Thom Tillis said his wife is a woman, apparently without specifying whether the definition of a woman requires being exactly like his wife in every regard. Does Tillis think that being a woman requires having touched his own personal penis? Or birthed his children? Or all the other things in between that none of us, literally none of us, want to think about?
The reporters’ exchange with Sen. Josh Hawley was … special.
“Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman,” he said. “Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.”
So if a woman has her uterus removed by a hysterectomy, is she still a woman?
“Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?” he asked. (Yes.)
Asked again later if he would consider a woman to still be a woman if she lost her reproductive organs to cancer, Hawley said: “I mean, a woman has a vagina, right?”
Actually, senator, some women don't have vaginas. And relatively few women appreciate being defined by them.
As the various failures of the Republican efforts to pin down what exactly a woman is in sciencey-sounding terms show, it's not that easy to define “woman.” And that’s without even getting into poststructuralist theory, which would lead us to a whole other set of complications.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was adept enough to sidestep a Republican trap. But her response wasn’t just a dodge. It acknowledged the importance of science and expertise in accurately answering what might on the surface sound like a simple, straightforward question. That’s an admirable trait in a judge, or a Supreme Court justice.
As a bonus, here’s a small sampling of some science writing on this very complicated issue:
"Stop using phony science to justify transphobia," by neuroscientist Simón(e) Sun in Scientific American
"The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that," by developmental biologist Claire Ainsworth in Nature.
Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD2.
When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.
"Male or female? It's not always so simple," from the UCLA Newsroom:
People often are unaware of the biological complexity of sex and gender, says Dr. Eric Vilain, director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology at UCLA, where he studies the genetics of sexual development and sex differences. “People tend to define sex in a binary way—either wholly male or wholly female—based on physical appearance or by which sex chromosomes an individual carries. But while sex and gender may seem dichotomous, there are in reality many intermediates.”
Understanding this complexity is critical; misperceptions can affect the health and civil liberties of those who fall outside perceived societal norms, Dr. Vilain says. “Society has categorical views on what should define sex and gender, but the biological reality is just not there to support that.”
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